Writing the Father's House: The Emergence of the Feminine in the Quebec Literary Tradition

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French studies at the University
of Guelph.

Published in French in 1988, Smart’s Йcrire dans la maison du pиre
won the Governor General’s Literary Award for criticism that year.
Writing in the Father’s House, its much awaited English translation by
the author herself, brings to the anglophone reader a view of what it
means, for women and for men, to be writing in a patriarchal world.

Novelists such as Laure Conan, Ringuet, Germaine Guиvremont, Anne
Hébert, Gabrielle Roy, Hubert Aquin, France Théoret, and others are
presented from a feminist perspective. A chapter on “The Corpse Under
the Foundations of the House: Violence to Women in the Contemporary
Quebec Novel” brings this perspective into even greater focus. Here
Hubert Aquin and Réjean Ducharme are seen as proposing an anatomy of
that particular illness or evil—thus, in fact, calling for voices that
can be free of such violence, can change cultural representations and
shift literary traditions. This, then, is, to some extent, the role of
women’s voices in Quebec literature.

Writing in the Father’s House will disturb those who do not wish to
read with a consciousness of gender differences, who do not want to
acknowledge the difference between, as Smart puts it, “his story”
and “her story.” Without such recognition, there will, according to
her, be no true dialogue between men and women, even when of the same
culture. And because the author is convinced that Quebec literature
reveals a deep crisis within Quebec’s culture—a crisis that can be
solved only by just such a dialogue—a certain sense of urgency
inhabits the book.

This is an iconoclastic book: new interpretations of such heroines as
Maria Chapdelaine or Alphosine Moisan; the weaving of quotations from
works by Virginia Woolf, Luce Irigaray, Christa Wolf, Madeleine Gagnon,
Claire Lejeune, Teresa de Lauretis, Susan Griffin, and other feminists
of international significance; and fine analyses of writings by Nicole
Brossard, Louky Bersianik, Théoret, and others reveal Smart’s
feminism. She is part of an intellectual network that aims at changing
the social order by radically revising patriarchal culture.