Women and Narrative Identity: Rewriting the Quebec National Text

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French Studies at the University
of Guelph. She is the author of Courts métrages et instantanés and La
Soupe.

This intelligent work demonstrates what specialists of Quebec literature
and of women writers contributions to the latter knew already:
simultaneously recognized for their literary importance and oppressed in
their position as the second sex, these women must be included in
writing what Jacques Godbout called the “national text.” While this
is not exactly a recent discovery, Green adds new elements to the
theory. For example, she reminds readers that Régine Robin, a Jewish
novelist, found this definition of Quebec women writers being “on the
edge”—on the edge to that which is new, to independence, to
postmodernity, to admitting that the Quebec writer is also a North
American writer and even a Canadian. She notices more clearly than any
other critic that Florentine (in Gabrielle Roy’s socialist and
pacifist novel, The Tin Flute) and Heloпse (in Marie-Claire Blais’s A
Season in the Life of Emmanuel) portray the new woman of Quebec who
questions traditional female roles and female confinement within the
family, and who strains to break free not only from political and
clerical oppression, but also from the traditional ideology that weighed
most heavily on women.

The greatest strength of this study is its resolute inclusiveness.
Green includes Régine Robin in the roster of Quebec women writers and
provides a 20-page chapter on the multicultural elements in Quebec
literature and such immigrant writers as Ying Chen, Marie-Célie Agnant,
Abla Farhoud, Mona Latif-Ghattas, and Bianca Zagolin. She concludes that
“these writings clearly contribute to a project of Quebec identity in
which the unspecified object of the Quebec motto “je me souviens”
opens to multiple horizons.”