Women and the Abuse of Power

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Helen Gavin

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781800433359
• eBook ISBN:
  9781800433366
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études relatives au genre

Do witches and witchcraft represent our understanding of how women who threaten the patriarchy are demonised?

If to be born female is to be born deviant, how deviant is a body transformed to be female?

There are few explorations of whether power exercised by women is as robust as that exercised by men, and therefore whether it is more open to abusive use. This fascinating anthology examines these questions through the lens of literary critique, history, criminology, and psychology to explore another representation of women - in relation to how they abuse power, or how they react when they are the victims of that abuse. 

With themes ranging from the personal consideration of female bodies, to the supernatural hidden realm, to the public condemnation of women who fall foul of either the law or of a male-dominated world, this collection of interdisciplinary essays provides an in-depth look at the fate of women who abuse or are abused by power.

Section 1
Abuse of Evil Women

Chapter 1

Seduced by Satan: Damnation, Salvation and the Plight of Women in Nineteenth Century Quebecois Tales and Legends

Cynthia Jones

Introduction

The 2016 film Chasse-galerie: La légende, directed by Jean-Philippe Duval and released in Quebec, revitalizes for the cinematic screen one of the most famous French-Canadian legends: La chasse-galerie or the Enchanted Canoe. Duval vividly brings to life personages from early French-Canadian rural life and the complexities these people faced, such as mobility and transportation across great distances and difficult terrain. Rather than focus solely on the fantastic elements of the legendary tales – as one might find in the films Babine (2009) and Ésimésac (2013) directed by Luc Picard, which also draw from French-Canadian legends and tales – Duval attempts to convey a more realistic representation. The goal was to illustrate these characters more profoundly than they had been in the past, according to Philippe Couture in his critique on the film. Couture discusses Duval's drive behind the film, noting that ‘mais c'est que personne n'a jamais pris le temps de vraiment raconter l'histoire de nos coureurs des bois et de nos bûcherons, qui sont tout à fait glorieux. Ma volonté est de réhabiliter ces héros trop souvent réduits à des figures folkloriques’.¹ Nonetheless, elements of the fantastic still exist within the film. For example, the loggers make a pact with the devil to race home to their wives in a flying canoe. One of them tries to dupe the devil, which results in this satanic figure, Jack Murphy, coming back a couple of decades later to claim the soul of the logger's daughter.

This film, amongst many others, firstly, attests to the continued importance of the oral and written folklore tradition in Quebec and, secondly, to the prevalence of the devil within popular culture. Satan becomes an interesting character within the context of Quebecois lore and legends, particularly in narratives where his relationship to women brings about notions of the monstrous feminine. Barbara Creed, building off of Kristeva's notions of abjection in The Monstrous-Feminine (1993), uses the term ‘monstrous-feminine’ to ‘emphasize the importance of gender in the construction of her monstrosity’ (p. 3). She continues to argue that a monstrous representation of women is always linked to transgressions from the accepted norm of female mothering and reproductive functions (p. 7). Within the context of Quebec, which has a long tradition of prioritizing a woman's role of child bearer and mother as her primary function, a woman who would forsake these duties is deemed monstrous. However, before continuing with my analyses of monstrous women within Quebecois tales, it is important to note that the genre of the literary tale is deeply intertwined with Quebecois cultural identity, which corroborates the resurgence of these stories in films and contemporary literature.

These fireside stories are retold, written, rewritten, and transformed from oral tradition to literature and finally to film. The constant churning of these narratives suggests their continued importance in forming a cultural identity or reflecting the current society. The famous folklorist, Alan Dundes, in The Meaning of Folklore (2007) notes that these stories, riddles, and tales act as a mirror of culture and that the study and analyses of these narratives can provide ‘a way of seeing another culture from the inside out instead of from the outside in’ (p. 55). It is precisely in this vein that I will embark upon the current analysis, positioning it at the threshold between literary and cultural studies through the examination of specific literary examples of the devil and female monstrosity. The conte, which I define as a literary narrative based on an oral tradition, serves as the lens through which one can gain insight into an underrepresented group. As previously mentioned, the popularity of Quebecois tales and legends has inspired many modern representations and rewritings, which reflect current cultural ideals; however, I am choosing to discuss some of the first written representations (nineteenth century) of these popular narratives in order to tease out possible insights into their continued use and popularity today.

Arguably, the devil and his relationship to women – as will be discussed through a small corpus of Quebecois tales – is complicated. He is a multifaceted character that often represents an attempt for women to gain their own agency and power. Looking specifically at the relationship of Satan to the female protagonist within tales of ‘the devil at the ball’, a sub-genre of the ‘conte de diablerie’ (Devilish tale) – a phrase coined by Aurélien Boivin in his collection Les Meilleurs Contes Fantastiques Québécois du XIXe Siècle (2001) from which the texts in the present study have been culled, I will tease out some of the difficulties that women faced in seeking out their own autonomy.

In the ‘devil at the ball’ tales, the devil arrives at the homes of young unmarried women to tempt them into corruption. It is often only via the aid of the village priest that the devil can be expelled, and the victim potentially saved from eternal damnation, thus ceding more supernatural power to the priest as an extension of God. The works that will be examined in this study are

• ‘L’étranger (The Stranger)’ by Philippe-Ignace-François Aubert de Gaspé (1837)
• ‘Conte populaire (Popular Tale)’ by Charles Laberge (1848)
• ‘Le diable au bal (The Devil at the Ball)’ by J. Ferdinand Morissette (1883)
• ‘A la Sainte-Catherine (At the party for Saint Catherine's Day)’ by Charles-Marie Ducharme (1889).

These texts share the common theme of the well-dressed stranger who appears unexpectedly at a party or a dance. The elegant unknown man is invited inside to participate in the festivities, during which he seduces a young unmarried girl. After making their bond, it is revealed that he is the devil and has sought to condemn one more soul to Hell. In the narratives explored here, Satan is the outsider that is invited in and disrupts the happy traditions and festivities of the partyers. This figure embodies the ‘outsider’ – within the context of these texts – meaning anything that threatens previous traditions: he represents industrialization, anglicization, and unattainable female agency. Moreover, the devil in human form embodies the plight of the nineteenth century woman, whose sole worth is the (re)productive ability of her body.

The authors listed above were at the forefront of the creation of a ‘Quebecois’ identity; they published regularly in newspapers such as Quebec Mercury, Canadien, Le Libéral, L'Avenir, Le Musée canadien, L’Étendard, and Le Monde illustré – all widely read by the literate public. They were lawyers, stenographers, and political men who believed in the nationalistic literary movement instigated by Henri-Raymond Casgrain, whom Manon Brunet in her article ‘Henri-Raymond Casgrain et la paternité d'une littérature nationale (Henri-Raymond Casgrain and the Fathering of a National Literature)’ (1997) refers to as the ‘organizer, labourer, leader, promotor, protector, guide or advisor, director or soul, or more simply put, the father of Canadian literature’ (p. 206).² Casgrain, who launched his fundamental work Le Mouvement littéraire en Canada in 1866, was exceptionally vocal about the importance of establishing a French-Canadian literary tradition to the formation and solidification of a national and cultural identity. He called for other French-Canadian writers to engage in pioneering a literary movement and writing style that will be ‘energetic and persevering like our Pioneers from long ago; and at the same time [this literature] will be like […] our vast rivers, our extended horizons, our grandiose nature, […] mysterious like the echoes of our immense and impenetrable forests’ (p. 83).³ In comparing the geographical terrain of Quebec to the literary task at hand, Casgrain calls for a literature that is inextricably linked to the French-Canadian terroir (land).

Interesting, however, is the lack of matriarchal lineage in the foundation of this national literature. Mary Jean Green in Women and Narrative Identity: Rewriting the Quebec National Text (2001) comments on the lack of female writers and representation in early French-Canadian literature by noting that under Casgrain – despite not having explicitly stated the limitation on gender within the creation of a new national literature – it was implied that ‘Casgrain had no need of making statements on gender, since he could rely on the wok of his ecclesiastical colleagues to impose the social roles that would naturally be “reflected” in the literary mirror he envisioned’ (p. 13). The role laid out for women, established by the church, and reinforced by society, was that of the reproductive mother: firstly, productive by means of raising her children, helping her husband work the land and running the household, and reproductive in the sense of providing the country with abundant offspring in order to populate it. Green also mentions the work of François-Louis Laflèche, Quelques considérations sur les rapports de la société civile avec la religion et la famille (A few considerations on the relationship of civil society with religion and family) (1866), which was much more explicit about the assignment of gender roles. She notes that according to Laflèche, the hierarchy was built starting with the church, then the state, and finally the family; thus ‘power flowed directly from a male God and was embodied in a masculine figure at each level of the social organization’ (p. 13). In this schema, the only role with which the woman is left is subordinate and devoid of any agency. Green continues by stating that when Casgrain and Laflèche were promoting their ideologies in 1866, ‘a crucial struggle for French-Canadian survival was taking place against the background of English-Canadian national formation, as expressed in the British North America Act of 1867 which constituted the Dominion of Canada’ (p. 14). These last two points made by Green became the launching pad for this work's exploration of the devil in the aforementioned texts. At a moment when geographical borders are shifting and becoming finalized (into what will be known today as the province of Quebec), there is a sense of urgency – as expressed by Casgrain – in solidifying a national literature. However, as Green highlights, this new literary movement does not necessarily consider a female subjectivity. Therefore, I argue that female agency can be found in the figure of the devil, who also embodies the forces of change (Anglophone and industrial) that are sweeping over Quebec during the nineteenth century.

The devil not only represents the blazing fire of industry that is burning its way through the countryside, into the homes and lives of the habitants, but also the intruding Anglo-Canadian, as well as female agency for the young French-Canadian women depicted in the narratives. Referring again to Alan Dundes, this chapter aims to look at a culture ‘from the inside out’ in order to understand how the presence of the devil embodies the fear of both industrialization and anglicization, which through new agency – via the conte – further reinforces the power and structure of the Catholic Church as an integral part of Quebecois subjectivity. Furthermore, the devil in these tales expresses an attempt to strengthen the role of the patriarch over the female body. In other words, since there is a direct flow of masculine power from God through the church, to the state and then to the male head of the family, any agency accorded to the female would then be portrayed as diabolical.

A Brief History of French-Canadian Women

In order to understand the circumstances of the women represented in the following texts, it is necessary to briefly summarize the history of French-Canadian women. During the seventeenth century, French women were recruited to colonize La Nouvelle France. According to Aubrey Jones in her dissertation entitled Love and Labor: Representations of the Female Body in Québécois Literature from 1882 to 1970 (2014), these women, also known as the filles du roi, were encouraged to leave their life in Europe for one in the New World because ‘quite simply, the King of France needed productive bodies in the colony, and female bodies in particular, as the male population far surpassed the trivial number of women present’ (p. 17).⁴ Approximately 800 women (mostly orphans and widows) were sent over to the French colony between 1663 and 1673, whose sole purpose was to marry a bachelor and produce more Canadiens. Peter N. Moogk in La Nouvelle France: The making of French Canada – A Cultural History (2000) states that ‘Jean-Baptiste Colbert regarded the women being sent as breeding stock so that the colony's population would grow’ (p. 106). Upon arrival, after travelling across the Atlantic, these women are voided of any subjectivity, they were goods that needed to yield more productive ‘goods’. Although the export of women from France to New France ended after the British gained control of the colony in 1763, the role of the woman as (re)productive mother persisted well into the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Even though there was a decline in births during the nineteenth century, married women in French Canada still had large families. Micheline Dumont et al. in L'Histoire des femmes au Québec (1985) notes that ‘au 19^e siècle, malgré la baisse des naissances, les femmes mariées ont encore des familles fort nombreuses. Le temps où une femme vit grossesse après grossesse et où elle s'occupe d'une ribambelle d'enfants en bas âge tous moins autonomes les uns que les autres occupe une importante partie de son existence’ (p. 174).⁵ Thus, at a time when more women were heading to the factory for work in other industrialized nations, such as the United States, Quebec remained largely rural and adhered to earlier traditions and values, with married mothers' lives being sole occupied with the dependent children. However, towards the end of the nineteenth century, many of the families that had moved out to rural areas under the colonization efforts encouraged by the Church at the beginning of the century moved back to more urban areas where textile mills and other factories provided work.

This move towards urban areas also complicated the role of women in society. Ideally, women were to marry, have children, and remain at home to take care of the family and run the household. However, more and more women found it necessary to work, either in the domestic sphere as household help or in the factories and textile mills, in order to supplement the family income due to the poor wages low-skilled factory workers received. It was also common for women to work in factories until they married, although there were further shifts in the role of women during this century. The mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth saw a steep rise in the number of women that joined the convent. Denyse Baillargeon in A Brief History of Women in Quebec (2014) states that ‘the number of nuns exploded, rising from 650 towards the middle of the nineteenth century to over 6,600 50 years later – a figure equal to 6% of all unmarried women over the age of 20’ (p. 60). The main reason for such an upsurge, other than the slightly increased agency in their own lives, was due to the lack of well-paying jobs available and a dearth of eligible bachelors for the large population of marriageable women. Since marriageable age was quite young, women who crept past their mid-twenties and remained unmarried often found that the only recourse they had was to join the religious order. This assured them lodging, sustenance, and a lifestyle free from the ridicule of having forsaken one's social duty to raise children.

An increasingly conservative shift in the attitude towards women and their role in society came out of the ethnic tensions between the French-Canadians and the British, Irish, and Scottish who started to increasingly populate the urban areas in French Canada, most notably Quebec City and Montreal. These conditions lead to the Rebellions of 1837–1838 between the French-Canadian members of the Legislative Assembly and the British elite. Baillargeon claims that this friction affected the view of women as well: ‘some Patriots did not hesitate to liken Queen Victoria, who had come to the throne in 1837, to a “whore”, thereby associating British “tyranny” with the sex and supposed sexual misdemeanors of the new sovereign’ (p. 41). In this sense, a woman who fraternized with the English could also be construed as loose in morals and defying her own people. The only role left to the Quebecois woman was to be pious, pure, and to aid society either by producing children and raising them or by dedicating her celibate life to the Church.

However, despite stricter and more conservative restraints on women, modernization (radio, ready-to-wear clothing, the automobile, etc.) crept in from the United States and started to take root in the minds of the young women of Quebec, who ‘influencées par les Etats-Unis, aspirent à une certaine modernité’ (Dumont et al. p. 245). Instead of adhering to the previous tradition of either marrying or joining the convent once the girls came of age, they chose to remain single and wait to marry for love.⁶ This new type of autonomy challenged previous societal constructs; in waiting to choose a mate for love rather than economic necessity, these women separated themselves from their previous object state of (re)productive mother and gained agency in forging their own subjectivity. The clash between tradition and modernity and objectivity and subjectivity is reflected in the texts that are explored here, via the character of le diable and his relationship to the heroine.

The Devil at the Dance

Before continuing the discussion of the devil and his relation to the woman in these texts, it is necessary to briefly summarize each of the narratives. While each is similar – belonging to the same genre le diable au bal – there are some distinct differences between each narrative that allow further reflection about the role of the devil. ‘L'Étranger’ (1837) by Philippe-Ignace-François Aubert de Gaspé is culled from his novel L'Influence d'un livre and centers on the cautionary tale of Rose LaTulipe who was courted all night long by the handsome stranger that mysteriously arrived at her father's party. Her father, taken by his suave appearance and behaviour, agreed that he may dance with his daughter, and Rose herself also consents by giving him her hand. At that moment, her hand felt a pin prick, and the sudden realization that she had just given herself to the devil came over her. Luckily, the village priest comes to her aid and is able to banish the devil and save her immortal soul – as long as she dedicate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Editors
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Author Biographies
• Introduction
• Section 1 Abuse of Evil Women
• Section 2 Dangerous Embodied Female Subjectivity
• Section 3 Women Who Kill
• References
• Index