Re-Writing Women into Canadian History

Margaret Atwood and Anne Hébert

Elodie Rousselot

• Publisher: Éditions de L'instant même
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9782895028383
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

L'essai « Re-Writing Women into Canadian History: Margaret Atwood and Anne Hébert », met en parallèle les œuvres de deux importantes auteures canadiennes du 20e siècle. L'étude s'attarde plus précisément à la façon dont l'ontarienne Margaret Atwood et la québécoise Anne Hébert ont « réécrit » en quelque sorte l'Histoire canadienne en y intégrant un espace spécifiquement féminin. Sous leur plume, des voix féminines peu entendues et ayant évolué dans un univers essentiellement masculin ont été libérées et ont contribué à enrichir le paysage littéraire et social. La démonstration d'Elodie Rousselot se base sur « The Journals of Susanna Moodie », « Grace » (pièce de théâtre non publiée) et « Alias Grace » de Margaret Atwood et sur « Kamouraska », « La cage », « L'île de la Demoiselle » et « Le premier jardin » d'Anne Hébert.

CHAPTER 1

Contemporary Canadian Historiography

This chapter proposes to set up the historiographical context within which Margaret Atwood and Anne Hébert have produced the literary works examined in this study. Because most of these works revolve around little known or forgotten historical characters, and omit to mention events and people which feature in mainstream Canadian history, it seems necessary to start with a brief outline of the history of Quebec and Canada. This will allow a better appreciation of those elements Atwood and Hébert have selected or left out in their narratives, and a better understanding of why they might have done so. Bearing in mind that Quebec regards itself as a separate nation within the Canadian Confederation, this historical overview focuses on those events which concern both Quebec and the rest of Canada, and emphasises, where need be, those events which have had a particular significance for the one or the other. This chapter then turns to the various historiographical trends which have been predominant in Canada and in Quebec in the second half of the twentieth century, the period during which most of the works examined in this study were published.

Brief Historical Outline

Canada was first colonised by European settlers in 1605, when the French founded Port-Royal in Acadia, and when they started to occupy the region of the St. Lawrence valley in 1608.⁵ This marked the beginning of the French Regime in the newly discovered territory of Canada, a regime which aimed at reproducing most of the institutional structures of France : French law, Catholic religion, and French language ; the colony became officially known as Nouvelle-France. In response to this, the English formed the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670, through which they intended to exert control over the fur trade in the entire region drained by the Hudson Bay. A British-French rivalry ensued and lasted for almost a century, until 1763, when France finally lost most of its possessions in North America, and England became the new ruler of the Canadian colony, an event which marked the French-Canadian community and has had important repercussions on the way it has perceived itself subsequently. In 1774, England passed the Quebec Act which restored in great part what the British Conquest had suppressed in 1763 : French civil law, the feudal system, and an increased freedom for the Catholic Church. The Act of 1774, by recognising the specificity of the French Canadians and granting them some rights accordingly, helped raise their sense of national identity, but also helped maintain a strong link with their mother country.

After the American Revolution (1775-83), the population of Canada was augmented by Loyalists fleeing the newly formed United States of America, which led the British to divide the colony in two in 1791, Upper and Lower Canada, and to extend to both provinces British institutions and constitutional rights. The fact that this division followed an ethnic line of demarcation also reinforced the sense of national identity of the Francophone population, in Lower Canada. However, strong economic and political dissatisfaction led to open rebellions in both provinces in 1837 and 1838 : they were started by the reformer William Lyon Mackenzie in Upper Canada and by Louis-Joseph Papineau and his republican group the Patriotes in Lower Canada ; both worked independently and aimed at implementing political change. But the Rebellions failed and the authorities killed and transported many of the rebels. These events are still remembered as the “failed Rebellions of 1837-38” and have also played an important role in the way French- and English-Canadians have perceived themselves subsequently. They are mentioned briefly in Margaret Atwood’s Journals of Susanna Moodie and Alias Grace, as well as in Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska, as will be seen in Chapters 2, 3, and 4. Some immediate change was, however, brought about through Lord Durham’s 1839 Report in which he advocated the reunion of Lower and Upper Canada into the Province of Canada. His recommendations were implemented in 1841, to the dismay of the French-Canadian population who considered this a damaging reprisal and an attempt at assimilation by the British authorities. In the Province of Canada, the Anglophone population became the majority, while French language was partially banned in government offices and in courts of justice.

These circumstances helped set in place what is known as the paradigm of survivance in French Canada. After the failed attempts at independence, the population felt it would not be able to achieve political and economic sovereignty. Consequently, many believed that the survival of the French-Canadian nation hinged upon the preservation of their culture, which meant protecting French traditions, celebrating French customs, and being faithful in all possible ways to the cult of the mother country. This attitude set the intellectual discourse in French Canada in a relation of dependence to France, which resulted in a depreciation of locally-inspired artistic productions. The Catholic Church also played an important role in the survivance : together with the protection of the French language, it turned the survival of the Catholic religion into a national crusade, and both came to be seen as founding pillars of the French-Canadian nation. During the same period, the British population in Canada also showed a desire to follow the model of its imperial centre in matters of politics and economy, as well as in arts and culture, thus maintaining a strong colonial link with Great Britain.

In 1867, the provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick agreed to a common scheme for Confederation, and the British North America Act gave the Confederation the status of Dominion. In subsequent years, the Dominion greatly expanded as more provinces joined the Confederation, bringing relative prosperity to Canada in the twentieth century, but failing to resolve the continuing disagreement between English- and French-Canadian communities. In the domain of arts and culture, the twentieth century saw the development of a distinctive Canadian sensibility which sought to capture local realities through painting and literature. Intellectuals and artists became more “reconciled” with their environment, and developed what is described in French Canada as the discourse of américanité. The latter refers to a way of thought which advocates a rapprochement with the continent and a renewed assertion of national identity, but this time without the relationship of dependence to the mother country. In French Canada, the traditional criteria of Catholicism and French origins as the defining features of the nation were gradually replaced by a reference to French language only : this was confirmed in 1974 by a law which gave French the status of official language in Quebec. However, some in French Canada believed that the political and economic links with the Canadian Confederation constituted obstacles preventing them from fully embracing their américanité. An instance of this can be seen in the way the term Canadien français was progressively replaced by Québécois, as a means of differentiation from the rest of the Confederation, and belonging to a specific territory (Quebec).

In the 1960s and 1970s, French Canada’s ideological assertions of national identity became political : this was the period of the “Quiet Revolution” (Révolution tranquille), an intense, but mostly peaceful, period of change. Yet some in Quebec felt the need for more radical action and founded the Front de libération du Québec, a small armed group which promoted the idea of social and political revolution through violence. In October 1970, the group kidnapped two government officials and killed one of them, a tragic event which constitutes the only instance of violence throughout the period of the Quiet Revolution. Nevertheless, Québécois separatism became a major issue for the Confederation as a whole, and the victory of René Levesque and his separatist Parti Québécois in the 1976 provincial elections confirmed Canadians’ fears about the nation’s future. In 1980, the Parti Québécois organised a referendum on political separation, to which the Québécois vote was negative. In order to resolve these national tensions, the British North America Act was repatriated to Canada, thus giving Canada total control over its constitution and severing its legal ties with the United Kingdom. The Canada Act was approved in 1982 and made Canada a fully sovereign state ; most notably, it contained a Charter of Rights and Freedoms which guaranteed thirty-four rights, including religious freedom, minority language education, and cultural tolerance, to all Canadians. However, Quebec did not approve the Canada Act ; instead it began negotiations with the federal government to establish a set of constitutional reforms known as the “Meech Lake Accord.” The Accord’s basic points included a guarantee of Quebec’s special status as a “distinct society” and a commitment to Canada’s linguistic duality. Still, the Accord was criticised by many women’s and Native rights groups in Canada for not being representative of the Canadian population as a whole, and as a result it failed to be ratified by all ten provinces and had to be abandoned in 1990. This prompted many Québécois to reconsider independence, and led to the 1995 Referendum in which Quebec once again rejected separation, although by a very slim majority. This brief overview brings into focus the set of challenges which Canada and Quebec have had to face in their respective process of nation formation, in the development of their cultural identity, and in their relationship to one another. The next section examines how these challenges have been reflected in the recent debates about the role of history and its possible representation.

Recent Trends in English-Canadian Historiography

Over the last few decades, historians in Quebec and in the rest of Canada have shown a particular concern with re-reading Canada’s history, and re-assessing its importance in the present. In Quebec, as mentioned before, this has led to a return to the period of the Quiet Revolution, and a re-examination of the ways in which the national discourse was initially formed. In the rest of Canada, two special issues of the Canadian Historical Review released in 2000 and 2001 invited “some of the nation’s most respected historians” to reflect on the themes that defined Canada in the twentieth century “in an effort to sustain [Canada’s] collective historical memory” (229). This section examines the process of historical re-interpretation at work in contemporary English Canada.

The forum held by the Canadian Historical Review allowed Canadian historians to share their concerns regarding recent developments in Canadian historiography. These concerns were also expressed in works such as J.L. Granatstein’s polemical Who Killed Canadian History ? (1998), and Michael Bliss’s article “Privatizing the Mind : The Sundering of Canadian History, the Sundering of Canada” (1991). In both works, the authors’ main criticism is directed at the historiographical shift away from political and constitutional history, and towards an exploration of people’s experiences according to their region, ethnicity, class, and gender. This shift Bliss calls the “privatization” of historical writing, an increased concern with the realm of the private which, in his opinion, has brought about the “dis-integration” of Canadian history (14). Bliss remarks that the interests of historians have been so thoroughly “privatized” that there no longer exists any body of writing describing the links that bind Canadians to one another. In fact, he deplores that historians have stopped writing what he describes as “readable” histories of Canada, histories of comparable “range, readability and personal witness” as Donald Creighton’s Dominion of the North (1944) or W.L. Morton’s The Kingdom of Canada (1963) (9). According to Bliss, this “dis-integration” of Canadian history has led to the “sundering of Canadians’ consciousness of themselves as a people” and the “withering of a sense of community in Canada,” both being related to the nation’s “current constitutional and political malaise” (5). At a time when Canadians are “immersed in the most intense debate about their future as a people since Confederation” (11), Bliss criticises historians for abdicating from what he sees as their role as “national sages” (7). The anxiety expressed by Bliss and others regarding Canada’s future and the state of its politics is not new ; it has been a frequent reaction to the “threat” of having a giant, economically superior American neighbour. Lately however, events within the Confederation itself, such as the two Quebec Referendums on separation and the failure of the 1990 Meech Lake Accord, have had a deep impact on Canada’s sense of itself as a united people. According to Bliss, in the aftermath of the Meech Lake Accord in particular, “ordinary” Canadians repeatedly expressed a sense of not understanding their country, of not knowing “who they were, where they had come from, and whither they were going,” questions which he believes historians should be addressing (14). In his opinion, the likes of Donald Creighton, W.L. Morton, A.R.M. Lower, and Frank Underhill, all “nationalist historians, more interested in the public history of the making of Canada than in the private lives of the Canadian people,” would have fulfilled that responsibility in the past (7).

A brief look at works such as W.L. Morton’s The Canadian Identity (1961) might be useful in order to illustrate the type of historical attitude Bliss is regretting. I examine in particular the chapter entitled “The Relevance of Canadian History,” which is taken from the presidential address Morton gave to the Canadian Historical Association in Kingston, Ontario, in 1960. In this address, Morton rejects the idea of a multiplicity of historical narratives and perspectives ; he explains instead that “Canadian history” means “one history, not one French and one British” as indeed “[t]here are not two histories, but one history, as there are not two Canadas, or any greater number, but one only” (88-89). Morton reinforces his point with the claim that “[t]here is but one narrative line in Canadian history” (88-89), thus confirming his exclusion of the idea of minority groups in Canada’s historical narrative. In this context, Morton’s denial of the presence of a “French history” indicates a very synthesised vision of history, one which does not take into account the fact of French-Canadian political and cultural specificity within Canada. This statement is even more striking if one looks at its historical context : 1960 marks the dawn of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, a period of heightened political and cultural activism in French Canada. Morton’s homogenous vision is further exemplified by his claim that “[h]istory is neither neat nor categorical,” as “it defines by what is central, not by what is peripheral” (93). Precisely what Morton considers to be “central” and “peripheral” is visible in his example of the “whole culture of the northern and maritime frontier” — by which he means some of Canada’s Native peoples — who in order to “succeed as well as survive,” required from the Europeans “a high religion, a great literature, and the best available science and technology to overcome [their] inherent limitations” (94). Morton asks :

Was not the basic difference between the north European and the Eskimo that the former had a central and metropolitan economy and culture on which to draw, while the latter had none until very recent times […] ? (94 ; emphasis added)

Morton’s analysis denotes the Eurocentric attitude and ethnic prejudice directed at Native peoples in Canada from the earliest days of the colony. This is confirmed by his final comment that “[o]ne may hope that Canada is at least giving those wonderful people the central base they lacked for so many unrecorded centuries” (94 ; emphasis added). Morton’s synthetic and homogenous vision of Canadian history therefore results in ethnic exclusion or assimilation, rather than national unity. The rigidity of the criteria determining what is central and what is peripheral prevents the recognition of the important roles played by Canada’s numerous minorities in the country’s process of nation formation. In the context of this study, this is particularly relevant in the case of French Canada, as its cultural and political specificity has been the object of several attempts at assimilation by the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture, as seen for instance with Lord Durham’s 1839 Report.

Such historical attitudes as Morton’s underwent a drastic shift in subsequent decades, with historians such as Ramsay Cook and J.M.S. Careless advocating a greater focus on people’s experiences according to their region, class, and ethnicity, thus promoting “analysis” instead of “synthesis” in Canadian historiography.⁶ This they called the “limited identities” approach to Canadian history, a phrase coined by Cook in his 1967 article “Canadian Centennial Cerebrations.” The date was significant as it marked the 100th anniversary of the British North America Act by which Canada gained the status of Dominion. But the centennial year also brought an acute renewal in historians’ and intellectuals’ anxiety regarding “Canada’s perennial problem,” specifically its “lack” of national identity and unity. In his article, Cook called for a new attitude :

instead of constantly deploring our lack of identity we should attempt to understand and explain the regional, ethnic and class identities that we do have. It might just be that it is in these limited identities that ‘Canadianism’ is found. (663)

Through the concept of “limited identities,” Cook advocates a different approach to Canadian history, an approach going against Morton’s view that there is only “one history” and “one Canada.” In addition, Careless in his 1969 article “‘Limited Identities’ in Canada” observed that if Canada was “one nation,” then it was an “eminently divisible” one (1). In his opinion, Canadians’ experiences “did not greatly focus on Ottawa and the deeds of hero federal politicians, or on the meagre symbols of some all-Canadian way of life” (2-3). Careless opposes Morton’s notion of a history which “defines by what is central,” namely Ontario and its decision-making officials (Morton 93). He remarks that in 1969 Canadian historians “are still considerably hung up on the plot of nation-building,” a plot which neglects and obscures as much as it explains and illuminates (1). Careless deplores in particular the “teleological cast” of this approach : “one looks for the end to be achieved ; one measures developments, pro or con, in terms of the goal — a strong, united nation” (2). In his opinion, this leads to a restricted vision of history, one that is out of keeping with “Canadian realities.” A better way of exploring these “realities” is, once again, through the “limited identities” of region, class, gender, and ethnicity.

However, these histories of “limited identities” are precisely the kind of “privatization” of historical writing Bliss was criticising earlier for causing the “dis-integration” of Canadian history. In a recent article entitled “‘Identities Are Not Like Hats,’” Cook addresses this issue. He responds to Granatstein’s and Bliss’s “[r]ecent pleas for a return to so-called national history, especially when defined as ‘political and diplomatic history’” (Granatstein 146, qtd. in Cook, ‘“Identities”’ 263) by pointing out that one of the most significant achievements of the new approaches to Canadian history has been precisely the severing of the “suffocating link between Canadian history and nationalism” (264). He reminds us that more than a century ago, Ernest Renan recognised that scholarly history and nationalism were incompatible.⁷ Cook explains that if he welcomes any efforts to write the entire history of Canada, this would have to include “workers and farmers, museums an...