Maria Chapdelaine

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Maria Chapdelaine is a novel written in 1913 by the French writer Louis Hémon, who was then residing in Quebec.

[edit] Essay

This section is written like a personal reflection or essay and may require cleanup. Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style. (December 2007)

Romance or parodic novel? Today, it can be read as a parodic novel. Hémon builds an account of the agricultural life in a family of the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region (Close to Péribonka, on the river bank of the Péribonka). He skilfully manages to use the climate, traditional values (farm, family and religion), and the reason for the identity search, which are all particularly recurring in Québécois literature. With such information, the novelist reproduces the Québécois French in a very moderate way and provides a plentiful inventory of quebecisms and local employment.

Opportunism, dedication and mythification

As death carries it at the time when it leaves Quebec, and before even publishing in volume its novel, published in serial in Paris, in 1913, Hémon is unaware of the great interest which its novel causes. The Canadian readers see “traditional there” before the letter, the masterpiece of French Canada. Plugged by their worship of French of France and by the nostalgia of the “motherland” sung everywhere by the neo-romantic poets, the first readers of the novel hoist his author with the row of national myth. This novel, that the Breton specialists do not consider with as much glare, remains a work of voyage and adventures, category in which fits besides the other writings of Louis Hémon, almost all published after his death. Still sometimes regarded as a masterpiece of the Québécois literature, and massively supported by the university institutions of Quebec (which however never declare that Lizie Blackstone, for example, is a British novel), Maria Chapdelaine makes forget the Breton origin of its author. However, the novel has a satirical and critical dimension, in particular when one considers the country and regional nomenclature which crosses the account heavily. These signs of otherness should not miss amusing Hémon itself, undoubtedly eager to produce an exotic work (standard of literature, for Parisian the particularly fond of delicacies ones of this kind at that time. Its work is rather a work intended to provide him the means of continuing its bohemian life, brutally stopped at 33 years when it is reversed by a train in Ontario where it went for the harvests. Lastly, the opening of the novel on Ite missa is (“the mass is known as”) and insistence on religious manners and the misery of the colonists does not miss either audacity for a vagrant such as Hémon, well-known for its opportunism and its frequentation of libertarian mediums. There remains astonishing to see, in the years 1920, a writer “reactionary” and nationalist like the maurrassien Henri Massis to defend the novel of Louis Hémon. The remainder of the work of the writer, however, is far from a plea for the rooting and the sedentarism.

François Paradise or the allegory of people “born for a roll”

The pessimism on which the novel is completed (resignation of Maria to marry a colonist), descriptions sharp of the anguish of the Chapdelaine mother, etc, reveal a barbarian universe without hello out of wood and the ground, an obscure, cold and closed universe, in short a universe of “eternal return of same” where any principle of hope or a future is tiny room to nothing. Here is the direction of the allegory of François Paradise, the applicant of Maria, who dies petrified in a snowstorm. It is a vision rather right of a province immobilist and traditionnalist, about 1900. The novel is to be compared with Promise Lake, written by another compatriot of Hémon, Philippe Porée-Kurrer, seventy years later. According to certain literary analysts, the allegory goes even further. The name that Louis Hémon chose for the three applicants of Maria is not the fruit of the chance. Thus, François Paradis represents the freedom of the Québécois people (“François”, the old “French” shape, and “Paradise”, it to what all aspired at the time). Runner of the wood and got excited of great spaces, it represents the ideal of Canadian-French. On his side, Surprising Lorenzo offers to Maria to leave the misery of the Lake-St-Jean to follow it to the United States. He thus represents the attraction of certain Canadian-French for the foreigner, especially that at the time, the “States” represented Klondyke for them. From where the first name with consonnance foreign (Lorenzo) and the evocative surname (Surprising). Finally, the author chose a name all that there is moreover “soil” for the farmer traditionnalist attached to the ground. Eutrope Gagnon represents all that there is of more common in the company of the time. The fact that Maria will marry it represents the resignation of the people Canadian-French of the time.

[edit] Adaptations

The novel has had three film adaptations, 2 French and 1 Québécois: in 1934, by Julien Duvivier, with Madeleine Renaud (Maria Chapdelaine), and Jean Gabin (François Paradis), partly filmed in Péribonka; in 1950 by Marc Allégret in a free interpretation of the work entitled 'The Naked Heart'; in 1984 by Gilles Carle with Carole Laure. The novel was also adapted as plays, illustrated novels, radio-novels, and televised series. Authors have even published continuations of the novel.

[edit] Origins

According to a letter written in 1950 to Wilfred Nevue by Germaine Garon of the Visites Interprovindiales in Chicoutimi, Eva Bouchard was the inspiration for Maria Chapdelaine. Nevue's interest stemmed from his upbringing in a French-Canadian family near Champion, Michigan. He considered the novel brilliant and read it many times. He even attempted to imitate it with his own book, published serially in a local paper and called "A Boy's Paradise."

Mlle. Garon's letter states, "The so-called Maria Chapdelaine, Miss Eva Bouchard, attended the Ursulines Convent in Roberval with my father’s sisters. She was a good student of average intelligence, nice and friendly. She has always been friendly but there was a time she did not like to speak about Louis Hemon or the book he wrote.

"When her father went to Periobonka, he must have been a pioneer of the northern district of Lake Saint John which had then been opened to farming. I easily imagine it was then right in the bush. After her graduation Eva taught in a rural school in St. Prime, a small but very progressive district on the southern shore of Lake Saint John. St. Prime is still a farming district. When Eva went home for the summer holiday she met Hemon for the first time.... She told me that one day Hemon knocked at her father’s home asking for work. He had very little luggage. As M. Bouchard needed help, he and his wife agreed to keep Hemon with them. Salaries would then very low. Besides Hemon got his meals and a room to himself which was almost a luxury in the circumstances. This little room was at the back of the house, it had a stove and a “fanal [lamp].” One must agree that a room, a stove and a “fanal” to himself is a luxury that not many hired men have had in this time of pioneers, and all over the world.

"Louis Hemon never proved to be a good worker as far as farm work is concerned. He was willing but not the kind of man to properly do farm work. Eva said that many times her mother got really mad at him because he could not handle cattle. Poor Madame Bouchard! She so often had to run after the cattle that more than once she ordered Hemon to stay in and she then went out for the cattle which saved time, she said.

"Apparently Madam Bouchard wondered why Louis Hemon, who was not fit for farm work, wanted so much to stay with them.

"On his arriving Hemon had asked for one day off a week. He said he had to write to his family. He was given every Thursday, which he spent writing in his room. Besides the letters to his family, he may then have been writing his novel.

"After months of this kind of life, I am not sure but I think it was about one year and a half, one morning he told the Bouchards he wanted to leave. So he went away as he had come to Peribonka.

"This is the story as Madamoiselle Bouchard told it to me a few years ago.... I used to take a group of students and teachers to Paribonka every year for these last years. Everybody liked her. She was a very humble and sympathetic person."

In a second letter dated November 9, 1950, Mlle. Garon, continues to recount the life of Eva Bouchard, whom she describes at one point as "...in her 40s and very good looking. She had such beautiful dark eyes! Her voice was sweet and calm." Eva never married but raised her brother-in-law's children after the death of her sister. Her brother-in-law ran a hotel where Eva was in charge of the rooms and dining room. The letter implies that she continued to raise the children after her brother-in-law died, sending them "to convents and colleges."

Eva and the people of Lake Saint John did not approve of the book. "...the whole village resented Louis Hemon and his novel that had brought them a reputation as a backward people." According to Eva, the characters in Hemon's novel were inspired by different members of her family and others he met during his stay with the Bouchards. Maria insisted her character had been inspired by Eva but mostly by her sister. Samuel Bedard, the sister's husband is "quite the character of Pere Chapdelaine. He is quite a character himself. "Le quetteux", the beggar, has really lived in Lake St. John. He was known all over the region.... "Le ramancheur" used to live in St. Prime, across the lake. Hemon was always very much interested in stories all the relations and visitors told while visiting the Bouchards. As a matter of fact, he used most of them in writing his novel. Of course his imagination took a big part in it also."

Eva eventually came to embrace her reputation. Mlle. Garon goes on, "Towards the end of her life, the government gave Eva a very small grant to gather all the things that had belonged to Louis Hemon or been used by him and arrange a small museum. She cleverly arranged a very nice small museum that is called Musee de Maria Chapdelaine.... A short distance from the museum she had a few cabins built for the tourists. She also had a little restaurant. Everything is very humble but in a beautiful spot on the shore of the river.

"I have never head her say that she was the real maria Chapdelaine. She kept sayng that Maria was a mixture of the female members of her family.... She died last fall at the age of 64. She certainly was a great woman, not on account of the part she may have played in Hemon's novel but especially for the kindness she always showed and the good she did."