1. Objectifs

Intentions :
« In particular, I would like to explore the idea that one form of women’s experience repeatedly portrayed in texts written by Quebec women - the relationship of mothers and children, and especially of women and daughters- enacts issues at stake in evolving concepts of Quebec identity in the post-World-War II era when women writers were accepted as important cultural voices. » (p. 62)

Questions/Hypothèses :
« I would like to suggest that these writers’ inscription of women’s experience may bear an important relationship to perceived change in Quebec culture. » (p. 62)

2. Méthode

Type de traitement des données :
Essai

3. Résumé

« For writers in Quebec, the relationship with the cultural heritage seems to be a difficult and tortuous one, a relationship that finds an appropriate equivalent in the ambivalent feelings of a daughter toward her mother. If the mother-daughter relationship is a central literary representation of the Québécois attitude toward the past, this may go some way toward explaining why women writers in recent years have played such an important role in Quebec literature and have been able to give form to a reality that is recognized by their readers not as exclusively feminine but, rather, as essentially Québécois. » (p. 76) « My analysis here focuses particularly on the fiction of Marie-Claire Blais, whose work I have chosen to privilege for two reasons. First, her very extensive fictional production provides a working out of this mother-daughter relationship in its various dimensions. Second, her writing covers a crucial period in the evolution of Quebec literature, and particularly for the writing of women: she began publishing in 1959, just before the Revolution Tranquille, and she has continued to produce a steady stream of novels and plays throughout the succeeding decades. Her work can thus serve as a framework within which similar representations in the work of other major women writers can be seen and understood. » (p. 64)