Hébert, Anne (1916—)

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Hébert, Anne (1916—)

Noted French-Canadian poet and prose writer who has been praised for her psychological insight as well as her expression of the growing discontent of Quebec's French-speaking population under English rule. Name variations: Anne Hebert. Pronunciation: Hay-BARE. Born on August 1, 1916, at Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault in the Province of Quebec, Canada; daughter of Maurice Hébert (a writer and government official) and Marguerite Marie Taché; attended Collège Notre-Dame-de Bellevue and Collège Mérici in Quebec.

Published first poems and stories (1939); endured death of her cousin, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau (1943); began work as script writer for Canadian National Film Board (1953); began residence in Paris (1954); published first novel (1958); elected to Royal Society of Canada (1960); settled permanently in Paris (1965); received Molson Prize (1967); received honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto (1969); received Prix des Libraires de France for her novel Kamouraska (1970); film version of Kamouraska appeared (1973); won Académie française prize for novel Les Enfants du sabbat (1976); received Prix Fémina (1982).

Major works (poetry):

Les Songes en équilibre (Dreams in Equilibrium, 1942); Le Tombeau des rois (The Tomb of Kings, 1953); Poèmes (1960); Le Jour n'a d'égal que la nuit (Day Has No Equal but Night, 1992).

Major works (novels, stories, and plays):

Le Torrent (The Torrent, 1950); Les Chambres de bois (The Silent Rooms, 1958); Le Temps sauvage (Season of Innocence, 1963); Kamouraska (1970); Les Enfants du sabbat (Children of the Black Sabbath, 1975); Héloïse (1980); Les Fous de bassan (In the Shadow of the Wind, 1982); L'Enfant chargé de songes (The Child Burdened with Dreams, 1992).

Anne Hébert, whose literary career has taken place in both Canada and France, is one of French-Canada's most distinguished writers. Her work, which often presents characters in situations of acute despair, and which shows only some of them able to escape to lead lives of freedom, has been interpreted by some critics as concerned principally with universal human dilemmas. But others have seen a substantial degree of social commentary and political awareness in her writing. Hébert first appeared on the French-Canadian literary scene as a poet whose works expressed human emotions in the face of death on a profound level. Her volume of poems, Le Tombeau des Rois, published in 1953, is broadly considered to be her crowning achievement as a writer of verse.

In addition to her work as a poet, Hébert has also written six novels. Her early prose works dealt at first gingerly, then more specifically, with a critique of French-Canadian society, notably the prevailing attitudes among the upper-middle class in her native Quebec. When she relocated to France in the mid-1950s, her reputation as a prose writer soared. Two of Hébert's novels, both of them written in France, won leading literary prizes and established her as a prose writer of note. Hébert's use of main characters who are females trapped by their upbringing and their role in a society dominated by males has led some critics to identify her as a prose writer with what Maurice Gagnon calls "fundamental feminist preoccupations." Much of her work deals directly or, more frequently obliquely, with what critic Murray Sachs has called "the victimization of women by certain facets of patriarchal Quebec society."

The French-Canadian literary world into which Hébert had entered by the 1940s was in the midst of great change. A literary tradition that had revered religious faith and moral preaching faded, and traditional concerns that included the promotion of national identity and the glorification of a rural lifestyle were increasingly challenged. In 1944, the first Quebec novel placed entirely in an urban setting, Roger Lemelin's Au pied de la pente douce (The Town Below), appeared. There was a new sense of realism that concentrated on describing the increasingly urbanized society now taking shape. In Gagnon's words, with Quebec's partial transformation into an industrial society, "the balance was to shift away from the idealized rural novel of clerico-nationalist aims to the urban novel." Moreover, questions of human psychology increasingly interested some of the region's authors.

Anne Hébert was born in the village of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault, Quebec, on August 1, 1916. Her birthplace was the family's summer home located approximately 25 miles northwest of Quebec City, the capital of the province of Quebec. The daughter of Maurice Hébert and Marguerite Marie Taché , Anne Hébert belonged to a distinguished French-Canadian family whose earlier members included the architect who designed the province's Parliament building. Her father was a government official who also developed a reputation as both a writer and a literary critic. While still a young child, she followed his work by listening to the programs that he was writing for Canadian radio. Although Hébert has been famous for her reticence in discussing her private life, she has made it known that her father was a key influence in her decision to become a writer.

Childhood illness restricted Hébert to a reclusive existence in Quebec City and Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault, and the future poet and novelist received only the conventional, superficial formal education typical for an upper-class girl of her era in French-speaking Canada. Nonetheless, she read extensively, with her father serving as the guide to her program of self-study. After examining some of his daughter's early works, the elder Hébert declared firmly that she had the talent to become a professional author.

A second figure who played a major role in shaping her work was her cousin, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau. Along with other young friends, Anne and Hector put on theatrical productions in the village where their family had its summer home. It was Hector, himself a poet who published a notable volume of his work in 1937, who encouraged Anne to write her first set of poems, Les Songes en équilibre. This work was marked by short lines, free verse, and an effort to recapture a vision of the world through the eyes of a young child. Lorraine Weir , in Canadian Writers, 1920–1959, has noted how this early work reflects a religious innocence that was still a fundamental part of "a conservative Catholic girlhood." Delbert Russell, another prominent student of Hébert's work, has found that this initial publication reflected both the influence

of Hector in its stress on childhood innocence as well as that of the noted French poet Verlaine in its poetic techniques. He also noted that such lasting themes in Hébert's work as the importance of death, the link between dream and reality, and the role of the artist in the world, made their first appearance here.

In addition to her initial set of poems, Hébert also produced several plays and short stories. An early short story, La Maison de l'esplanade (The House on the Esplanade), published in 1943, was in Russell's words, "a mordant criticism of the artificiality and emptiness of the life of the haute bourgeoisie of Quebec." Living in a half-deserted mansion, its main character is an aged woman who passes each day of her life in a rigid and sterile routine. Hébert's critical view of the society in which she had grown up was to form a significant theme in her future writing.

Through her exploration of the classic themes of guilt, evil, violence, … she has created a fully unified oeuvre which is both brilliantly executed and profound in its understanding of the psychology of pain and entrapment.
—Lorraine Weir

Le Torrent stands as Hébert's most significant early work of prose. Published in an abridged version in 1947, then presented in its entirety three years later, it was a collection of short stories written over the previous decade. The title work in the volume is the account of a tormented young man who believes he has committed matricide, and then, years later, finds himself driven by guilt to take his own life. This tale has been praised for its acute psychological insight, but some critics have found in it as well a critique of the harsh Jansenist variety of Catholicism prominent in Quebec life. In this view, the hero François has been warped from childhood by his mother's effort to inculcate in him the Jansenist call to renounce the real world and to sink into a life of self-denial. The social implications of Hébert's theme help account for the fact that the story was initially published only in a censored version. When it appeared in its full form in 1950, it had to be published at Hébert's expense, and it faced a harsh critical response. As Weir has put it, many in Hébert's audience apparently felt that such stories "were altogether too revealing of a side of Quebec life that should be kept hidden."

In contrast, the collection of poems in Hébert's second volume of verse, Le Tombeau des rois, received enormous acclaim when the book appeared in 1953. In Russell's words, it is "now regarded as an undisputed masterpiece." In both her homeland and France, critics lauded the combination of feeling, imagery, and precise language Hébert put into these 27 poems. The verses focus on the theme of death and the emotional reactions produced by facing this human reality, and the symbolism the poet employed included a bird, jewels, water, bones, and light. Hébert evidently found herself drawn to examining the end of a human's existence by the loss of two beloved individuals. Her cousin, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, died of a longstanding heart ailment in October 1943 at the age of 32. In 1952, her younger sister Marie Hébert , then only 30, also passed away.

In 1953, Hébert took a job with Canada's National Film Board. In this capacity, she spent most of her time writing commentaries to accompany educational films. Within a year, she received an offer of financial support from the Royal Society of Canada. She accepted and used the funds to relocate to Paris where she was able to devote herself full-time to her writing. She continued to maintain a home in Quebec until 1965, but thereafter returned only for visits. Despite her increasing absence from her home country, her achievements as a Canadian writer brought her election, in June 1960, to the Royal Society of Canada. Much of her prose continued to focus on French-speaking Canada, but she now viewed that society from the perspective of a sojourner in a foreign country.

Hébert's first novel, Les Chambres de bois, appeared in 1958. Its cycle of short, loosely connected chapters drew on her skills as a poet. As Gagnon notes, she was now exploring "a multifaceted dreamlike world of anguish and evil" like the one in her verse. The book tells the story of a newly married Parisian couple. The husband Michel has remained erotically tied to his sister. Catherine, the wife and the book's heroine, breaks away from this claustrophobic and unhealthy world to reclaim her freedom. Les Chambres de bois concentrates on the growing awareness within Catherine's mind, and it shows how she becomes more and more conscious of the meaning of the sensations she experiences. Nonetheless, Gagnon saw this intensely personal story as linked to political currents. He noted that frequently in the novels by Quebec authors a principal character's psychology "coincides with the historical themes of possession and dispossession of land and country under Anglophone authority." Thus, as French-Canada was growing increasingly uncomfortable with English domination, so too "Catherine/Quebec no longer accepts her lot as a passive plaything of an authoritarian ruler." Russell discounted such a view, claiming that the work "pays more attention to the interior world of the small group of characters than to their social environment."

The novel was followed in short order by a new collection of poems, Mystère de la parole (Mystery of the Verb), in 1960. Departing from the terse style of Le Tombeau des rois, in which the author employed brief lines and irregular rhythms, this work of seven years later employed new techniques. Delbert Russell noted the similarity between Hébert's "long, stanza-like verses" and verses found in the Bible. In contrast to the overpowering sense of alienation found in Le Tombeau des rois, this later work, critics felt, discards such pessimism and offers a celebration and new acceptance of life.

Despite Hébert's physical distance from her homeland, she remained concerned about French Canadians' immersion in religious ritual and their unwillingness to attempt a profound examination of their links to the harsh physical reality around them. Her play Le Temps sauvage, first performed in 1966 in Quebec City, shows a tormented family whose children struggle for independence from a domineering mother, Agnès Joncas. In the end, Agnès sees her children escape their claustrophobic home environment on a mountainside north of Montreal. Weir interpreted the play's meaning in personal terms to show that even this most domineering mother "is powerless to prevent the incursions of chaos" inserted into her tiny family circle by the outside world. Thus, with "her dream of perfect motherhood shattered, Agnès is left with her own corrosive bitterness." But other critics have put the play into a different, more politicized context. Writing in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre,Renate Benson described the climax to the plot as "analogous to Quebec's liberation from a repressive past."

Hébert expressed her growing interest in the history of her homeland in both essay and novel form. Her essay, entitled "Quebec," appeared in the Montreal newspaper La Presse in 1967. Described by Russell as "a prose poem which recounts the Quebec experience from a historical and human point of view," it consists largely of the names of locales and individuals who appear throughout the history of Quebec, the center of French-speaking Canada.

After four years of work, in 1970 Hébert completed a major historical novel, Kamouraska, considered by many critics to be her most masterful work of prose. It was a fictionalized account of a famous murder and subsequent murder trial in Quebec City at the close of the 1830s. The heroine, Elizabeth, arranges the murder of her tyrannical husband; she is then tried but acquitted for the crime. The course of events is seen through Elizabeth's mind and recollections. Hébert portrays Elizabeth as a woman reared in an oppressive moral code that she subsequently breaks but cannot escape. As Gagnon put it, Elizabeth "cannot but remain imprisoned in the irreducible contradictions brought about by a set social, moral, and religious education." Unfortunately for her, she dwells in "a society that condemns more than it condones and does so on absolute religious terms incompatible with human needs and failings." According to Sachs, the novel combines a variety of potent elements: "the colonial mentality in nineteenth-century Quebec, … class, sex, and economic differences, … the proper role of tradition, morality, and the Church in the life of the individual." The novel was made into a highly regarded film in 1973. It served to introduce Hébert to an English-language audience, and much of her work was now translated into English for the first time.

Hébert presented a more optimistic picture of an individual caught in an oppressive religious system in her subsequent novel Les Enfants du sabbat. Published in 1975 and set in the Quebec countryside during the Depression, this shows Sister Julie, a young novice in a religious order, who successfully escapes to freedom. Writes Gagnon, the heroine rejects "a comportment tainted by feelings of prison and death." Instead, she chooses "authenticity and autonomy." This novel presents the most direct attack so far in Hébert's writing on the role of the Catholic Church in Quebec society. It features a picture of a convent community marked by sexual repression, hallucinations, and a search for hidden sorcerers. As Russell described it, the book "effectively presents and condemns a religious climate in Quebec which was finally to come to an end during … the 1950s and 1960s." He has also noted how, in both Kamouraska and Les Enfants du sabbat, "the physical substance of recaptured times and places is added to the intensity of feeling found in her best poetry."

Hébert's next novel, Héloïse, was set entirely in Paris. Like Les Chambre de bois, this work shows a young married couple starting their life together in an apartment. This time, however, Hébert offers neither of her main characters an escape. The book ends with both of them in the midst of dead animals and plants, a preview of the fate that hangs over their heads.

In 1982, Hébert's fifth novel, Les Fous de basson was placed back in the familiar setting of Quebec. Unlike her previous writing, which had examined the lives of French-Canadians, the book dealt with the Protestant Anglophones of Canada. In a series of separate segments told from different points of view, her characters recall the death of two citizens of the small village of Griffin Creek in the summer of 1936. It is a profoundly pessimistic work in which the characters, in Gagnon's words, live in a "sense of helplessness and hopelessness."

In 1992, Hébert presented her latest works of both prose and poetry. Her novel, L'Enfant chargé de songes, presents a male protagonist, living in Paris just after World War II and recalling his Quebec childhood. Her volume of poetry, Le Jour n'a d'égal que la nuit, was her first since 1960. It contained 49 poems, written between 1961 and 1989.

Since the late 1950s, Hébert has been an honored writer in both her native country as well as France. In addition to the numerous literary prizes she has won in Paris, such as the Prix des libraires de France in 1971 for Kamouraska and the Prix Fémina in 1982 for Les Fous de Bassan, she has received a host of awards in Canada as well as doctorates from three Canadian universities: the University of Toronto in 1969, the University of Quebec at Montreal in 1979, and McGill University in 1980.

Evaluations of Hébert's work necessarily involve balancing a consideration of her achievements as a writer and an assessment of her role in reflecting and commenting on the society that produced her. Critics like Albert LeGrand have described her work as a product of the Quebec psyche. But Delbert Russell has presented the more widely accepted view in noting that she will "be remembered not primarily as a Quebec poet, but as a poet." For Weir as well, Hébert's achievement has been to create "a complex and tightly unified system which transcends particularized settings," one which explores "the profoundest forces at work in human life."

sources:

Benson, Eugene, and L.W. Conolly, eds. The Oxford Companion to the Canadian Theatre. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Gagnon, Maurice. The French Novel of Quebec. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1986.

Lewis, Paula Gilbert, ed. Traditionalism, Nationalism, and Feminism: The Women Writers of Quebec. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Mitchell, Constantina Thalia, and Paul Raymond Cote. Shaping the Novel: Textual Interplay in the Fiction of Malraux, Hébert, and Modiano. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996.

Moritz, Albert and Theresa. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987.

New, William H., ed. Canadian Writers, 1920–1959. First Series. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1988.

Russell, Delbert W. Anne Hébert. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1983.

Toye, William, ed. Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1983.