Table of Contents
In his 1993 book, Blasphemy, David Lawton is of the opinion that blasphemy in the arts is healthy because it ‘often registers the irruption of a new reading community’[1] and marks such a community’s rite of passage. Women’s writing has been an important site of blasphemy in the twentieth century. Blasphemy has provided a formerly marginalised group with a medium though which to assert its rights against an existing social and cultural order that abhors transformation and resists it. It does this by wielding the power of religious constructs about the sacrosanctity of dogmas and beliefs, the naturalness of civil codes of ethical and moral propriety, and the necessity of judicial provisions like repressive censorship and blasphemy laws. This chapter examines a literary scandal that marked Quebec’s rupture from traditionalism and religious institutionalism, and the emergence of its post-Quiet Revolution feminine identity.
The scandal of Les fees ont soif erupted in 1978 — more than a decade after the Quiet Revolution (1960–66) and Quebec’s rejection of traditionalist spiritual values, classical education, church-controlled and inspired social welfare institutions and its rural, agricultural heritage, and its assertion of a new Quebecois identity. Feminine emancipation was still in its embryonic stage. The Catholic Church, despite its waning political clout, exercised nevertheless, considerable influence on the behaviour of women.[2] A decade of secular outlook had not been long enough to dismantle traditional constructs about the role of women and centuries of cultural and social conditioning about male superiority, or to undo the imposing omnipresence of retrograde patriarchal ideologies in newly established secular institutions. Frustration, coupled with the emergence of a second wave of feminism in Western Europe and the USA, catalysed the surfacing of an almost militant and utopian feminist movement in Quebec. In 1976, Quebec witnessed the emergence of L’Autre Parole, a publication by women who identified themselves as Catholics and feminists and asked for the de-gendering of religious practices and discourses to include the presence and the voice of women. Louky Bersianik’s l’Eugelionne, published the same year, parodies sacred male writings, especially the Bible and the writings and theories of Freud and Lacan, satirically denoted as Saint Siegfried and Saint-Jacques-Linquant. L’Eugelionne challenges, deflates, and deconstructs androcentric ideology, its sexist discourse and practices, its misogynist reality, and its harmful dichotomies.
Owing to its representational power to encompass physical and sexual difference within the existing patriarchal discourse and to deconstruct negative myths and images, theatre provided feminist collectives with a transgressive and performative space in which to pursue their quest for a female identity. Well known examples of this feminist iconoclastic fervour are plays like Si Cendrillon pouvait mourir (If Cindrella could die) (1975) and La Nef des sorcières (A Clash of Symbols) (1976), which directly attack stereotype female role models.
On 16 May, 1978, the Arts Council of Montreal informed the director of the Théâtre du Nouveau-Monde, Jean-Louis Roux, about their decision not to fund Les fees ont soif. The president of the council publicly called this play ‘a piece of shit’, ‘trash’ and challenged local newspapers to publish three pages of its script. The day after this declaration, La Presse published an extract of the play and by the end of the month, the editor of Devoir, Michel Roy, called for a censor. By June, the debate over the play mobilised public opinion, igniting another Querelle de Tartuffe.[3] While rehearsals continued, organisations such as the Association of Theatre Directors, the Human Rights League, Quebecois Writers’ Union, and the International Institute of Theatre filed petitions against a potential censor. The only female member of the Council, Mme Thérèse Lamarche resigned in protest against the council’s decision. On 11 November, when the play was advertised to be staged, the battle seemed won. However, the crusade had just begun. The play premiered on 25 November amidst protests by the extreme right, with reparation vigils organised by the Archdiocese of Montreal and congregations even picketing the theatre en masse to recite the rosary while the play was being performed. Three days later, the Archbishop of Quebec, Mgr. Paul Grégoire, denounced the play for its vulgarity and its frivolous portrayal of the Holy Virgin as ‘a puppet, an invention of male domination, a figment responsible for the alienation of women’.[4]
A judicial imbroglio ensued. Following a plea lodged by Emile Colas on behalf of Young Canadians for Christ, Quebecois Catholic Parents’ Association, Farmers’ Association and the Quebec State Council of the Knights of Columbus, the printed version of the play was banned by the High Court. In January 1979, the decision was reversed on the basis of a technicality and a petition signed by intellectuals, including Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Phillippe Sollers, Denis Roche and Christiane Rochefort. Colas, appealed to the Supreme Court and lost. More judicial proceedings followed until the Supreme Court declared, in 1980, that it would not hear any more cases against the work, stating that ‘any injunction against a work of art having considerable social impact, should come from the Public Prosecutor of the province, given that the work affects the whole society, not isolated individuals’.[5]
Since 1980, Les fees ont soif has been successfully staged several times — even during the papal visit to Canada in 1984 — and as recently as July 2005 during the Festival de Fringe in Montreal, without being decried as blasphemous or scandalous. In the literary and in the cultural paradigm, Les fees ont soif is considered as a prominent marker of the post Quiet Revolution assertion of the feminine identity and the social rupture from religious dogmatism in Québec. Why?
[1] David Lawton, Blasphemy, 1993, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 139.
[2] In Les religieuses sont-elles féministes?, Micheline Dumont speaks about the increase in the number of Quebecoise nuns (from 1850 to 1965, an increase from 650 to 43,274) and explains that taking orders was a form of individual emancipation, that the Church provided women who became nuns with an access to life which the Quebecoise society would have otherwise denied them. Micheline Dumont, 1995, Les religieuses sont-elles féministes? Montreal: Bellarmin.
[3] Querelle de Tartuffe (1693-94). As evidence that the clergy in the New World could be as controlling as that of the Old, the Church banned the proposed production of Molière’s Le Tartuffe. Even 30 years after its creation, the play was still considered controversial in France. In the New World, the controversy was more of a battle of power between the state and the clergy than a battle over morality.
[4] Lise Gauvin, ‘Introduction’, in Denise Boucher, 1989, Les fées ont soif, Montréal: l’Hexagone, p. x. For a more recent version of the play, see Denise Boucher, Les fées ont soif, Éditions Typo, 2008. This play has also been translated in English by Alan Brown as The Fairies are Thirsty, Talonbooks, 2008. This translation can also be found in the Anthology of Québec Women's Plays in English Translation, Volume I (1996-1986), (edited by Louise H, Forsyth) Playwrights Canada Press, Toronto, 2006. An English translation can also be found in Plays by French and Francophone Women: A Critical Anthology (edited and translated by Christiane P. Makward and Judith G. Miller with an annotated bibliography by Cynthia Running-Johnson) The University of Michigan Press, 1994.
[5] Ibid., p. xi.