Le Rapport mère-fille dans deux romans à la première personne de Gabrielle Roy

Abstract

The main objective of this thesis is to study the representation of the mother-daughter relationship in Rue Deschambault and La Route d’Altamont, works of Gabrielle Roy. We will present, initially, an overview of the dominant ideological representation of women in the French-Canadian novel before 1945 and then study the manner in which Roy recounts and interprets the experiences of the women of her time. Thus, we will be led to indicate how the representation of Roy’s female figures reflects a certain transformation of the role of women in French-Canadian literature and society. In the first chapter we will analyze certain aspects of Roy’s first-person narrative. We will pay particular attention to aspects of the "autobiographical imagination," the representation of the maternal figure and the mother-daughter relationship, and the notion of being part of a "female genealogy". In the second chapter we will reveal how the mother-daughter relationship contains a patriarchal message which encourages the daughter to embrace a certain role within her family. Moreover, we will study the process of awakening which brings the daughter as Roy constructs her to a desire for demarcation and emancipation from the maternal figure. In the final chapter we will study the themes of travel, the mother, and writing in the novels we have been studying. These topics are studied in order to highlight how the themes of travel and writing are related to the theme of the desire to both draw closer to and move away from the mother. They highlight the daughter’s quest for space and identity of her own through expanding her horizons and affirming the legitimacy of her own imagination and creative processes. We will conclude by affirming that Roy offers fresh perspectives on the representation of the maternal figure and mother-daughter relationships in French-Canadian literature.