Marie-Claire Blais

by Mary Jean Matthews Green

The tradition-bound Catholic Quebec of the 1950s from which the young Marie-Claire Blais hoped to escape was the very world she wrote about with such intensity, precision, and poignance in her many acclaimed novels, theater pieces, and essays. Even after she had found her personal and artistic freedom in other cultures, Blais spent many peripatetic years casting a backward glance at Quebec's people and their ways - observations borne out in such works as Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel (1965), the three-volume Manuscrits de Pauline Archange (1968-70), and Visions d'Anna (1980). In this first book-length English-language study of Blais, Mary Jean Green pays especially close attention to what she considers the author's four major works - La Belle Bete (1959), Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel, Le Sourd dans la ville (1979), and Visions d'Anna - and addresses Blais's other novels according to their focus on various themes: the life of the couple, the alienation of adolescence, love amon