SOURCE: "Antonine Maillet and the Epic Heroine," in Traditionalism, Nationalism, and Feminism: Women Writers of Quebec, edited by Paula Gilbert Lewis, Greenwood Press, 1985, pp. 141-55.

[In the following essay, Fitzpatrick examines the female roles in several of Maillet's novels.]

Traditionalist, feminist, nationalist—how is one to classify the broad range of Antonine Maillet's important female characters? The answer has to be: partly each, yet not exclusively any of the above. At the risk of offending partisans of all three groups, I suggest that the wonderfully gifted Maillet—surely one of the best storytellers writing in French today—has simultaneously transcended the confining stereotypes of traditionalism, the humorlessness of some feminism, and the narrow vision of fanatic nationalism. At the same time, no author currently writing has created women who are at once more classically feminine, more liberated … and more Acadian.

How has Maillet achieved this remarkable synthesis? One thinks, of course, of her humor and her narrative genius, but in addition there is the striking use she makes of female protagonists. When one examines their characters, personalities, objectives, and actions, it is clear that many of these women have much in common with the typically male epic hero. Indeed, "heroine" seems almost too derivative a word to apply to these strong, memorable figures. They come closer to the powerful but unquestionably feminine women that Maya Angelou refers to as "she-roes."

Although Maillet's best known character is doubtless la Sagouine, the kind of epic heroine (let us resign ourselves to the traditional word) alluded to above is better exemplified in her narrative works, of which three will be considered here: Mariaagélas, Les Cordes-de-Bois, and—obviously—Pélugie-la-Charrette. Two of these sparkling novels proclaim the centrality of their women protagonists right in their titles. The third, Les Cordes-de-Bois, in fact does so as well, since the title refers to the entire clan of extraordinary women known as the Mercenaires, whose most impressive (and central) figures are la Piroune and her daughter la Bessoune.

The strictures that threaten the freedom and self-fulfillment of these redoubtable Mercenaire women are reflected spatially in the setting of the novel: a stifling, hypocritical, "well-ordered" village called le Pont after its most prominent physical feature, standing cheek by jowl with the rakishly timber-covered butte called les Cordes-de-Bois, home of and synonym for the Mercenaires. The entire novel will revolve around the opposition between these two microcosmic universes and the principles they represent.

More specifically, however—in a major departure from much feminist literature—the struggle will pit la Piroune and la Bessoune against another woman, Ma-Tante-la-Veuve, a fire-breathing, witch-hunting virago who has become the self-appointed guardian of the morals of le Pont. In this novel, as in Mariaagélas and more subtly in Pélagie, we thus find both the forces for "good" (the struggle for freedom, the refusal to bow to convention, the determination to conquer obstacles) and the forces of "evil" (self-righteous hypocrisy, adherence to convention, the cult of personal power for its own sake) led by women. Maillet virtually suggests that only another woman would have the boldness, the shrewdness, the energy to serve as a worthy adversary for the likes of the world's Pirounes and Bessounes. The latter, seen as personal scourges by Ma-Tante-la-Veuve, give scandal precisely because they refuse to be bound by the traditional limits on their freedom to which the "respectable" village ladies docilely adhere. If the continuous dust-ups between the Mercenaires and Ma-Tante-la-Veuve owe more to the héroï-comique tradition of Boileau's Lutrin than to the epic heroism of Roland facing the Saracens, the fact remains that the two courageous Mercenaire women, relying only upon their own resources and wile, overcome numerous and often apparently insurmountable obstacles strewn in their path by an implacable foe.

The same pattern emerges in Mariaagélas. The young heroine, Maria, born into a family known for its rejection of the petit bourgeois norms of village society, has as chief antagonist the female incarnation of that society in all its hypocritical rectitude: la veuve à Calixte. In many ways the struggle between these two is even more sharply etched (though narrower in its feminist implications) than the conflict between the Mercenaires and Ma-Tante-la-Veuve, since Maria and la veuve à Calixte seem to take their greatest satisfaction from out-smarting each other. While the Mercenaires and Ma-Tante-la-Veuve symbolize irreconcilable mores that necessarily come into confrontation, the unending fight between the outlaw Maria and the ambitious veuve à Calixte has more the quality of a personal grudge match. In both cases, however, the author's—and therefore the reader's—sympathies clearly lie with the renegade women, who willingly forgo comfort, respectability, acceptance, and even legality in exchange for freedom and self-fulfillment.

Has Maillet set up these female antagonisms for the sake of symmetry, or are Ma-Tante-la-Veuve and la veuve à Calixte simply surrogates for men in what is essentially a male-ordered universe? Can we make a case for the latter by noting that both women are identified only by titles that define them in terms of their relationship to men? One might take such an argument one step further and observe that both these dragons, while serving as champions of the most benighted traditionalism, are freed from some of its more oppressive routine aspects by their very widowhood.

As tempting as it is to pursue this line of thought, a better explanation may in fact be the one suggested earlier. While the heroines and their antagonists find themselves (the latter willingly, the former most involuntarily) in a world whose parameters have been largely shaped by authoritative men, the fundamental struggle as they conceive it seems not to be between male and female, but between institutional constraint and individual freedom. Women are lined up against women, not in some mutual self-destructive loathing, but because they make worthy and interesting adversaries. Indeed, as the narrator points out in one sardonic passage in Mariaagélas, both heroine and villain are so accustomed to coping mainly with men that they occasionally underestimate each other:

La veuve à Calixte connaissait tout ça [that most rumrunners were eventually caught and jailed by the authorities], et savait par conséquent qu'unjour ou l'autre le sort tomberait sur Mariaagélas comme sur les autres contrabandiers. Mais la veuve à Calixte avait oublié une chose: Mariaagélas n'était pas un contrabandier, mais une contrabandìere.

De son côté, Mariaagélas avait négligé de reconnaître les attributions de la veuve, s'imaginant que sa fonction se limitait à de petits commérages de bénitier ou de bureau de poste. Depuis belles années, pourtant, la veuve à Calixte débordait chaque saison son rôle et étonnait tout le monde.

Pélagie-la-Charrette, for all its good humor and savory Acadian epithets, comes closer than either of the other novels to being a true epic. The struggles played out in mischievous fun between the Mercenaires and Ma-Tante-la-Veuve, between Maria the bootlegger and la veuve à Calixte, are repeated in deadly earnest by Pélagie and her prime adversary, no less a figure than Death herself (feminine in French). Pélagie's quest is not merely for personal freedom but for the very life of Acadia, the Promised Land whence she was expelled during the Great Dispersion and to which, against all the wiles of the Foe, she is determined to lead her little remnant of survivors. Death takes many forms along Pélagie's route, all of them female or identified by feminine nouns. At one particularly desperate moment in the journey she is la Faucheuse, the Grim Reaper, whom Pélagie bests only through exhausting and heroic efforts. Be it noted, however, that Pélagie's triumph depends on her moral force rather than physical strength, for which she unhesitatingly relies upon the men in the company. As la Faucheuse lurks impatiently nearby, Pélagie's Cart, symbol of life and hope, is sinking inexorably into the Salem swamp. While the men bend every ounce of their strength to extricate the wagon, Pélagie wages her titanic struggle out of the depths of her soul:

Les chroniqeurs du dernier siècle ont juré que Pélagie n'avait pas bougé durant toute la scène, qu'elle se tenait droite comme un peuplier, la tête au vent. Elle n'aurait pas crié, ni prié, ni montré le poing au ciel comme l'on a prétendu. Personne ne l'a vue se jeter à genoux et se lamenter, ce n'est pas vrai. Personne ne l'a entendue hucher des injures aux saints, ni les supplier pour l'amour de Dieu.

"Et alors, son cri?"

"Elle a dit un seul mot, un seul…."

"Ma vie!" qu'on entendit monter des marais de Salem et rouler sur les roseaux jusqu'au pont de bois.

La charrette a dû l'entendre, car elle a grincé de toutes ses pentures et de tous ses essieux. Deux fois en un jour on s'en venait impudemment lui barrer la route? Qui osait?

Another female manifestation of Death on Pélagie's path is the phantasmagoric black cart, the charrette noire, which attaches itself to Pélagie's companion Bélonie-le-Vieux and is visible only to him. While Pélagie imbues her own cart with her vibrant sense of life, hope, purpose, and freedom, Bélonie's cart seems instead to define him as it rumbles mockingly along with the pilgrims like a malevolent shadow, sapping energy and provoking despair. As Pélagie is to her Cart of Life (alive, active, generative of hope), so the Cart of Death is to Bélonie (resigned, passive, prepared to be trundled to his death). Only with the discovery of a living grandson, long thought dead, does Bélonie truly, totally, join in the communion of Pélagie's joyous will to survive, to reach Acadia again. Robbed of its essence, Bélonie's death cart then disappears, never to return. The epic heroine, wielding as sole weapons her own vitality (maternal as well as personal) and the wagon that embodies it, has faced down the greatest adversary of humankind, won the race against doom, and saved her less hardy friend. Though the nature of her struggle and the mode of her triumph are, as we shall see, defined by her womanhood, she thinks of them not as primarily a victory of Woman over Man, but of Life over Death.

This is not to say that the gender of Maillet's protagonists is irrelevant to their struggles—quite the contrary! In every case the fact that a struggle is necessary at all is a consequence at least partly of their sex, and both the nature of the obstacles they face and the weapons they use in overcoming them are tied to it as well.

The linkages in Mariaagélas are multiple but quite clear. At eight years of age the profit-minded preschooler Maria was out cornering the village market in returnable bottles while she was thought to be safely at home, like a good little girl, with her grandmother. At fourteen she was destined, like other girls of similarly humble circumstances, to be shipped off by her father to work in the shops, or to go into domestic service, but Maria was not about to accept either option. With scornful disregard for her future employability in any "respectable" home, she settled a perceived insult by the schoolmistress to her younger sister by storming into the schoolhouse one day, "avant que personne n'eût pu prévoir le coup, et sous le regard ébarroui des petits de la petite classe,… avait administré à M'zelle Mazerolle le plus formidable poing dans l'oeil de mémoire scolaire."

Moreover, Maria was not the first woman of her family to reject the traditional destiny: her Aunt Clara, much admired by the adolescent Maria, had become a prostitute and a vagabond in preference to remaining in the horrid conditions of a succession of sweat-shops. In her last such job Clara had even organized the other women in a short-lived mutiny, torched the shop, and spent time in prison. Despite the cost, Maria was deeply impressed by Clara's refusal to conform and looked to her as a model in her own budding life of outlawry. Nor did she aspire to the "respectable" women's roles as dependent wife, doting mother, pious parishioner, and loyal good citizen. No one—not her father, the priest, the schoolmarm, or tradition—was about to tell Mariaagélas what she must do or what she must become, or not become. Fortified by her natural taste for adventure and her business acumen, she therefore seemed to fall almost by fate into a highly profitable profession—bootlegging—that made her a moral, social and legal outlaw.

From then till the end of her days, Maria took mischievous pleasure not only in running the most successful bootlegging operation in her area during those dangerous Prohibition days, but in carrying out her feats under the very nose of the sanctimonious veuve à Calixte. In one supremely ironic ruse, Maria played upon two of the most deeply entrenched stereotypes of her society. Disguising herself as a nun, she had a bootlegging partner drive her and a full cargo of illegal liquor in her own Buick across the American border, counting accurately upon the gallantry of the québécois border guards towards her sex and the respect of the Irish-American guards for her habit to protect her from the usual close search. Her contempt for the limitations placed upon her free choice by tradition and prejudice inspired her to use them as weapons in the service of her own illegal ends.

The outlawry of la Piroune and la Bessoune in Les Cordes-de-Bois was more social than statutory, but as disruptive of local society as that of Mariaagélas. Like Maria, they were members of a renegade family whose women were known for flouting the conventions (in this case principally sexual) established by their "betters." Again the battle lines were drawn early, and again a small act of defiance signaled the charge. The bourgeois society of le Pont was centered, typically, around the parish church, whose Angelus bells called all right-thinking townspeople (notably innocent young girls) to pious meditation. The Mercenaires, however, worshiped at a shrine belonging to a very different myth. The nubile Piroune, in particular, was drawn to the quay instead of the church, and one fateful evening she jingled the little bells on the buoy at the very moment the Angelus was sounding. Though Ma-Tante-la-Veuve would not have believed it, the narrator claims that this was not a gesture of contempt, but one of affirmation:

[L]a Piroune, à cette époque de sa vie, ne cherchait dans les bateaux que des souvenirs, une sorte de mémoire-hommage à l'ancêtre. Elle se rendait au quai comme Marie-Rose et Jeanne-Mance [two of Ma-Tante-la-Veuve's many respectable nieces] à la niche de Marie-Immaculée: en pèlerinage. Cette orpheline de père et de mère semblait s'accrocher à son passé, faute d'avenir, à son lignage tout plein de mystère et de faits glorieux qu'elle revivait là sur sa bouée.

Indeed, the first of the Mercenaires had surfaced generations before in some mysterious fashion from the sea, had braved nature and the local owner to establish his brood permanently on top of the butte, and had passed down both his affinity for the sea and his rejection of conventions to his many descendants, now mostly women. As her male progenitor had emerged from the sea, la Piroune's own mother, Barbe-la-Jeune, had disappeared into it after saving the lives of some sailors stranded on ice floes by a sudden thaw.

The motif of the sea is all-pervasive in this novel (and prominent in the two others), but in contradictory ways. It gives birth and brings death. It promises hope (the vigil of la Piroune at the quay, where passing sailors come to meet her and often stay), and inflicts despair (la Bessoune's efforts to drown herself after her young priest/lover has apparently done just that). It beckons to far-off lands (the Irish sailor, "Tom Thumb," finds it an almost irresistible lure), and validates the regeneration of the entrenched Mercenaires (la Bessoune is born nine months after her mother, la Piroune, heroically saves a child snared in some ship's rigging and celebrates with the cheering assembled sailors). Neither exclusively male nor female in its symbolism, it is a self-complete, eternal, mystical life force, permeating all Acadian myth and legend. La Bessoune, twinless twin of an unknown father, is indeed a child of the sea, whose wildness and freedom she fully incarnates. Like the rest of her line, she will not be mastered by mere ordinary mortals and their silly laws, any more than they can dictate to the restless waves of the unending sea.

As a child la Bessoune puts up with the discipline of Church and school only as much and as long as she pleases, then abandons both. With adolescence she steps easily into the footsteps of her mother, selling contraband liquor and offering the bounty of her own sensuous nature to passing sailors. La Piroune and la Bessoune do not so much challenge the institutions of le Pont as ignore them, with an insouciance that often leaves Ma-Tante-la-Veuve in a state of spluttering frustration. The mere existence of the Mercenaires is an intolerable affront to the well-ordered universe of le Pont, whose futile efforts to control them result in constant, inevitable confrontation.

While the Mercenaire women thwart Ma-Tante-la-Veuve mainly by attracting most of her potential male allies to their side through sheer joyous sensuality, their ultimate ironic triumph comes on the widow's own supposed home ground: the domain of the spirit. Like everything else in le Pont, charity has been institutionalized. At a yearly "auction" held by the parish church, the destitute are assembled and farmed out to whatever families bid the lowest amount and promise to provide for them. One year, a truly pathetic case disturbs the smug rhythm of the auction: Henri à Vital, a once-popular local raconteur who had gone off for adventure to the States and was now back, a poor paralytic wreck, finds no takers. Ma-Tante-la-Veuve and the others are willing enough to do their Christian duty for the elderly and sickly, who can be counted upon not to survive beyond a decent interval. But who, the sweating auctioneer suddenly realized, would take on the wheelchair-bound Henri à Vital, "pas un vieillard encore, ni tout à fait un déshérité, qui mangerait ses trois repas par jour et pouvait vivre encore des années?"

Into the silence that follows steps la Piroune, prodded by la Bessoune, who offers to take Henri à Vital—for nothing. Ma-Tante-la-Veuve, nearly apoplectic, tries to sidetrack this scandalous turn of events, but the new young curate, overriding his stunned pastor, vigorously supports the right of the poor to go off with whomever they choose. Henri à Vital, predictably, heads right for the Cordes-de-Bois, as do a pair of orphans who have clung instinctively to la Piroune's welcoming skirtfolds.

The narrator describes the sweet taste of vengeance the whole affair leaves in the mouths of the Mercenaires as they savor the discomfiture of their archenemy:

Effectivement, le vicaire avait le pied sur celui de son curé, c'est la Bessoune qui l'a vu. Et elle sourit, la Bessoune. Un sourire qu'elle flanqua sous le nez de la Veuve en plein mitan de l'estrade de l'encan des pauvres. Tout était à l'envers, ce jour-là: les chenapans et les vieux renards qui faisaient leurs Pâques à la Trinité occupaient la tribune de l'église: les filles à matelots narguaient le Tiers-Ordre et les confréries; les pauvres achetaient les pauvres; et voilà que le vicaire marchait sur les pieds de son curé.

On a dit que la Bessoune avait été saisic alors d'un tel élan d'éblouissement et de reconnaissance, qu'elle aurait sauté au cou du jeune prêtre, là, à la face de toute la paroisse qui en am ait fait: aah!

This incident, with its climactic position near the end of the novel, underscores an interesting aspect of the question of womanhood in this particular Maillet universe. For Ma-Tante-la-Veuve the sexual behavior of the Mercenaires is a thing apart, a sin-in-itself, a violation of all the old guilt-inducing strictures of Church and polite society. For la Piroune and la Bessoune, however, sexual gratification is not an avenue into which they are reluctantly channeled for want of freedom, but a perfectly natural manifestation of the freedom they already joyously feel. As human beings, and specifically as women, they are whole beings of free-spirited openheartedness, no more self-conscious about the sharing of their bodies than they are about sharing family loyalty or the maternal warmth to which the poor and the abandoned are instinctively drawn. The struggle they are forced to wage is not within themselves, but against an embittered foe who cannot even understand, much less successfully prevent, the totality of their freedom, both defined by and expressed through their specific nature as women.

We see in Pélagie-la-Charrette the same harmony between a passion for freedom and strong womanly traits of the most traditional sort. Survivor (unlike her husband) of the sack of Grand-Pré at the time of the Great Acadian Dispersion, she has seen friends and relatives strewn all up and down the Atlantic coast and has spent fifteen years tied alongside black slaves to the plough of a Georgia planter. When she finally decides she has had enough, her revolt is inspired in equal measure by heroism of soul—strong, brave, decisive, bent on action—and by a vivid belief in her critical role as surviving mother of a whole race. The Cart of Life that she sets plunging northward on the path to liberty is also a warmly enveloping rolling home, full of the weak and defenseless, crammed with pots and pans, sheltering the pitiful remnants of a nearly exterminated generation. Hopelessness and suffocation are not, however, related to the dark interior of Pélagie's wagon, but to the monotonous closed circle traced by the Georgia planter's plough, the mud that nearly sucks the wagon under in Salem, and the frenetic, aimless charge of Bélonie's Cart of Death. Pélagie's womanhood is as traditional as a tigress fighting to save her cubs and as liberated as the warrior hero who saves a nation. It is the essential context of her being, the condition that gives form and meaning to her epic quest for life and freedom—not a contradiction but an affirmation.

The only power strong enough to distract Pélagie even momentarily from her relentless drive northward is the call of the nearby sea—here, as elsewhere in Maillet, a mysterious atavistic force of compelling power for all Acadians. Both progenitor and protective mother, master of nature and alluring mistress, proof of freedom and assurance of continuity, the sea links man and woman, past and future, life and eternity. Tempted as she sometimes is to divert her route towards its magical embrace, Pélagie sees it as above all a guaranteeing sign of her odyssey's ultimate success: "La mer restait leur plus sur lien avec l'Acadie du Nord. On peut s'égarer dans la forêt, ou se cogner le front aux monts; mais la mer du nord ne saurait aboutir qu'aux pays."

We have seen the strength of Maillet's assertive women, but what of the men in their worlds? In all three novels the important role of chief antagonist is given to another woman (though in Les Cordes-de-Bois and Mariaagélas these women may, through their widowhood, represent an institutionalized, bourgeois, male-dominated society). There are, however, several important male characters in these novels, and there are—perhaps surprisingly—very few instances of hostility in the relations between them and the epic heroines. A few of the men are subjects of mild scorn, like the simple-minded soldier Bidoche and the informer Ferdinand in Mariaagélas, or the strait-laced pastor in Les Cordes-de-Bois. Some are sympathetic but clearly secondary characters, such as Maria's bootlegging partner le Grand Vital and the stream of men captivated and lured to the butte by the Mercenaires.

Of greatest interest, however, are the examples of genuine respect and affection between the epic heroines and certain men around them. Hinted at in the family loyalty of Mariaagélas, which extends even to her rough-spoken father, this kind of warm relationship blossoms more clearly in Les Cordes-de-Bois. Two of la Bessoune's "conquests" are most unlikely partners: "Tom Thumb," the homesick Irish sailor always going back off to sea—except the last time—and the earnest young curate.

The latter, first drawn to the butte by the desire to convert the lawless Mercenaires, soon falls under their spell. They, and particularly la Bessoune, seem to possess already all the joy, selflessness, and freedom that he has come to preach. After long months of pleasure on the butte and scandal in the village, the priest is reported one night to have stepped off the bridge into the dark sea. As reported by Catoune, another Mercenaire and the only witness, his parting words are a confession of guilt to the village charge that for all his natural virtues he has not led a single soul to God: "C'est Ma-Tante-la-Veuve qu'avait raison … qu'il a dit." To this Catoune adds her own assessment: "Fallit qu'il mettit l'océan entre lui pis le monde … fallit qu'il éteignit le feu … le feu qui y brûlait les boyaux." When the heartbroken Bessoune tries soon thereafter to join her lost lover at the bottom of the sea, she is saved by Tom Thumb, now a permanent inhabitant of the Cordes-de-Bois. His healing compassion, inspired by the Mercenaires' own rough-hewn love, thus completes the redemptive cycle. In a final, gentle benediction, a report later filters back that the curate did not drown after all but has been spotted on a ship bound for Rome.

Tom Thumb, as we have noted, comes to rest at the Cordes-de-Bois only after innumerable short stays followed by renewed sea voyages. The narrator's commentary on his ultimate decision to stay explains what the spirit of the Mercenaires, and the Acadia they symbolize for him, has come to mean in his life:

Vous aviez ciu, vous, qu'il allait partir comme ca, le Tom Thumb? quitter un pays qui lui rendait son Irlande transposée et transfigurée, pour une Irlande réelle et misérable qui mourait de faim? Allez donc! C'est en Amérique que l'Irlande est belle. Et c'est en Acadie que Tom Thumb pourrait en rêver à son aise.

Il s'ébroua, le petit matelot, et offrit sa plus splendide grimace à la Bessoune.

"Moi pis le grand Brendan," qu'il dit, "on ira par terre et mer chercher les héros: les géants, les saints, les navigueux, les sorciers, les holy men … et on juchera tons ces salauds sur le faît des Cordes-de-Bois. Pis ça sera là le centre du monde," qu'il fit.

La Bessoune ne répondit pas. Mais Charlie Boudreau jure qu'elle a mis sa main dans celle de Tom Thumb, et qu'ils sont partis tous les deux par les dunes vers les Cordes-de-Bois.

The end of Tom Thumb's lifelong search for mythical Celtic heroes has come in the undemanding affection of the outcast Mercenaires, for whom love is sharing, not dependency. Like freedom and heroism, it is not to be found in some distant, inaccessible place, but within the soul.

No one could be less dependent than the determined Pélagie-la-Charrette, who takes her vocation as epic heroine very seriously. Others defer to her natural leadership without question, as when, on a day when she decides to give her flagging troup a pep talk. "I'Acadie entière lève des yeux bleus suppliants sur son chef qui déjà s'empare de la tribune." When she has finished, "elle redescend de la tribune en se drapant dans sa cape comme un consul romain dans sa toge." The narrator notes the stirring effect of her speech on the little band of travelers: "Ce jour-là, on l'aurait couronnée de lauriers, la Pélagie, si on avait été en saison." Her admiring friend, Captain Broussard dit Beausoleil, characterizes her thus: "Quelle femme, cette Pélagie! capable à elle seule de ramener un peuple au pays. De le ramener à contre-courant."

Yet the two most cherished friends of this Pélagie—heroine, leader, object of admiration—are men. Though her relationships with Bélonie-le-Vieux and with Captain Broussard dit Beausoleil are very different, each is rooted in love of a very special kind. Bélonie, noted croniqueur described as already old at the outset of the trek, brings out Pélagie's protective instincts: "matetral" would not be too strong a word. Her youth contrasts with his age, her strength and vigor with his feebleness, his black cart of despair—of resignation to death—with her Cart of Life. Pélagie, who must have strength enough for them both, refuses to leave Bélonie behind: "Pélagie n'aurait pas eu le coeur de laisser derrière le doyen des déportés, même s'il devait traîner avec lui jusqu'à la Grand' Prée [sic] sa charrette fantôme."

Onwards she prods and encourages him, mile after mile, until at last along the coast of Massachusetts the miracle occurs. The Grand' Goule (formerly the deportation ship, Pembroke, seized from the English by the exiles themselves) intercepts Pélagie's wagon near Salem. Captain Beausoleil hails the straggling band and proudly presents one of his crew: young Bélonie, grandson of Bélonie and unsuspected survivor of the Great Dispersion. Pélagie's obstinate determination to keep the old man alive is now abruptly vindicated; the death wagon becomes a pointless relic, and Bélonie-le-Vieux joins the ranks of Life. Maillet, through her narrator, uses an astonishingly effective reversed sex-role image to convey the intensity of Bélonie's joy at that moment:

Le ciel lui-même a dû ce jour-là enregistrer le cri du capitaine Beausoleil-Broussard, puis le renvoyer rebondir à la tête de Bélonie-le-Vieux qui le reçut comme un coup de pied au ventre. Si jamais un homme depuis le début des temps, a éprouvé l'ombre d'une douleur de l'enfantement, c'est le Bélonie de la charrette. A cent ans, ou presque, il venait de mettre au monde sa lignée.

Pélagie and the gallant Beausoleil have a very different sort of relationship. She often turns to him for the same sort of strength and moral support that Bélonie seeks from her. The first meeting of Pélagie and Beausoleil after the Dispersion, when the Grand' Goule comes into port as Pélagie's wagon is passing through Charlestown, shows the depth of their mutual affection:

Le front du capitaine se déride et ses joues éclatent dans un large rire à l'ancienne comme Pélagie n'en a point entendu depuis le temps. Alors les bras de cette femme éperdue se referment sur son coeur pour le garder au chaud et l'empêcher de bondir hors du coffre: ce rire vient du passé, mais point de l'Au-delà. Et de la poitrine dc cette veuve d'Acadie qui traîne depuis tant d'années une plaie ouverte, s'arrache un cri que même les morts auront entendu:

"Il est en vie!"

From then on Beausoleil is Pélagie's guiding star, paralleling at sea the route of her wagon on land. Their reunions at a succession of coastal points are so many marks of progress along Pélagie's path to Acadia. Beausoleil helps save her foundering cart in the Salem swamp and cheers her when her courage wavers. At their last rendezvous before her final push through Maine, Pélagie measures the extent of her debt to Beausoleil and the depths of her affection and gratitude:

Il était là, son capitaine, son chevalier, son héros, l'homme qui avait par trois fois risqué sa vie pour elle, qui avait calé dans la vase mouvante pour la troisième fois qui est toujours la dernière, pour elle, pour les siens, et à la fin pour sa charrette. C'est lui à la fin qui l'avait sauvée, sa charrette, lui qui s'était agrippé aux riddles, à la vie, à la mort.

Et elle se serra contre lui, se berça la tête au creux de ses épaules en murmurant des gloussements et des mots qu'il n'entendait pas…. Il avait risqué sa vie pour elle qui en échange avait offert la sienne. Leur double vie en otage l'un pour l'autre. Plus rien n'effacerait ça dans le ciel. La charrette à jamais en serait le gage.

The bond suggested here is beyond the sexual, though it involves mutual self-giving, profound union, and regeneration. The same is true of the love that links Pélagie with Bélonie—clearly not sexual, yet bursting with the seed of rebirth, of new life. Both Bélonie and Beausoleil disappear at the end—Bélonie into the forest, Beausoleil out to sea—and thus quickly pass into the domain of legend. Pélagie herself is the source and inspiration of that legend as she and her Cart of Life at last go to their final rest in the soil of the new Acadia. Thus Acadia itself becomes the heaven of the emerging myth, the medium of ultimate union between Pélagie and the two men she loves. Pélagie is the brightest star in the new constellation, neither diminishing Bélonie by offering him her strong protection nor herself diminished by accepting the same from Beausoleil. She is the epic heroine whose quest for life and freedom has given significance to the lives of the others, and it is her womanhood that shapes that quest. Her triumph is in defining the roles of the others without limiting them.

Pélagie herself asserts the primacy she attaches to womanhood by selecting her daughter Madeleine rather than one of her sons to carry on after her death. Near Pélagie's grave in the new Acadia, Madeleine takes up the challenge to renew the race and "refaire l'Acadie":

C'est tout près, dans la vallée de Memramcook, qu'elle abattrait son premier arbre, Madeleine LeBlanc, sous le regard ahuri de son homme et de ses frères qui n'en croient point leurs yeux…. Allez, ftancs mous, c'est icitte que je nous creusons une cave et que je nous bâtissons un abri!… Madeleine, digne rejeton de la charrette par la voie des femmes.

"La voie des femmes"—the royal road to the rebirth of Acadia! All the heroines in these Maillet novels could in some sense be symbols of Acadia—a small nation, weak in the eyes of a world that knows only physical force, but strong in her desire to live and flourish despite all obstacles. Refusing the right of others either to condemn her to death or to dictate the conditions of her life, this Acadia triumphs over her foes by courage, boldness, humor, shrewdness, and nobility of spirit. There is heroism in her struggle, but also a saving mischievousness that excludes excessive solemnity. She is Maria the bootlegger, refusing the life of the shops, thumbing her nose at the fate others have reserved for her. She is la Piroune, using the buoy bells to broadcast the invitation of a generous heart across the open sea. She is above all Pélagie, hitching up her hem and setting off in a dilapidated wagon towards life and liberty. Her traditionalism does homage to a past born in the Celtic mists of the sea and tempered in the fire at Grand-Pré; her liberation creates a nation that determines its boundaries by the location of its soul; her nationalism is a reflection of the universal human quest for life and freedom. One may smile at her indulgently, but always with admiring affection, for Acadia is still living her epic—glorious, and, in its way, consummately female.