When Marie-Claire Blais was asked which writers had influenced her work she named Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, authors who experimented boldly with forms of psychological fiction. In looking over the nine novels Mlle Blais has written up to now one can see signs of that influence in a variety of technical devices. Diaries and letters are used for psychological introspection and analysis in Tête Blanche, A Season in the Life of Emmanuel and L'Insoumise, while the stream of consciousness method is explored in the "novel-poems" and notably in The Day Is Dark, where the form appears to be markedly influenced by Virginia Woolf's The Waves. As well as being explorations of the nature of evil and its particular manifestations in Quebec society, these novels are technical experiments in conveying the inner life of the mind and especially of the adolescent mind.

It is in this context that one must approach Mlle. Blais' first novel, Mad Shadows. But whereas the psychological concerns of her later novels are apparent, those of Mad Shadows may be obscured by the unusual form and gothic content, with the result that critics have either written the novel off altogether, as many early reviewers did, or have been tempted to read into it a metaphor of "the world before birth" or an allegory of the Apocalypse of St. John. One simpler way of reading Mad Shadows is as a psychological novel whose method is, like that of Kafka's America, the projection of inner states through fantastic actions. The fantasies enacted here are those of an adolescent girl in her response to sexuality, sex being the turning point between innocence and bitter experience as it is also in the more conventionally structured Tête Blanche.

At first, Mad Shadows may also appear to be a conventional "realistic" novel. Features of a landscape are mentioned: fields, farms, lake, woods, railway, asylum, and the narrative develops in straightforward chronological order, the simplicity of its superficial framework marked by a style which is at key moments as elementary as that of a child's primer…. But these normal situations explode into sensational developments: the jealous sister starves and ravages the spoilt brother, disillusionment in marriage provokes instant separation, the son murders his stepfather, the daughter kills the mother, both children commit suicide. Only Greek and Elizabethan tragedies have exploited so much horror and violence in so confined a space; generally speaking, novelists work on a larger scale where the fearful actions do not hammer obsessively one upon another. It is the number of horrors within a very short novel that threatens credibility here and alerts one to the fact that this is not, after all, a novel of the realistic school.

The method of Mad Shadows consists of creating action out of normally sublimated emotional responses. Given Isabelle-Marie's jealousy of Patrice as a recognisable normal state, the nature of that passion is then explored, not by interior monologue nor by the author's analysis, but by projecting as external actions the extremes to which, in most people, only fantasy gives free play. The sense of nightmare in Mad Shadows arises from this surrealist technique. The landscape appears to be real, actions seem to be logical, but they are so only on the level of the subconscious mind. "It is all a picture," Marie-Claire Blais herself said, "it is all art while life goes on, it is a picture of the emotions of love or fear."…

The picture metaphor is enforced in the novel itself by references to film: in the first paragraph, Patrice's mental confusion is "like a billowing stormcloud on a screen" and, later, Louise and Lanz have the "artificial depravity of faces in the movies". Most insistently, theatre imagery suggests that this is not reality we observe but an artificial enactment: the characters are described as marionettes or as "grave performers" in a "vast tragedy" and Patrice uses make-up to turn his face into a devil's mask. The culmination of this pattern is the inclusion, late in the novel, of the character Faust, a retired actor who becomes Patrice's friend in the asylum where they are both confined. It is in the Faust episode that the technique of creating "art while life goes on" is most fully explored. Faust, like his legendary namesake, possesses the magical art of living and exerting power by illusions. (p. 65)

The Faust story is only one of several legends, myths or fairy tales evoked in the novel…. More obviously, the strange family relationships recall certain Greek myths: the Oedipus pattern is suggested in the almost incestuous obsession of Louise and Patrice for each other while the two filial murders recall the Orestes-Electra story. The Narcissus myth is introduced not only in Patrice's adoration of his own image in the lake and his death there but in Louise's worship of her own beauty reflected in her son. Metaphor enforces this link with Narcissus: "without him she was lost, shorn of both roots and flowers." (pp. 65-6)

The most obvious echo in the novel, clearly indicated by the French title La Belle Bête, is of the Beauty and the Beast tale, "la belle et la bête", where the beast is under a spell which can only be broken by the love of a princess. Here again illusion is important (the beast is really a handsome prince) but in Mad Shadows the image is turned so that the beauty and the beast are one. Patrice is beast because he lacks reason but his body is divinely beautiful, that of an Adonis. In its origins the Beauty and Beast tale no doubt enforces a moral lesson about sexuality, the physical in man being given sanction by pure spiritual love. The fact that Marie-Claire Blais fuses the two, making the beauty-love figure totally beast-physical; points to one of the dominant themes in this novel, namely the essential destructiveness of human love.

All of the legendary tales mentioned above have sexual connotations and within the novel the echoes of them reflect on a series of relationships which are all self-centered and superficial…. In this novel, love is literally only skin-deep and without physical attraction it does not exist. To provide a visual emblem of imperfection, each of the characters is made physically defective, Michael blind, Lanz lame, Isabelle weak-ankled, Louise hideously scarred and Patrice wholly beautiful but both empty-headed and finally rendered grotesquely ugly. The emblem is reflected in the animal kingdom, with the seemingly gratuitous, surrealistic detail of a one-winged bird flying near the lake. (p. 66)

Before she dies, Isabelle appears to have a momentary spiritual illumination: "She thought it was Louise's land that she was destroying but suddenly she realized it was God's land. Terror rose to her eyes. And shame."… Up to this point there has been very little religious reference in this man-centered novel: only an identification of Isabelle with Eve, a comparison of the asylum to a "cathedral with bars" and, most important,… observations on the character of Isabelle's father in which we may find a clue to her final experience.

[We] are told that the daughter resembled the father, "that gallant dreamer and poet who used to speak of his land as though of a virgin consecrated to God."…

Marie-Claire Blais seems to suggest that only love for God and love for the land are non-destructive; all other human love is corrosive, especially in its sexual manifestations. The only release into humanity is by loss of concern for the body: when Patrice perceives his ugliness and destroys his body, he finds his soul. That pervasive theme of Quebec literature, the dichotomy of body and spirit, is here once more projected, not by allegory but by externalisation of inner impulses.

"My first and second novels are about passions, the emotions which are so dangerous to liberate," said Marie-Claire Blais. Mad Shadows shows the liberation not merely of passion into action but of concealed fantasies into external story. The novel is an experiment in fictional technique, one which is dangerously open to a literal interpretation and therefore close to the absurd and unintelligible. But if read as psychological fiction, an exploration of the dark recesses of the mind, then Mad Shadows may well appear to be, like Patrice's face, "so dazzling that it makes one think of genius." (p. 67)