by Hermione Lee
Evidently Cather had read the great nineteenth-century New English historian Francis Parkman’s books on La Salle, and decided to bury that male pioneering story under Cécile’s. As she had done for Death Comes for the Archbishop and would do again for Sapphira and the Slave Girl, she read widely on the period, putting sources against each other for a balanced view. Parkman’s anti-Jesuit histories gave her characters, such as Frontenac’s (‘full of contradictions…as gracious and winning on some occasions as he was unbearable on others’),19 insights into the quality of Canadian life – the ‘feminine’ influence of the Catholic church,20 the mixture of roughness and piety, the taming of the wilderness by means of ‘a musket, a rosary, and a pack of beaverskins’21 – and vivid visual evocations of exactly the sort Cather needed to corroborate her own impressions:
Let us visit Quebec in midwinter [wrote Parkman of the 1650s]. We pass the warehouses and dwellings of the lower town, and as we climb the zigzag way now called Mountain Street, the frozen river, the roofs, the summits of the cliff, and all the broad landscape below and around us glare in the sharp sunlight with a dazzling whiteness. At the top, scarcely a private house is to be seen; but, instead, a fort, a church, a hospital, a cemetery, a house of the Jesuits, and an Ursuline convent. Yet, regardless of the keen air, soldiers, Jesuits, servants, officials, women, all of the little community who are not cloistered, are abroad and astir.22
To set against Parkman’s robustly Protestant views, she consulted a life of Laval by Abbé Scott, vicar of a village near Quebec whom Cather went to talk to, the famous Relations of the martyr-missionaries,23 and the records and letters of the pioneering nuns, who were of such importance in the religious and social history of Canada, Marie de l’Incarnation, who founded the Ursuline convent in Quebec, and Mother Juschereau of the Hôtel Dieu.24 And for the splendours and miseries of the Sun King’s regime, she went to Saint-Simon.
Cather prided herself on her historical accuracy, 25 though she distorts her main figures somewhat for her own ends: the grimly puritanical Laval is more benign, the overbearing and violent-tempered Frontenac kinder to his dependants, and the austerely fastidious Saint-Vallier more hedonistic than seems to have been the case. (A pity that the oddest example of the hostilities between the Governor and the priests fell outside her time-scheme, Saint-Vallier’s outraged censoring in 1694 of an intended production at the castle of Molière’s anti-clerical Tartuffe.)26
But her acquired knowledge is discreetly evident everywhere. When Auclair and Saint-Vallier disagree on the inevitability of the brandy trade, [SR, p.254] they are rehearsing one of the most bitter areas of dispute between the clergy, who wanted to stop the ‘nefarious traffic’27 which corrupted Indians and traders alike, and the traders and administrators who knew that if they didn’t give brandy to the Indians, the Dutch would. When Cécile reflects fondly on her time at the Ursuline convent day-school, she illustrates one of the dominant features of colonial life, the ‘training of young girls’28 by the pioneering orders of nuns whose main function, like the Jesuits’, was educational. The character of Auclair himself is scrupulously authentic. Sick people mostly went to the Hôtel Dieu or the General Hospital, where they would be bled or purged; but there were a few doctors in the colony, who were often barbers and herbalists as well. The most notable French physician who came over in 1685 was Michel Sarrazin, a surgeon who was also a distinguished botanist and who compiled, as Auclair seems to be doing, a catalogue of over two hundred Canadian plants, with notes of their pharmaceutical properties.29
What Cécile takes in of the history that surrounds her comes in the form of objects and legends – her father’s medicinal herbs, Madame Juschereau’s stories of her predecessor Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustin, M. Pommier’s ‘feet’. The transformation of history into legend, Cather’s lasting subject, is felt as a recurrent process. Just as Cather has been inspired to make this legendary fiction through her readings of Canadian history, so Cécile has the stories of Brébeuf and Chabanel, of Mother Catherine and Jeanne le Ber, repeated to her. Her acquisition of history as legend denotes the making of a colony into a country:
Cécile liked to think they did things of their own in Canada. The martyrdoms of the early Church which she read about in her Lives of the Saints never seemed to her half so wonderful or so terrible as the martyrdoms of Father Brébeuf, Father Lalemant, Father Jogues, and their intrepid companions….And could the devotion of Sainte Geneviève or Sainte Philomène be compared to that of Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustin or Mother Marie de l’Incarnation? [SR, pp.100-101]
An emotional passage on the force of miracles, which, by being told, become ‘a beautiful image’, confirms the central idea of this writing, that history in the form of legend becomes an object, ‘an actual possession’ which can be ‘bequeathed to another’, [SR, p.135] as Cather bequeaths us this book.
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History as a legend for Cécile becomes, then, a child’s story. In the process it undergoes a considerable amount of censorship. Quebec in the 1690s was more of a rough-house than the sanctuary of French traditions Cather would have liked it to be. A priest described the town in 1704 as ‘an open bordello’;30 edicts against drunkenness and immorality were constantly being issued by Laval and Saint-Vallier. Some of the ‘King’s Girls’, sent over from the 1660s as brides for the soldier-settlers, went to the bad; there were a large number of illegitimate and abandoned children. Just outside the town walls there was a shanty town of beggars.31 In Montreal, when the coureurs de bois came in from living in the woods with the Indian women, they tore the place apart. La Hontan, an officer (one of Cather’s minor characters) who wrote some witty, sceptical memoirs of the times, described it vividly:
You would be amaz’d if you saw how lewd these Pedlers are when they return; how they Feast and Game, and how prodigal they are, not only in their Cloaths, but upon Women. Such of ’em as are married, have the wisdom to retire to their own Houses: but the Batchelors act just as our East-India-Men, and Pirates are wont to do; for they Lavish, Eat, Drink, and Play all away as long as the Goods hold out; and when these are gone…they are forc’d to go upon a new Voyage for Subsistence.32
Cather does not omit any of this. Jacques’ mother ‘Toinette is one of the ‘King’s Girls’, [SR, p.50] always going off with the trappers and abandoning her child; Pierre Charron, when he is out in the woods, squanders his money on ‘drink and women and new guns’; [SR, p.171] the slums inside the city walls are mentioned: ‘Respectability stopped with the cobble-stones.’ [SR, p.61] But everything is softened and muted, filtered through Cécile’s domestic pieties. ‘Toinette’s child is uncorrupted and religious, and she herself is in awe of the Bishop. Pierre Charron doesn’t behave like ‘a pig’ in Montreal out of respect to his mother. His roughness is thoroughly romanticized, and his (offstage) sexuality turns into protective chivalry with Cécile. Cather has done this kind of idealizing before, with her gallant American soldiers in One of Ours. Here the intention is twofold. She wants to be optimistic about the future of the French colony. Everything is directed to making Cécile into a true ‘Canadienne’. The plot, such as it is, centres on Auclair’s deciding not to go back to France, and (less explicitly) on Pierre’s recovering from his loss of Jeanne le Ber so that he can become Cécile’s future husband. Both these male stories are instruments of Cécile’s destiny, to be the mother of sons who are the ‘Canadians of the future’. [SR, p.276] They will inherit both the French traditions Cécile so scrupulously preserves, and Charron’s ‘romantic’ pioneering spirit as ‘the free Frenchman of the great forests’, with ‘the good manners of the Old World, the dash and daring of the New’. [SR, pp.169-70] We don’t see this marriage, but we hear of it in the epilogue: Pierre and Cécile, Auclair reports, are living in the Upper Town with their four sons and ‘are well established in the world’. [SR, p.276] (No more details are given, but presumably Pierre has given up being a coureur de bois, and become, as the colony’s administrators wanted th
e backwoodsmen to become, a solid member of the Quebequois bourgeoisie.) As with her earlier desire to ensure a future for rural America out of the maternal legacy of women such as Ántonia33 and Alexandra (‘Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra’s…to give them out again…in the shining eyes of youth!’ [OP, p.309]), the utopian conclusion has required some historical smoothing-over.
But the gentling of Quebec’s history has mostly to do with the novel’s theme of childhood. Shadows on the Rock is a children’s book for adults; hence its modest tone and simplified manner. Though the point of Cécile’s story is to show her aptitude for motherhood, we are not to see her grow up. She has to be innocent and presexual, ‘a little girl of twelve, beginning to grow tall, wearing a short skirt and a sailor’s jersey, with her brown hair cropped like a boy’s’, [SR, p.9] Pierre Charron’s ‘petit singe’. [SR, p.11] Cather is reinventing herself as a child at the point when she most needed, as she said, to gather the beginnings of things around her.34 Though she borrowed little Jacques’ childishness from her favourite nephew,35 she gave a version of her own childhood to crop-headed Cécile, with her gentle home-loving father, and a mother as organized and conservative as Cather’s, but, being dead and absent, easier to emulate and to love.
Cather enters with deep pleasure into the creation of a tactile, visual child’s world. Cécile delights in things which take on magical properties, the Count’s ‘crystal bowl full of glowing fruits of coloured glass’, [SR, p.58] Mother Juschereau’s embroidered flowers, the cobbler’s wooden lasts. Her pleasure in domestic artefacts emulates her mother’s belief that a house made up of ‘wood and cloth and glass and a little silver’ is ‘really’ made up of ‘fine moral qualities’. [SR, p.25] So Cécile’s respect for the fragile parsley and the fine sheets her mother left her to look after, the gooseberries her father enjoys, the wood-doves in lard he lays down in the cellar all winter, are moral emotions. Objects are valued for their usefulness to life; hence Cécile’s interest in her father’s specialities and prescriptions, his boxes of sugared lemon peel, boiled pine-tops for cough syrup, sassafras tea, saffron flowers for flavouring fish soup, bitumen for curing snow-blindness, foxglove-water for the dropsy, the eucalyptus balls he makes for keeping off mosquitoes. Objects, well looked-after, can cure and repay their owners. When Cécile knows she is not going to leave home, all her things look more secure to her:
She really believed that everything in the house, the furniture, the china shepherd boy, the casseroles in the kitchen, knew that the herbarium had been restored to the high shelves and that the world was not going to be destroyed this winter. [SR, pp.249-50]
On the other hand, when she goes to stay on the Île d’Orléans with the rough smith’s family, the Harnoises, she is extremely distressed by the bad housekeeping, the dirty sheets and the greasy food. This is because, as she fully realizes on her return, care taken for things makes ‘life itself’. [SR, p.195] Even Bishop Laval’s holy water needs ‘cooking’:
In winter the old man usually carried a little basin as well as his lantern. It was his custom to take the bowl of holy water from the font in the evening, carry it into his kitchen, and put it on the back of the stove, where enough warmth would linger through the night to keep it from freezing. Then, in the morning, those who came to early Mass would not have a mere lump of ice to peck at. Monseigneur de Laval was very particular about the consecrated oils and the holy water; it was not enough for him that people should merely go through the forms. [SR, p.104]
Things are not empty forms, they are full of literal meanings which do not need to be explained. (‘ “N’expliquez pas” ’, Cécile implores Mother Juschereau after a story about Mother Catherine.) Just as historical legends become objects that can be bequeathed, so objects can have spiritual meanings. The translation of objects into things of the mind is insisted on:36 Auclair’s eyes look as if ‘his thoughts were pictures’; [SR, p.7] the nuns take with them wherever they go a comfortably ordered universe ‘in the world of the mind (which for each of us is the only world).’ [SR, p.96] Little Jacques, Cécile’s naive protégé, endearingly mild and vague, makes the kind of literal readings of objects which are the equivalent of a belief in miracles. Because Cécile’s christening mug, his greatest object of admiration, has her name engraved on it, it is ‘peculiarly and almost sacredly hers’. [SR, p.87] Because Madame Pommier has a picture of the Holy Family, he thinks that is why her street is called Holy Family Hill. [SR, p.100]
Cather’s own reservations (like Bishop Latour’s) about the literal reality of miracles is voiced by Auclair and Charron, but that does not remove sympathy from the children’s literal beliefs: that they will be struck by lightning for failing to pay for a candle, or that a sailor could be converted by swallowing a morsel of a martyr’s skull. Though the childish viewpoint is not the author’s, adults in the book are judged in their relation to children. Old Bishop Laval rescues little Jean from neglect, and feels that the child has been sent to him as a sign. The missionary priest, the sea captain, the woodsman, all express strong feelings for children and families, and the life of the ‘rock’ is seen as that of a sanctified family, here on its way to midnight mass on Christmas Eve:
Across the white ledges that sloped like a vast natural stairway down to the Cathedral, black groups were moving, families and friends in little flocks, all going toward the same goal, – the doors of the church, wide open and showing a ruddy vault in the blue darkness. [SR, p.112]
Like Auclair’s thoughts, this is a picture in the mind. Cather includes in her text, characteristically, some naif art-works as pictorial analogues for the literal readings of childhood: the woodcut which Cécile shows Jacques of the Infant Jesus appearing to St Edmund, awkward and friendly, with the figure of Jesus ‘treading on the earth, not floating in the air as visions are wont to do’, [SR, p.85] or the paintings in the town church of St Geneviève as a shepherdess, the kingdom of heaven as a medieval French castle, and the Virgin Mary as ‘a charming figure of young motherhood’. [SR, p.65] Like the novel, these literal art-works give the Christian stories a specifically French-Canadian quality. The most obvious example of this is Cécile’s carefully made nativity scene (distantly echoing the Burdens’ Christmas tree in My Ántonia) to which Jacques, meaning well, adds his precious possession, a wooden carved Canadian beaver, to stand with the traditional ox and ass.
The Nativity scene is central to the book. Family life – of the right kind – re-enacts the life of the Holy Family. Cécile’s distaste for the Harnois family and her strict avoidance of ‘Toinette are not meant to be just priggishness (though they look rather like it): they make emphatically clear that the literal, everyday life of the family has to maintain a metaphorical sanctity. Cather wants Jacques to suggest the Infant Jesus and Cécile to stand in for the Virgin Mary,37 and by sustaining the focus of childhood, she gets away with it. The Mariolatry of Death Comes for the Archbishop gave a chaste and feminine tone to that male story of religious pioneering. Here, it subdues a history of priests and hunters, doctors and governors, under a female story of mothering. Mme Auclair’s shadow fills the book: Cécile learns from her, and from the nuns, childless mother figures, to be the mother of the house, and (hence) of the nation.
This sounds tiresomely pious, and there is, I think, a moralizing and sentimental quality to Shadows on the Rock which weakens it. But it is not such a simple, celebratory, or serene novel as I have been making it sound. Cécile is not sorrowful (even when she thinks she is), [SR, p.93] but her childhood is infiltrated by stories of bitter sadness. The strangest and most ambivalent of these is the story of the recluse, a silent presence at the centre of the novel who takes to its furthest point Cather’s lifelong attraction for withdrawal and solitary reflection. Judith Fryer reads Jeanne le Ber as a Sybilline, creative female power, weaving her embroideries out of her own time and space.38 And certainly the story of the girl who has cut herself off from her grieving family and from an adult sexua
l life, to spend her life alone in her bitterly cold three-room cell behind the altar of a Montreal chapel, makes a powerful alternative system to Cécile’s domestic order. Jeanne turns herself into a legend which (like the work of the woman writer) provides lasting and beautiful images out of her private language.
But what Fryer does not do is emphasize our last sighting of Jeanne. Long after he has given up hope of her, Pierre Charron, her childhood sweetheart, hides in the church to see her come out at night to pray. What he sees is a soul in torment, her voice ‘hoarse, hollow, with the sound of despair in it….When she prayed in silence, such sighs broke from her. And once a groan, such as I have never heard; such despair – such resignation and despair!’ [SR, p.180] It is the paradox of legends, of course, that consolatory, educative life stories come out of personal suffering. But the bitter resignation of Jeanne le Ber makes a story that is not suitable for children.
That opposition between childhood faith and adult disappointment, suffering and failure, persists throughout. All the ‘real’ stories that are pieced into the narrative are unhappy: the old Bishop’s ‘heavy labour’, [SR, p.74] the Count’s ‘life of brilliant failures’, [SR, p.237] Saint-Vallier’s regrets for his mistakes. [SR, p.269] Life for ordinary people under the tyranny of Louis XIV is evoked by two wretched stories, of Auclair’s Paris tenant, old Bichet the knife-grinder, tortured and executed for stealing two pots, and Blinker’s history as a torturer of just such unfortunates. But for those ordinary men who escaped France for the Canadian wilderness life could be just as grim. The woodsman Antoine Frichette tells a terrible story of accident and endurance in the snow. The sufferings of the Jesuit martyrs are often invoked, and, of all those stories, Cather chooses to tell the most distressing, that of Noel Chabanel, a fastidious professor of rhetoric for whom life among the Hurons was an unmitigated ordeal of revulsion, self-reproach and physical indignity. Chabanel’s story, turned to legend, is, like Jeanne le Ber’s, an inspiration to others. But its awful personal painfulness seems to endorse Auclair’s philosophy of resigned stoicism (drawn from his reading of the Latin poets), rather than the trusting faith of nuns and children.