Ringuet's Thirty Acres
Feb. 5th, 2003 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldHere's a draft of the Ringuet segment of my paper. Comments? (It comes to 15 pages in WordPerfect.)
B. Ringuet’s Thirty Acres
From its publication in 1940, Ringuet’s novel Thirty Acres has been hailed for its decisive break with previous trends in French Canadian literature. Exceptions such as the symbolist poet Émile Nelligan aside, French Canadian literature developed apart from–indeed, often in reaction to–the literary trends of realism and symbolism that prevailed in the literatures of western Europe and the United States. This literature’s preeminent genre–the roman du terroir, the “novel of the land” or “romance of the land”–glorified the French Canadian peasantry, in keeping with the prevalent ideologies extant in French Canadian society (Lemire 36-39). This genre was rooted in a rural ideology which strongly favoured French Canadians’ strong attachment to agriculture and rural residence (at least relative to English Canada, though it was comparable to western Europe and not particularly backward at all) as both a cause and an effect of a generally strong attachment to religious and cultural traditions, strongly attached to their territorial base and the Roman Catholic Church while rejecting the outside world’s liberal ideologies. The roman du terroir was an essentially conservative literature, then, seeking to derive meaning from the French Canadian nation’s rural traditions as opposed to the more innovative and cosmopolitan urban centres, in the fashion of many nations likewise newly developing a coherent national identity.
Although Ringuet wrote within the context of the roman du terroir, he contradicted the genre’s enthusiastic embrace of traditional conservative cultural norms and of a viable French Canadian peasant society. In Thirty Acres, Ringuet’s character of Euchariste Moisan becomes a paragon of French Canadian society, and then proceeds to lose all–first his prosperity, then his farm, and finally his family–that he had so painstakingly earned. Indeed, Moisan’s failures derive in large part from his adherence to such traditional French Canadian values as attachment to the land, fervent Roman Catholicism, and a general disinterest in the wider world. In English translation, Thirty Acres corresponds to the themes of such English-language Canadian writers as Frederick Philip Grove (Sirois 20) as to the waste and unproductivity of rural life. Ringuet manages to provide a subtle but powerful critique of the whole concept of a French Canadian national economy, tied to traditional social and religious mores, existing separately from the wider Canadian and world economies.
Thirty Acres, as a novel, is concerned with land. Ringuet wrote from a society–that of French Canada–whose leaders almost unanimously praised the supposed close attachment of French Canadians (individually and collectively) to their land. This attachment–certainly real in the 19th century when French Canadians were an overwhelmingly rural population, but doubtful at the time of Thirty Acres’ writing following a generation of breakneck urbanization–was regularly invoked as justification for all manner of policies, state-sponsored and otherwise. For instance, vast government programs of sponsored colonization in Québec’s internal frontiers were inaugurated soon after Confederation in order to encourage the maximum dispersion of French Canadian peasant communities (Mann 135-7). Further, just as Euchariste Moisan himself notes (Ringuet 131) the Roman Catholic Church strongly discouraged out-migration from rural areas--whether to the growing cities of central Canada or to the prosperous industrial towns of New England--on the grounds that in cities, removed from their tradition-bound and highly integrated rural communities, French Canadian peasants could lose their faith. French Canada’s peasantry was identified as a hybrid, demonstrating the time-honoured traditions of pre-revolutionary Europe in the new world of America. This peasant culture, combining the good elements of both the Old and New Worlds, would serve as a beacon for both hemispheres, occasionally expanding to a full-blown messianic impulse as hinted at by Louis Riel in his writings on the Métis future, or in claims by such people as the Abbé Groulx (Lemire 12-13) and Jules-Paul Tardivel (Mann 162-4) that the St. Lawrence valley could emerge at the centre of a vast new Francophone Roman Catholic North American nation. Encouraging a popular attachment to the land and to agriculture, then, served the interests of the established authorities in French Canada by reinforcing the social and religious attitudes that supported this attachment.
Many nationalist ideologues imagined that the attachment of French Canadians to the land and the very high birth rate among French Canadians could be used to support a plan of expansion. In the first half of the 19th century, the zone of French Canadian settlement in Québec province was limited almost entirely to the lands drained directly by the Saint Lawrence river, with Anglophone immigrants predominating elsewhere, but government-sponsored settlement programs--and, far more importantly, uncontrolled population movements--in the western, southeastern, and northern frontiers of Québec permanently installed French Canadians as the majority across most of that province’s habitable land area (Linteau 40-43). Québec’s internal colonization was contemporary with a vast wave of French Canadian emigrants, who sought opportunity elsewhere in adjacent areas of Canada (particularly Ontario) and in New England.
This heavy emigration from traditionally French Canadian areas of Québec did not necessarily represent a failure in the minds of nationalist ideologues; indeed, this migration could potentially redraw the North American map, by installing thriving French Canadian societies across the continent (Waddell 161-4). The emigration was problematic only when it appeared that these emigrants might be assimilated, whether by government fiat in Ontario’s school crises in the first quarter of the 20th century, or by the increasing attractiveness of consumer capitalism to the populous Franco-American diaspora in New England. This Francophone system’s core would be located among the dense French Canadian populations of Québec’s St. Lawrence valley. From this core, French Canadian communities would cautiously disperse in several different directions: north, into the unsettled wilderness of the Canadian Shield; west, to the mines and farmlands of northern Ontario and the Prairie provinces; and south to the booming factory and mill towns of New England. These immigrants would form new French Canadian communities--focused just as in the St. Lawrence valley upon Roman Catholicism, the French language, and the patriarchal stem family--that would unite with their parent community. With luck, the strong attachment of French Canadians to the land and church and the high birth rate of French Canadians would allow these communities to prevail over their counterparts and to install new French Canadian colonial societies. As Susan Mann wrote in the case of New England, Catholic priests joined French Canadian immigrants
The responsibility of the failure of French Canadian emigration to produce many enduring communities can be placed on the relatively small volume of French Canadian emigration compared to the total population, and on the lower-class nature of the French Canaidan population which made assimilation a prerequisite for upward mobility. At the time, though, in the early 20th century, this was unknown.
In turn, this territorial and geographical expansion of the French Canadian ecumene would be accompanied by an ideological challenge to the mores prevailing on the North American continent. At the time, French Canadian identity was very closely intertwined with the Roman Catholic Church, which in reaction to political radicalism in Europe–in particular, the unification of Italy and the confiscation of sovereign Church lands–had adopted reactionary policies in regards to both church theology and contemporary politics. In those societies which were the greatest influence on French Canada–the Anglophone countries of the North Atlantic basin and secular republican France–the trends towards liberal societies and industrial capitalism continued regardless of Papal condemnation (Mann 115-130). Some visionaries sincerely hoped that a vast
New France, centered on the French Canadian homeland by the Saint Lawrence river but including territories colonized by French Canadians, would rise to continental power and supplant both the laicized radical France of the Third Republic and the industrialism and urbanism associated with Protestant Anglophones of North America. These ambitious ideologues sought, then, to do nothing short of entirely remodelling North America to produce a territorial and cultural hierarchy centered upon Québec (Linteau 1983 30-32). Thirty Acres destroys this hope for the future. While Ringuet does allow for the possibility of some fulfillment deriving from French Canada’s stated attachment to the land, these achievements are ephemeral. The Laurentian valley proves insuffucient for its residents, and is certainly insufficient to radically change North America’s social geography. Only for a time, in the era of prosperity driven by the demands of the First World War, does it seem to the reader as if French Canadian peasant society can triumph over urban industrial society elsewhere, but even this prosperity is parasitic.
Euchariste Moisan is Thirty Acres’ dominant figure. Moisan is a person very strongly attached to peasant agriculture: “The Moisans are farmers. Farming’s always been good enough for the Moisans and they’ve always been pretty good at farming” (Ringuet 130). Despite Moisan’s strong attachment to tradition, however, in many respects he is an unlikely proponent of conservative French Canadian values. He is not native to Saint-Jacques; he was born “in the newly settled lands of the north” (Ringuet 20), in the community of Sainte-Adèle. Moisan’s few memories of this community are negative:
These memories of penury and suffering on Québec’s northern frontiers culminate in the death by fire of Moisan’s entire family when he was only five years old. Euchariste Moisan’s personal experiences should indicate, then, that the nationalist rhetoric of
colonization and French Canadian expansion is not only harmful but potentially lethal. Nonetheless, when Moisan comes of age he does not seek to abandon the Moisan family’s lands--for a life in a Québec town like his cousin Édouard, for life in industrial New England like his Larivière cousins--rather he seeks to reestablish the cycle disrupted by the death of his family. Moisan’s unorthodox family--made up of his childless uncle Ephrem, his distant elderly cousin Amélie Carignan, and himself an orphan-- is seen not as an aberration, but rather as an expression of “the human trinity: man, woman, child; father, mother, son” (Ringuet 20). Yet this unorthodox family is itself a subversion, made up of individuals who had no intimate blood connection to one another and who simply chose to function as a family, more-or-less independently of traditional family connections.
Ringuet’s narrative is concerned with the efforts of Euchariste Moisan and his contemporaries to restore to the Moisan family resident in Saint-Jacques the traditional cycles of life--”birth, marriage, sickness, death” (Ringuet 35). After the birth of his third child Étienne four years after his marriage to Alphonsine Branchaud, Moisan reflects that the birth of his son Oguinase “added something to the Moisan farm, something that was its due and for which it had been waiting a long time” (Ringuet 73). The Moisan family now lived on, and under his strict unimaginative guidance the Moisan family prospered within the context of French Canadian peasant society. Moisan’s parsimony contributed to the substantial economic success of the Moisan farm; Alphonsine bore 13 children (including nine surviving children) before her death, contributing to the French Canadian population’s rapid growth as Roman Catholic doctrine and nationalist sentiment would have her; three of Moisan’s children entered religious orders, with Oguinase becoming a priest just as Moisan promised the parish priest when he began courting Alphonsine and Oguinase’s sisters Malvina and Eva becoming nuns; Euchariste Moisan himself became a leading member of his community, in church and school. Though Moisan’s son Ephrem does become a troublemaker, his actions can be controlled enough for Moisan to continue to see Ephrem as his favourite son.
Even the First World War does not harm the Moisan family. If anything, Euchariste Moisan prospers from the high prices for food grains and hay that accompanied this conflict. The departure of the French-born farmhand Albert Chabrol to serve in his country’s army also removes a source of tension that had hindered Moisan’s rising status in the community, as Chabrol’s outsider status–exemplified by his modern nationalist sentiments and his irreligion–contrasted sharply with the parochial outlook and devout faith of rural French Canada (Shek 57). The psychic detachment of the Moisans and their neighbours from the horrors of the First World War testifies to their profound lack of interest in the outside world. The Canadian debate over conscription is the only “foreign” event that profoundly affects the community, yet even it passes as soon as it is clear that farmers’ sons will not be called to serve on the battlefields of Europe. This detachment lacks visible consequences, even when it is directed against Britain and France. The First World War is entirely peripheral to these people’s concerns. Euchariste Moisan is
miraculously able to afford near-complete indifference to the affairs of the wider world.
The first two sections of Thirty Acres conform to the romantic mythologizing of the roman du terroir in depicting a French Canadian peasant family that thrives through attachment to traditional virtues. The only exceptions to this are the depictions of Alphonsine’s fatigue of bearing so many children and her subsequent death, and the reluctance of 11-year-old Oguinase to be separated from his family. The circumstances depicted by Ringuet are entirely plausible; the thriving Euchariste Moisan and his growing family seem to prove the durability of the French Canadian peasant family in the face of atomizing social forces. With some reservations, the first half of Thirty Acres reinforces the social geography proposed by French Canada’s nationalist ideologues. In the second half of Thirty Acres, however, this ideal social geography dissolves. The first indication of this lies in the angry departure of Lucinda from Saint-Jacques, after being chastised for bringing her boyfriend to Mass and wearing revealing clothing. Despite the initial misgivings of father and son, Oguinase has become a priest; but despite Euchariste’s hope that his son will provide him with spiritual and social capital, he witnesses his son’s slow decline as he is sent to tend, without aid, a large overpopulated parish. Ephrem’s decision to emigrate to work in the factories of New England is a further disappointment to his father, who had hoped that his favourite son might stay to continue the Moisan heritage; Étienne, the son who stays, is embittered by his father’s preference. The farm’s prosperity proves to be ephemeral, as Europe’s agriculture recovers from the First World War’s ravages further destabilizing the Moisan family and French Canadian peasant society.
The gradual decline of the Moisan family’s fortunes and the exile of an impoverished Euchariste to New England can be traced to two linked phenomena, namely, the introduction of legalistic procedures and the growth of American influence. Euchariste simply finds himself unable to adapt to a society ruled not (as was once the case) by custom and by mutual friendship, but rather by law and impersonal relationships, to make the transition from Weber’s gemeineschaft to geselleschaft. One notable example is Euchariste’s outrage at his neighbour Phydime Raymond, who prospered from ochre deposits taken from land that once belonged to Euchariste. Euchariste simply fails to understand the concepts of modern property law or of a judicial system, believing, for instance, that his prior ownership of the land qualifies him to consideration as a sort of secondary owner of the disputed property, and that Raymond’s refusal to allow him that sort of consideration–in accordance with the rigid system of property law which has permeated across Québec–is immoral if not illegal. After failing to provide useful testimony at the court hearing but driven by a profound bitterness towards Raymond, Euchariste decides to appeal the lawsuit to higher courts; he succeeds only in increasing his financial burden. At the same time, Euchariste gradually loses two of his children: his son Oguinase dies of tuberculosis, contracted during his ill-paid and low-status tenure as parish priest in a newly-opened marginal parish on the northern frontiers of Québec, while his daughter Lucinda appears have been drawn into the lower classes of urban Montréal, possibly even as a prostitute. Even Étienne–Euchariste’s appointed inheritor to the Moisan farmstead, despite Étienne’s own youthful discomfort with the idea–grows increasingly embarrassed by his father, by his pursuit of his lawsuit against Raymond and his archaic conservatism. Once, when French Canadian rural society was relatively intact in the late 19th century, Euchariste Moisan was a relatively progressive young man, but now he finds that he and his childhood society have been entirely supplanted.
This replacement of custom with law is aided, in part, by the penetration of American influence. Almost until the moment of Euchariste’s emigration to the United States, he had underestimated the degree of American influence on his life despite the popularity of American cars, music, and baseball and the very large number of French Canadian immigrants living in the United States. Euchariste believed unquestioningly in the belief of expansionist ideologues that the United States was being steadily converted into a French Canadian colony. On arriving, in fact, Euchariste finds that the French Canadian community has been almost entirely assimilated, with Ephrem marrying an Irish-American woman, his American grandchildren possessing no connection at all to French Canadian tradition, and use of the French language and longing for the old days being confined only to the elderly Euchariste’s failure to adapt ends up confining him to the margins of American society as a night watchman–a job given to him as a favour–that limits his connection with tradition to a weekly reading of La Presse and its news. Even in Saint-Jacques, Étienne Moisan is unable to achieve the prosperity once enjoyed by his father despite his strict attachment to the legalistic norms prescribed by government agronomists. The French Canadian peasant society proposed as viable competition to the urban industrialism elsewhere has failed, leaving its remaining proponents stranded. As Maurice Lemire observed in a commentary on Québec’s newly-urbanized French Canadian populations,
Ringuet cannot provide, in Thirty Acres’ closing pages, an explicit solution to the French Canadian predicament. The life history of the Euchariste Moisan, however, stands as an implicit critique of French Canada’s traditional ideologies and the high hopes derived from these ideologies. Irregardless of the early promise which they seemed to offer in a prior age, they are quite insufficient to face the modern age. The land is not enough to provide prosperity; the church cannot take care of its own; the family grows distant and hostile. The only thing that can be done is to live like Ephrem, happily enough in the city, while hoping that Ephrem’s near-total assimilation abroad can be averted at home. Thirty Acres, in the end, is a eulogy for the French Canadian nationalist challenge to North America, and an augur of the North Americanization of Québec.
B. Ringuet’s Thirty Acres
From its publication in 1940, Ringuet’s novel Thirty Acres has been hailed for its decisive break with previous trends in French Canadian literature. Exceptions such as the symbolist poet Émile Nelligan aside, French Canadian literature developed apart from–indeed, often in reaction to–the literary trends of realism and symbolism that prevailed in the literatures of western Europe and the United States. This literature’s preeminent genre–the roman du terroir, the “novel of the land” or “romance of the land”–glorified the French Canadian peasantry, in keeping with the prevalent ideologies extant in French Canadian society (Lemire 36-39). This genre was rooted in a rural ideology which strongly favoured French Canadians’ strong attachment to agriculture and rural residence (at least relative to English Canada, though it was comparable to western Europe and not particularly backward at all) as both a cause and an effect of a generally strong attachment to religious and cultural traditions, strongly attached to their territorial base and the Roman Catholic Church while rejecting the outside world’s liberal ideologies. The roman du terroir was an essentially conservative literature, then, seeking to derive meaning from the French Canadian nation’s rural traditions as opposed to the more innovative and cosmopolitan urban centres, in the fashion of many nations likewise newly developing a coherent national identity.
Although Ringuet wrote within the context of the roman du terroir, he contradicted the genre’s enthusiastic embrace of traditional conservative cultural norms and of a viable French Canadian peasant society. In Thirty Acres, Ringuet’s character of Euchariste Moisan becomes a paragon of French Canadian society, and then proceeds to lose all–first his prosperity, then his farm, and finally his family–that he had so painstakingly earned. Indeed, Moisan’s failures derive in large part from his adherence to such traditional French Canadian values as attachment to the land, fervent Roman Catholicism, and a general disinterest in the wider world. In English translation, Thirty Acres corresponds to the themes of such English-language Canadian writers as Frederick Philip Grove (Sirois 20) as to the waste and unproductivity of rural life. Ringuet manages to provide a subtle but powerful critique of the whole concept of a French Canadian national economy, tied to traditional social and religious mores, existing separately from the wider Canadian and world economies.
Thirty Acres, as a novel, is concerned with land. Ringuet wrote from a society–that of French Canada–whose leaders almost unanimously praised the supposed close attachment of French Canadians (individually and collectively) to their land. This attachment–certainly real in the 19th century when French Canadians were an overwhelmingly rural population, but doubtful at the time of Thirty Acres’ writing following a generation of breakneck urbanization–was regularly invoked as justification for all manner of policies, state-sponsored and otherwise. For instance, vast government programs of sponsored colonization in Québec’s internal frontiers were inaugurated soon after Confederation in order to encourage the maximum dispersion of French Canadian peasant communities (Mann 135-7). Further, just as Euchariste Moisan himself notes (Ringuet 131) the Roman Catholic Church strongly discouraged out-migration from rural areas--whether to the growing cities of central Canada or to the prosperous industrial towns of New England--on the grounds that in cities, removed from their tradition-bound and highly integrated rural communities, French Canadian peasants could lose their faith. French Canada’s peasantry was identified as a hybrid, demonstrating the time-honoured traditions of pre-revolutionary Europe in the new world of America. This peasant culture, combining the good elements of both the Old and New Worlds, would serve as a beacon for both hemispheres, occasionally expanding to a full-blown messianic impulse as hinted at by Louis Riel in his writings on the Métis future, or in claims by such people as the Abbé Groulx (Lemire 12-13) and Jules-Paul Tardivel (Mann 162-4) that the St. Lawrence valley could emerge at the centre of a vast new Francophone Roman Catholic North American nation. Encouraging a popular attachment to the land and to agriculture, then, served the interests of the established authorities in French Canada by reinforcing the social and religious attitudes that supported this attachment.
Many nationalist ideologues imagined that the attachment of French Canadians to the land and the very high birth rate among French Canadians could be used to support a plan of expansion. In the first half of the 19th century, the zone of French Canadian settlement in Québec province was limited almost entirely to the lands drained directly by the Saint Lawrence river, with Anglophone immigrants predominating elsewhere, but government-sponsored settlement programs--and, far more importantly, uncontrolled population movements--in the western, southeastern, and northern frontiers of Québec permanently installed French Canadians as the majority across most of that province’s habitable land area (Linteau 40-43). Québec’s internal colonization was contemporary with a vast wave of French Canadian emigrants, who sought opportunity elsewhere in adjacent areas of Canada (particularly Ontario) and in New England.
This heavy emigration from traditionally French Canadian areas of Québec did not necessarily represent a failure in the minds of nationalist ideologues; indeed, this migration could potentially redraw the North American map, by installing thriving French Canadian societies across the continent (Waddell 161-4). The emigration was problematic only when it appeared that these emigrants might be assimilated, whether by government fiat in Ontario’s school crises in the first quarter of the 20th century, or by the increasing attractiveness of consumer capitalism to the populous Franco-American diaspora in New England. This Francophone system’s core would be located among the dense French Canadian populations of Québec’s St. Lawrence valley. From this core, French Canadian communities would cautiously disperse in several different directions: north, into the unsettled wilderness of the Canadian Shield; west, to the mines and farmlands of northern Ontario and the Prairie provinces; and south to the booming factory and mill towns of New England. These immigrants would form new French Canadian communities--focused just as in the St. Lawrence valley upon Roman Catholicism, the French language, and the patriarchal stem family--that would unite with their parent community. With luck, the strong attachment of French Canadians to the land and church and the high birth rate of French Canadians would allow these communities to prevail over their counterparts and to install new French Canadian colonial societies. As Susan Mann wrote in the case of New England, Catholic priests joined French Canadian immigrants
in the “little Canadas” of the manufacturing centres of New England and added ecclesiastical and social structures to what they grudgingly admitted was a permanent presence beyond the borders of Quebec. By the end of the [nineteenth] century they even began to find significance in that presence. Surely a population totalling three-quarters of a million in 1886 and doubling every twenty-eight years from the birth rate alone, without adding the continuing influx of immigrants from Quebec, must be destined to play an extraordinary role in America. Perhaps the hand of providence was at work after all, dotting the heathen landscape with compact groups of Catholics who treasured their familial customs and traditions (134).
The responsibility of the failure of French Canadian emigration to produce many enduring communities can be placed on the relatively small volume of French Canadian emigration compared to the total population, and on the lower-class nature of the French Canaidan population which made assimilation a prerequisite for upward mobility. At the time, though, in the early 20th century, this was unknown.
In turn, this territorial and geographical expansion of the French Canadian ecumene would be accompanied by an ideological challenge to the mores prevailing on the North American continent. At the time, French Canadian identity was very closely intertwined with the Roman Catholic Church, which in reaction to political radicalism in Europe–in particular, the unification of Italy and the confiscation of sovereign Church lands–had adopted reactionary policies in regards to both church theology and contemporary politics. In those societies which were the greatest influence on French Canada–the Anglophone countries of the North Atlantic basin and secular republican France–the trends towards liberal societies and industrial capitalism continued regardless of Papal condemnation (Mann 115-130). Some visionaries sincerely hoped that a vast
New France, centered on the French Canadian homeland by the Saint Lawrence river but including territories colonized by French Canadians, would rise to continental power and supplant both the laicized radical France of the Third Republic and the industrialism and urbanism associated with Protestant Anglophones of North America. These ambitious ideologues sought, then, to do nothing short of entirely remodelling North America to produce a territorial and cultural hierarchy centered upon Québec (Linteau 1983 30-32). Thirty Acres destroys this hope for the future. While Ringuet does allow for the possibility of some fulfillment deriving from French Canada’s stated attachment to the land, these achievements are ephemeral. The Laurentian valley proves insuffucient for its residents, and is certainly insufficient to radically change North America’s social geography. Only for a time, in the era of prosperity driven by the demands of the First World War, does it seem to the reader as if French Canadian peasant society can triumph over urban industrial society elsewhere, but even this prosperity is parasitic.
Euchariste Moisan is Thirty Acres’ dominant figure. Moisan is a person very strongly attached to peasant agriculture: “The Moisans are farmers. Farming’s always been good enough for the Moisans and they’ve always been pretty good at farming” (Ringuet 130). Despite Moisan’s strong attachment to tradition, however, in many respects he is an unlikely proponent of conservative French Canadian values. He is not native to Saint-Jacques; he was born “in the newly settled lands of the north” (Ringuet 20), in the community of Sainte-Adèle. Moisan’s few memories of this community are negative:
“There wasn’t nothing but stones up there. We’d put in the potatoes and when we came to dig them up there’d be nothing but stones--big ones, little ones--and hardly no potatoes at all. It was kind of queer of the old man to go and settle up there. But Father Labelle [a priest closely involved with Québec’s internal colonization plans] came around here to where Pa was working on Uncle Ephrem’s farm. I don’t remember so well, because I was only five when we got burnt out. But I know sure enough that it was more of a stone-mine than a gold-mine. Just stones and stones.” (Ringuet 1989: 10)
These memories of penury and suffering on Québec’s northern frontiers culminate in the death by fire of Moisan’s entire family when he was only five years old. Euchariste Moisan’s personal experiences should indicate, then, that the nationalist rhetoric of
colonization and French Canadian expansion is not only harmful but potentially lethal. Nonetheless, when Moisan comes of age he does not seek to abandon the Moisan family’s lands--for a life in a Québec town like his cousin Édouard, for life in industrial New England like his Larivière cousins--rather he seeks to reestablish the cycle disrupted by the death of his family. Moisan’s unorthodox family--made up of his childless uncle Ephrem, his distant elderly cousin Amélie Carignan, and himself an orphan-- is seen not as an aberration, but rather as an expression of “the human trinity: man, woman, child; father, mother, son” (Ringuet 20). Yet this unorthodox family is itself a subversion, made up of individuals who had no intimate blood connection to one another and who simply chose to function as a family, more-or-less independently of traditional family connections.
Ringuet’s narrative is concerned with the efforts of Euchariste Moisan and his contemporaries to restore to the Moisan family resident in Saint-Jacques the traditional cycles of life--”birth, marriage, sickness, death” (Ringuet 35). After the birth of his third child Étienne four years after his marriage to Alphonsine Branchaud, Moisan reflects that the birth of his son Oguinase “added something to the Moisan farm, something that was its due and for which it had been waiting a long time” (Ringuet 73). The Moisan family now lived on, and under his strict unimaginative guidance the Moisan family prospered within the context of French Canadian peasant society. Moisan’s parsimony contributed to the substantial economic success of the Moisan farm; Alphonsine bore 13 children (including nine surviving children) before her death, contributing to the French Canadian population’s rapid growth as Roman Catholic doctrine and nationalist sentiment would have her; three of Moisan’s children entered religious orders, with Oguinase becoming a priest just as Moisan promised the parish priest when he began courting Alphonsine and Oguinase’s sisters Malvina and Eva becoming nuns; Euchariste Moisan himself became a leading member of his community, in church and school. Though Moisan’s son Ephrem does become a troublemaker, his actions can be controlled enough for Moisan to continue to see Ephrem as his favourite son.
Even the First World War does not harm the Moisan family. If anything, Euchariste Moisan prospers from the high prices for food grains and hay that accompanied this conflict. The departure of the French-born farmhand Albert Chabrol to serve in his country’s army also removes a source of tension that had hindered Moisan’s rising status in the community, as Chabrol’s outsider status–exemplified by his modern nationalist sentiments and his irreligion–contrasted sharply with the parochial outlook and devout faith of rural French Canada (Shek 57). The psychic detachment of the Moisans and their neighbours from the horrors of the First World War testifies to their profound lack of interest in the outside world. The Canadian debate over conscription is the only “foreign” event that profoundly affects the community, yet even it passes as soon as it is clear that farmers’ sons will not be called to serve on the battlefields of Europe. This detachment lacks visible consequences, even when it is directed against Britain and France. The First World War is entirely peripheral to these people’s concerns. Euchariste Moisan is
miraculously able to afford near-complete indifference to the affairs of the wider world.
The first two sections of Thirty Acres conform to the romantic mythologizing of the roman du terroir in depicting a French Canadian peasant family that thrives through attachment to traditional virtues. The only exceptions to this are the depictions of Alphonsine’s fatigue of bearing so many children and her subsequent death, and the reluctance of 11-year-old Oguinase to be separated from his family. The circumstances depicted by Ringuet are entirely plausible; the thriving Euchariste Moisan and his growing family seem to prove the durability of the French Canadian peasant family in the face of atomizing social forces. With some reservations, the first half of Thirty Acres reinforces the social geography proposed by French Canada’s nationalist ideologues. In the second half of Thirty Acres, however, this ideal social geography dissolves. The first indication of this lies in the angry departure of Lucinda from Saint-Jacques, after being chastised for bringing her boyfriend to Mass and wearing revealing clothing. Despite the initial misgivings of father and son, Oguinase has become a priest; but despite Euchariste’s hope that his son will provide him with spiritual and social capital, he witnesses his son’s slow decline as he is sent to tend, without aid, a large overpopulated parish. Ephrem’s decision to emigrate to work in the factories of New England is a further disappointment to his father, who had hoped that his favourite son might stay to continue the Moisan heritage; Étienne, the son who stays, is embittered by his father’s preference. The farm’s prosperity proves to be ephemeral, as Europe’s agriculture recovers from the First World War’s ravages further destabilizing the Moisan family and French Canadian peasant society.
The gradual decline of the Moisan family’s fortunes and the exile of an impoverished Euchariste to New England can be traced to two linked phenomena, namely, the introduction of legalistic procedures and the growth of American influence. Euchariste simply finds himself unable to adapt to a society ruled not (as was once the case) by custom and by mutual friendship, but rather by law and impersonal relationships, to make the transition from Weber’s gemeineschaft to geselleschaft. One notable example is Euchariste’s outrage at his neighbour Phydime Raymond, who prospered from ochre deposits taken from land that once belonged to Euchariste. Euchariste simply fails to understand the concepts of modern property law or of a judicial system, believing, for instance, that his prior ownership of the land qualifies him to consideration as a sort of secondary owner of the disputed property, and that Raymond’s refusal to allow him that sort of consideration–in accordance with the rigid system of property law which has permeated across Québec–is immoral if not illegal. After failing to provide useful testimony at the court hearing but driven by a profound bitterness towards Raymond, Euchariste decides to appeal the lawsuit to higher courts; he succeeds only in increasing his financial burden. At the same time, Euchariste gradually loses two of his children: his son Oguinase dies of tuberculosis, contracted during his ill-paid and low-status tenure as parish priest in a newly-opened marginal parish on the northern frontiers of Québec, while his daughter Lucinda appears have been drawn into the lower classes of urban Montréal, possibly even as a prostitute. Even Étienne–Euchariste’s appointed inheritor to the Moisan farmstead, despite Étienne’s own youthful discomfort with the idea–grows increasingly embarrassed by his father, by his pursuit of his lawsuit against Raymond and his archaic conservatism. Once, when French Canadian rural society was relatively intact in the late 19th century, Euchariste Moisan was a relatively progressive young man, but now he finds that he and his childhood society have been entirely supplanted.
Euchariste Moisan ... est l’héritier d’une terre véritablement ancestrale. Et quand il est menacé par des changements et par de nouvelles techniques agricoles, ceux-ci n’ont pas une origine externe, qu’il pourrait mieux comprendre. Ces changements sont suggérés par son propre fils. Bien qu’il ait été la victime du notaire, quand il perd sa terre, c’est parce qu’il l’a cédée á son fils (Cowan 47).
Euchariste Moisan is the inheritor of a truly ancestral land. And when he is threatened by change and by new agricultural techniques, he finds that these do not have a comprehensible external origin; rather, these changes are suggested by his own son. Granted that he was the victim of the notary, when he loses his land it is because he gave it to his son.
This replacement of custom with law is aided, in part, by the penetration of American influence. Almost until the moment of Euchariste’s emigration to the United States, he had underestimated the degree of American influence on his life despite the popularity of American cars, music, and baseball and the very large number of French Canadian immigrants living in the United States. Euchariste believed unquestioningly in the belief of expansionist ideologues that the United States was being steadily converted into a French Canadian colony. On arriving, in fact, Euchariste finds that the French Canadian community has been almost entirely assimilated, with Ephrem marrying an Irish-American woman, his American grandchildren possessing no connection at all to French Canadian tradition, and use of the French language and longing for the old days being confined only to the elderly Euchariste’s failure to adapt ends up confining him to the margins of American society as a night watchman–a job given to him as a favour–that limits his connection with tradition to a weekly reading of La Presse and its news. Even in Saint-Jacques, Étienne Moisan is unable to achieve the prosperity once enjoyed by his father despite his strict attachment to the legalistic norms prescribed by government agronomists. The French Canadian peasant society proposed as viable competition to the urban industrialism elsewhere has failed, leaving its remaining proponents stranded. As Maurice Lemire observed in a commentary on Québec’s newly-urbanized French Canadian populations,
Déracinée, la population urbaine récemment arrivée de la campagne traverse une crise d’identité d’autant plus grave qu’elle se retrouve dans un monde dominé par le capital anglais et en concurrence avec une foule d’immigrants qui la considère comme marginale. La vision du monde qu’avait élaboré l’agriculturalisme au XIXe siècle éclatait et le discours qui l’accompagnait risquait lui aussi de perdre sa cohérence. . . . [I]l fallait trouver un sens nouveau, une justification nouvelle á la présence des Canadiens français en Amérique. (Lemire 12)
Uprooted, the urban population recently arrived from the countryside suffered a grave identity crisis plunged into a world dominated by English capital along with a crowd of immigrants that considered it marginal. The worldview that the
agriculturalism of the nineteenth century had developed was destroyed, and the discourse that accompanied it also risked destruction. . . . It was necessary to find a new logic, a new justification for the presence of French Canadians in America.
Ringuet cannot provide, in Thirty Acres’ closing pages, an explicit solution to the French Canadian predicament. The life history of the Euchariste Moisan, however, stands as an implicit critique of French Canada’s traditional ideologies and the high hopes derived from these ideologies. Irregardless of the early promise which they seemed to offer in a prior age, they are quite insufficient to face the modern age. The land is not enough to provide prosperity; the church cannot take care of its own; the family grows distant and hostile. The only thing that can be done is to live like Ephrem, happily enough in the city, while hoping that Ephrem’s near-total assimilation abroad can be averted at home. Thirty Acres, in the end, is a eulogy for the French Canadian nationalist challenge to North America, and an augur of the North Americanization of Québec.
