{"id":15588,"date":"2015-08-28T13:17:25","date_gmt":"2015-08-28T17:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/?p=15588"},"modified":"2024-08-09T07:42:43","modified_gmt":"2024-08-09T11:42:43","slug":"from-the-nun-to-the-call-girl-patricia-smarts-award-winning-book-on-quebec-womens-personal-writings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/2015\/from-the-nun-to-the-call-girl-patricia-smarts-award-winning-book-on-quebec-womens-personal-writings\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Nun to the Call-girl: Patricia Smart\u2019s Award-winning Book on Quebec Women\u2019s Personal Writings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n
\n\n
\n
\n
\n

\n From the Nun to the Call-girl: Patricia Smart\u2019s Award-winning Book on Quebec Women\u2019s Personal Writings\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

Patricia Smart pens an award-winning book on the personal writings of Quebec women.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Chancellor\u2019s Professor Emerita in the Department of French wins Gabrielle Roy Prize, the Acad\u00e9mie des lettres medal and the Jean \u00c9thier-Blais Prize. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Distinguished Research Professor and Chancellor\u2019s Professor Emerita in the Department of French<\/a>, Patricia Smart, has been awarded the Prix Gabrielle Roy and the Jean \u00c9thier-Blais Prize for her latest book, De Marie de l\u2019Incarnation \u00e0 Nelly Arcan. Se dire, se faire par l\u2019\u00e9criture intime<\/em>(\u00c9ditions du Bor\u00e9al). The book was also shortlisted for the Governor General\u2019s Award and for Ontario\u2019s Trillium Award.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rounding off a very successful 2015, Professor Smart finished the year by receiving the prestigious Medal of Quebec\u2019s Acad\u00e9mie des lettres for her overall contribution to the study of Quebec literature and culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These accolades are a fitting endorsement of a career which has always been dedicated to putting English-Canadian and Quebec literature and language on the national agenda.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCarleton\u2019s English and French departments in the 1970s, with professors like Robin Mathews, Parker Duchemin, Donald Smith, Sinclair Robinson and myself, were instrumental in bringing Canadian literature to the forefront, and it\u2019s gratifying to see that present day Carleton professors like Sara Jamieson, Jody Mason, Jennifer Henderson and Catherine Khordoc are still playing major roles in developing new critical approaches to our national literatures,\u201d said Smart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Released in 2014, Professor Smart\u2019s De Marie de l\u2019Incarnation \u00e0 Nelly Arcan. Se dire, se faire par l\u2019\u00e9criture intime<\/em>brings together a number of published and unpublished first person accounts of the lives of Quebec women from the time of New France to the present day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smart began her research with the intention of writing a study of Quebec women\u2019s autobiographies, but was surprised to discover that in the three centuries between Marie de l\u2019Incarnation\u2019s spiritual autobiography (1654) and Claire Martin\u2019s memoir of her childhood, Dans un gant de fer<\/em>(1965), there had been no publicly accessible autobiographies by women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This striking absence of centuries\u2019 worth of personal commentary from half of the province\u2019s population obviously leaves an important gap in the collective understanding of life in Quebec. To help bridge it, Smart began the monumental task of searching for correspondence and diaries by women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve become more and more interested over the years in what literary texts can tell us about history,\u201d said Smart. \u201cWhat I\u2019ve tried to do in this book is to study each of the texts in depth. I wanted the authors I was studying to come to life for the reader, and that meant that I had to take the time to really immerse myself in the work of each one of them. They feel like \u2018my\u2019 women now, and I want their voices to be heard.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The women featured in Smart\u2019s book come from all walks of Quebecois life and their personal stories raise important questions. Their voices provide a new perspective on some of the major events of Quebec political and social history. Through a new lens, De Marie de l\u2019Incarnation \u00e0 Nelly Arcan<\/em>revisits the rebellions of 1837-1838, the cholera epidemic in Montreal and surrounding areas in the mid-nineteenth century, the slow beginnings of feminism and Church resistance to it in the early twentieth century, and the changes brought by the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two celebrated writers named in the book\u2019s title, Marie de l\u2019Incarnation and Nelly Arcan, are representative of the book\u2019s great diversity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marie de l\u2019Incarnation, the founder of the Ursuline order in Quebec, was a mystic, while Nelly Arcan became a best-selling author in France and Quebec in 2001 with the publication of her autobiographical text Putain (translating to \u201cwhore\u201d or \u201chooker\u201d) which tells of her experiences working as a call girl while studying at the Universit\u00e9 du Qu\u00e9bec \u00e0 Montr\u00e9al. \u201cSo, through the work of two brilliant and important writers, we go from one extreme to the other of the roles assigned to women, from the nun to the prostitute,\u201d explained Smart. \u201cTragically, Arcan took her own life in 2009, at the age of 36.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other authors studied include Julie Papineau who is known thanks to her forty yearlong correspondence with her husband Louis-Joseph Papineau, the leader of the 1837-1838 rebellions; Henriette Dessaulles, who wrote a diary critical of life in Quebec as a teenager in the 1880s; Michelle Le Normand, an early twentieth century novelist whose diaries demonstrate the incredible struggle of a woman who aspired to be a writer, a wife, and a mother; and Claire Martin, whose denunciation of the family, the educational system and the Church in the years of her childhood was an important and controversial work in the Quiet Revolution period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are but a few examples of the many authors featured in the book, who deliver a multiplicity of perspectives on the ways women experienced the strictly prescribed roles of wife and mother dictated by French-Canadian Catholicism. Smart\u2019s presentation of these texts provides a new look at both the public and private history of Quebec women, from the motivations and dreams of the nuns who chose to come to New France in the seventeenth century, on through to the postmodern age where, as the tragic writings of Nelly Arcan display, women are still severely restricted by their vulnerability to the expectations prescribed by society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI like to think that my book could be described as a history of women\u2019s subjectivity in Quebec,\u201d said Smart. \u201cThrough their writings these women express their struggle for an autonomous voice\u2014often achieved through the process of writing itself\u2014and they document the obstacles to freedom of expression and action that women have faced across the centuries and still face.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"From
From the nun to the prostitute<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"Patricia
Patricia Smart poses with her husband, John Smart, after the awards ceremony for the Acad\u00e9mie des lettres<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

More information on Patricia Smart and <\/a>De Marie de l\u2019Incarnation \u00e0 Nelly Arcan. Se dire, se faire par l\u2019\u00e9criture intime<\/a><\/em><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Listen to an interview with Professor Smart on Radio-Canada<\/em><\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Patricia Smart pens an award-winning book on the personal writings of Quebec women. Chancellor\u2019s Professor Emerita in the Department of French wins Gabrielle Roy Prize, the Acad\u00e9mie des lettres medal and the Jean \u00c9thier-Blais Prize. Distinguished Research Professor and Chancellor\u2019s Professor Emerita in the Department of French, Patricia Smart, has been awarded the Prix Gabrielle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[87,55,50],"tags":[85,86,88,89],"class_list":["post-15588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fassinate","category-french","category-research-2","tag-autobiographies","tag-canadian-literature","tag-prix-gabrielle-roy","tag-womens-studies"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15588"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34255,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15588\/revisions\/34255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}