The driving force of Le Premier Jardin, argues Lori Saint-Martin, is Flora Fontange’s ultimately hopeless nostalgia for the pre-Oedipal bond between mother and daughter: the forever unattainable ‘first garden’. Describing the text in terms of its ‘maternal structure’, Saint-Martin asserts that on the level of theme, of narrative, and even of syntax the work is organized by the successive mother-daughter relations it depicts. Flora’s excavation of her own personal history is interwoven with her dramatization of the feminine condition in Quebec’s colonial past, a theme which Pallister herself explores in her account of the relationship between fiction and history in Hébert’s work for theatre, La Cage.

Where Saint-Martin’s ‘maternal structure’ is bound up with a rewriting, redemption, and reordering of the past, for Barbara Godard Hébert’s mother-daughter relations are associated with chaotic proliferation and multiplication. Her comparison of split feminine subjectivities in Kamouraska and Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle draws on Simone de Beauvoir’s rejection of patriarchal binary logic as well as Irigaray’s conception of mother-daughter relations in terms of refracting mirrors. In each novel, Godard suggests, the protagonist’s split narrative viewpoints not only give rise to an excess of subjects and plots, but also instigate a process of textual ‘birthing’ through which she is able to bring forth grotesque and monstrous selves.

A recurrent theme in the collection is that of conflict over cultural as well as geopolitical space. Ellen W. Munley’s analysis of cultural perspectives in Un habit de lumiére examines the position of the migrant Almevida family ‘on the margins or interstices of two or more antagonistic national cultures’ (p. 126) and postulates the existence of a ‘third space’ in which the young Miguel Almevida might have escaped destruction. For Amy Reid, cultural space or its absence is integral to Hébert’s work. Reid’s essay focuses in particular on the relationship between textual space and a specifically feminine Quebec identity, a relationship that she considers to be a driving force behind Hébert’s fiction. In both Le Premier Jardin and Kamouraska, she suggest, Quebec feminine identity is textualized, performed, and memorialized through acts of writing and speech.

This anthology bears out Hébert’s own vital role in the textualization of Québécois identity. As both an overview of and a tribute to her work, it will be of considerable value to both Hebertian scholars and to those new to her writing.

–Heather Williams Elder, MLR, 98.2, 2003

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