“Without too much that it seems”, here is well, according to Marie-Pier Luneau, historian of literature, and Jean-PhilippeWarren, sociologist, why what today seems heavy, boring, even ridiculous, hid a power capable, for our elites of the 1940s and 1950s, of “undermining the very foundations of traditional Quebec”. Popular romance novels challenged the nation and Catholicism, no less.
Assisted by Karol’Ann Boivin and Harold Bérubé, Marie-Pier Luneau and Jean-Philippe Warren, authors of Love at 10 cents, explore “post-war Québécois sentimental novels”, these cheap, mass-produced short stories that were found almost everywhere in stores, “apart from bookstores”! By this touch of humor, the researchers distinguish these opuscules from the least serious literature.
Intended primarily for an audience of 15 to 20 years old, popular romance novels offended our conservative elites because they celebrated, as researchers have clearly detected, “an individualistic withdrawal into the couple” and “happiness above all material “. For their critics, they “seem to have been the antechamber of desires and fantasies, which they distorted, reverberated and reshaped” by fiction.
It is, to use the terms of our researchers, a “cultural fast food”. That is to say “an American dream with Quebec sauce” where the hot dog becomes the “hot dog” in “an imagination filled with hopes of social ascent, where we drive gleaming cars, frequents the most beautiful neighborhoods of Montreal, dines in the best restaurants, all the while loving each other with a burning passion that seems to guarantee eternal youth”.
Montreal cartoonist André L’Archevêque (1923-2015) illustrated thousands of these popular romance novels. Scholars point out that his talent and that of his ilk greatly contributed to the success of the stories. Love at 10 cents is teeming with eye-catching cover prints: The kiss of fire, The sleeping beauty, The love seeker…
Moralism triumphs in the novels: male or female homosexuality is monstrous there. But facts are shaking up conventions, the researchers note. The French language is essential among the poor as among the rich, even the characters of British descent speak it!
To be born out of wedlock is not an indelible blemish. The researchers specify: “By succeeding in disproving prejudices, the bastards and bastards of our novels embody self-made women and self-made men worthy of American myth. To unite Americanization and eroticization in Quebec, isn’t this to guess the depth of a continental unconscious that goes back several decades?