Posted yesterday at 12:00 p.m.
Reflecting the fantasies and dreams of an era, but also its norms and prohibitions, “the sentimental novel indicates how to love, how not to love”, explains Jean-Philippe Warren, professor of sociology and anthropology at Concordia University.
“His characters are role models for the rest of society; we project ourselves into them, we desire as these characters desire and desire each other, he says. It is both a school of feelings and a whole world of prohibitions, of dreams, of hopes, so much so that it has been controlled by the ideological authorities of French Canada, first, and of Quebec by thereafter, until being banned from libraries. »
love like a novel lists some 150 works from the Quebec sentimental repertoire, from the 19and century to the present day, passing through “the Harlequin surge”, to which Quebec did not escape, in the 1970s, and the craze for chick bed, which gave birth to bestsellers like those of Rafaële Germain, in the early 2000s. It is a dense read, a detailed account of their research carried out over more than six years and a wealth of information for anyone is interested in detail in the history of Quebec through its literature.
Love reinvented over the years
In each era, love reinvents itself in the sentimental novel, underlines the professor of literature at the University of Sherbrooke Marie-Pier Luneau. Of repressed love, in the books of the 1850s, then sublimated at the turn of the XXand century, love was “domesticated” in the interwar period; “the destiny of heroines will be to become good wives and good mothers”, write the authors.
Then came the golden age of the Quebec sentimental novel, in full Duplessism, with these booklets printed on newsprint, “written in a hurry” and illustrated with catchy covers, which scandalized the elites and were sold everywhere. , in pharmacies and convenience stores, for 10 cents (rather than $1 or $2 for classic-format novels).
PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, THE PRESS
These novels are an incredible source for discovering both the revealed side of French-Canadian or Quebec society – the things that can be said, that we must say, that we must celebrate – and the hidden side which is found in the watermark of the stories, but which is often reformulated and wrapped in such a way that it passes the test of censorship.
Jean-Philippe Warren
Regardless of the era, Marie-Pier Luneau discovered with surprise that love is always linked to matters of material improvement for the heroine. “In Quebec culture, where we were told ad nauseam that we were a people born for a small loaf, that surprised me because even when the novel is the most rigid in its discourse and narrows the dreams of love, i.e. the 1920s with the wave of local novels, the heroine’s greatest dream is to change farms to enter another where she will be rich. […] This dream of material wealth has fascinated me through the ages because that’s not how we heard our mothers and grandmothers talk about their dreams. »
An undeniable success
Even if the sentimental novel has in turn been criticized and accused of being anti-feminist or of praising rape, often despised – we even go so far as to say that these books are “stunning”, illustrates Jean-Philippe Warren – , the genre has always been able to count on a large readership.
“If we look at the post-war booklets, thousands of copies are sold every month; a million copies sold during the year for certain publishers”, he specifies.
PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, THE PRESS
Marie-Pier Luneau
And this success has not been denied over the years: in 1982, more than half of the books sold in Quebec were sentimental novels, or some 10 million copies, we learn in the essay. In 2020 again, notes Marie-Pier Luneau, sentimental literature ranked third in sales of popular genres, according to data recorded in Gaspard by BTLF.
“The most recent trend is rather to say that when we despise this literature, we also despise what women have chosen to read en masse,” she adds. So the idea is rather to understand what’s in there, to possibly fight it, perhaps, but in any case try to understand the phenomenon. There was a time when a Harlequin novel sold every seven seconds in the world; how can everyone be wrong? »
Love as a novel – The sentimental novel in Quebec, from yesterday to today
Marie-Pier Luneau, Jean-Philippe Warren
The Presses of the University of Montreal
368 pages