Maria Chapdelaine by Louis Hémon

First published: 1914, serial; Maria Chapdelaine: Recit du Canada francais, 1916, book (English translation, 1921); illustrated

Type of work: Social realism

Themes: Death, family, friendship, and love and romance

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: Canada

Principal Characters:

• Maria Chapdelaine, a young Canadian girl who comes of marriageable age while living in the backwoods of Canada
• Samuel Chapdelaine, her father, a man who is never content unless working to tame the wilds
• Laura Chapdelaine, her mother, a hardworking woman who loyally follows her husband from one rural farm to another
• Francois Paradis, the adventurous trapper with whom Maria falls in love
• Lorenzo Surprenant, an Americanized Canadian who tries to convince Maria to come to the United States and be his wife
• Eutrope Gagnon, the industrious, respectable Canadian whom Maria finally agrees to marry

The Story

Maria Chapdelaine begins with Maria’s return from a trip to visit relatives of her mother. Though Maria is an attractive young girl, suitors for her hand are discouraged by the inaccessibility of her father’s farm and also perhaps by Maria’s own ethereal, almost aloof, beauty. In town, before starting the journey home with her father, Maria meets Francois Paradis, a vibrant young trapper who has sold his late father’s farm because he cannot bear to be tied to land. She feels an instant attraction toward him, but their meeting is brief: She and her father must get back before the ice on the river breaks up into uncrossable floes.

They make the trip home with their horse Charles Eugene, named for a neighbor involved in a long-ago feud so that each generation “might give himself the pleasure every day of calling out very loudly: ‘Charles Eugene, ill-favored beast that you are! Wretched, badly brought up creature! Get along Charles Eugene!’ ” This humorous example of neighborly vengeance, Canadian-style, concludes: “For a whole century the quarrel was dead and buried; but the Chapdelaines ever since had named their successive horses Charles Eugene.”

The Chapdelaine family has greatly missed Maria, and it is not long before the arrival of a visitor who has also missed Maria: Eutrope Gagnon. He is the opposite of Francois in many ways: He is content to farm the land, and he is a quiet, unaggressive young man. Yet another suitor arrives in the person of Lorenzo Surprenant, an expatriate Canadian working in a factory in the United States.

Maria, however, has fallen in love with Francois—and he with her. He leaves for the winter to work and save money for their marriage. By Christmas, the weather has isolated the Chapdelaines. Unable to journey anywhere to hear the midnight Mass, they celebrate at home. Maria devoutly says a thousand Hail Marys to ensure Francois’s safe return in the spring. Tragically, New Year’s Day brings news of Francois: Set on visiting Maria despite the bad weather, he has “gone astray” in the woods. To “go astray” in the Canadian backwoods is a death sentence: Francois will not be returning.

Maria’s grief is such that she removes herself from the world. Her worried parents take her to see the local priest, or cure, who admonishes Maria to stop grieving for Francois, as they had no formal understanding or engagement so far as Maria’s parents knew, and, therefore, it is unseemly for Maria to be sacrificing her life this way. His instructions to Maria (“The duty of a girl like you—good-looking, healthy, active withal and a clever housekeeper—is in the first place to help her old parents, and in good time to marry and bring up a Christian family of her own”), though somewhat insensitive and harsh, do serve to bring Maria back to life. Meanwhile, the attentions of Lorenzo Surprenant reveal his wish for Maria to become his wife.

Just as Maria is coming to accept Francois’s disappearance and certain death, however, her mother falls ill with a mysterious and painful malady. The doctor can do nothing to save her, and finally the cure comes to administer last rites. After her mother’s death, Maria all but decides to accept Lorenzo’s proposal and go to the United States with him. Yet, in her heart, she still feels a kinship to the land, even though it is the hardships inflicted by that very land that have killed two people whom she loved very much: her mother and Francois. In the end, Maria tells Eutrope that she will marry him, thereby deciding to stay in her native land.

Context

Louis Hémon was a French immigrant who was killed in a railroad accident at the age of thirty-three. Yet, his novel Maria Chapdelaine has gone on to become a Canadian classic. It is viewed as a portrait of the most admired traits of the Canadian national character, a keystone to understanding the Canadian philosophy of life. Just as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn embodies the all-American boy, so Maria Chapdelaine is the quintessential Canadian farmgirl.

Hémon’s work codified the Canadian resistance to change and pride in hard work and inspired other romans du terroir (novels of the soil) from such famous Canadian authors as Frederick Philip Grove (Felix Paul Greve, who was also an immigrant, though from Germany). Hémon was perhaps inspired himself by the work of the Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of the famous Anne of Green Gables (1908).

Though not well known outside Canada, Maria Chapdelaine has had a strong influence on all Canadian literature, both adult and juvenile, since the 1910’s. So realistic are Hémon’s characters, however, that Maria Chapdelaine’s emphases on religious faith and physical fortitude have served as a model not only for the literature of Canada but also for the everyday life of the Canadians. His fable is written at an unusual level of social realism for juvenile literature, without a pat ending, and is perhaps most closely echoed in American literature by the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder, in her Little House on the Prairie series.