The Selected Letters of Marie de LIncarnation - Essay Example

?The wave of immigrants from Europe who settled in Canada represented mixed interests and reasons for coming abroad. Like all previous great migrations, this wave was accompanied both by religious zealots and detractors alike. Religion was an integral percept of life in contemporary Europe and the Catholic Church was determined to create influence in the new world too. In order to ground themselves into the new and emerging system, the Catholic Church sponsored a number of missions into Canada. However this was not without opposition. As religion was too well grounded in personal belief and society, the opposition was more or less private in nature. These contrasts can be observed in early works of Canadian literature such as the letters of Marie de l’Incarnation and Frances Brookes character Lieutenant Colonel Ed Rivers. While Marie represents a nun from the Ursuline order and an actual person, the Colonel is a fictional character from the works of Frances Brookes that had been shaped around the lives of actual people in contemporary Canadian society. The backgrounds of the works and the backgrounds of their authors will serve as important indicators along with the works to decipher how their views on Catholic missionary work differ. Marie de l’Incarnation decided to dedicate her life to missionary work in the new world after the death of her husband and the period following it. Marie managed her brother in law’s business in France for quite some time after her husband’s death but eventually she chose to serve God. In this endeavor she left her eleven year old son in the care of her sister and joined the Ursuline monastery in Tours. Rising through the ranks Marie volunteered to go to Canada and there she worked with the Native American Indians who she often referred to as “savages”. Marie’s only reason for coming to Canada was doing missionary work and she strived to “win souls to Jesus” (Marshall 75). The collage of Marie’s letters are directed to a number of audiences including her son Claude, reports for the Jesuits and the Ursulines at Tours as well as fund raising letters to “ladies of rank” in France. Throughout the letters of Marie one can sense her viewing her work as necessary to lift the poor masses of savages out of their barbaric ways and into civilization. Being a woman herself, the bulk of Marie’s work was directed to the uplift of the Native American Indian women and her letters reflect this. The natives have been referred to as “savages” time and again by Marie and have been scrutinized ethnocentrically by her. She describes the locals as having “poor clothing” but “delightful spirits”. This indicates that Marie viewed these people as innocent and simple yet pushed into barbaric ways with enough margins to rescue them through the work of the Catholic Church (Rowan). She expresses this by stating in her letters that (Marshall 79): “The candor and simplicity of their spirits are so delightful that they cannot be described.” This indicates that Marie considers the natives simple people and is ready to put herself fully into her work in order to rescue these souls. She states (Marshall 79): “It is a singular consolation to us to deprive ourselves of all that is most necessary in order to win souls to Jesus Christ, and we would prefer to lack everything rather than leave our girls in the unbearable filth they bring from their cabins.” While Marie considers these people simple yet she tends to condescend upon them as uncivilised and dirty as indicated by the statement above. This is a necessary trait that was shared commonly by Christian missionaries around the world. The missionaries were convinced that their work was going to improve the lives of the “savage” peoples they were working with by imparting Christian values even if it means that the native culture was eliminated in the process (Zecher). Moreover like other missionary settings, Marie is prepared to use any amount of resources in order to win over the natives. In one of her letters, Marie states (Marshall 75): “It is a very sensible consolation to us to take bread from our mouths to give it to these poor people, in order to inspire them with love for Our Lord and for his holy Faith.” While one part of society’s extreme was represented by religious zealots such as Marie, there was an alternate brand of people emerging in the new world who were opposite to these religious notions. These people represented a new generation of emerging liberals and this movement can be distinctly traced and tied to art and literature from the subject period. Frances Brookes is one such person whose writings have portrayed contemporary Canadian society and common people within it. Her work The History of Emily Montague represents her views of the society in Quebec in terms of the politics and religion. The letters are written by Lieutenant Colonel Ed Rivers (who is portrayed as Emily’s lover in the book) and by Arabella Fermor (Emily’s friend and confidante). It is speculated that Colonel Rivers was based on Henry Caldwell and that Arabella was based on Anna Marie Bondfield, the wife of George Allsopp (Merret). The author’s use of actual people to portray her ideas in the form of her characters indicates that she is actually providing an insight into the newly emerging classes in Canada and their disillusionment with religion. Historically this was an important time in the history of the world as religion was being peeled back layer by layer due to newly found social orders in the freedom of the New World. The Colonel is portrayed as a worldly man whose primary aim in life is to cash in on the opportunities presented in Canada as best as he can. Rivers is shown as coming to Canada in pursuit of his commercial aims and this is expressed both visibly and in latent form in the book (Benedict). One of River’s letters clearly depicts his mind set (Brooke Letter VIII): “This colony is a rich mine yet unopen’d; I do not mean of gold and silver, but of what are of much more real value, corn and cattle.” Rivers is uninterested in religion in any given form because of his overwhelming interest in economics. His views on the “victimisation” of a Native American Indian woman by the Ursuline Convent reveal the character’s abhorrence for the Catholic missionary system and the values it most espouses. River’s states in one of his letters (Brooke Letter V): “I cannot help being fir’d with a degree of zeal against an institution equally incompatible with public good, and private happiness; an institution which cruelly devotes beauty and innocence to slavery, regret, and wretchedness; to a more irksome imprisonment than the severest laws inflict on the worst of criminals.” Clearly Rivers feels that the Catholic missionary system’s practice of abstinence is more or less self imposed suffering. This also means that Rivers highly disapproves of the Catholic convents and their practices of converting people over as these practices take away a person’s freedom. Other than the quote above, Rivers is seen expressing his attitude on the Catholic missionary system in a number of other instances too. The character states that the people who are “serving the God of mercy” are bringing about “voluntary tortures” amongst themselves and are also “cutting themselves off from that state of society” in which God has placed them (Brooke Letter V). Here it must be noted that Rivers does believe in God as he used the words “God of mercy” but he does not approve of the Catholic missionary system. Overall the work of Marie through The Selected Letters of Marie de l’Incarnation reflect on the state of Catholic Christian missionaries and their work in Canada. More prominently Marie’s work indicates that she views the natives as “savages” who can be saved from barbaric ways. Her work reflects that the missionaries believe that what they are doing is extremely necessary and right. The missionaries are ready to use any resources to win the natives over to their system of beliefs and behaviour. In sharp contrast, France Brooke’s character Colonel Rivers from The History of Emily Montague is seen as possessing belief in God but disapproving of the Catholic missionary system as being self imposed torture and exile. Bibliography Benedict, B. M. “The margins of sentiment: nature, letter and law in Frances Brooke's epistolary novels.” ARIEL 23(3) (1992). Brooke, Frances. The History of Emily Montague. London: Book Jungle, 2008. Marshall, Joyce. Word From New France The Selected Letters Of Marie De L'Incarnation. Ed. Joyce Marshall. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Merret, R. “The politics of romance in "The History of Emily Montague".” Early American Literature (2005): 92-108. Rowan, Mary M. “Conversion and Reconversion in the Writings of Marie de l'Incarnation.” Quebec Studies, 6 (1988): 65-77. Zecher, Carla. “Life on the French-Canadian hyphen: Nation and narration in the correspondence of Marie de l'Incarnation.” Quebec Studies, 26 (1998): 38-51. Read More