Adrienne Maillet Biography

Marie-Augustine-Adrienne Maillet was born in Montreal on 10 December 1885, the daughter of Ludger Maillet, a lawyer, and Sarah Larose Maillet. As a child she attended the Académie Saint-Léon in Montreal, the Slade School at Fall River, Massachusetts, and the Mont Sainte-Marie convent school in Montreal. She began studies at Montreal's Ecole normale, but was obliged to withdraw after completing four years of the program in order to take on additional responsibilities within her family. In 1910 she left the family home in order to administer the dental office of her brother. In 1917 she began a long career in the postal service, throughout which time she resided at a Franciscan convent in Montreal. During the period 1934-1936 she supplied three short comedies to the sisters for use in their school, and in addition she wrote seven other comedies which were staged at various locations in Montreal, such as the Saint-Sulpice theater and the Monument National, the proceeds going to various charitable organizations. She also acted on occasion, in such plays as L'Aiglon by Edmond Rostand. After retiring from the postal service in 1937, she traveled extensively, visiting Egypt, Spain, and Greece. During her latter years she devoted herself to writing and produced eight novels, a collection of six short stories, and two biographies. She died in September 1963.

Maillet's literary production does not fall within the categories of what is now generally considered of significant interest in Quebec literature during the two-decade period extending from her retirement in 1937 to the appearance of her last book in 1955. Nevertheless, her work was held to be of considerable religious and moral utility and thus attracted a wide readership in a church-dominated society. To her credit, important attention is accorded in her fictional writing to certain pressing social problems of the time. However, the overabiding simplicity of plot and characterization, in addition to a persistent tendency toward the melodramatic, relegate these works unavoidably to second if not third rank.

Yves Bolduc, writing in the Dictionnaire des oeuvres littéraires du Québec in 1982, has pointed out with particular eloquence the fundamental principles upon which Maillet's fictional creations are based. The bipolar structures which typify the work of so many Quebec writers are indeed present in Maillet's thematic catalogue as well; in this case the bipolarity consistently pits suffering virtue, identified generally with women mistreated by dominant males in a paternalistic society, against evil that is never more than momentarily triumphant. As Bolduc points out, it is always good that has the last word. The emotionally charged atmosphere of these works is further enhanced, if somewhat artificially, by the author's frequent, evident, and openly gratuitous interventions. Lacking the sort of tight inner consistency that characterizes a higher quality of fictional writing, these texts are frequently marked by improbable successions of chance events, coups de theatre, unforeseen meetings, and sudden shifts of plot. In obvious ways, the author betrays her presence within the fabric of the fictional discourse by frequent evaluative comments on events, by revelations of the secret thoughts of the characters, and by an unrestrained tendency toward moral observation.

Although the texts permit readers to form a more or less realistic idea of certain limited environments in Quebec during the periods portrayed (the home and the workplace of the middle and professional classes in Montreal, for example), it must be admitted that the banality of much of Maillet's dialogue and the naive simplicity evident in the psychology of her characters leave the reader somewhat dismayed. One must agree, however, with critics of the time that Maillet wrote with imagination and verve and that her denunciations of class prejudice and male chauvinism (particularly as regards the extension to women of the right to vote) must be commended. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the overall aim of much of her writing is to show that virtue is unfailingly rewarded, and that Catholic Christian faith and morality, despite adversity, are finally triumphant. It is this conviction that nourished Maillet's creative impulse and touched the largest number of her readers.

The plot of Peuvent-elles garder un secret" (1937), Maillet's first novel, may be cited as an example of much that typifies the melodramatic nature of her imagination. Yolande and Fernand are engaged to be married, but the fickle Fernand abandons his fiancée and seduces her sister, Madeleine. Fernand then momentarily quits the scene and is unaware of the birth of his child, Suzanne, and of the little girl's having been entrusted to a nun by Madeleine shortly before Madeleine's untimely demise. Fernand, meanwhile, undergoes a conversion experience and becomes a missionary.

In the novel's second part, Yolande's daughter and Suzanne, twenty-three years later, are in love with the same man. Suzanne is favored by the suitor, but Suzanne and Marthe, her adoptive mother who has meanwhile left the religious order, are suspected of having illicitly influenced the young man's choice. In order to secure Suzanne's honor and happiness, Marthe reveals the secret of Suzanne's origins; the principals are reconciled and Suzanne's marriage ensues.

The other novels and short stories, as well as the biographies of Michelle Rôbal and Rachel Merode (two ordinary women remarkable only for their extraordinary moral qualities), similarly turn for the most part around the moral contortions of a bourgeois society with strong church connections. Perilous situations are created from which only extreme ethical fortitude, a quality not always equally shared, can extricate the characters. Melodrama, sentimentality, and emotive Roman Catholicism combine to produce a literature of which one critic has said that the fact that it can be placed in any hands is perhaps its only merit.