In Les Chambres de bois, Anne Hébert tells a simple story with few characters, little action, an uncomplicated plot…. Anne Hébert's language is sparse and precise, dépouillé. Time and space are anonymous, and are, in fact, internalized; the real time and space of the novel exist within the characters, within their dreams, within the confined world created by Michel and Lia in their chambres de bois. The tone of this novel, its symbolic language, its deceptive simpli...

Anne Hébert's story, Le Torrent, and its relation to the rest of French-Canadian literature takes on the same significance as does the relation between an ancient House and its coat of arms. It can be argued that the story is a zenith point within the tradition to which it belongs. (p. 9) Le Torrent is most accessible through its superficial meaning, through its theme of conflict. It has been stated above that the story is emblematic; as such, it represents the duality that has always characte...

Kamouraska is especially suited to begin an analysis of twentieth-century gothic fiction in Canada, since in form and content it provides the reader with a double perspective, a Janus-like look both towards past and present types of gothicism. Looking one way we can see it as a continuation of the traditional black romance, with many of the gothic features and motifs of its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors. Looking another way we see it has characteristics which are undeniably contemporary an...

The writing of Anne Hébert records an intense interior drama of poetic and spiritual evolution, though in volume her poetic output has been quite small…. Miss Hébert's first volume of poetry, Les Songes en Equilibre, reveals to us a young girl in the first stages of physical, artistic and spiritual evolution. The style likewise is as yet unformed; on the whole it is thin and frail, but occasionally it gives a foretaste of the clearcut, unadorned style of Miss Hébert'...

[In "Le Torrent" Anne Hébert deals with a protagonist who is] seeking the joy or freedom which … is, at the same time, apart from and part of [his] existence…. Hébert, through the image of the rapids, [articulates] the dilemma of a fragmented personality in search of some healing reconciliation, and in dealing with this search, the [work assumes a symbolic dimension which takes it] from the particulars of presentation into universal considerations of man's re...

[The reader] of Anne Hébert's The Silent Rooms (Les Chambres de Bois) will find that it is a novel about the choice between human normalcy and one kind of art. The English reader may therefore be surprised. The Silent Rooms is not a "modern" novel in the sense of an obvious technical breakthrough. However, it was, and is, a revolutionary novel in French Canada which deals with the alienation of the artist, a theme long familiar to students of English poetry. The Silent Rooms is s...

[Traditional Quebecois] rejection of the real world as well as of the pleasures (sinful) of the present and of the body resulted in a collective malaise that is expressed with great sensitivity and power in [Poems by] Anne Hébert. Indeed, perhaps no other Quebecois poet has so successfully presented the long night of the French-Canadian soul as it seeks to exorcise its demons and escape from the small "chambre fermée" in which it finds itself imprisoned and exiled. Although this ...

[In Les Enfants du Sabbat we] encounter the archetypal Quebec literary experience; a precocious adolescent becomes the battleground between the commands of the spirit and the desires of the flesh. Les Enfants du sabbat seems to be a logical development of Anne Hébert's earlier novels, Les Chambres de bois … and Kamouraska…. The fable-like, implicitly incestuous world of Les Chambres de bois and the romantic, implicitly demonic northern landscape of Kamouraska develop into a much ...

[Children of the Black Sabbath] is a forceful tale of personal and social anguish. It is the story of Sister Julie of the Trinity, born of parents who practise quasi-occult rites such as incestuous "initiations" and drunken orgies…. The novel is, simultaneously, the most traditional and the most unique on the Quebec literary scene…. Anne Hébert makes the point unequivocally at several instances and readers acquainted with Quebec's literature will find the portrayal ...

[Perhaps] no other Quebecois poet has so successfully presented the long night of the French-Canadian soul as it seeks to exorcise its demons and escape from the small "chambre fermée" in which it finds itself imprisoned and exiled [than has Anne Hébert]. Although [her] poetry is deeply personal and highly original, it is difficult not to remark upon the similarities between the personal adventure of Anne Hébert and the general evolution of Quebec society in recent years. ...

                     The world is in order                     The dead below                ...

[Like much of québécois fiction "Le Torrent"] shows the distorting effect of a strict religious upbringing, in this case the stunting of the life of a child by a pious mother who is paying off an old debt to society…. The whole story is built round a series of polarities; the hero is held … between the attraction of a world of movement, smell, colour and danger … and the inculcated urge to call all this evil and master it…. There is no way out of this ...

[Children of the Black Sabbath is], simultaneously, the most traditional and the most unique [novel] on the Quebec literary scene…. Anne Hébert makes the point [that people are extensions of the land on which they live] unequivocally at several instances and readers acquainted with Quebec's literature will find the portrayal of the people suffering under the yoke of climate and clergy more than familiar. The worldliness and hypocrisy of the Church, another theme "exposed" ...

In "Children of the Black Sabbath" [Anne Hébert] poses the timely question of whether a beautiful young girl from an impoverished rural community in Quebec can find happiness and contentment in the Sisterhood of the Precious Blood—whether she can take final vows as Sister Julie of the Trinity before her complicated, colorful past as the daughter of an alcoholic sorceress and a sado-masochistic father (in fact, the Devil himself) can cause mischief. She does not succeed. Another d...

In "Children of the Black Sabbath" [Anne Hébert] poses the timely question of whether a beautiful young girl from an impoverished rural community in Quebec can find happiness and contentment in the Sisterhood of the Precious Blood—whether she can take final vows as Sister Julie of the Trinity before her complicated, colorful past as the daughter of an alcoholic sorceress and a sado-masochistic father (in fact, the Devil himself) can cause mischief. She does not succeed. Another d...

[The Tomb of the Kings] is a book closely unified by its constant introspection, by its atmosphere of profound melancholy, by its recurrent themes of a dead childhood, a living death cut off from love and beauty, suicide, the theme of introspection itself. Such a book would seem to be of more interest clinically than poetically, but the miracle occurs and these materials are transmuted by the remarkable force of Mlle. Hébert's imagery, the simplicity and directness of her diction, and the rest...

Héloise is a modern-day recounting of the Abélard (here as Bernard) and Héloise legend, with Bernard's wife, Christine, representing the spiritually good life. It is also a modern Dracula, with the atmosphere of a Fellini film, The Damned, and even Cabaret. From the outset of the story, carefully chosen language evokes a somber feeling of perdition, silence, and a void, immediately contrasted with words suggesting life, joy, and light. Surrounding these two distinct realms is the...

[Les Fous de Bassan] applies the term for a sea-bird (fou = gannet) to the half-crazed remnants of a Puritan community living on the eastern sea-board. Since they came up originally from America, have English names and have remained Protestant, it seems unlikely that they would express their sexual frustrations and homicidal tendencies in Canadian French, but one never knows. The blurb suggests that the main character is the seawind, the spirit moving over the waters; perhaps this is why the book seems vacu...