Care and the Bodily Identity of the Urban besogneuse in Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion

Abstract

This article presents Gabrielle Roy’s 1945 novel Bonheur d’Occasion as a reading of the female literary body that contributed to nascent changes in feminine literary subjectivity in Quebec’s cultural texts leading up to the Quiet Revolution, and one that provides a critical approach to a matrix of meaning that has been largely overlooked in studies of the novel and of Quebec’s fiction at large: namely, that of love, labor, and the body in the emerging urban setting. Establishing subjectivity as necessarily corporeal, the article demonstrates that by examining the configurations, movements, and ornamentation of the female body-subject in Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’Occasion , a careful reader will note that Roy’s female protagonists, Rose-Anna and Florentine, begin to move away from their position as mere objects of the male gaze and as commodities in “l’ordre de la production” of which male habitants were the proprietors (Boynard-Frot 126). This shift toward literary women’s subjectivity is effected by means of what I define as care, that is, the convergence of love and labor, or affect and duty. Female body-subjects in Roy’s work are portrayed as inter -subjects, finding meaning and authenticity when their labor is marked by affect linking them to a loved one. When their actions and desires are out of alignment, both body and subjectivity deteriorate, signaled by mechanization and disfigurement.