From Vilified to Victorious: Reconceiving La Corriveau in Anne Hébert’s La Cage

Abstract

The eighteenth-century murder case of Marie-Josephte Corriveau inspired a significant body of nineteenth-century fictional adaptations, notable among them Philippe Aubert de Gaspé’s Les Anciens Canadiens, James Macpherson Le Moine’s “Marie-Josephte Corriveau, A Canadian Lafarge,” Louis Fréchette’s “Une Rélique,” and William Kirby’s The Golden Dog. Although based on a scarcity of reliable archival information, these works transformed a rather banal incident of domestic violence into a cultural myth of great proportions. In her 1989 play La Cage, Anne Hébert denounces and dispels resilient Québécois conceptions of La Corriveau as a murderer, a witch, or a ghost and instead casts the storied figure as a new mythical Quebec mother. Hébert relies on a combination of history, myth, and fiction to subvert basic tenets of the nineteenth-century legend, such as the fundamental symbol of La Corriveau’s iron cage; in doing so, she is able to rewrite and right some of history’s wrongs.