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...indicates that Roy favors highlighting the variety of people included in the "Canadian Mosaic" in works such as Ces enfants de ma vie. (1) This tendency to view cultural differences as a beneficial and enriching component of a given society is evidenced in Roy's attention to the interactions among ethnicities in Ces enfants de ma vie. Likewise, the same can be said of Rue Deschambault, among other works. Through the variety of her literary representations of interpersonal connections that defy deeply engrained cultural divides, Roy fruitfully complicates an issue that may appear simplistic but is quite complex in her literary Manitoban reality.
In Rue Deschambault and Ces enfants de ma vie, Gabrielle Roy lyrically recounts several attempts at cultural border crossings in her series of short stories that are written in an autobiographical vein. (2) By the end of Rue Deschambault, we learn of the narrator's plans to become an elementary school teacher, plans that parallel the author's own in 1920s Manitoba. The narrator of Ces enfants de ma vie chronicles the life of a Francophone school teacher who serves as cultural initiator to children of many different lands and languages. This older narrator's seemingly limitless energetic attention to the process of making cultural connections and of surmounting cultural and linguistic differences reveals a leitmotiv that is clearly distinguishable in Rue Deschambault as well.
Through Roy's narrators' encounters with characters from culturally, linguistically, and sometimes geographically different backgrounds, the author effectively complicates the delicate and rather daunting task of crossing cultural borders. The narrators of the two works confront characters distinctly "other" to themselves in a variety of situations. Likewise, the narrators' methods of cultural bridge-building are varied. Furthermore, the results of their attempts to make cross-cultural connections, although generally successful, are not always effective in the long run. In "Vincento," the narrator facilitates her student's transition to school through the use of nonverbal communication. In "L'Italienne," the narrator's family facilitates their neighbors' transition to life in the Canadian prairies through the use of food. The school-teacher narrator of "Demetrioff" not only helps her student adjust to life in her classroom by enlisting the help of the skill of handwriting, but also paves the way for the student to connect with his equally frustrated and frustrating father for the first time. The cultural divides in "L'Alouette" and "Les Deux Negres" are almost eliminated by the narrators' enlisting the help of music. Finally, the narrator's father's benevolent attempts to ease an entire village into life on the plains in "Le puits de Dunrea" have catastrophic results.
In Rue Deschambault and Ces enfants de ma vie, Gabrielle Roy's narrators employ various methods in order to overcome the obstacles they face. Roy's real life position as Francophone in an Anglophone environment served, perhaps, as the impetus to her use of music and of nonverbal communication in her everyday world. In her autobiographical La Detresse et l'enchantement, Roy describes several meaningful encounters with music and the theater.
To begin, Roy tells of her reaction to a production of the Merchant of Venice at the Walker Theatre in Winnipeg. She likens the communication that took place in the theater to the language of music:
Il ne s'agissait plus enfin de francais, d'anglais, de langue proscrite, de langue imposee. Il s'agissait d'une langue au-dela des langues, comme celle de la musique, par exemple. (Detresse, 72) (3)
Like music, the language of the stage, both physical and verbal, surpassed all linguistic boundaries for its audience.
Gabrielle Roy's other memories of the power of music center around her uncle's home and family. While Roy was teaching in Cardinal, she frequented her uncle's home where music played...
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