Abstract
This chapter examines Ben Farmer’s Evangeline: A Novel (2010), which rewrites Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847). Written a decade after 9/11—which put considerable strain on Canada-US relations—Farmer reimagines the famous story of Evangeline and her betrothed husband Gabriel to explore dominant versions of national exceptionality and the ways in which each country strategically includes and excludes specific populations to shore up that country’s identity. Farmer’s novel can be read as raising fundamental questions about the US desire to consign Acadians as a distinctive people to the distant past before they were Americans, and the Canadian desire to overlook the brutality of the 1776 Deportation and its aftermath as an event that occurred prior to the creation of the nation-state, and for which blame is placed squarely on English and/or American colonial forces. By modeling potential versions of what Lee calls “ingenious citizenship” through his novel [Ingenious Citizenship: Recrafting Democracy for Social Change. Durham: Duke University Press (2016), 27], Farmer’s Evangeline provides a provisional example of what social change might look like in the post-9/11 era for racialized women who refuse to remain beholden to entrenched nation-state mythologies that have confined them to a falsified past.
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Notes
- 1.
See Moss for a detailed survey of historic and recent rewritings of Evangeline’s narrative, including a 2011 book by Canadian-born American writer, Richard F. Mullins, titled Evangeline: The Novel. Mullins’ story also “suggests a parallel between the dispossession of Native Americans and that of the Acadians” (Moss 2017, 99). Moss does not mention Farmer’s novel in her chapter.
- 2.
See Authers (2021, 52–66) for another thoughtful discussion of the culture of redress in Canada.
- 3.
See the Canada Post Corporation’s post on its “Latest Stamps” from August 15, 2005, for more details about both the original stamp, released in 1930 on the 175th anniversary of the Acadian Deportation which “portrays the famous statue of Evangeline and the Acadian chapel at Grand-Pré National Historic Site.” The 2005 stamp, designed by “graphic artist Pierre-Yves Pelletier,” juxtaposes the original image with an “illustrated … Acadian flag in motion” with a “backdrop of waves, in a five per cent screen” representing “the sea voyage.” As the blog’s unnamed author argues, the inclusion of the Acadian flag with its gold star on the top left is critical because “[t]he star, Stella Maris, is the star of the sea and symbolizes the wanderings of the Acadians through the storms and dangers of life” (“Acadian Deportation 1755–2005” 2005).
- 4.
- 5.
For further critical work on North American borders and how they were used to frame identities, see Hoy (2021).
- 6.
See Deveau and Ross (1995, 63).
- 7.
See Matthews and Basque for recent perspectives on the use of the term “genocide” to describe the systematic and violent targeting of racialized populations to consolidate a “hegemonic Western and white-coded Canadian national identity” (Matthews 2019, 2). Matthews contends that the “genocide finding” in the case of Indigenous peoples puts “truth to the lie of the picture of Canadian liberal tolerance” (4). In the case of the Acadian Deportation, Basque is one of many scholars who contends, for a variety of reasons, that “genocide” should not be used to describe “the Grand Dérangement. Acadie was not Armenia, and to compare Grand-Pré with Auschwitz and the killing fields of Cambodia is a complete and utter trivialization of the many genocidal horrors of contemporary history” (2011, 66). Nonetheless, the Société de l’Acadie de Nouveau-Brunswick formed a new committee in 2019 to look at “whether the expulsion of Acadians should be considered a genocide” (Bird 2019).
- 8.
See also Moss (2017, 101).
- 9.
See Mercer for recent coverage of the significance of Grand-Pré for Acadians, which describes the ways in which Acadians have continued to fight for recognition of their identity despite their decreasing numbers and systematic marginalization; Mercer argues that “their story is one of defiance and perseverance” (Mercer 2022).
- 10.
- 11.
See Griffiths (2005, 35) for the significant role intermarriage played in the development of French and Mi’kmaq families in Acadia.
- 12.
See Paul (2022, 86, 175) for descriptions of the close relationships between the Mi’kmaq and the Acadians from the arrival of the Acadians to after the Deportation.
- 13.
See, for example, Laxer who claims that “[i]n Acadian communities, there were many families whose children were the product of unions between French and Mi’kmaq partners” (2007, 33). Likewise, Griffiths notes that “in terms of the genetic heritage of the Acadians, there is the question of marriage, according to Catholic rite, with the Mi’kmaq. As was mentioned in chapter 2, there is evidence that, during the 1730s and 1740s, members of the Lejeune, Thibodeau, and Martin families had Mi’kmaq spouses,” and usually Mi’kmaq wives (2005, 172). In the case of Farmer, the invocation of this mixed-blood heritage, I am arguing, is gestured toward as part of his larger fictional revisioning of Longfellow’s Evangeline, rather than grounded in irrefutable fact.
- 14.
See Clark (2007, 75).
- 15.
See Clark (2007, 40).
- 16.
See Farmer (2010, 273).
- 17.
See Faragher (2005, Chapters 14, 15, and 16 (392–498)), for detailed accounts of the dispersal of the Acadian population internationally from 1756 to 1785.
- 18.
See Griffiths (2005, 440, 458, and 463).
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Andrews, J. (2023). Evangeline’s Revisioning: Reading Ben Farmer’s Post-9/11 Evangeline: A Novel. In: Canada Through American Eyes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22120-0_3
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