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Antonine Maillet was born in 1929 in the Acadian community of Bouctouche, New Brunswick. In 1950, she received a B.A. from the Université de Moncton and, nine years later, completed an M.A. at the same institution, writing a thesis on Gabrielle Roy. She continued her studies at the Université Laval, earning a PhD in literature in 1970. Between 1971 and 1976, Antonine Maillet taught literature and folklore first at Laval and then at Montreal. Later, she worked for Radio-Canada in Moncton as a script writer and host. She is currently the chancellor of the Université de Moncton.
Antonine Maillet's academic and professional career was always accompanied by a fierce commitment to writing and storytelling. 1958, for instance, saw her play "Poire-acre" win a theatre festival award for the best Canadian play. That same year saw the publication of her first novel, Pointe-aux-Coques, which later won the Prix Champlain (1960). In 1960, she also won an award from the Canada Council for her play "Les jeux d'enfants sont faits." These works were followed in 1962 by the novel On a mangé la dune and the play "Les Crasseux" in 1968. Receiving Canada Council grants from 1962 to 1964 and 1969 to 1970, Maillet spent those years in Paris working on her writing and, later, her PhD dissertation which she completed in 1970. The dissertation, Rabelais et les traditions populaires en Acadie, was published in 1971 and catalogued over 500 archaic phrases and figures of speech from sixteenth century French that are still used in the Acadian communities of Canada's Eastern provinces.
Despite spending five years of the 1970s teaching university courses in literature and folklore, this period was the most prolific and successful of Antonine Maillet's career thus far. The first of her works published during this period was "La Sagouine" (1971). A series of dramatic monologues by an old Acadian washerwoman, "La Sagouine" earned rave reviews and was performed in both French and English throughout North America and Europe by Viola Leger. The written text also achieved tremendous success, selling over 100 000 copies. Most importantly though, "La Sagouine" broke new ground in Acadian writing in theatre; Maillet gave voice to the common person in her culture and brought to the foreground the unique dialect of her people which, as she revealed in her thesis, contains in a striking way the sixteenth century roots of her people but which over time has also been "distorted by the climate and sharpened by the sea; by the salty air in the larynx and the obsessive beating of the waves in the ears." Her following work, the fantastic tale of Don L'Orignal (1972) also met with great success, winning the 1972 Governor General's Award for Fiction (French). That was followed in the same year by the story collection Par derrière chez mon père and in 1973 a personal and anecdotal travel guide entitled L'Acadie pour quasiment rien and the play "Gapi et Sullivan."
Also published in 1973 was Mariaagélas, a novel which tells the Prohibition-era story of a young woman who, ostracized by her community, turns to bootlegging to escape the misery of her supposed lot in life. Mariaagélas' rebellious refusal to be drawn into what society expects of her is echoed in the 1975 play "Évangéline Deusse" in which the protagonist asserts her independence through being a prostitute. While Évangéline may sell her body, she does so, ultimately, without ever selling herself. By not bowing to the morays of her society, she remains true to what she believes, despite the obvious contradictions of how she makes a living. 1975 also saw the publication of another novel, Emmanuel à Joseph à Davit. Her next major novel, though, was 1977's Les Cordes-De-Bois, which came close to winning that year's Prix Goncourt. Maillet did not have to wait long until her next chance at France's most prestigious prize, however, as it was awarded to her two years later for Pélagie-la Charette. This 1979 novel tells the story of the ten year voyage of a group of Acadians returning to their homeland fifteen years after the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia in 1755. A moving and epic novel, Pélagie-la-Charrette has sold over one million copies and has been translated into a number of languages including English, Slovak, and Bulgarian. A sequel to Pélagie, entitled Cent ans dans les bois, was published in 1981.
During this period in which her fiction met with such great success, Antonine Maillet did not lessen her commitment to writing for the stage. In fact between 1977 and 1981 she published three new plays: "La Veuve enragée" (1977), "Le Bourgeois gentleman" (1978), "Le Contrebandière" (1981), which was essentially Mariaagélas rewritten as a play. In 1981, Maillet also wrote her first book especially for children, Christophe Cartier de la Noisette dit Nounours. Her next play, like "Le Bourgeois gentleman," was a inspired by a classic of French literature. Entitled "Les Drolatiques, Horrifiques et Épouvantables Aventures de Panurge, ami de Pantagruel" (1983), this play allowed Maillet to indulge her fascination with the work of Rabelais and its relevance to Acadian culture. While writing several more completely original plays during the 1980s and 1990s, including "Garrochés en paradis" (1986) and "Margot la folle" (1987), Maillet also produced more adaptations and translations of other literary works such as "William S." (1991), "La Fontaine ou la Comédie des animaux" (1995), Shakespeare's "Richard III" (1989) and "La Nuit des rois" (1993), and Ben Jonson's "La Foire de Saint-Barthélemy" (1994).
Over the last fifteen years, Maillet has remained a prolific writer of fiction, publishing five novels since 1984, among which are Crache à Pic (1984), which revisits the history of Acadian bootlegging and smuggling operations, and Le Huitième Jour (1986). L'Oursiade (1990) marked somewhat of a departure for Maillet with its anthropomorphizing focus on a community of black bears and their encounters with the people of the region. Nevertheless, L'Oursiade is a moving tale that offers a unique look at the theme of the Acadians' relation to their physical environment. Maillet followed this novel with Les Confessions de Jeanne de Valois (1992), a tour de force that consists entirely of the first-person narrative of a woman born in 1899 who, after having lived through nearly the entire twentieth-century, aspires to witness the dawn of the new millenium. As Jeanne de Valois recounts her life story and shares her thoughts on everything from religion to the role of women in Acadian culture, it becomes clear to the reader that the voice of the author freely mingles with that of the character, continually blurring the line between biography and autobiography. Her two most recent works of fiction bring back some of most popular characters in Maillet's fictional universe. Le Chemin Saint-Jacques (1996) marks the return of Radi, a character introduced in the 1962 novel On a mangé la dune, while L'Ile-aux-Puces (1996) is a collection of commérages or gossips in monologue and dialogue form from characters such as Mariaagélas and Gapi.
Aside from the Prix Goncourt (1979) and the Governor General's Award (1972), Antonine Maillet has received many honours, including the Grand Prix littéraire de la ville de Montréal (1973), Le Prix Québec-Paris (1975), and over twenty honourary doctorates. She has been named a Companion of the Order of Canada (1976), an Officier des Arts et des Lettres de France (1985), an Officer of the Ordre National du Québec (1990), and is a member of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada. She currently serves as the chancellor of the Université de Moncton.
Over the years, many of Antonine Maillet's works have appeared in English translation. These include The Tale of Don l'Orignal (1978), La Sagouine (1979), Pélagie (1982), The Devil is Loose! (1986), all three of which are available from Northwest Passages.
Paul Martin
September 1998
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