"Pour instruire leurs filles": from displacement to renewal in the writings of Marie de l’Incarnation

Abstract

This article focuses on the works of Marie Guyart, better known as Marie de l’Incarnation, the founder of the Ursulines in Quebec, who arrived in New France in 1639 and is a key figure in French North America.  Guided by a pedagogical and apostolic counter-reformation vocation, her writings bear witness to a difficult (re)conciliation: between a desire (duty) to Christianise, understood as the need to ‘instruct’, that is to say, educate, to change the other, and the encounter with those whose difference (spiritually, morally, socially) makes them no less worthy of (God’s) love.   By focusing on the Relation de 1654 and Marie de l’Incarnation’s correspondence, I will analyse the way in which her writing names and formulates this difficulty, but also the manner in which this difficulty concerns as much as it informs the challenge of this discourse.  Such a reading, which gives place to both the imaginaries and stories from which Marie de l’Incarnation draws her representation of the “Sauvage,” will allow us to reflect on the manner in which we can approach these, in may ways, upsetting works without overlooking the unease evoked by the description of these “poor people” whose girls demand instruction.