Studies on the romance novel have placed great emphasis on the importance of exoticism, whose function is, on the one hand, to “make the readers dream” of distant, carefree worlds in which they can more freely project themselves, and on the other hand, to communicate information that helps to alleviate the sense of guilt associated with reading these delegitimized, “futile” literary products. In Quebec, the most successful sentimental collection of the post-war period, “Roman d’amour,” published by Éditions Police-Journal, is surprisingly devoid of foreign spaces, every story being set in the Canadian province. Looking at a corpus of some 200 novels, this article seeks to understand the causes of this “exoticism without cosmopolitanism,” while examining what types of knowledge these narratives also carry.
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In attempting to understand this spatial closure within Quebec, the present article examines the issue of borders—both geographical and generic. Why is the exoticism of faraway lands banished from the P-J corpus, while the publisher’s other collections, printed at the same time but dedicated to crime, espionage or adventure, do not hesitate to send their heroes on investigative missions to Miami, Morocco or Bali? Our reflection is based on the hypothesis of a horizon of expectations which, in the (French) Quebec romance novel, imposes a form of exoticism based not so much on the discovery of far-off, foreign places as on a rooting in an endogenous and endogamous social milieu. More precisely, the characters’ movement is subject to the obligatory union, at the end of the story, of a French-speaking Canadian woman and a French-speaking Canadian man in their national space, which prevents any form of exile (Luneau and Warren 2024). In the first section of this article, we argue that love is in itself a journey for the heroine and that exoticism is used first and foremost to make her metamorphosis from daughter (of her father) to wife (of her husband) more magical. The prosaism of her (more or less miserable) pre-marital situation and quiet happiness of her post-marital life (once settled in a suburban bungalow) are interrupted only by a brief interlude that grants her a certain freedom from the beaten paths of the feminine mystique (Friedan 1963). In the second section, we show how the strict national endogamy of post-war French-Canadian ideology weighed heavily on matrimonial affairs, shattering any desire to deviate from the French-Canadian milieu by falling in love with foreigners. Finally, in the third section, we address the question of “exoticism from within” to describe how Montreal’s bourgeois leisure spots proved to be, in the eyes of the working-class readership, just as glamorous as the palaces of Venice and the penthouses of New York. For those dreaming of travel, the portrayal of dinners in downtown restaurants and movie nights was glamorous enough to avoid the need for boat or plane trips to far-away destinations. (155-156)
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Romance dime novels eschew exoticism, because travel poses the danger, as defined by a nationalist discourse endorsed by Editions P-J, of heroines denying their homeland. By going into exile, they risk falling in love with a “foreigner.” On the rare occasions when they cross Quebec’s borders, they systematically meet one of their compatriots by happenstance [...]. The only acceptable lovers are white, Catholic, French-speaking and heterosexual, i.e. French-Canadian. Exceptions are either excluded from the circle of eligible marriage candidates, or nationalized in extremis by an accumulation of appropriate signs (Luneau et al. 2023). (159)
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the national prejudices in the corpus primarily concern British, American and English-Canadian characters, as well as South Americans (Brazilians, Mexicans). People of British origin are not suitable suitors due to a supposed lack of feeling: the women are too cold, and the men too calculating and materialistic. South Americans have the opposite problem, being considered too fiery. Women are too “hot” and sensual, and men are often shady or involved in criminal affairs. (159-160)
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