When 'Wolves Become Lambs': Hybridity and the 'Savage' in the Letters of Marie De l'Incarnation

Writing to her son Claude from Quebec in 1644, Marie de l'Incarnation described the Canadian mission at Tadoussac, attesting to the 'very exemplary life (vie tres exemplaire)'and 'great fervour (grande ferveur)' of Christian converts who 'had been nourished in brutality (avoient este nourris dans la brutalite)'. The French, she went on, 'cried with joy to see wolves become lambs and beasts children of God (pleuroient de joye de voir des loups devenus agneaux et des bestes enfans de Dieu)'.1 Renderings of the indigenous Americans of New France as alternately and simultaneously 'wolves (loups)' - perfidious, insolent, barbarous - and 'lambs (agneaux)' - noble, submissive, docile - mark Marie de l'Incarnation's transatlantic correspondence as a rather conventional and hardly surprising instance of early modern colonial discourse.2 Dramatized in the Valladolid debate of 1550, articulated in the Jesuit Relations, typical to the rhetoric of American Puritans, this bifurcated image of the American sauvage proves a conspicuous - and well-studied - feature of early modern colonial texts.3There is, therefore, little to be gained at this stage in the postcolonial game from looking, again, at what Marie de l'Incarnation writes about the savage Other of seventeenth-century New France. If, however, we reorient the frame of analysis to consider not the content but the consequence of Marie's representations of the Amerindian, the work performed by such familiar tropes in the articulation of a distinctive brand of colonial identity comes into focus. In what follows, I argue that Homi Bhabha's model of ambivalent colonial discourse illuminates the ways in which Marie de l'Incarnation's epistolary corpus discursively produces a colonial identity that escapes the neat binaries of self and other. Taking as my body of evidence the extant letters sent by Marie from Quebec to her son Claude in France, I argue in particular that Bhabha's notions of stereotype, mimicry, and hybridity draw attention to the articulation of a colonial identity that takes shape not just in the interstices between colonizer and colonized but through the dynamic interplay of a range of colonial interests, as 'neither the one thing nor the other', 'split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference'.4Born in Tours in 1599 (just one year after the resolution of the French wars of religion and not quite thirty years after the conclusion of the Council of Trent), Marie de l'Incarnation (nee Guyart) migrated to the nascent colony of New France in 1639 to found the first Ursuline convent in the New World.5 There she would establish a school for the purpose of educating Native American girls, translate catechisms into indigenous languages, and serve some eighteen years as superior, negotiating with bishops, contracting with businessmen, and managing the affairs of her community of women. From New France, Marie would also carry on an extensive correspondence with her son, Claude, whom she had abandoned at the tender age of eleven to enter religious life. The letters exchanged between mother and son over the course of some thirty years (1640 to 1671) reveal much about the early history of New France, the spiritual itinerary of one of the most celebrated mystics of the seventeenth century, and - not least of all - an early modern anthropology of the savage Other.Like other early modern Europeans, Marie de l'Incarnation struggled to fit the native populations within a biblical worldview imported from France in which the place of the indigenous American was subject to debate. For Europeans both at home and abroad, the existence of New World natives gave rise to a series of questions: Were these curious people irrational beasts or human beings included within the sphere of biblical revelation? Did they represent an earlier stage in human development? A degenerate race? Were they, like the Europeans themselves, sons of Noah? …