La maison de retraite comme espace hétérotopique dans les romans canadiens : Exit Lines de Joan Barfoot, Et dansent les hirondelles de Marguerite-A. Primeau et Les vieux ne courent pas les rues de Jean-Pierre Boucher

Abstract

Abstract: The retirement home, a heterotopic space removed from the centre of fast-paced twenty-first century urban life, is increasingly becoming a site of revolt and transformation in Canadian fiction. Constructed principally as feminine spaces, these sites nevertheless offer the possibility of featuring a kaleidoscope of ways to age and create a microcosm where small acts of delirious rebellions may occur. These acts become fodder for writers who nevertheless acknowledge the undeniable challenges linked to aging in our era of agism. Three Canadian novelists have set their novels in just such a space: Joan Barfoot in Exit Lines (2008) offers an irreverent portrait of uprooted seniors intent on defining their “last identity,” Marguerite-A. Primeau in her still unpublished Et dansent les hirondelles renders an equally caustic, soberly ironic look at the secret, segregated world of the retirement homes, and Jean-Pierre Boucher in Les vieux ne courent pas les rues (2001) satirizes the “compassionate care” provided in nursing homes where seniors are segregated and managed but seldom loved. In this paper, I consider, through the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of “heterotopic spaces” and empirical research on seniors’ habitats, the magical way novelists are able to transform what is often seen as a desperate situation for seniors into readable, engaging, and sometimes subversive narratives.