When They were Young: Adolescent Representations in Les Fous de Bassan‪.‬

Les Fous de Bassan was published in 1982 and won Anne Hebert the Prix Femina, previously awarded to Gabrielle Roy for her novel Bonheur d'occasion. Hebert's novel is about the lives of five people who recount their version of two murders in their community on the night of August 31, 1936. The two protagonists are adolescent females, Nora and Olivia, whose coming of age in Griffin Creek is the focus of the novel. While Hebert herself contends that this novel is not based on fact, the story portrayed bears resemblance to a similar occurrence involving the murder of two female cousins on August 31, 1933, which was reported on the Gaspe Peninsula where the fictional village of Griffin Creek is located (Boivin 326). The novel is composed of six books and each of the main characters--Nicolas, Perceval, Stevens, Nora, and Olivia--relates a version of the night of the murder. Stevens, who is accused of killing Nora and Olivia, narrates two books and relives the murders in the second one. Much has been written about this remarkable novel and many articles have been devoted to the female figures in this narrative. Roseanna Lewis Dufault's article, "Coming of Age in Griffin Creek: Anne Hebert's Adolescents in Light of Les enfants de Jocaste by Christine Olivier," is a comparison of Hebert's and Olivier's narratives, and specifically of the different ways in which young women come of age. Dufault's study has led me to examine the expressions of adolescence in this novel in more depth to determine the significant role played by the adolescent protagonists' development. I consider how this work fits into the literary genres that apply to development and coming of age. This novel is a novel of adolescence, in which three of the narrators undergo changes that lead them to adulthood. Initiation into adulthood may or may not occur in such novels. In this case, however, not only do the adolescents--Nora, Olivia, and Perceval--undergo a process of initiation, but the village of Griffin Creek also becomes liberated. In novels of adolescence, the author often uses the story to criticize the society in which the young protagonists live. As we shall see, this is the case In this novel as well.