Louis Hémon's Intertextual Use of Pêcheur d'Islande in Maria Chapdela

This book demonstrates that, in developing the plot outline and male protagonist of his last novel, Maria Chapdelaine (1914), Louis Hémon repeatedly evoked Pierre Loti¿s then popular narrative about Breton fishermen and their community, Pêcheur d¿Islande (1886). A Breton himself, Hémon seems to have evoked Loti¿s male protagonist, Yann Gaos, repeatedly in presenting his own, François Paradis, because such intertextualization allowed him to deal in a new way with the question of a perceived decline of masculinity, an issue that he had treated in several of his previous narratives and that was occupying Western European thought at the time. Such intertextualization also allowed him to deal with an issue that had been of personal significance to him since his adolescence: the importance of finding a way to be free of constraints that he perceived modern society as trying to impose on men.