Enchantment And Sorrow Analysis

Roy’s divided nature creates wearisome and challenging “bonds between identity and home” (Boyd), story and situation. Even when Roy was a pupil at the English run school in Manitoba, she found that there was no opportunity for Francophone students to experience “blossoming of the self” (Roy 63). “[She’s] been brought up to be French, but what would [she] find here to nourish and sustain [her]?” (Roy 109). Roy was dissatisfied, thus she decided to set out on a quest for cultural and intellectual stimulation. At this point in the autobiography, Roy admits to feeling trapped in a “walled enclosure” (Roy 109). Nevertheless, her travels in pursuit of her roots did not bring her that personal satisfaction that she had hoped for. On the contrary,

Roy felt lost. She hoped to be welcomed as “the lost daughter [that has] come home”, but was received as “the little cousin” (Roy 110) who was not really lost. Boyd in her “Domestic Gardening” summarized and reflects Roy’s journey of self-discovery, by stating that “moving from the abandoned childhood garden of Manitoba, to the idyllic bower of Century Cottage, to the war-altered reality of Hyde Park, […] with Francophone surroundings of the city, Roy's final descriptions of her early writing in Montreal form a significant conclusion to the entire trajectory” (Boyd). By the end of her autobiography, when Roy moves to Montreal she was finally able to admit that she has found “the feeling of having come home” (Roy 410).
Enchantment and Sorrow consists of two parts.

As one begins to read Roy’s autobiography it becomes evident that the first part is mostly set in the town of Manitoba, where Roy discusses her family, education, her teaching career and her love for the dramatic theater. Once the reader moves further into the book, one will find himself situated in a different country. The second half of Roy’s autobiography reflects her travels to Europe, specifically France and England, where she faces the realization that her future lies not in theater, but in writing. There are couple of instances in the text that signal to the reader the prevailing concern with linguistic identity. This concern with linguistic identity becomes evident in the first lines of Enchantment and Sorrow, where Roy asked “when did it first dawn on [her] that [she] was one of those people destined to be treated as inferiors in their own country?” (Roy 3). After this introduction, Roy goes on to retell one of her shopping expeditions with her

mother.
Crossing the Franco-Manitoban border to the Anglophone centre of Winnipeg created a sense of amazement for young Roy. At this point, early on in her autobiography, Roy clearly portrays to the reader view and relationship between language and identity in Winnipeg. “The humiliation of having someone turn around to stare when [one] was speaking French in a Winnipeg street” (Roy 4) became a sort of norm for Roy and her mother. The feeling of displacement and oppression that seemed to haunt Roy’s text in the beginning of its pages, was dispersed when the idea that “everyone was a foreigner” (Roy 5) was introduced.
“Anxiety about language is typical of the colonial subject” states Rosemary Chapman in her “French and English in Gabrielle Roy’s Autobiographical Work”. Foreigners, as Roy calls them, tend to have a natural desire for correctness in their second language, which is English in this case. Constantly measuring everyone, and being measured, by their fluency and accent creates a sort of phenomenon where one is always in the process of learning English. This process at some point becomes a life style, until one realizes that Canada is the land of foreigners, where everyone is in the same situation, living a life of constant linguistic learning. In Gabrielle Roy’s case, this anxiety over linguistic belonging has stimulated her desire to study drama in Europe. However, by the end of the autobiography the reader comes to a realisation that despite all of the stereotypical linguistic belongings, Roy has always been feeling as a “wanderer in this life” (Roy 408) even though her home was closer than she thought.
To conclude this essay, Gabrielle Roy’s Enchantment and Sorrow exposes linguistic oppression which was the result of colonialism.

Nevertheless, Roy’s autobiography, as well as other writings, gives the reader an inside to both languages. Her autobiography gives examples of linguistic relations and situations where English language, in unification with embarrassment and rejection, brought joy. Roy’s depiction of the variety of linguistic differences sets off a chain reaction which aims to untangle the sense of solid pecking order of languages. Most of all, Enchantment and Sorrow come off as a text about bilinguals, in which Roy presents the reader with many different relationships one can have with language. Hence, the reader can freely move between the realms of victimization and colonization of diglossia to dynamic and original contributor of dialectal relations. Gabrielle Roy’s ‘story’ in Enchantment and Sorrow is shaped by her ‘situation’ as a Franco-Manitoban created a strong voice that encourages all of Canadian minorities to become active, culturally encompassed individuals in our great multicultural country. Gabrielle Roy died of heart failure on July 13th, 1983 (Kalman Naves). Possibly, her flamboyant voice spoke through the racial gloom of everyday life, piercing the hearts of people just to reassure them that they are not

alone.