Marie-Claire Blais

love truly is. In Marie-Claire Blais’ Mad Shadows, Blais clearly illustrates what happens genuine love cannot exist and is replaced by misinterpretations, with the use of well developed character relationships. In many of the relationships (romantic and otherwise) displayed in Mad Shadows, characters face a great deal of pain and suffering at the hands of their deluded notions of love; that fundamentally being that beauty and appearance equate to love. Their

“for better or for worse”. As the quote explicitly states, the condition of one reflects the condition of the other. As Patrice’s condition and life of blissful luxury collapses due to various events such as his starvation at the hands of Isabelle-Marie, and his ostracism at the hands of Lanz. In this context, her mirror is Patrice itself, and her downward spiral parallels Patrice’s. However, the difference between Patrice and Louise resembles the difference between idyllic ignorance and deliberate

Work Cited Blais, Marie-Claire. Mad Shadows. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1959. More Than Skin Deep Mad Shadows is a French Canadian novella written by Marie-Claire Blais and was published in 1959. This novella illustrates a dysfunctional family, where outer beauty reflects status and is deemed more significant than inner beauty. Louise is a mother who loves her son Patrice solely based on his flawless physical beauty, which in essence

French Canadian novel Mad Shadows by Marie-Claire Blais explores the relationships of a dysfunctional family in a “fairy tale” world where beauty and material possessions are valued over internal beauty. The concept of love appears throughout the novel, however with each instance of love is fragile and stemmed from an underlying motive. The love that appears in the novel in most cases is not a shared love between characters but a performative love that is attached to vanity and self pleasure rather

her crave human affection, and she copes with this by trying to escape reality, while at the same time avoiding the memories of the freedom she once had. Religion is an idea that is also significant in A Season in the Life of Emmanuel by Marie-Claire Blais. This theme is accompanied by hypocrisy, abuse and the need for escape from reality. This novel tells the stories of children growing up in a society in which their lives are not valued. The children in this society are expected to repress