Biological letters

Description

With this volume, Éditions du Boréal makes a set of unpublished texts by Brother Marie-Victorin accessible to the general public. These texts, which the scientist himself called his “biological letters”, are taken from a correspondence that he maintained for more than ten years, from 1933 to 1944, with the woman who was his assistant at the Institute and at the Montreal Botanical Garden, Marcelle Gauvreau. Forming a coherent whole, they contain his reflections and investigations on sexuality. We see Marie-Victorin tackling a new field of study at a time when dominant morality made any public discussion on the subject unthinkable.

The publication of these letters was necessary, because they represent an important contribution to the history of sexuality in Quebec and that of religious life. Indeed, sources on the intimate lives of religious people are rare, and everything relating to sexuality remained taboo until the 1960s, in Quebec as elsewhere in the West. If these letters still risk shocking today, it is because they present a vision of sexual life and celibacy very far from that of today. They remind us of the “great darkness” which then surrounded sexual questions and allow us to measure the progress made since then.

These letters will interest the historian as much as the psychologist or the psychoanalyst, because they make us discover a deep and spiritual friendship between a man and a woman, based on a relationship with God which blocks the path to a physical relationship which both know is impossible. . They will also be of interest to a wider audience, in that they allow us to lay essential milestones in the trajectory of an intellectual who profoundly influenced Quebec society through his freedom of mind and speech as well as his desire to shake up conventions. .

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Author: Yves Gingras
Edition: Éditions du Boréal
Publication: February 6, 2018
Pages: 280
ISBN: 9782764625194
Language: French

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