"If anything is yet to come, it'll come from the sea." The aquatic element in Anne Hébert's novels

Abstract

This article studies the impact of water on the story and topography in the novels of Anne Hebert. Its main purpose is to define two antagonistic trajectories of the natural element: on the one hand, its role as an adjuvant to the characters’ survival; on the other, its impact as a criminal force, a place of entrapment, and a source of tortures. In the first step of my analysis, I look at the author’s propension to reify human characters in order to then submit them to the surrounding nature’s will. As a parallel, I account for the multiple strategies used to anthropomorphize water, in order to finally uncover the articulation of the two aforementioned contradictory faces, representing an active will which pulls the strings in these nine novels.