Images of Gé Rouge in ÉTienne's la Femme Muette and in Desquiron's Les Chemins De Loco-Miroir

The Goddess as Destroyer, also known as the Crone, was not only one of the most powerful and fearsome of the ancient tribal matriarchs, but also one of the most paradoxical. Traditionally appearing as an old woman, a female corpse, or a mummy, was both the incarnation of life-affirming wisdom as well as death and destruction (Walker 1985, 33).1 Her dual nature combined many contrasting and, to all appearances, contradictory qualities. As the goddess Kali Ma in India, for example, was the greatest of all the deities and assumed all forms.. .both ugly and beautiful, Virgin and Crone, darkness and light, winter and summer, birth giver and death bringer (Walker 1985, 72).2 As the font of life and the conveyor of death, Vodou's Erzulie Ge Rouge is closely associated with the Crone. Although this most powerful manifestation of the complex Haitian goddess has much in common with the loups-garous [werewolves who] are women whose real nature is revealed by their red eyes, Ge Rouge is by no means considered completely evil (Herskovits 1964, 238). The redness of her eye color itself suggests a link with the Crone in its combination of both life and death. For, as Estes (1992, 99) has noted, Red is the color of sacrifice, of rage, of murder, of being tormented and killed. Yet red is also the color of vibrant life, dynamic emotion, arousal, eros, and desire. In the literature of Haiti, the red-eyed goddess of Vodou is at times associated with the folklore of the zombie, linking the myth explicitly with death.3 In this article I will examine manifestations of Ge Rouge as the zombified characters of Marie-Anne Lafleur in Gerard Etienne's (1983) La Femme muette (FM) and Violaine Delavigne in Lilas Desquiron's (1970) Les Chemins de Loco-Miroir (LM).4 Not simply spiritual zombies, these female protagonists physically join the ranks of the living dead, and as such, depict many of the contrasting characteristics of the Crone. They are associated with the ugly and the beautiful, darkness and light, death and rebirth. Both women become zombified, but, as their last names Lafleur and Delavigne suggest, they are tied to the natural world and have a powerful capacity for regeneration in times of near-total devastation. Although the two novels are set thousands of miles apart, in Montreal and in the south Haitian city of Jeremie, their respective story lines describe similar attitudes with regard to social conformity. The government's campaign to regulate and repress its members has produced parallel repercussions in the two families. Neither female character has been fully accepted into society or family life. In the model of the chthonic heroines of old, each is seen as an aberrational figure among her own (Powers 1991, 188) and will be enslaved as a zombie for refusing to fit into the mold society has laid out for her. Both Marie-Anne and Violaine were born strong and vigorous individuals, but because of the stifling atmosphere of their social setting, they become outcasts for most of their young lives. Even though the growing void in this enormous field of memory5 obscures much of the zombified Marie-Anne's past life, remembers that as a girl in Haiti was encouraged to become less independent (FM 93). In order to find a man, people assured her, needed to abandon her natural ways and assume the identity of a more proper young lady: she had to stop her old habit of running barefoot through the plains, of walking straight into the brambles as if were uncivilized [...]. So gradually began to lose her natural expression (FM 53). As the only child of the upper class Delavigne family in Jeremie, Violaine too felt hemmed in from her first days of life. The very house was bom in with its stench of being closed up seemed to be intended to confine and subdue her (LM 78). Although her bedroom served as her sanctuary, at the same time it enveloped her as if herself were in a cage (LM 40). …

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