SOURCE: "The Development of a Lesbian Sensibility in the Work of Jovette Marchessault and Nicole Brossard," in Traditionalism, Nationalism, and Feminism: Women Writers of Quebec, edited by Paula Gilbert Lewis, Greenwood Press, 1985, pp. 227-39.

In the following essay, Rosenfeld compares the "great contributions [of Nicole Brossard and Jovette Marchessault to the development of a lesbian sensibility in the literature of Quebec."]

Until the rise of the women's liberation movement, lesbianism as a theme had no real existence in the history of literature. From the age of Sappho in the sixth century B.C. to the beginnings of a lesbian culture in the Paris of the early twentieth century, a silence of two thousand five hundred years bears witness to the long war which the patriarch) waged against lesbianism. In Quebec the literary expression of lesbian love would be censored for an even longer period of time due to...