In Evangeline’s quest of the Bride for the Bridegroom, of the lover for her true beloved, we are reminded of the soul’s quest for Christ, who is the Bridegroom of all bridegrooms.
The figure of Evangeline Bellefontaine is as elusive as the figure of Gabriel Lajeunesse, the man to whom she was betrothed and whom she spent her life trying to find. There is a statue of her in the courtyard of a reconstructed French church in Grand-Pré in Nova Scotia, which is where she lived until she was forcibly exiled from her home by British soldiers. She is no longer there except in spirit, her ghost haunting her old haunts. There is also a statue of her two thousand miles away in St. Martinville, Louisiana, which is where some say she lived following her expulsion from her homeland. It is even said that she is buried there, even though the name on the gravestone isn’t hers but that of “Emmeline LaBiche” who some say was the real Evangeline. But whether or not the bones of Evangeline are buried in this particular grave, there is no doubt that her ghost haunts the graveyard. And then there is the “Evangeline Oak”, also in St. Martinville, which is said to be the site of Evangeline’s reunion with the man to whom she was betrothed but from whom she had been forcibly separated. But this must be merely wishful thinking because it is not part of the story that is told about her. According to the story, there was no lover’s tryst, no happy union, beneath the boughs of the gnarled oak, even though Evangeline’s shade might still be glimpsed in the shadows that the ancient tree casts. And perhaps her ghost might also be glimpsed gliding through the Louisiana wilderness of the Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site, the state park named in Evangeline’s honour and in honour of the poet who brought her story to life.
And this brings us to Evangeline’s secret. She is not to be found among the dead because she is still alive with the life that the poet breathed into her. She is alive with the prosody that brings the prosaic to life. Perhaps she is so alive that she is more alive than the dead poet who brought her to life. Perhaps the poet is still alive because of the life that she still breathes into him.
But Evangeline’s greatest secret and her greatest strength is that she is not merely a fictional character, a figment of the poet’s fervid and vivid imagination, nor is she merely a character who really existed in history as a real-life victim of real-life viciousness. She is both fact and fiction, truth and myth. She was real as a mere fact and became even more real as a true myth. She is like other larger than life legends who lived once upon a time before becoming timeless. She shares a kindship of spirit with the likes of King Arthur or Robin Hood. She is as real as they are and as elusive.
Although Evangeline haunts the present, she is alive with the living spirit of the past. She incarnates the suffering and the struggle of the Acadians, the French-speaking inhabitants of the North American region historically known as Acadia who were forcibly expelled from their homeland by the British between 1755 and 1764. The historic Acadia, prior to its destruction, encompassed parts of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Maine. Approximately 11,500 were deported, of whom almost half died of disease, starvation or shipwrecks. Their land was given to settlers loyal to Britain, mostly immigrants from New England and Scotland. In modern parlance, the Acadians can be seen as victims of ethnic cleansing, a crime which besmirches the reputation of the British Empire.
Longfellow was first introduced to the true story of the Acadians by his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had been told a story of separated Acadian lovers by Boston minister Rev. Horace Conolly, who had heard it himself from his own parishioners. Inspired by the tale of true love torn asunder by the wickedness of men, Longfellow began months of research on the historical backdrop to the expulsion of the Acadians. Having done so, he was able to take the dead letter of historical data and bring it to poetic life.
As for the poem itself. It’s a masterpiece of epic verse which begins with Evangeline’s haunting of “the forest primeval” which once had been her home:
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
It’s as though the natural world is haunted by the supernatural presence of the woman who had once graced it but had long since departed. The very trees, bearded with moss, are like the druids and bards of yore, playing their harps as they sing their haunting lament for the departed souls of the exiled villagers and for the exiled heart of Evangeline. And the ocean itself, recalling the fishing village which once had nestled along its shore, answers the lament of the forest with its own deep-voiced and disconsolate dirge, the sea joining the land in a threaded threnody for the souls of the faithful departed. As for us, we are meant to hearken to the song being sung:
Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient,
Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman’s devotion,
List to the mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest;
List to a Tale of Love in Acadie, home of the happy.
If the forest primeval is haunted by the ghost of the exiled Evangeline, we sense that Longfellow the poet is himself haunted by the ghost of his poetic mentor, Dante, and by the ghost that had haunted Dante, the pure and paradisal Beatrice. Longfellow had a passionate love of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which he would later translate as a labour of that passionate love. As Dante’s poem begins in the Dark Wood, so does Longfellow’s. As Dante’s epic is in some sense the poet’s quest to be reunited with Beatrice, his true love, Longfellow’s epic can be seen as the quest of Evangeline, the poet’s own Beatrice, to be reunited with the true love from whom she’d been separated on their wedding day.
Following the prologue in the forest primeval, the poem is divided into two parts of almost equal length. Part the First takes place in Acadia, which is depicted as Arcadia, the good place, the eu-topia of pastoral peace and rustic simplicity. In stark contrast, Part the Second doesn’t take place in any one place. It follows the heroine in her restless wanderings on the quest for her beloved. It has no somewhere but only anywhere and everywhere, which is nowhere in particular. The first part of the poem is rooted in the soil, and with the soul’s relationship with the soil. This soil-soul nexus is at the very heart of the theology of place, the desire for immutable permanence which is an inkling of heaven itself. Thus the idyllic depiction of the arcadian Acadia is an evocation of that primal and permanent “Home”, that place of rest, which has what Hilaire Belloc has called “the character of enduring things”:
[I]t has been proved in the life of every man that though his loves are human, and therefore changeable, yet in proportion as he attaches them to things unchangeable, so they mature and broaden.
On this account … does a man love an old house, which was his father’s, and on this account does a man come to love with all his heart, that part of earth which nourished his boyhood. For it does not change, or if it changes, it changes very little, and he finds in it the character of enduring things ….
In contrast, Evangeline’s quest is marked by the absence of rest. It is marked by the restlessness of Penelope awaiting the homecoming of Odysseus, except that this new Penelope, like the old Odysseus, has her own great wanderings searching for the beloved. In this quest of the Bride for the Bridegroom, of the lover for her true beloved, we are reminded of the soul’s quest for Christ, who is the Bridegroom of all bridegrooms. The quest for union with Christ is the soul’s purpose, and the sole purpose of life; it is the primal and primeval quest for Love which is the archetype of all other loves. We are reminded that all great wanderings in this world, in the City of Man, are marked by the absence of rest because, in St. Augustine’s immortal words, our souls are restless until they rest in Love Himself.
Perhaps it is this restlessness and the quest for rest which is Evangeline’s secret. Her quest for rest is the quest for true love, the love which every true heart desires.
This essay first appeared in the ACS Books edition of Longfellow’s Evangeline and is republished with permission. This is its first publication online.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image, uploaded by Jannerb, is “Evangeline and Memorial Church of Grand-Pré.” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license., courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.