New Horizons in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel - Literature and Painting in Quebec: From Imagery to Identity - page 125

4.3 Laure Conan, Paysage de Neuville , vers 1900. Illustration dans Laure
Conan (édition préparée et présentée par Roger Le Moine), Œuvres roma-
nesques . Tome 1: Un amour vrai / Angéline de Montbrun (Montreal: Éditions
Fides, collection 'du Nénuphar, 48,' 1974). Courtesy of Éditions Fides / Landscape
at Neuville , circa 1900. Illustration in Laure Conan (edition prepared and pre-
sented by Roger Le Moine), Œuvres romanesques , vol. 1.
a nearly inaccessible enclosure. She wanted thus to express, as in her
written work, the impossibility that was hers to reach the loved one.)
Noting that the female figure is not only excluded but also imprisoned
between the towering twin trees in the centre, Patricia Smart sees the
painting less in personal terms than as an emblem of Conan's gender
dilemma: 'Could it be that Laure Conan has depicted her own ambiva-
lence towards her sex and her culture? Looked at from a modern fem-
inist perspective, the painting does in fact evoke the situation of a
woman writer without a “context” for her writing, one who finds her-
self condemned by biology to remaining on the “margin” of culture'
(22-3). Seen from a purely visual perspective, however, may we not ask