« Don't I long for Montreal »: L'identité hybride d'une jeune migrante franco-américaine pendant la Première Guerre mondiale

Abstract

Between July 1917 and October 1918, Alma Drouin, a young Franco-American woman from Laconia, New Hampshire, sojourned in Montreal. She had been drawn to Canada's metropolis by the opportunities that it offered for professional mobility, as well as by its big-city attractions. Through an analysis of Alma's correspondence and her diaries, we have attempted to understand the ways in which she represented her daily life in Montreal, along with the place of this big city in her broader mental geography. Alma Drouin possessed a hybrid identity and a transnational consciousness, the latter evident in her participation in a cross-border network of correspondents. Both this network and Alma's use of geographical mobility to achieve social mobility were part of a long migratory tradition in the western world and in French Canada. While Alma constructed herself in her correspondence and her diaries as an independent "working girl", she was nonetheless dependent upon a significant cross-border network of relatives, friends, and acquaintances.

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