The Home for Unwanted Girls

Elodie is an orphan, which, Tata has explained, means she does not have a mother or a father. When Elodie once asked her why not, she was told quite plainly, “You live in a home for unwanted girls because you were born in sin and your mother could not keep you.”

There's a really shocking true story at the core of The Home for Unwanted Girls: After having, for years, downloaded the care of orphans and psychiatric patients to the Catholic Church, Quebec's provincial government began, in the 1950s, to merge the two types of institutions; declaring orphan children to be mentally ill or delayed in order to claim a Federal subsidy that was three times higher for asylums than for orphanages (this apparently saved the province millions, was hugely profitable for the Church, with both now denying responsibility for these “Duplessis Orphans” ). But this story isn't really what this book is about (even the title refers to an orphanage that is soon repurposed as an asylum on “Change of Vocation Day” in the narrative): What author Joanna Goodman mainly focuses on is a melodramatic love story and a fraught quest for a young mother to learn the fate of the infant daughter she had been forced to give up as a teenager. With low-level prose and extraneous plotlines that add nothing to the main narrative (rape! infidelity! divorce!), I was definitely more impatient than delighted with this book.

Feelings come in waves. Grief, relief, shame, guilt. She could have kept the baby. She's not blameless. Instead, her infant daughter is about to be hurled into the world all alone. She will grow up untethered, incomplete. They both will.

Maggie begins to drift off, lulled by the rain battering the windows. In that place between sleep and alertness, the name comes back to her. She whispers it into the night. Elodie.

I will find you, she thinks, slowly succumbing to sleep. It's a promise as much to herself as to her newborn daughter. I will get you back and make it right.

In the acknowledgments at the end of the book, Goodman thanks her mother and the long talks they had about her Montreal childhood for the inspiration she provided for the book's main character, Maggie. I don't know if that means that Goodman's mother had been forced to give up an infant born out of wedlock, or if she simply had the pure laineFrench mother and Anglo father that provides so much of the background tension in Maggie's story, but either way, the details of this character's life just feel so extraneous to the narrative (ie. Maggie gets a job translating a French author's work into English, which has nothing to do with the story, and which doesn't even become the main focus of her working life, so that's either pointless or something that Goodman's mother did and the author decided to leave in for “authenticity”.) For the most part, this book is Maggie's story, interspersed with chapters from the forsaken child, Elodie's, point-of-view, but I would have found the whole thing more interesting (and definitely more informative) if the book had, instead, concentrated on Elodie's journey:

“Stop barking or I'll get Sister Louiselle,” Elodie threatens. Sister Louiselle is the meanest nun at Saint-Sulpice. She arrived with the crazies two years ago to manage the mental patients and teach the nuns – who previously had only ever cared for orphans – how to run the place like a hospital. Big Abéline growls. She weighs about 250 pounds and could crush seven-year-old Elodie like an ant. Still, it's Elodie's job to wash Abéline before bed, which means scrubbing her back and under her armpits and even her private parts, which Elodie always skips.

Elodie's story takes large jumps in time: she's four years old, living a relatively happy life in a home for unwanted girls (it's never explained why this orphanage is just for girls, but it makes for a good title); she's seven years old and forced to help care for the mental patients who are transferred into their institution; she's ten years old and declared mentally unwell, along with many others, and sent to a children's psychiatric institute in Montreal; she's fourteen and working like a slave in the asylum's sewing shop, trying to avoid being assaulted by male caretakers and mistreated by evil nuns; she's seventeen and just waiting to age out. There are hints of torture, forged paperwork, and unnecessary lobotomies, but these institution-based chapters are never the focus of the story. Even when Elodie is released when she's old enough, we're told that she has trouble trusting people and learning to navigate the world on the outside, but nothing about her character seems authentic as a survivor of life-long abuse and neglect. 

There's really a perfect symmetry to it all, Maggie thinks, a sweet, symbiotic full circle that's led them to this moment.

And if an author feels the need to have a character acknowledge that her story arc ends with “perfect symmetry”, then that author is admitting to Hollywood-ending-style narrative laziness; this does not feel like a real life. I think that this material deserves to have been better treated – apparently Goodman's source material on the conversion of orphanages into asylums, Pauline Gill's Les Enfants de Duplessis, doesn't have an English translation – and what has resulted is an opportunity lost. C'est dommage.