She and Damienne defended themselves against the ravening, mad beasts forever attacking them, steadfast with their guns and the dead man’s sword, and with the arquebus, which by then she could so skillfully wield that she once shot three bears in a day. And the last bear — this, she told (Thevet) — was “as white as an egg”.
The publisher’s blurb calls The Bear Woman a blending of “autofiction and essay”, so while it would be tempting to think of this as a straight-up historical investigation into a remarkable woman who has been mostly lost to memory, I think it’s important to underline the fiction in “autofiction” and recognise that author Karolina Ramqvist isn’t merely writing about that investigation here. Like Rachel Cusk or Karl Ove Knausgård, Ramqvist gives the details of a work of nonfiction while subtly crafting something larger and deeper, and I was intrigued and moved by the whole thing. This is art, and I loved it. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
From that day on I couldn’t stop thinking about her. This period now seems almost like a delimited space in time, those first years with a husband and three children — and her entry into my life right then. It wasn’t so much the thoughts in my head — they weren’t particularly developed as far as I recall — but more how I pictured her. She seemed so close, as though she and I were in the same room, or as if the distant place where she was were materializing here: her body clad in bearskin and a tattered, high-necked dress; or naked, her skin’s every extravasation exposed, beaten, dirty and blushing, pale against the darkness, the ground, the mountain and earth.
On the surface, this is the story of young noblewoman Marguerite de La Rocque de Roberval (that might be her name; all we can say for sure is that her first name was Marguerite), who, in 1541, was taken on a voyage from her native France to the New World, where she was eventually marooned with her maidservant on a deserted island in the St. Lawrence River. Ramqvist responds to Marguerite’s story as a feminist and as a writer and we follow along as she (or, at any rate, the book’s narrator) reads primary sources and travels and consults maps and museums and experts to fill in the gaps in Marguerite’s story. This is also the story of a writer (and wife and mother) and how unravelling Marguerite’s history challenges and changes her personally. In an afterword, Ramqvist creates distance from the narrative by stating, “Like the narrator of this book, I too was captivated by the story of the bear woman without really knowing anything about her.” And in the body of the work, while contemplating the three contemporaneous sources for Marguerite’s story, Ramqvist writes:
For the most part, I resist critical interpretations of a text based on the author’s biography — possibly too much. It’s probably because I have a persisting suspicion that this type of interpretation affects women who write differently than it does men, because what men write about is considered universal, whereas women ostensibly only write about themselves.
All of that to say: I will also resist assuming that everything that happened to this narrator happened in exactly this way to the author. The Bear Woman definitely does have a feminist slant: this is the story of a female writer rediscovering an historical female figure (who was mistreated in her time because of her sex) and insisting that her story be told and remembered alongside the men commemorated in history books. Of the three writers who memorialised Marguerite in the sixteenth century, the most interesting to me (probably because she got the most space from Ramqvist) was Marguerite de Navarre: an author, queen, and powerful figure in her day, she was inspired by Boccaccio’s The Decameron to assemble her own collection of stories (eventually writing seventy-two in her posthumously published Heptaméron), and I was as nonplussed as the author to learn that despite Marguerite de Navarre’s power, position, and education, she was portrayed as a mere dalliance for Henry VIII in TV’s The Tudors (despite Marguerite de Navarre actually being busy at that exact time rescuing her brother, the King of France, from false imprisonment. But, alas, so are women’s stories told.)
I never really wanted to commit my research to paper. Instead I imagined immersing myself in the material, becoming one with the facts, then all I’d have to do was write. I wanted her to arise in me. I had no desire to see that we were two separate people, and her continued subjugation was the link that spanned the time between us; here I was, a person in a position to exert power over her. Yet another one.
This could have been interesting bit of historical fiction if it were merely a retelling of Marguerite de La Rocque’s harrowing experience (and it would seem that Elizabeth Boyer did a competent job of telling that tale in the 80s with A Colony of One), but it’s Ramqvist’s response to the material that elevates this to a serious work of art. I loved the story and the writing and the peek inside the author’s mind; rounding up to five stars.
