ABSTRACT
In order to understand Quebec's pervasive sense of being a colonized culture, one needs to know something of the province's history. It colonized in the eighteenth century as part of New France and so was French-speaking from the beginning. Though neither Anne Hé Marie-Claire Blais is overtly concerned with the language question in the novels author shall discuss, like the writers of nouvelle écriture, concerned with marginality as an ideological issue. This brings us to the point of remarking on importance of women in Quebec's history. With Hé Bert and Blais question of displacement into fictions of the underground life of self-enclosure and fantasy, as Nights in the Underground and Hé loï seboth show. As one might expect, both have strongly gothic elements, figuratively in Blais's novel while Hé Bert's Hé loï se is gothic fantasy. The author suggests that answer to this question of the appeal of Blais and Hé Bert lies in their use of the gothic mode.
