Abstract
In an early moment from Anne Hébert’s The Savage Season, matriarch Agnès Joncas declares, “My home is not a public place” (23). Having received news that the new priest in the village closest to her rural home is making his way over to her residence, Agnès draws a thick line between what she perceives to be the perimeters of private life (one’s home, one’s children and the relationships engendered by their enclosure) and the public domains of action (the parish, its authorities and the codes of conduct that bind them). Against Agnès’s will, however, the doors of her home are opened, the larger world floods in, and the remote, rural life to which she wishes she could bind her children, slowly begins to break apart.
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