A World of Curiosities

The novel depicts women suffering due to misogynistic and ignorant beliefs at a number of different points in time; it also depicts women coming together to form community and work toward a common purpose.

Anne Lamarque and other women accused of witchcraft in 17th-century New France were literally demonized and accused of colluding with supernatural forces; these accusations took place because the men around them did not want to accept that women could be intelligent, resourceful, and self-reliant. The punishment of banishment represented a desire to excise powerful women from a community because they provoked fear in others; however, Anne Lamarque was able to join forces with others and not only survive but thrive. They founded “a community where all were welcome. That was the real magic” (293).

Centuries later, the female engineering students studying at École Polytechnique are akin to modern-day witches because they also challenge assumptions and power dynamics within a historically male-dominated field. The violent attack explicitly targeting women for daring to study and hold professional ambitions represents a male attempt to assert control, but also terrible cowardice. The survivors of the attack, like the survivors of the witch trial, band together and work to create a better world by advocating for human rights and stricter gun control.

Ultimately, the novel implies that women gain strength and purpose by fighting back against a world that is often quick to demonize them; describing the effects of the Polytechnique shootings on the women, Gamache observes, “Now they were warriors” (31).

Well educated, successful in their fields, and often creative, the female characters in the Three Pines community realize that had they lived in an earlier time, “they too would have been targeted. For dancing and reading and having breasts and wombs and minds of their own” (171). Even so, vestiges of the demonization of women persist in the deeply entrenched view that women are prone to mental illness because of the seeming vagaries of their biological nature. “Hysteria” comes from the Greek word for uterus. The events of the novel push against this fatalist and flawed notion, not only because what has been presumed to be a woman’s post-hysterectomy, depression-based suicide is actually a murder, but also because Amelia, Harriet, and Fiona, all three of whom are unlikely heroes, combine their strengths and abilities to contribute to saving Gamache and the others from Fleming, the real demon in the novel.