EVANGELINE: AN INQUIRY INTO CULTURAL CONCIOUSNESS AND STORYTELLING

This project seeks to illuminate the importance of storytelling to a culture's collective memory and consciousness through an inquiry of the Evangeline Myth. The story of Evangeline has shaped much of Acadian and Cajun identity. However, this story was written by a non-Acadian, and therefore is born of an outside-looking-in perspective. This project illustrates why this outsider perspective may have negative consequences on a culture using specific examples from the Acadian diaspora to prove that the Evangeline Myth is not an accurate portrayal of Acadian-ness and, in fact, dilutes and whitewashes both the Deportation of 1755 and the Acadian identity in the minds of outsiders and insiders alike. A discussion of writing as resistance occurs, introducing the concept of erasure poetry, a type of poetry in which former works are erased to create a new narrative. This erasure is done on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline itself, thus creating a new narrative out of the old. It is acknowledged that the author is, like Longfellow, a white Anglophone who does not belong to the Acadian community. It is further acknowledged that Acadie is not a monolith, so this analysis of the Evangeline Myth may not resonate in every corner of the diaspora.