Evangeline Endures

Deconstructing Louisiana's most beloved literary legend

by

Her dark, mournful eyes seem to follow you, framed on canvas by fair skin and long black hair, her softened face bearing an inquisitive expression. Her stark-white dress sets her aglow against the muted neutrals of the bayou country landscape behind her.

George Rodrigue painted Evangeline more than a hundred times over the course of forty years—in traditional Acadian dress, as a buxom partner to his Blue Dog, and as an ethereal maiden holding clusters of red blooms. In almost every iteration, though, the motifs remain: fair skin, dark hair, a questioning gaze, and a white dress. You recognize her.

Rodrigue is only one of the many artists who have been inspired by the mythic figure since her inception in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie. Over time, Evangeline has taken on a Laura Palmer-esque presence in Louisiana culture; she is larger than life, beloved and controversial, inaccessible, and continues to captivate us, even after all these years.  

[Read more from writer Lauren Heffker, who explores the spiritual role of waterways in Louisiana's culture for our October 2020 issue.]

Longfellow’s epic poem, which catapulted its titular heroine to a household name after it was published in 1847, tells the story of a young couple separated on their wedding day at the onset of Britain’s expulsion of the Acadian people from their home in Nova Scotia. Evangeline spends the rest of her life searching for her lover Gabriel, only narrowly missing him several times and finally reuniting by chance on his deathbed. Earning comparisons to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with its star-crossed lovers struck by tragedy at every turn, Evangeline has evinced a similar staying power, enduring as a classic work of American literature and occupying a permanent place on the mantle of Louisiana lore and culture.

While the poem’s narrative is based on historical events, the characters themselves are fictional—the New England-born Longfellow had been to neither the village of Grand Pré nor the Boot, and even the name “Evangeline” was his own imagination at work; the name is of Greek origin, meaning “good news”. According to most accounts, Longfellow heard the story at a dinner party attended by the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had first heard the tale from fellow acquaintance Rev. Horace Lorenzo Conolly.

Despite its author’s outsider status, the broad strokes of Evangeline’s quest mirrored the realities of Le Grand Dérangement, leading many readers—especially the descendants of the displaced Acadians themselves—to mistake  Longfellow’s word for truth, a phenomenon emphasized as the story became part of the oral tradition. The plausible young protagonist was embraced by a people who saw themselves, also exiled and marginalized, within her verse. She connected the Acadians living in Louisiana to their cultural identity and their ancestral homeland. And she embodied a set of values to aspire to, such as strength, perseverance, steadfast faith, and devotion. 

Prior to the poem’s printing, Le Grand Dérangement—the ethnic cleansing of the Acadian people from the Canadian Maritime provinces by the British—wasn’t yet common knowledge to general populations outside of Louisiana and present-day Nova Scotia, especially considering Longfellow’s work was published nearly a century after the expulsion. As Evangeline gained mass appeal with a mainstream audience, the legend instilled a newfound sense of pride and unity in the Acadian people, heralding an era of Acadian nationalism in the early twentieth century. 

Longfellow’s version also spurred other accounts of the Great Upheaval; in his 1907 novelette, Acadian Reminiscences: The True Story of Evangeline, Judge Felix Voorhies recounts the story of the “real” Evangeline as it was told to him by his grandmother. According to his telling, Emmeline Labiche and Louis Arceneaux attempted to flee from their village of St. Gabriel in old Acadia, only to be caught by the British and kept apart, eventually fated to reunite in St. Martinville under the now-famed oak. 

 “Evangeline, the heroine as Longfellow saw her, had all the makings and potential to become an archetype, a universal representation of goodness and good news. She was a nurse, a caregiver, at the end of the saga, one of the few ways a woman could take some kind of agency in the world. What keeps her from being that kind of universally appealing figure is that her audience co-opts her heroism by turning her into something that the poet did not intend." —Darrel Bourque

In South Louisiana, the name Evangeline gradually became a signifier to denote Acadian-owned businesses even before Cajun was used as a colloquial term; manufacturers such as the Evangeline Maid Bread Co., small businesses like restaurants, banks, markets, and buildings bore her name and likeness, and of course, the eponymous Cajun prairies of Evangeline Parish were so named in 1910 in her honor. Her image quickly became ubiquitous throughout the region, thoroughly commercialized for the purposes of attracting commerce and cultural tourism, which today continues to lure visitors to places like St. Martinville's famed Evangeline Oak on the banks of the Bayou Teche.

Today, creatives across the region continue to find inspiration in Evangeline and her story. Such is the case for lifelong Lafayette resident, poet, and landscape painter Melissa Bonin. For Bonin, who was searching to uncover her own cultural identity as a new mother in 1990, Evangeline was a means to access her Acadian heritage. Two of her paintings are included in the exhibit at the West Baton Rouge Museum—“Self Portrait With Acadian Bonnet” and “Evangeline of the Canefield”. At the time of Longfellow’s breakthrough success, Bonin pointed out, it was groundbreaking for a classically modeled epic to center on a female heroine. “Longfellow’s poem reveals Evangeline as a woman who, despite all that she had endured, managed to acquire an education, become a nurse, and spend her life in service of others,” Bonin said. “I was a young woman in South Louisiana and I needed a heroine.”

For many like Bonin, Evangeline endured as a symbol of hope and resilience; cast out of the only home she had ever known, she exemplified grace and conviction simply by continuing to go on. “I definitely think she’s relevant today, especially with the state of things right now,” Bonin said. “There are so many problems in the state of Louisiana, especially loss and grief with hurricanes and COVID where, you know, we’re all mourning the life we used to have.”

Still, some have critiqued Longfellow’s patriarchal notion of Evangeline’s myopic suffering as a romanticization of the Acadians’ very real struggle for survival. Her life is portrayed as a sort of bucolic fantasy even before the exodus, and she is depicted as a sought-after, demure milkmaid promised to Gabriel. She is characterized by her fidelity and femininity, spending her life in search of true love, when for many Acadian women,  reality demanded a hard-scrabble life spent attending to the demands of a rural homestead, caring for livestock and children.

“You have to throw yourself out into the world today,” said Darrell Bourque, former Louisiana Poet Laureate and professor emeritus of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “And it’s not only about finding your long lost love. I mean, that’s a pretty idea and all, but can it be the way we move through the world?” Bourque has written two poems on Evangeline: “Evangeline Speaks” in  2011 (also published in his seventh poetry collection, Megan’s Guitar and Other Poems From Acadie, in 2013)  and “Evangeline Revisited” in 2021. The second was commissioned by the West Baton Rouge Museum for the 2021 exhibit Evangeline: Evolution of an Icon, and Bourque expands on the idea presented in his first work by once more adopting Evangeline’s perspective, empowering her to take on the role of the poem’s speaker and seeing her story through her own eyes: 

“​​There is a brief expanse of time in which we are

ourselves surely. We feel that in bone and blood

and thigh and heart and back and breast, ineffable

one’s self. That one-self we give to some other self

if luck is on our side. But that’s not the way stars

are made and we are made of stars, not the way

legends are made and some of us are legends

whether we want to be or not. I had no say

in the game.”

—Darrell Bourque, “Evangeline Revisited”

“It is a point that recognizes that she is a figure that is a construct rather than a real person,” Bourque said. “There’s no historical Evangeline, and yet, the idea of Evangeline is something that we can’t dismiss because it is a part of our heritage, both historical and literary.” Viewed through a contemporary lens, her image and identity are not her own to claim. In some ways she adapts, like her image evolving over time, and in others remains static, whether acting as a source of inspiration or exploitation. 

 “Evangeline, the heroine as Longfellow saw her, had all the makings and potential to become an archetype, a universal representation of goodness and good news. She was a nurse, a caregiver, at the end of the saga, one of the few ways a woman could take some kind of agency in the world. What keeps her from being that kind of universally appealing figure is that her audience co-opts her heroism by turning her into something that the poet did not intend. She becomes in popular culture a sort of cardboard thin figure, retiring, demure—a caricature with derailed agency: an oversimplified homemaker, a princess or queen, a figure who can be attached to everything from names of thruways, to banks, to funeral homes, to credit agencies. She can be pasted onto everything and anything, and so she loses her power and agency to be the heroine that she could have been if she had been representative of the strong, resilient, inventive, grounded women who were the real Acadian women who both migrated to other parts of the world from Acadie and the ones who stayed in what was to become the maritime Canadian provinces.”

 It may be true that the more layers of Evangeline you peel back, the more nuanced the task of reconciling all of her iterations becomes. Above all, though, she helps us to remember who we are and where we come from. In “Evangeline Revisited,” Bourque writes, “Lands make us what we are when we are here.” Here, Longfellow tells us, is the Eden of Louisiana, where our divinely flawed Evie still reigns in all her glory.