Dressing Up the Past: Creating and Re-Creating Acadian Identity

Abstract

During the early twentieth century, Acadian women dressed up in a costume based on the main character from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1847 epic poem Evangeline at nation-building events to symbolize the Acadian people and its past. Acadians came to consider the Evangeline costume to be the national and historic dress of their people. Yet their ancestors never wore this outfit. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Acadian settlers to what is today Canada’s Maritime region instead developed a distinct style of dress based on a mix of local and external influences, which differentiated them from their French origins and from the colonists in other North American settlements by the time most of the population was deported from the region during the Seven Years’ War. In the period following the Expulsion, Acadians continued to wear unique styles of dress which contributed to the sense of a distinct identity. Longfellow’s Evangeline drew on the Romantic Movement, however, and its tendency to view rural dwellers as simple and picturesque peasants wearing exotic costumes. Evangeline led to a reimagining of the Acadians as they became widely associated with their description in the poem, in part due to the popularity with Norman peasant costumes evoked in the poem. This is the version of their past that Acadians chose to emphasize during the twentieth century.

This thesis traces the process of reimagining the Acadians’ past that occurred during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century through a study of representations of Acadian dress in popular culture by both outsiders and members of the community. This thesis intends to shed light on why the Evangeline costume has come to symbolize the Acadian people and their past. During the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, Acadians used Evangeline as a tool for nation building to bring together disparate communities to create a unified nation based on the values described in the poem. By wearing the costume and including it in nation-building events, Acadians portrayed the version of their history described in the poem. Additionally, it will be shown that even though the Evangeline costume does not reflect the historical record, Acadians preferred it because the costume represents what the community came to believe was a more suitable version of the past.