The Role Of Massicotte As A False Father

The priest Massicotte in Robert Lepage’s Le Confessional on the hand presents the expression of an unfaithful clergy and a “False Father” character as oppose to the ideal priest of Father Logan. The term false father imposes two folds of meanings towards the Massicotte character. Firstly, Massicotte does not have his biological offspring, so that he is not qualified with his patriarchal identity with a family as he has never been a father. Secondly, the false Father refers to both his disloyalty to the Catholic religion when he was still a priest, and his ultimate leaving of no longer being a clergy. All of the implication that Massicotte being the False Father character are in some way related to the castration anxiety about both his own patriarchal identity and the decline of the religion during the 20 years after Duplessis Era. In order to better understanding the change through the ideal Father to the False Father as well as the changing of the status of Roman Catholic Church, we need to have a fundamental knowledge of what have happened socially and politically between the 1950s to the 1980s. As Le Confessional sets itself at the beginning, the films lend two time periods in its plot line: 1950s known as the Hitchcock’s Era, and 1980/90 which is the “presence” of the old Massicotte character. The author of the article, Le …show more content…
The Duplessis reign[1936-1939 and 1944-1959], which is sometimes referred to as La grande noirceur (The Great Darkness) was built on strong Church patronage, which led to policy of anti-Communism, anti-unionism, and conservative social policies”