EVA TANGUAY: THE QUEEN OF VAUDEVILLE AS FRANCO-AMERICAN

by Rebecca Arnold

 A plane trip from Québec to California lasts only about eight hours, but for Eva Tanguay, it was the journey of a lifetime. Long before powerful airplanes were streaking through the sky and leaving puffy white trails behind them, Eva was starting her lifelong adventure. She was not alone. A wave of French-Canadian immigrants would come with her to the United States. As the twentieth century approached, “thousands of Québécois boarded trains for the United States and settled in the industrial towns of New England.” Eva’s family was no different. While she was still a young child, her family moved to the United States with her in tow. This simple fact about her early life is clear enough, although the details about where exactly her family moved are often disputed in various historical accounts. Regardless of which northeastern mill town Eva’s family settled in, she was pulled from her ancestral homeland into a new world at a very early age. Little did anyone know at the time, nor would anyone have reason to suspect, Eva would make quite the name for herself in America. However, before she stepped foot on the vaudeville stage, she was a little immigrant girl, torn between two worlds. Her path in life would take a revolutionary deviation from the common expectations of Franco-American women, but she was still undeniably one of them. The mysteries of Eva’s life, including her alleged time spent in Cohoes, New York and her struggles as an immigrant, are what make her journey through life fascinating and relevant for contemporary audiences.
To truly understand Eva’s story, one must realize that it actually began five years before she was born. The year was 1873. Two financial crashes, one in Vienna, Austria and the other in New York, led to “a full-blown economic depression that spread through Europe and North America.” This period of history, the Long Depression, was especially tough on Eva’s homeland of Québec. In 1873, at the start of the Long Depression, Québec was still gripped by change and reform which had begun nearly forty years before. The uprisings of 1837 and 1838 had given way to the reform of “legal, social, educational and religious institutions.” While Québec was still coming to terms with these various reforms and big changes in Canada, the Long Depression hit. Things were looking bleak. On August 1, 1878, Eva Tanguay was born into this dark time. She was born in the Eastern Townships of Québec, where her father worked as a doctor from a long line of farmers. Eva’s very early years were spent in a location ruled by tradition and agriculture, yet her family basically rejected both. As a young child, while most of the people in her life would have been French-Canadian, it is possible she ran into some British immigrants. During this time, a significant number of British immigrants were coming to Québec and buying property in the Eastern Townships. However, most British immigrants who came to Québec did not stay; they either moved on to other provinces or the United States. Even if Eva did know some British immigrants, it is unlikely that her family associated with them very much. Long before Eva was born, there had been conflict between the English and French in Canada. Between armed conflict and French-Canadian boycotts of English goods, there was a culture of xenophobia in Canadian communities. However, it was not only British immigrants who sought better than what agrarian Québec could offer. A wave of French-Canadians crossed the border into the United States during this period of economic hardship. This rural area was good enough for Eva’s ancestors, but when the Long Depression rolled around and booming cities beckoned from just across the border, the Tanguay clan made the move to the northeastern United States. In fact, Eva’s mother’s family were Francophones who had already moved to the American town of Keeseville.

After immigrating to the United States, the lives of French-Canadian women would often change drastically. Eva Tanguay’s life was no exception. She may have been only four or five when her family immigrated to America in 1883, but young Eva must have noticed the dramatic change in culture. There is no way of knowing the exact details of Eva’s childhood and the profound experiences she went through. However, the experiences of other French-Canadian women who moved to the United States can help to fill in some of the blanks. To understand Eva’s youth, it might help to look at the life of Camille Lessard-Bissonnette. Camille was a woman who was born in rural Québec, just like Eva. Her family immigrated to Lewiston, Maine in 1904. In Québec, she had worked for three years as a schoolteacher. When her family moved to Maine, she worked for four years in the textile mills. With one simple border crossing, Camille was performing a radically different job in a different culture. She was not alone. French-Canadian women were a common presence in the mills of New England. The New England city of Holyoke, Massachusetts, where Eva’s family finally settled, was “the undisputed paper-milling capital of North America.” It is likely that young Eva was surrounded by women very much like Camille, rural French-Canadian women who quickly became workers in a New England factory. She had women like these as neighbours and family friends, who she would have known closely due to the “homosocial” nature of relationships in the Victorian era.

Camille Lessard-Bissonnette’s life and her relevance to Eva’s story do not end with her work in the textile mills. Eventually, Camille became a journalist and a novelist. In her novel Canuck, she tells the story of a fictional girl whose experiences reflect her own. The main character in Canuck is a young woman named Vic Labranche who moves with her family from their farm in Canada to an apartment in Lowell, Massachusetts. Vic’s story helps to paint a picture of what life would have been like for the average female French-Canadian immigrant. In other words, the writings of Camille Lessard-Bissonnette can help to understand the experiences of Eva and the women Eva grew up around. Lessard-Bissonnette reveals in Canuck that there were both benefits and drawbacks to being a French-Canadian woman in the United States. Benefits included a new sense of freedom which had not been afforded to them in Québec. The fictional Vic, upon looking around her family’s new apartment for the first time, experiences a glimmer of rebellion. Vic’s independence is a major theme in the story, and America is where she gets her first big tastes of it. Franco-American women had only ever known “a rigidly conservative, reactionary, and patriarchal society” in Canada; the United States were different. Of course, there were plenty of drawbacks to a new life in America. Life could be miserable. In the 19th century, girls would work “a seventy-three hour week, a total of thirteen or more hours a day, Monday through Friday, with a short eight-hour shift on Saturday” in the Lowell mills. Working conditions were as unfortunate as the work hours. To add insult to injury, it was not unheard of that the derogatory term ‘canuck’ was used against Canadian women. The financial independence of earning a wage came at the price of terrible work and discrimination. Such were the lives of the women Eva grew up around. Even if no one in Eva’s family ever worked in the mills, she was surrounded by women who did. Holyoke, Massachusetts “had one of the largest populations of French-Canadian émigrés in the United States”, and also had the mills with which to employ that population. In America, the women in young Eva’s life were just like Camille Lessard-Bissonnette and her heroine, Vic.

While it is not clear whether Eva herself ever worked in the mills, her new surroundings must have had an effect on her young mind. Up until her family’s big move, the only home Eva had ever known was rural Québec. Steady, traditional, and populated by her fellow French-Canadians, the land of Eva’s first few years could not have been more different than the land in which she found herself as a young child. Holyoke was “a hectic, diverse city on the rise, percolating and shuddering with industrial growth.” Gone were the days when women were not members of the wage-earning workforce, here was the land of opportunity for all. Eva’s young mind might have experienced culture shock. Writings about culture shock “suggest that all people will suffer culture shock to some extent” and that culture shock is an unpleasant experience, although this is not sufficiently supported by research. However, Eva’s girlhood might have made her more susceptible to culture shock. There is a “tendency for women socialized in traditional cultures to be dependent, passive and family oriented”, which may contribute to their culture shock or related experiences such as homesickness. While Eva’s personality was far from dependent or passive, she was socialized in a traditional culture. In other words, she and the women around her were socialized to be dependent, passive and family oriented. Upon coming to the United States, where the traditions of her homeland were twisted and often rendered obsolete, it is likely that Eva experienced culture shock or a related condition.
If Eva did experience culture shock or another sort of identity crisis related to her status as an immigrant, it is not too difficult to figure out what that might have been like for her. As with many other prominent Franco-Americans, she was likely torn between her homeland and the new home she would grow to love. One example of this internal conflict was language. Like Franco-American novelist Jack Kerouac, Eva grew up “in a French-speaking family environment.” In rural Québec, her family and almost everyone she knew communicated in French. In bustling Holyoke, her family and a few thousand other Canadians spoke French, but thousands of non-Canadians probably did not. In 1880, “there were 4,902 Canadians in a city of 21,915 people.” Eva and her countrymen were outnumbered; their French enclave was tiny compared to the surrounding population. Her people had been the majority at home, but in the United States, they were a minority. She had traveled from a homogeneous society to a heterogeneous one. At this point, little Eva had a few options. She could retreat into her native culture and shut herself off from anything new and American. This would involve rarely leaving the perceived safety of Holyoke’s French neighborhood and putting off her studies of the English language. Jack Kerouac, who was born to French-Canadian immigrants in Lowell, Massachusetts, spoke only French until he began school. Even after he started school, he still spoke mainly French because of the language’s “dominance in his Franco neighborhoods, national parishes, and parochial schools.” Eva could have done the same thing. Not only did the non-Canadians of Holyoke speak other languages, many of them practiced other religions. Eva’s countrymen were Catholics. The women of Québec were especially faithful to the Church. Their lack of philosophical education and political knowledge caused them to be “less motivated to question the control exercised by the Church.” Despite Holyoke’s significant Catholic population, the city was run by “a strong, individualistic Protestant work ethic.” Eva could have easily embraced her French Catholic heritage and rejected everything about her new American Protestant home. After all, the nature of Franco-American enclaves in New England, otherwise known as ‘Little Canadas’, were such that “it was possible to live and die in one of these communities without ever having to speak English.” Eva could have also tried to get the best of both worlds, employing a healthy mix of curiosity and caution. This would have been similar to how Jack Kerouac experienced his teenage years, when he “attended public junior high and high schools, acquired a wider range of contacts in Lowell outside ‘Little Canada,’ and began to question his religious upbringing.” Finally, there was a third option. Eva could reject her native culture and embrace the new American one. At age seventeen, Jack Kerouac left Lowell to live a “liberated lifestyle” nothing like “traditional Franco culture.” Eva left Holyoke only five years after moving there. She was ten years old, and she made the decision to leave her countrymen behind and travel around her home - the United States. She chose her identity - or did she?

Eva, along with other prominent Franco-Americans who seemingly rejected their heritage, likely never forgot her culture. A person’s heritage is impossible for them to escape. It is out of the question to run away from one’s blood. Jack Kerouac certainly could not. In fact, his “ethnic identity crisis haunted him throughout his life and may have been responsible in part for his early death.” His lingering connections to his French-Canadian youth are apparent in his writings. In his 1963 novel Visions of Gerard, Kerouac returns to his hometown of Lowell and his childhood in Little Canada. The book was published when Kerouac was a grown man, in his early forties. Yet he has not completely rejected his identity as a Franco-American, as he describes the scenes of his childhood, which are inescapable memories and essential parts of his identity. He remembers the “quite substantial redbrick smokestacks of the Lowell Mills along the river” and the “Canucks of Lowell.” These are things which he experienced, a community in which he lived and was a part of, no matter how much he grew to despise it. Despite the distaste he shows for certain French-Canadian men, describing them as “bleak gray jowled pale eyed sneaky fearful French Canadian” and expressing that he would rather be buried in India or Tahiti than a French-Canadian cemetery, his heritage is a fact. It was an essential part of his identity and life experience which he could not ignore. The same was true for Camille Lessard-Bissonette and another Franco-American novelist, Grace Metalious. Camille’s Canuck and Grace’s No Adam in Eden are semi-autobiographical, focusing on Franco-American women. If these novelists could not escape their Franco-American identity, no matter how hard some of them tried, it is unlikely that Eva managed to escape it either.

Eva was a troubled spirit. Anyone who is even remotely familiar with paranormal investigation can tell you that restless spirits are typically the ones who stay behind. These troubled souls had some sort of unfinished business here in the world of the living, and can not move on until the business is resolved. Peaceful, confident souls who set their affairs in order before they pass on are not the ones who would likely stay behind. Regardless of whether or not ghosts actually exist, Eva Tanguay would meet the qualifications of ghostdom. In fact, many people already believe that she is a ghost. It is rumored that “Eva Tanguay’s ghost haunts the recesses of the Cohoes Musical Hall, not far north of Albany, in upstate New York.” It is clear why Eva could not move on, if that is truly the situation her spirit finds itself in. Like some of her fellow Franco-Americans who attempted to run from their heritage, Eva’s Franco-American identity likely followed her throughout life. For example, during Eva’s young years in Holyoke, she was exposed to alcoholism, a problem which was “especially grave among Holyoke’s French Canadians.” Her father might have succumbed to the disease. Later in life, while Eva never fell into the dark pit of alcoholism herself, she ended up with “romantic partners who drank, used drugs, and abused her.” Alcohol was not the only common thread connecting the rest of her life to Holyoke’s French-Canadian population. As an adult, Eva Tanguay maintained a homosocial lifestyle reminiscent of traditional Victorian values. She kept “a women-only circle of close friends and relatives.” This lifestyle mirrored established Franco-American customs. Her memories of Holyoke’s Franco-American population must have haunted her, even while she lived in Manhattan or while she was on the road. She may have chosen to identify herself as an American, but her French-Canadian roots were inescapable. It is possible that this identity crisis plagued her until death. The Franco-American status of Jack Kerouac and Grace Metalious certainly contributed to their identity crises; these crises were likely haunting their minds until death. Grace’s novel No Adam in Eden was published “only a few months before her death” and was her only novel which “brought her French Canadian heritage onto center stage.” Jack Kerouac “lived in Lowell just before his death.” Both Grace Metalious and Jack Kerouac experienced early deaths which were “hastened by chronic alcoholism.” While Eva’s troubles in death were not all related to her identity as an immigrant, she would still have unresolved issues connected to her heritage. After all, there is no indication that she ever recognized or embraced any part of her heritage after leaving Holyoke when she was just a child; she abandoned it, left it behind her. However, it is unlikely that the memory of her heritage ever left her. Despite deciding that her place in the living world would not be among her countrymen, she would eventually return to Holyoke as a young woman. Even if Eva’s struggles with her heritage were subconscious, and she never realized that she was running away from her heritage, the haunting memory of it would still have been damaging. It is widely recognized that not acknowledging a part of one’s identity can eat away at that person. Whether it be ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, or gender, staying ‘in the closet’ about one’s identity can be dangerous. It is doubtful that Eva’s suppressions of her own heritage were subconscious, though. She once claimed that her father was a doctor from Paris. For whatever reason, there were periods of Eva’s life when she would hide from her Québecoise background.

The question of why Eva would haunt Cohoes Music Hall is an intriguing one. There is no concrete evidence that the Cohoes Music Hall was ever important to Eva or that she ever lived in Cohoes. However, she did perform there. In 1894, when Eva was a teenager, the New York Dramatic Mirror reported that her traveling dramatic company would be in Cohoes from December 3 to December 8. The next year, the Clinton Courier reported that Eva had recently performed in Cohoes. The Courier reproduced a report from the Cohoes Dispatch which said that Eva’s company resulted in “one of the largest audiences that has ever been present in the City Theatre,” to the point where people had to be turned away after a certain time. Apparently, the people of Cohoes were quite taken with Eva. Whether Eva was quite so taken with them is another matter entirely; Eva traveled all over the country, for thousands of adoring fans over the course of her career as a performer. There is no record which suggests that she loved the people of Cohoes more than the people of any other city in which she performed. If the people of Cohoes made an impression on Eva, she kept it to herself. What is clear beyond a doubt is that the people of Cohoes had a unique love for Eva, and love her still to this day. Once Eva’s career began to take off, it was not only Holyoke which claimed her as one of their own. Beginning in the late 1800s, local newspapers such as the Troy Daily Times began to refer to Eva as a “Cohoes girl.” It might even be believable that Eva was from Cohoes if there weren’t earlier records of her beginning her career as a little girl in Holyoke. Even into the late 20th century, long after Eva’s death, the memory of a connection between Eva and Cohoes is so strong that people can recall an exact address where she might have lived. It is possible that Eva maintained friendships in the Cohoes area, but there is no solid record that she ever maintained a long-term permanent residence there. All of this talk about Eva and Cohoes begs the question: Why does Cohoes claim her as their own when she might not have ever lived there? The answer lies with Eva’s French-Canadian heritage. Not only did Eva have a vibrant and unique stage personality which would have made her a beloved treasure in any city, she shared so much with many of the residents of Cohoes. Like her childhood home base of Holyoke, Cohoes was a center of industry in the northeastern United States. The mills of Cohoes also relied on the labor of French-Canadian immigrants. It is understandable why many of the people in late 19th century Cohoes would have been able to see themselves in Eva. She shared their culture, their homeland, and their history. Undoubtedly, she spoke their language. It would have been so easy for them to begin thinking of Eva as one of them. In many respects, they were not wrong. She was a Franco-American from a northeastern mill town, just like them. In this context, it makes sense why Eva’s presence is still felt so strongly in the Cohoes Music Hall. To this day, about one third of the Cohoes population is of French-Canadian descent. Eva’s energy can still be felt throughout Cohoes, attracted by the love and devotion of her fans in the city. Even if she was never particularly attached to Cohoes in life, it can not be denied that Cohoes continues to remember Eva in a world which has mostly forgotten her. If Eva’s spirit is floating around somewhere, it would be difficult to name a place she would rather be.

Eva Tanguay, who had once been a little immigrant girl torn between two worlds, made quite the name for herself on the vaudeville stage. Her life took a drastic departure from the typical Franco-American experience. Whereas the women in her community would usually take jobs in New England factories, there is no concrete evidence that Eva ever did. While many of her countrymen were content to stay in the homogeneous safety of Little Canada, Eva left and became an American icon. Her story, especially her identity as an immigrant and her persistent connection to Cohoes, is incredibly relevant to contemporary audiences. As a Franco-American girl, she would have seen the older female role models around her experience great changes in their lives and expectations. The changes Eva observed can be exemplified by looking at the lives and writings of other prominent Franco-American women, such as Camille Lessard-Bissonnette. As an immigrant, Eva would have experienced identity issues, culture shock, and homesickness. With immigration as one of the central topics in our modern political discourse, it is important that immigrant case studies from the past, such as Eva Tanguay’s life, are analyzed. After all, the internal struggles faced by immigrants are often overlooked in contemporary discourse; looking to the past allows immigrant problems to be examined without the cloud of toxic politics hanging over discussions. Eva Tanguay’s status as a Franco-American immigrant is also the foundation of her deep and continuing connection to Cohoes. Eva Tanguay’s accomplishments on the vaudeville stage are remembered by so few people compared to the number of fans she had at the height of her career, and her Franco-American heritage is remembered by even less people. Keeping the memory of her journey through life alive and well is an important task.


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Rebecca Arnold is a student in the Class of 2020 at Siena College. Her major is American Studies, with a Pre-Law certificate. Rebecca would like to acknowledge Dr. Janet Shideler of Siena College for being a guide and mentor on this project. She would also like to recognize Siena's Center for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity for allowing her to give this project life. Rebecca can be reached via e-mail at arnoldr898@gmail.com.