L.M. Montgomery and Gender 9780228010166

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n

L.M. MONTGOMERY AND GENDER

EDITED BY

E. HOLLY PIKE AND LAURA M. ROBINSON

L.M. MONTGOMERY AND GENDER McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston | London | Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 isbn 978-0-2280-0878-1 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-0879-8 (paper) isbn 978-0-2280-1016-6 (ePDF) isbn 978-0-2280-1017-3 (epub) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This volume has been supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Anne of Green Gables and other indicia of Anne are trademarks and Canadian official marks of the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority Inc. L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon, The Story Girl, and The Blue Castle are trademarks of Heirs of L.M. Montgomery Inc.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: L.M. Montgomery and gender / edited by E. Holly Pike and Laura M. Robinson. Names: Pike, E. Holly (Elizabeth Holly), 1958– editor. | Robinson, Laura M., 1966– editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2021025503x | Canadiana (ebook) 20210255072 | ISBN 9780228008798 (softcover) | ISBN 9780228008781 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780228010166 (ePDF) | ISBN 9780228010173 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Montgomery, L. M. (Lucy Maud), 1874-1942—Criticism and interpretation. | LCSH: Sex role in literature. | LCSH: Femininity in literature. | LCSH: Masculinity in literature. | LCSH: Gender identity in literature. Classification: LCC ps8526.o55 z739 2021 | DDC c813/.52—dc23

CONTENTS Figures ix Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xiii

INTRODUCTION “You Don’t Want Me Because I’m Not a Boy”: L.M. Montgomery and Gender 1 E. Holly Pike and Laura M. Robinson

MASCULINITIES AND FEMININITIES 17 1 The White Feather: Gender and War in L.M. Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside 19 Kazuko Sakuma 2 From “Uncanny Beauty” to “Uncanny Disease”: Destabilizing Gender through the Deaths of Ruby Gillis and Walter Blythe and the Life of Anne Shirley 44 Lesley D. Clement 3 Barney of the Island: Nature and Gender in Montgomery’s The Blue Castle 68 Ashley N. Reese

DOMESTIC SPACE 87 4 The Robinsonade versus the Annescapade: Exploring the “Adventure” in Anne of Green Gables 89 Bonnie J. Tulloch 5 Soliciting Home: The Cultural Function of Orphans in Early Twentieth-Century Canada 119 Mavis Reimer 6 “That House Belongs to Me”: The Appropriation of Patriarchal Space in L.M. Montgomery’s Emily Trilogy 152 Rebecca J. Thompson

CONTENTS

HUMOUR 173 7 Cross-Dressing: Twins, Language, and Gender in L.M. Montgomery’s Short Fiction 175 E. Holly Pike 8 “I’m Noted for That”: Comic Subversion and Gender in L.M. Montgomery’s “The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s” and “Aunt Philippa and the Men” 195 Wanda Campbell 9 “Nora and I Got Through the Evening”: Gender Roles and Romance in the Diary of L.M. Montgomery and Nora Lefurgey 211 Vappu Kannas

INTERTE X TS 229 10 The Blue Castle: Sex and the Revisionist Fairy Tale 233 Catherine Clark 11 L.M. Montgomery, E. Pauline Johnson, and the Figure of the “Half-Breed Girl” 249 Carole Gerson 12 Orgies of Lovemaking: L.M. Montgomery’s Feminine Version of the Augustinian Community 266 Christina Hitchcock and Kiera Ball 13 Feminizing Thomson’s The Seasons: Identity, Gender, and Seasonal Aesthetics in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables 284 Heather Ladd and Erin Spring

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CONTENTS

BEING IN TIME 305 14 Her Reader 309 Jane Urquhart 15 Like a Childless Mother: L.M. Montgomery and the Anguish of Mother’s Loss 316 Tara K. Parmiter 16 Magic for Marigold: Engendering Questions about What Lasts 331 Elizabeth Rollins Epperly Bibliography 351 Contributors 377 Index 383

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FIGURES

5.1 “Homes Wanted for Homeless Children,” broadside, Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E. 126 5.2 “Nice Little Boys,” Toronto Daily Star, Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E. 129 5.3 “Children’s Aid Society – Help Us Do It,” postcard, Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E. 133 5.4 Kelso, J.J., The Children’s Aid Society, pamphlet, Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E. 136 5.5 “Heart – Hunger,” broadside, Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E. 140 5.6 Kelso, J.J., Protection of Children, monograph, Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E. 142 5.7 “Some of Ontario’s Children,” The Globe, Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E. 145

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

n Taking as its origin the 2016 international L.M. Montgomery Confer-

ence, entitled “L.M. Montgomery and Gender,” at the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island, this volume is the culmination of years of work by many people. Andrea McKenzie coorganized the 2016 conference with Laura Robinson, and her direction and experience has proven invaluable. We would like to express our gratitude to the authors collected in this volume for their excellent essays, careful revisions, thoughtful comments on each other’s essays, and their patient commitment to a thorough process of collaboration and review. We are also indebted to the anonymous readers at McGill-Queen’s University Press. Their constructive comments and suggestions made the volume stronger and more coherent. Chelsey Lush, then an undergraduate student at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland, was a skilled and able editorial assistant, always going above and beyond. Chelsey is now a PhD student in English at McMaster University. Our acquisitions editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press, Mark Abley, lent his wisdom, humour, and directness to this project. When he left mqup, he handed this project to Jacqueline Mason, who took it on with grace and competence. We are grateful for the work undertaken by the excellent editors at mqup. We wholeheartedly thank the L.M. Montgomery Institute, particularly Philip Smith, the director, and Elizabeth Epperly, the founder. Both provided strong leadership, ongoing support, and kind mentorship. The L.M. Montgomery Institute and its biennial conferences, along with its other work to promote Montgomery’s writing and life, have created a model of intellectual collaboration and sharing. We are grateful for all the scholars, collectors, and enthusiasts who gather, in person or virtually, to share ideas about and passion for all things Montgomery.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge, with gratitude, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a Connection grant to partially fund the publication of this volume. We also acknowledge Kate Macdonald Butler, the heirs of L.M. Montgomery, and Sally Keefe-Cohen for the support and encouragement they lend to academic explorations of Montgomery’s life and writing. Holly Pike acknowledges the support of Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland and thanks her partner, Marc Thackray. Laura Robinson acknowledges funding from Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland, and the Royal Military College of Canada, which aided in the research for this volume. She extends extra special thanks to David Crabb.

Permissions The illustrations in chapter 5, “Soliciting Home: The Cultural Function of Orphans in Early Twentieth-Century Canada” by Mavis Reimer, are reproduced with the permission of Library and Archives Canada. “Her Reader” is excerpted from Extraordinary Canadians: Lucy Maud Montgomery, by Jane Urquhart. Copyright © 2009 Jane Urquhart. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

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ABBRE VIATIONS

aa afgg

agg ahd ai ain awp bc bq ca cj ec enm eq ggl gr jlh mm Poetry psb ri rv sg sj tw

Anne of Avonlea After Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery’s Letters to Ephraim Weber, 1916–1941, edited by Hildi Froese Tiessen and Paul Gerard Tiessen Anne of Green Gables Anne’s House of Dreams Anne of the Island Anne of Ingleside Anne of Windy Poplars The Blue Castle The Blythes Are Quoted Chronicles of Avonlea Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery Emily Climbs Emily of New Moon Emily’s Quest The Green Gables Letters from L.M. Montgomery to Ephraim Weber, 1905–1909, edited by Wilfrid Eggleston The Golden Road Jane of Lantern Hill Magic for Marigold The Poetry of L.M. Montgomery, edited by John Ferns and Kevin McCabe Pat of Silver Bush Rilla of Ingleside Rainbow Valley The Story Girl Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery A Tangled Web

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INTRODUCTION

“You Don’t Want Me Because I’m Not a Boy”: L.M. Montgomery and Gender E. HOLLY PIKE AND L AUR A M. ROBINSON

n L.M. Montgomery’s first published novel centres on an orphan who is

unwanted because of her gender. “You don’t want me because I’m not a boy,” Anne cries out when she arrives at the Cuthbert house to confront Marilla’s surprise that she’s a girl.1 The remainder of the novel works to show that being a girl might just be preferable to being a boy. The culminating moment occurs when Anne laments that if the Cuthberts had adopted a boy who could work the farm instead of her, life would have been easier for Matthew. He reassures her: “Well now, I’d rather have you than a dozen boys, Anne … Just mind you that – rather than a dozen boys.”2 That he dies in the next chapter also indicates Montgomery’s potential verdict on gender binarism: as tragic as this fate may be, perhaps

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the time is up for traditional domestic roles, as Matthew’s death and that of Thomas Lynde ultimately lead to Marilla and Rachel setting up house together, which, to use Eve Kornfeld and Susan Jackson’s term, allows the culmination of the “matriarchal utopia” of the novel to take place.3 This volume is an exploration of the variety of gender analyses possible in the early twenty-first century. Much Montgomery criticism of the past several decades has regarded her writing from a feminist and gender-studies perspective, an important scholarly endeavour, which ensured inclusion of her work in the canon of serious literature. Given that Canada recently celebrated the centenary of women’s suffrage in the province of Manitoba (1916) and nationally (1918), it is timely for this collection to reconsider the role of gender in Montgomery’s work in a North American society that has now entrenched women’s rights in the law – especially as some of those rights are presently being challenged in the United States.4 These essays emerge from the twelfth biennial conference, “L.M. Montgomery and Gender,” hosted by the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island in 2016, at which the following questions were asked: To what degree do Montgomery’s works, or works inspired by her, challenge or re-entrench normative gender roles? Do her works envision new possibilities for girls and women, boys and men? Or is the contemporary fascination some readers feel for her world, in part, nostalgia for what people imagine to be the more clearly defined gender roles of a bygone era? This volume extends the work of that conference, as the essays were selected with an eye to interconnection, and the collected scholars and writers have read each other’s essays and considered how their analyses inform each other. Our aim is to examine how Montgomery’s constructions of gender reflect her own historical moment, shape later understandings of gender, and potentially transmogrify when examined through new perspectives. A brief examination of some of Montgomery’s attitudes highlights the extent of the ambiguity around gender in her time, when roles seemed clearly demarked. As our opening quotation from Anne of Green Gables demonstrates, Montgomery clearly knew that being female was generally less valued than being male in the strict gender binarism of lateVictorian Canada, and this knowledge affected her writing. Her use of 2

INTRODUCTION

“L.M.” suggests that she understood the potential prejudices she would be up against as a woman writer, and she therefore disguised herself in the manner of the Brontë sisters, who gave themselves the pen names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and of writers George Eliot, George Sand, and others. Notably, in a Boston Journal article published on 21 November 1908, Montgomery rather coyly does not reveal any personal information, so much so that the title of the article is “Author Tells How He Wrote His Story,” which means, as Benjamin Lefebvre points out, “that the newspaper editor evidently could not detect that she was a woman.”5 She is arguably consciously hiding this identity from the public. And no wonder, really, as her own stance on women’s roles appeared ambivalent. While a small coalition of women in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Canada were fighting for the vote in a movement now considered part of what is often called “first wave” feminism, Montgomery was decidedly not one of them, at least not publicly. “I am not a suffragette,” she is reported to have said in an interview with a Boston Post reporter in 1910, continuing, “while I believe a woman, if intelligent, should be allowed to vote, I would have no use for suffrage myself … I believe a woman’s place is in the home.”6 Her private statements in her journals hit a different note: “On Monday, Dec. 17, I polled my first vote!” she notes with apparent excitement in her journal on 19 December 1917.7 She admits that she had not previously had a particular interest in politics or voting, but her tone here evinces some pleasure that she can finally vote. Is that the difference between a private and a public persona, or the difference a few short years can make? Just as her public and private statements create ambivalent messages about gender and gender roles, Montgomery also received mixed responses to her work, many of which are starkly gendered. She categorizes some of these responses in a long journal entry, dated 1 March 1930, many of the contradictory reviews she cites using very loaded words from a gendered perspective. Even when offering praise, these reviews highlight a concern with emotionality that reflects common expectations of a girls’ story: “There is no maudlin sentiment about the book” or “Wholly free from mawkish sentimentality,” critics said about Anne of Green Gables, for instance. Many others pepper their 3

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reviews with words that reveal similar assumptions: “melodramatic,” “sweetish,” “schoolgirl gush,” “tedious,” “slight and artificial,” “a pleasant little sentimental romance,” “light inconsequential reading of the harmless schoolgirl type.” In the positive reviews Montgomery quotes, the word “charming” appears liberally, as if the novels themselves had attended a posh finishing school. Furthermore, in this journal entry she comments on her name as an author troubling her gender identity: “Then my name and initials suffer all kinds of indignities – L.W. Montgomery, L.C. Montgomery, Lionel Montgomery, Louise Montgomery, T.M. Montgomery, S.M. Montgomery, K.D. Montgomery, L.W. Anderson, L.B. Anderson, Laura Montgomery – while quite often I am referred to as ‘he,’ ‘his,’ and ‘him.’”8 While Montgomery conveys no ambivalence about her own gender construction and sexual identity in her writings, this entry records common thinking about gender in her time. It also suggests that she is not only aware of the role gender plays in perceptions of what is appropriate but is also frustrated by it. In her 1928 essay A Room of One’s Own, modernist writer Virginia Woolf, a contemporary of Montgomery from a very different background and perspective, argues that women need a room of their own and £500 a year in order to take writing seriously. In other words, they need the dedicated space and time for serious work that is created by a level of financial security. Woolf encourages women writers to focus on content traditionally relevant to women in that era: daily life, children, food, and relationships. The unfortunate offshoot of writing about women’s lives and concerns is that academic and mainstream patriarchal culture historically has not seen or acknowledged any value in this type of writing. Indeed – and more likely – it may be denigrated. It is no surprise then that despite, or perhaps because of, Montgomery’s overwhelming popularity, the literary men of modernist Canada did not find her writing to be of a high calibre. Their perspective begs to be read through the lens of gender, as Lefebvre points out in Volume Two of The L.M. Montgomery Reader: “Given that the exclusion of female authors from the canon of Canadian literature was fairly systematic, Montgomery’s critical decline had less to do with the quality or content of her books than with the fact that they had been written by a woman.”9 She was pushed out of 4

INTRODUCTION

the Toronto Branch of the Canadian Authors Association, according to Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, unquestionably because of William Arthur Deacon, an influential literary critic. Deacon had been very critical – Rubio and Waterston use the word “contemptuous” – of Montgomery’s writing. Rubio and Waterston suggest that much of the disdain directed toward her arose because her writing was “regional, domestic, and largely located within a single province,” and a tiny one at that.10 Kate Sutherland refers to the Canadian Authors Association at this time as “Canada’s developing literary old boys’ network,” and further points out that they “had openly expressed disdain for Montgomery’s writing.”11 Like Rubio and Waterston, Sutherland isolates Deacon as a key player in this anti-Montgomery discourse. She cites his comment in his collection of essays, Poteen: “Lucy Maud Montgomery of Prince Edward Island shared the quick popularity of [Ralph] Connor in a series of girls’ sugary stories begun with Anne of Green Gables (1908). Canadian fiction was to go no lower; and she is only mentioned to show the dearth of mature novels at the time.”12 Sutherland shows that Deacon was unfortunately not the only critic who promulgated these opinions. In her biography of Montgomery, L.M. Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, Mary Rubio points out that Montgomery’s literary reputation continued to decline for the last several years of her life and beyond. Virginia Woolf had already summed up the type of critical bias women writers faced in general: “Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial.’ And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.”13 However, Rubio points out that a revision of these judgments eventually occurs: “Not until near the end of the twentieth century, long after she was dead, would literary critics dismantle and discredit the norms that the entire generation of academic critics had worked so hard to establish in the 1930s, norms that pushed popular fiction – and almost all women’s writing – completely out of the canon and off the map of literary culture.”14 Of course, some critics still disparage popular texts, particularly those that treat childhood, rural life, 5

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and female-centred existence. But at least we now have other perspectives that do not hesitate to offer scholarly attention and respect to texts previously dismissed as irrelevant. Condescending assumptions about Montgomery’s writing and the scholarship around it were also implied in Cynthia Brouse’s awardwinning article on the biennial L.M. Montgomery conferences,15 “The Maud Squad,”16 published in the Canadian magazine Saturday Night in 2002. With a disdainful tone at the outset that surely emerges from a gender-biased vision of the Montgomery Studies world as a simplistic, feminized one, Brouse rather begrudgingly accepts that the conferences are not as kitschy as she had assumed. She even comes to appreciate the ability of the Montgomery enthusiasts and the scholars to mix without any problems. She writes, “The fuzzy line between fan and scholar also became easier to accommodate because of recent trends in literary criticism. Before the 1970s, when academia barely took CanLit and women writers seriously, let alone children’s books or romance fiction, a graduate student who proposed doing research on Montgomery would have been laughed at. It was only in the 1980s that the rise of reader-response and feminist literary criticism and the serious analysis of both children’s books and popular culture, especially ‘girl culture,’ built up the author’s ‘scholarly capital.’ The ivory tower acknowledged what generations of readers had always known: not only was Anne of Green Gables an elegantly crafted story, but it was also, at some level, radical.” 17 Brouse’s comment that feminist literary criticism was crucial in the reassessment of girls’ stories holds very true for Montgomery. The generation of feminist scholarship generally identified as “second wave”18 and credited with bringing women writers into the literary canon for serious study is represented in Montgomery studies through the pioneering efforts of Elizabeth Waterston, Mary Rubio, and Elizabeth Epperly. In the face of obstacles, such as a male academic telling Waterston not to pursue Montgomery studies because of the damage it would do to her career,19 these scholars forged ahead. Rubio and Waterston began publishing Montgomery’s selected journals in 1985, arguing with the publishers to include what they considered important, and finished the five volumes in 2004.20 In Montgomery scholarship, 1991 and 1992 6

INTRODUCTION

were banner years, with the 1991 publication of Gabriella Åhmansson’s A Life and Its Mirrors: A Feminist Reading of L.M. Montgomery’s Fiction, followed in 1992 by both Mavis Reimer’s collection Such a Simple Little Tale: Critical Responses to L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Epperly’s The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass: L.M. Montgomery’s Heroines and the Pursuit of Romance, the first full-length monograph to treat all of Montgomery’s long works.21 Establishing a clear tradition of scholarship about Montgomery’s most famous novel, Reimer’s book gathers together Anne of Green Gables essays from 1979 to 1988. In Fragrance, Epperly demonstrates how complex Montgomery’s novels are: “Montgomery shows us how respectable but also imaginative and strong girls and women depart from and ultimately conform to cultural expectations.”22 Pioneering work that helped establish Montgomery studies was undertaken by Francis W.P. Bolger, who in 1974 published The Years Before Anne: The Early Career of Lucy Maud Montgomery, as well as working with Elizabeth Epperly to produce My Dear Mr. M: Letters to G.B. Macmillan from L.M. Montgomery (1992). Taken together, and with some others,23 these scholars established Montgomery scholarship as a legitimate field. Mirroring the productive fragmentation of feminism that characterizes the so-called third wave,24 Montgomery scholarship continued to branch out and engage with a multiplicity of theoretical perspectives. The biennial international L.M. Montgomery conferences beginning in 1994, and the collections which emerged from them, explored new topics in Montgomery scholarship in increasingly multidisciplinary ways, such as conflict, nature, life-writing, cultural memory, and war.25 As well, scholars began to explore the construction of identities that intersect with gender in Montgomery’s writing. Marah Gubar interrogated not-so-compulsory heterosexuality in her 2001 article “‘Where Is the Boy?’: The Pleasures of Postponement in the Anne of Green Gables Series,” in which she argues that the postponement of heterosexuality in the Anne books enables powerful and deep female-female relationships. Helen Hoy engaged the public’s imagination when she reassessed the character Anne through the lens of ability, specifically fetal alcohol syndrome, in 201026; Jane Ledwell and Jean Mitchell’s 2013 collection, Anne 7

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Around the World, interrogates other identity categories, from Caroline E. Jones’s article on class to Brooke Collins-Gearing’s incisive article on Anne as imperial child erasing the presence of the Indigenous. Struggle, conflict, and strife often percolate under the surface of Montgomery’s texts – both her fiction and her journals – and the culture that emerges from them, as Jean Mitchell’s collection of essays, Storm and Dissonance: L.M Montgomery and Conflict (2008), made clear. Not only does Montgomery embed the conflict, but she produces it. Such conflict and debate might be productive, just as they have been for feminism, in that they are the evidence of intra-active entanglements, to use Karen Barad’s language.27 For example, when Laura Robinson argued at an academic conference that Montgomery represented lesbian desire in the Anne books, there was outcry and concern, both nationally and internationally; certainly, the greater community wanted to shut down the possibility of these ideas, as Robinson has discussed in her article “‘Outrageously Sexual’ Anne: The Media and Montgomery.”28 However, the circulation of these ideas may have led to other ideas and creative works, such as Anne Made Me Gay, an all-woman musical.29 Kat Callahan’s online article “Your Childhood Pal, Anne of Green Gables, Was Probably Queer,” expresses dismay at the negative response to Robinson’s queering of Anne: “There’s got to be something which speaks to the rebel spirit. The marginalised. The subaltern. However, Anne’s icon status, rather than allow for literary criticism exploring Anne Shirley as ‘other,’ has been the determining factor in denying it. Indeed, she is considered the perfect Canadian female archetype, and as such, her fans, the Canadian government, and even more importantly, those that hold the merchandising rights, will fight any attempt to paint her in anything but the ‘right’ light. Perhaps it’s long past time we challenge what the right light actually is.”30 In this volume, we are interested in the intersection between the study of Montgomery’s life and writing and opportunities created by gender and feminist analysis. It should already be clear that we situate gender analysis within the realm of feminist thought that took as its central goal a liberatory politics, by which we mean an emancipation of women, inclusively defined31 and understood to be historically oppressed, from roles and laws and social conventions that 8

INTRODUCTION

impeded their personal growth and political progress. Well over two hundred years of feminist activism and gender analysis, from Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) to the women fighting for (white) women’s right to vote in the early 1900s and women’s right to adequate health care, for instance – what scholars have called the first and second waves of feminism  –  have laid a foundation for interrogating the very “nature of nature” to borrow the words of Karen Barad, whose theories we will discuss in more detail later. We have referred in passing to first-, second-, and third-wave feminism and how those movements have affected and continue to affect the development of Montgomery scholarship. Nearly thirty years ago, Judith Butler changed gender and queer studies in her ground-breaking book Gender Trouble (1991) by arguing that “[g]ender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts,”32 thus paving the way for her theory of performativity. Initially criticized for overlooking the materiality of the body, Butler clarified her theory in Bodies That Matter (1993) and further in Undoing Gender (2004) by including material conditions more specifically in her analysis. For Butler, gender is not a thing imposed by an external structure on a pre-existing subject but rather a chronic doing that makes the subject intelligible. At the outset of Gender Trouble, she situates her argument in the context of both feminism’s representational politics, or “the assumption that the term woman denotes a common identity” and the resulting desire to ensure that “woman” is adequately represented. Acknowledging the degree to which the signifier “woman” is contested and incomplete, she writes, “If one ‘is’ a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered ‘person’ transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out ‘gender’ from the political and cultural intersections in which it is 9

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invariably produced.”33 She similarly engages with the limits of feminist arguments about social construction – that a gendered identity is constructed through discourse and culture. If gender is socially constructed, she asks, then is there a pre-discursive subject that choses its identity or whose identity is determined by some external power? Moreover, she asks whether positing this kind of social construction of identity diminishes the possibilities for transformation and agency. If identity is foisted on the subject by an external force, then that external power determines the subject position, and the possibilities for agency are foreclosed. For Butler, rather, agency necessarily appears in the repeated iterations of identity that can never be self-identical. We find Butler’s theories to be liberatory for the subject in that she reveals the dynamism inherent in identity formation: the subject is always in the process of becoming and therefore always open to change. Building upon Butler’s theory of performativity and positing an even more liberatory theory of power relations, a “politics of possibilities,” Karen Barad offers the concept of “agential realism” to cut across “many of the well-worn oppositions that circulate in traditional realism versus constructivism, agency versus structure, idealism versus materialism and poststructuralism versus Marxism debates.”34 Coming from a transdisciplinary perspective, Barad praises Butler for challenging the notion of a fixed nature and thus “opening up … the possibilities for change,”35 but Barad takes those possibilities further. While Butler often seems to be challenged to account for the materiality of the body, Barad creates a focus on the materiality of identity, underlining that “matter and meaning are not separate elements,”36 rather they are fused; one does not precede or supersede the other. Butler’s theory, in Barad’s perspective, “reinscribes matter as a passive product of discursive practices rather than as an active agent.”37 Barad’s theory reveals a world always vibrantly engaged in intra-active being – “the world’s radical aliveness”38 – which posits infinite possibilities in experiencing identity: “Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-exist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.” She explains further that this intra-relating makes “it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between 10

INTRODUCTION

creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future.”39 In a powerful example in “Nature’s Queer Performance,” Barad cites the well-documented phenomenon of lightning: when lightning initiates a strike, the earth sends up a similar energy to meet it and, moreover, can even call a strike toward it. By emphasizing that something we often assume is passive, such as the earth, is as engaged and energized as the more obvious lightning that appears to strike it, Barad enables a perspective that concentrates on the unceasing activity of all facets of nature in constructing themselves in relation to each other, including – but not limited to – humans. This materialist feminist approach highlights the agency of all actors. For instance, we would argue that Montgomery did not passively absorb all the norms of her society; however, even if she attempted to insert dominant ideologies unchallenged into her texts, her readers might not read her works the way she may have hoped, just as her use of intertexts shows her active rereading and rewriting of her culture. Readers will always bring their own agency to a text, as they are also not passive recipients. In this way, Montgomery’s oeuvre can shape-shift over time and across cultures as rereadings reveal different meanings, and new readings affect those of the past. Barad calls this type of interaction the “ethics of entanglement,” which “entails possibilities and obligations for reworking the material effects of the past and the future.”40 In other words, we continue to reassess and remake understandings of the past and the future, of individual identities, and of the physical world. We (Holly and Laura) find this an exciting place to position ourselves for exploring the interconnections of the essays in this collection, because it focuses on agency and possibility, on rereading and recreating identities, on the interrelation of identity. While some of the work included in this volume overtly examines gender as part of a matrix of power relations that involve multiple identity categories, such as race in Carole Gerson’s essay or social class in Mavis Reimer’s, the volume explores various modes and activities by which identity, gendered and otherwise, is constructed materially, and how that identity is not only shaped by, but also challenges and intervenes in, the discourse around and material conditions of individuals. 11

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As editors, we acknowledge inevitable gaps and exclusions in this wide-ranging volume. As far as we are aware, the writers all identify as women, for instance, and the analyses emerge primarily from what are usually called Eurocentric or Western viewpoints. We see, for instance, a need for more racialized perspectives to come to bear on Montgomery’s works and studies. However, we hope that the gaps in this volume work to invite scholars and readers to explore other perspectives, in that process of what Barad might see as productive entanglements. We have structured our collection to highlight Montgomery’s strategies for engaging and exposing, expressing and challenging, the culture around her, and to underscore the degree to which her writing shapes culture. We are also pleased that this volume addresses some of Montgomery’s works that are often overlooked, such as her short fiction, playful diary writing, and novels such as The Blue Castle and Magic for Marigold. In the first section, Masculinities and Femininities, Kazuko Sakuma, Lesley D. Clement, and Ashley N. Reese each overtly address the gender constructions Montgomery confronted, exploring the historical context of the white-feather movement, medical discourses of disease and death, and the degree to which nature is gendered. Each chapter deploys a different approach – historical research, a theoretical unpacking of representations of death, and close reading – in order to demonstrate how Montgomery both encodes and redefines traditional constructions of masculinity and femininity. The section on Domestic Space gathers essays by Bonnie J. Tulloch, Mavis Reimer, and Rebecca J. Thompson that interrogate the connections between gender and space, seeking to redefine domestic space as a site of adventure, to understand the centrality of the child – in this case the orphan – to the definition of home, and to reimagine patriarchal spaces in the home. Using different methods of analysis, such as generic comparisons, archival research, and close reading, each essay in this section ultimately focuses on Montgomery’s exploration of the gender dynamics underwriting the need for material safety and belonging. In the section on Humour, essays by E. Holly Pike, Wanda Campbell, and Vappu Kannas show how Montgomery deploys laughter to disrupt and challenge. Examining often-overlooked Montgomery genres, such as her short fiction 12

INTRODUCTION

and her comic co-written diary, through theories of humour, autobiography studies, and close reading, these authors each demonstrate that Montgomery uses humour to question and dismantle traditional power relations. The next section, Intertexts, groups essays by Catherine Clark, Carole Gerson, Christina Hitchcock and Kiera Ball, and Heather Ladd and Erin Spring to interrogate the range of intertexts evident in Montgomery’s writing. By exploring Montgomery’s use of fairy tales, shared tropes, theological writings, and popular poetry, these chapters show how Montgomery’s writing transforms and is transformed by other works, and how Montgomery employs, but also revises, masculinist and colonialist writing traditions. Finally, in the section Being in Time, Jane Urquhart, Tara Parmiter, and Elizabeth Rollins Epperly engage with the notion of generations and the fluidity of time as a factor in the construction of gendered identity. Each chapter takes a different approach: one creatively explores how Montgomery modelled empowerment for a young girl that was passed along to that girl’s child; one presents a close reading to unpack Montgomery’s representations of a mother’s grief; another revisits the author’s own previous reading of the often-neglected novel Magic for Marigold by engaging queer theory to understand the relationship between granddaughter and grandmother. Each of the sections has its own small introduction, which, we hope, will provide context and ground the reader. Montgomery scholarship as we know it today emerged from a strong tradition of feminist and gender studies, and our hope is that this collection of essays, taken together, demonstrates an ongoing and developing richness and diversity of feminist and gender analyses of Montgomery’s writings, maintaining a currency with, and prompting innovations in, the field. We also hope that these essays will lay the groundwork and provoke more questions and inquiry for future Montgomery studies, as well as for gender studies in general. From any theoretical position, Montgomery most certainly provides a complex and contradictory landscape for scholars and readers of all types, and we believe this volume celebrates her varied readers’ ability to embrace that complexity.

13

E. HOLLY PIKE AND L AUR A M. ROBINSON

No t e s 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

Montgomery, agg, 74. Ibid., 318. Kornfeld and Jackson, “The Female Bildungsroman,” 74. American lawmakers are attempting to overturn Roe v. Wade, the law that protects women’s rights to abortion, for example. The state of Alabama passed a law in April 2019 that would criminalize abortion. Women’s hard-won rights are still under contestation. “Author Tells How He Wrote His Story,” in Lefebvre, The Montgomery Reader, 1:33. “Says Women’s Place Is Home,” in Lefebvre, The Montgomery Reader, 1:51. Montgomery, sj 2:234. Montgomery, sj 4:36–40. Lefebvre, “Introduction: A Critical Heritage.” The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 2:6. Rubio and Waterston, Introduction. sj 5:xviii. Sutherland, “Advocating for Authors,” 229. As cited in Sutherland, 229–30. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 80. Rubio, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, 466. The L.M. Montgomery Institute was established in 1993 at the University of Prince Edward Island and, beginning in 1994, has hosted biennial international scholarly conferences. Brouse, “The Maud Squad,” 291–304. Ibid., 295–6. For an excellent discussion of “waves” in feminist scholarship, both the positive and negative effects of such a metaphor, see Henry, “Waves,” 102–18. Rubio, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, 4–5. See Rubio, “Dusting Off,” 51–78. It’s notable that Epperly explains in her memoir, Power Notes, that she thought writing on Montgomery would be a career ender, and it turned out to lead to her eventual presidency at the University of Prince Edward Island. See Epperly, Power Notes. Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 249. Similar important scholarship in Montgomery studies was undertaken by scholars such as Wilfrid Eggleston, Mollie Gillen, and Rea Wilmshurst, although these scholars did not pay particular attention to gender analysis. Several other scholars helped solidify study of Montgomery’s writing, such

14

INTRODUCTION

24 25

26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

as Perry Nodelman’s often-cited article “Progressive Utopia: How to Grow Up Without Growing Up,” Susan Drain’s “Community and the Individual in Anne of Green Gables: The Meaning of Belonging,” Rubio’s Harvesting Thistles, which collected together a new generation of scholars, and Foster and Simons’s What Katy Read. See Henry, “Waves.” As mentioned in an earlier footnote, the L.M. Montgomery Institute was established in 1993 at the University of Prince Edward Island, and since 1994 has hosted biennial conferences on Montgomery. Hoy, “Too Heedless and Impulsive,” 65–83. See also Kingston, “Leave Anne Alone!” for an example of the public dismay. See, for example, Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Robinson, “‘Outrageously Sexual’ Anne,” 311–27. See also Robinson, “Bosom Friends.” See Rowe, “Anne Made Me Gay,” 6–11. Callahan, “Your Childhood Pal, Anne of Green Gables Was Probably Queer,” Jezebel, 15 May 2014, https://roybiv.jezebel.com/your-childhood-pal-anne-ofgreen-gables-was-probably-1577149816. We include trans and non-binary people here, as they may have experienced oppressions associated with female identity as well as other types of oppressions. Butler, Gender Trouble, 140, original italics. Ibid., 3. Barad, “Re(con)figuring Space, Time, and Matter,” 76. Ibid., 64. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 3. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 33. Ibid., ix. Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 150.

15

MASCULINITIES AND FEMININITIES

n As Judith Butler states in Gender Trouble, “gender is not always

constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts,” and because it intersects with other “discursively constituted identities,” it is necessary to think of multiple instantiations of gender and of gendered roles and expectations.1 Ann Weatherall notes that gender is now “understood as a thoroughly social construct, one that is produced by language and discourse … On the one hand, gender is constructed in the ways it is described in talk and texts. On the other hand, gender as a concept is itself constructed – a social meaning system that structures the way we see and understand the world.”2 Such gendered expectations and constructions of behaviour are the focus of the chapters in this section. The writers analyze both how gender is constructed in the cultures Montgomery depicts and the extent to which Montgomery can be said to question those constructions. These questionings of gender essentialisms suggest Montgomery’s awareness of “regulatory practices”3 at work in her own time and place. In “The White Feather: Gender and War” Kazuko Sakuma revisits the white-feather campaign of the First World War and Rilla of Ingleside, contending that Montgomery criticizes her society’s gender roles and shows how oppressive gendered expectations were to boys and men. Because of a sustained and encouraged community pressure, she argues, Walter is forced to accept an identity and space that ultimately results in his death. Lesley Clement works with Elizabeth Bronfen’s and Sarah Webster’s contention that death is gendered in her chapter, “From ‘Uncanny Beauty’ to ‘Uncanny Disease’: Destabilizing Gender through the Deaths of Ruby Gillis and Walter Blythe and the Life of Anne Shirley.” She argues that Montgomery

MASCULINITIES AND FEMININITIES

undermines and disrupts traditional gendered understandings of death through her representation of the deaths of Ruby Gillis and Walter Blythe. These deaths also inform “the philosophical and psychological changes of Anne, which are indicative of Montgomery’s growing concern with a wider social malaise, characterized by lifedenying ennui and despair.”4 The final chapter in this section explores how Montgomery offers potential liberation through overturning assumptions about gender roles. In “Barney of the Island: Gender in Montgomery’s The Blue Castle,” Ashley N. Reese argues that Barney, as a feminized male character, is instrumental in Valancy’s “idealized domesticity,”5 and the advice she gets through his John Foster books helps her participate in the natural world that her family has prevented her from experiencing.

No t e s 1 Butler, Gender Trouble, 3. 2 Weatherall, Gender, Language, and Discourse, 76. 3 Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 89. 4 Clement, “From ‘Uncanny Beauty’ to ‘Uncanny Disease,’” 45. 5 Reese, “Barney of the Island,” 59.

18

1 The White Feather Gender and War in L.M. Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside

K A ZUKO SAKUMA

n In her essay Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag states that

Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas “offered the originality … of focusing on what was regarded as too obvious or inapposite to be mentioned, much less brooded over: that war is a man’s game – that the killing machine has a gender and it is male.”1 In fact, L.M. Montgomery had the title character of Rilla of Ingleside (1921) reach the same conclusion seventeen years earlier: “His [Kenneth’s] thoughts were full of this Great Game which was to be played out on blood-stained fields with empires for stakes – a Game in which womenkind could have no part. Women, thought Rilla miserably, just had to sit and cry at home.”2 As these passages both suggest, war is arguably the setting that traditionally has most insisted on binary gender differences. As Woolf and Montgomery acknowledge, in the First World War, biological sex was a marker and

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determinant of gendered roles – of men, as soldiers at the front, and of women, as supporters on the “home front.” At first glance, in Rilla of Ingleside, the eighth book in the chronology of Anne Shirley’s life,3 Montgomery might seem to be taking traditional gender roles as given and determined. While Rilla and Susan Baker, the Blythes’ housemaid, are the novel’s apparent heroines, a closer analysis reveals that Rilla’s older brother Walter Blythe is a critically important character in the novel. Several characters in Rilla express some uncertainty about contemporary gender norms, or at least the roles and duties they entail. Most notably, from the beginning of the Great War, the delicate Walter agonizes over whether to enlist to fight. The pressure for men to join the armed forces was intense, and Walter receives an anonymous envelope containing a white feather. This symbol of cowardice was part of of an actual historical campaign that gave women a rare power: to attack certain men’s masculinity in order to shame them onto the battlefield. The white feather received by Walter is a key element in the novel in both symbolic and narratological terms, and one that casts an interesting light on the effects of war on gender roles and norms in the First World War era. Although Rilla is the protagonist, whose growing up and romance with Kenneth structure the narrative, Walter’s agony over enlisting and his eventual fate is the dramatic core of the novel, offering a much more serious and and gripping story. As Elizabeth Rollins Epperly states, “The emotional high point of the book is not her reunion with Kenneth but the loss of her idealistic brother Walter on the battlefields.”4 The white feather he receives is an emblem of Walter’s gendered struggle, focusing the reader’s attention on the added edge gender distinctions took on during the First World War. In the twenty-first century, diverse, complex, and more sophisticated views of gender have found greater mainstream acceptance, as people in societies such as Canada’s have become increasingly informed about and accepting of ideas that do not conform to supposedly rigid traditional notions of gender and sex. But as Joshua S. Goldstein, historian and author of War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, notes, though we all now confidently assume that “‘sex’ refers to what is biological, and ‘gender’ to what is cultural,” there remains the problem “that this 20

THE WHITE FEATHER

sex-gender discourse constructs a false dichotomy between biology and culture, which are in fact highly interdependent. More concretely, the conception of biology as fixed and culture as flexible is wrong … Biology provides diverse potentials, and cultures limit, select, and channel them … I see no useful border separating ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ as conventionally used.”5 For my purposes, I find useful Goldstein’s warning about any belief in reified notions of gender, regardless of historical period, and also his resulting definition of “gender”: “masculine and feminine roles and bodies alike, in all their aspects, including the (biological and cultural) structures, dynamics, roles, and scripts associated with each gender group.”6 In the society of Montgomery’s era, men and women were undeniably categorized socially in terms of their biology, but just as undeniably, especially in the context of war, gender norms were often insisted upon simply and rigidly. Men should fight at the battlefront, while women should support the war (and “their men”) on the home front. Montgomery recognized the insistence on these separate spheres, and commented upon it. In a letter to Ephraim Weber on 12 January 1916, she concedes, “that is the woman’s part to bear and endure and ‘tarry by the goods’ at home while the men go to war.”7 However, as Montgomery will also note in Rilla, the white-feather campaign represented something more than women tarrying at home. Although this campaign had a strong impact in Britain and the Empire, and especially in the “white dominions” of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand during the war, it gradually faded out of historical accounts. Only in the late 1990s did it re-emerge as a subject for discussion, with Nicoletta Gullace being one of the earliest historians to produce detailed scholarly work on the propaganda.8 Her article “White Feathers and Wounded Men: Female Patriotism and the Memory of the Great War” (1997) and her book “The Blood of Our Sons”: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (2002) together constitute the first and still most comprehensive and influential analysis of the white-feather campaign, and subsequent scholars have relied heavily on her works. Gullace criticizes the lack of study of the white-feather movement, noting that, in keeping with reified gender stereotypes, “historians studied ‘feminist pacifism’ 21

KAZUKO SAKUMA

rather than women’s pro-war efforts.”9 Subsequently, historian Erika A. Kuhlman mentions a Canadian case at the beginning of the book Petticoats and White Feathers: Gender Conformity, Race, the Progressive Peace Movement, and the Debate Over War, 1885–1919,10 and historian Suzanne Evans goes on to explore some cases of white-feather-giving in Canada in her book Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief.11 More recently, Kimberly Elisa Stevens, in her master’s thesis, “Flight of the White Feather: The Expansion of the White Feather Movement Throughout the World War One British Commonwealth,” writes that “[w]ith the more recent popularity of study of the war following its centennial and the airing of popular television shows like Downton Abbey,”12 attention paid to the white feathers has been increasing.13 (Significantly, Stevens notes that her own interest in the topic can be traced to reading Rilla in middle school.) But, at least so far, few if any Montgomery studies have examined her use of the campaign in detail. In this chapter, I propose that the white-feather episode in Rilla offers insights into Montgomery’s own struggles with the dominant and reified notions of gender she recognizes in her society. I argue that, by depicting Walter’s agony over enlistment, symbolized by the white feather, Montgomery implicitly criticizes the contemporary gender system as not only a tool for oppressing men by coercing them into battle but also enlisting women as agents of this coercion within a wartime atmosphere of excessive patriotism. The “Glossary” in the annotated edition of Rilla edited by Benjamin Lefebvre and Andrea McKenzie defines the white feather as “a symbol of cowardice.” The entry elaborates that “A small group of women in Britain and Canada began a white-feather campaign, publicly handing out white feathers to young men who were not in uniforms to show their contempt for them.”14 This connotation of a white feather supposedly appeared around “1785 … from the time when cock-fighting was respectable, and when the strain of game-cock in vogue had no white feathers, so that ‘having a white feather, is proof he is not of the true game breed’”15 – a poor fighter, a coward. Gullace further explains that, during the First World War, “The inspiration for the use of the white feather, and its significance in the construction of masculine honor and 22

THE WHITE FEATHER

feminine disdain, were borrowed from The Four Feathers, a popular imperial adventure by A.E.W. Mason.”16 In this 1902 novel, Harry Feversham is expected to follow in his grandfather’s and father’s footsteps by becoming an officer in the British Army. But he is a sensitive man, full of imagination, who has been secretly afraid since boyhood of someday being exposed as a coward. He becomes an army officer, and is engaged to an Irishwoman, Ethne, who cannot face living away from her hometown. When he receives a telegram that his regiment is being dispatched to Egypt, he decides to marry Ethne and avoid the fighting. Burning the telegram, he resigns from his regiment that very night. Speculating that he has resigned to escape battle, three of Harry’s fellow officers each send him a white feather to show their contempt. Then, upon learning the reason for his resignation, Ethne gives him another white feather and breaks off the engagement. Driven by their contempt, Harry travels on his own to Egypt and Sudan to redeem his honour, which he achieves by fighting on the side of the British Army and saving the life of one of his comrades. He then asks his officer accusers to take back their feathers, and, finally, he regains Ethne’s love and respect.17 In the years immediately before women actually started distributing white feathers, its signification of wartime cowardice was therefore already established in the public imagination. Although Montgomery does not mention the book in her complete journals,18 The Four Feathers was very popular at the time and went through four editions during the war, with a film version appearing in 1915, directed by J. Searle Dawley, and another one in 1921, directed by René Plaissetty.19 In addition, the play The White Feather (1914: its original British title was The Man Who Stayed at Home), by J.E. Harold Terry and Lechmere Worrall, toured Montreal in April 1915 and Toronto in March 1916.20 It is thus highly probable that Montgomery knew about the symbolism of the white feather through multiple sources. According to Gullace, the actual white-feather campaign started on 30 August 1914, one month after the First World War began, when Admiral Charles Penrose Fitzgerald gathered thirty women in Folkestone, Kent, “to hand out white feathers to men not in uniform. The purpose of this gesture was to shame ‘every young “slacker” found 23

KAZUKO SAKUMA

loafing about’ and to remind those ‘deaf or indifferent to their country’s need’ that ‘British soldiers [were] fighting and dying across the channel.’”21 Fitzgerald recognised that the power of women to publicly humiliate men would be tremendous,22 and soon these groups became known as “The Order of the White Feather” or “The White Feather Brigade.”23 News of this campaign quickly spread to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the “white dominions” of the British Empire, which had automatically been brought into the First World War by Britain, and later, to the United States.24 On 12 September 1914, only two weeks after the Folkestone distribution, the Toronto Daily Star reported that “a group of pretty girls distributed white feathers to a crowd of young men,” and that the Folkestone town crier announced that “the men had been ‘decorated with the Order of the White Feather for shirking their duty and failing to respond to the call for defenders of the Union Jack.’”25 A few years later, after the United States had entered the war, Sarah N. Cleghorn, the editor of the feminist, pacifist journal Four Lights, printed a picture of a card and white feather, and reported that a woman who secured the enlistment of ten young men had received a brooch for her efforts.26 Historians and writers have described the white-feather-givers as “female patriots.”27 For example, Virginia Woolf quotes Bernard Shaw’s description of “civilized young women” handing out feathers.28 Such characterizations may lead us to wonder to what degree these women adhered to and/or subverted the strict gender norms of the time. Since women themselves could not enlist and fight, under the popular notions of “chivalry” at the time of the Great War, a man had no real acceptable recourse if a woman confronted him with a feather. Despite the many and often complicated reasons why a man might not be in uniform, his only options at that moment would be to agree that he was a coward, or to enlist in the armed forces. Gullace provides many examples of recipients doing so. In her article “White Feathers and Wounded Men,” she reports finding over two hundred accounts of white-feather-giving in the sources for the tv documentary, The bbc Great War Series, and other accounts in materials not related to the bbc series.29 During her research, she encountered: 24

THE WHITE FEATHER

the wrenching stories of over-aged men, young boys, fathers of families, and the medically disabled who joined or tried to join the army out of the fear of receiving the white feather. Mrs. J. UpJohn vividly recalled the day her father received a white feather while coming home from work in Westminster. “I was only six years old at the time, but I can remember the occasion well, as it was one of the only times I remember my father crying. But that night he came home and cried his heart out. My father was no coward but he had been reluctant to leave his little family, my mother, my sister of three, and I. My mother had been very ill, with the shock of her dear brother, being killed at the Dardanelles … [H]e joined up soon after. I never forgot how upset he was, poor dad he was never a coward.30 This woman’s memory of her father crying over a white feather was still fresh after so many years – and so too was her disgust that anyone could suggest that her father was a coward, and her sadness that he felt forced to enlist, despite the troubles at home. Another poignant story that Francis Beckett told in the Guardian was about his own grandfather, who experienced the white feather. He repeats it as told to him directly by his mother: He [Beckett’s grandfather] had three small daughters, which saved him from conscription, and his attempt to volunteer was turned down in 1914 because he was short-sighted. But in 1916, as he walked home to south London from his office, a woman gave him a white feather (an emblem of cowardice). He enlisted the next day. By that time, they cared nothing for short sight. They just wanted a body to stop a shell, which Rifleman James Cutmore duly did in February 1918, dying of his wounds on March 28. My mother was nine, and never got over it. In her last years, in the 1980s, her once fine brain so crippled by dementia that she could not remember the names of her children, she could still remember his dreadful, useless death. She could still talk of his last leave, when he was so shellshocked he could hardly speak and my 25

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grandmother ironed his uniform every day in the vain hope of killing the lice … She blamed the politicians. She blamed the generation that sent him to war … But most of all, she blamed that unknown woman who gave him a white feather, and the thousands of brittle, self-righteous women all over the country who had done the same.31 It is evident that the trauma the white feather caused, not only to him but also to his family, will never disappear. Other accounts recall the frequent injustice, and even the horrible results, of the campaign: “Veteran G. Backhaus told the bbc the story of two friends of his who received white feathers claiming that, ‘Unfortunately both the men I know who suffered that terrible [fate] died because of it.’ Relating the story of how his underage cousin had enlisted as a result of female taunts and was ‘blew to pieces’ [sic] and how an overage friend of his ‘died of madness’ as a direct consequence of their insults, Backhaus makes it clear that women, rather than the enemy, were responsible for these tragic deaths. As Backhaus concludes, in terms reminiscent of those used to describe death in the trenches, ‘the look in his eye has haunted me ever since … The cruelty of that white feather business needs exposing.’”32 As Backhaus’s story suggests, the campaign soon became notorious for “false giving.” Many women mistakenly and embarrassingly gave white feathers to men on leave, underage men, and injured men, solely on such misleading factors as whether they were in uniform or not.33 One feather was even given to a recipient of the Victoria Cross medal who was not in khaki at the time. Gullace cites Times correspondent Michael MacDonagh’s war diary: “A gallant young officer was recently decorated with the V.C. by the King at Buckingham Palace … Later on the same day he changed into mufti and was sitting smoking a cigarette in Hyde Park when girls came up to him and jeeringly handed him a white feather. He accepted the feather without a word and … put it with his V.C. It is said that he remarked to a friend that he was probably the only man who ever received on the same day the two outstanding emblems of bravery and cowardice – the V.C. and the white feather.”34 26

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This story captures the necessarily arbitrary but heavily gendered nature of feather-giving. From the fallible perspective of the feather-givers, men were shamed because they appeared to be “shirkers,” and therefore not “real” men. Although the campaign understandably waned when conscription was implemented in January 1916, for many men and women, the white feather endured as a scathing memory. When the bbc documentary advertised for memoirs of people who engaged in the campaign, only two women replied, which suggests a sense of guilt and shame among the women who had been involved.35 In time, the campaign has come to be regarded as an example of women manipulating men’s fates without considering the accuracy or the justice of their actions. The practice of giving white feathers did not just shame men into enlisting; for many, including those like Backhaus who did not receive a feather, it produced a traumatic shock that endured for many years after. Although Gullace notes that the white-feather-giving has a “genderspecific fascination,”36 it should be remembered that a man, Admiral Fitzgerald, kicked off the campaign with a clear intention to recruit men,37 and Gullace also reminds us that “few propagandists shied away from employing women.”38 The white-feather campaign should not therefore be seen exclusively as an act of female-initiated patriotism, but also as a complexly gendered structure, in which men exploited women to coerce and shame other men during wartime. Certainly the thousands of women involved bear responsibility for their behaviour, and especially when they handed out feathers “jeeringly,” as MacDonagh says.39 This exploitation of what power they had to destroy men’s dignity and determine their destiny may have come from women’s frustration at the oppression and discrimination they faced from men in their daily lives. But this excessive use of female power transgresses the conventional feminine roles and stands at odds with the common representation in war novels and wartime of women as vulnerable, potential victims to be protected. I would argue that by including the white feather in Rilla, Montgomery demonstrates how excessive female patriotism not only hurts men as well as women, but could turn women into callous and cruel offenders during the conflict – a dark phenomenon that the contemporary gender system makes possible.40 27

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Based on this history, I will now focus on Walter’s white feather in Rilla of Ingleside. The first reference appears in his letter to Rilla in December 1914. He writes that someone had sent him an envelope containing a white feather: “I deserved it, Rilla. I felt that I ought to put it on and wear it – proclaiming myself to all Redmond the coward I know I am.”41 Clearly, Walter has no difficulty interpreting the white feather as an accusation of cowardice, or acknowledging his own sense of his lack of bravery. Beating himself up emotionally, he even claims that he should be forced to wear the feather. But for Walter, the feather is not the only attack on him. At Christmas of that year, he “showed Rilla a cruel, anonymous letter he had received at Redmond – a letter far more conspicuous for malice than for patriotic indignation.”42 As Owen Dudley Edwards points out, “the persecution of Walter before he enlists  … suggests a social sickness beneath the pro-war patriotism.”43 In Walter’s case, the anonymity of the person or persons who sent the white feather and the malicious letter especially upsets Walter and Rilla. Because the sender could be a friend or acquaintance of theirs, Walter in particular becomes suspicious and paranoid. Here emerges an interesting gap between the novel and historical fact, even though Rilla has been praised for its verisimilitude and for its “documentary qualities.”44 Through the newspapers, Canadians were aware of the white-feather campaign from its beginnings in England, but the first actual white-feather-giving reported in Toronto appeared at a recruiting rally on 9 August 1915. According to an article in the Toronto Daily Star: Toronto, for the first time, made the acquaintance of that very unwelcome agent, the “white feather.” Into the crowd came the two gay young ladies, each carrying a small sofa cushion, the ends of which they had opened. And to the astonished and outraged young men standing around the girls were joyously doling out the white chicken feathers that stuffed the cushions … Someone would brush past and quietly lay something white on your lapel. It did not dawn at first what the white thing was. Then when you saw, in the dim light, your single 28

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violent impulse was to crawl, on hands and knees, out of the crowd and climb a tall tree. It is a deadly method of attack.45 This article clearly conveys the extremely negative aspects of this white-feather phenomenon and casts blame on the givers. Another newspaper article about a white-feather episode in Canada appeared on 8 June 1916, in the Wetaskiwin Times, in Alberta, which clearly criticizes the giving of the white feather: “It is said that quite a few young fellows in the neighbourhood have received white feathers lately. This is one of the silliest methods of attempting to obtain recruits. It will do more harm than good, and this harm will be permanent. It has been tried in many places and invariably found disadvantageous. That a young man does not enlist is not necessarily a mark of cowardice.” The writer further says it is “worse than folly to attempt to frighten [young men] into enlistment by means of anonymous letters or ‘white feathers.’ The young man who can be scared into enlistment would not be of much use as a soldier.”46 In Rilla, however, Walter receives his feather in December 1914, only four months after the outbreak of war. Why? This may be an accidental anachronism given Montgomery’s process of composition. According to her journal, she began planning out Rilla in 1917, but only actually started writing in 1919, after the war had ended.47 Summer 1915, when the feathers actually appeared in Toronto, would for the purposes of the novel be too late to serve as a vehicle to dramatize Walter’s agony and his decision to enlist. It is possible that Montgomery was not certain about when white feathers first appeared in Canada, but it seems likely to me that she deliberately moved the date back to December 1914, as it was in Britain, to suit her purpose in delineating Walter’s responses. To fully understand Walter’s suffering, and its implications for gender, we need to look more closely at his personality. In Rainbow Valley (1919), Montgomery had characterized the younger Walter as a boy very sensitive to the beauty of life and nature. The son of Anne, “he had all his mother’s vivid imagination and passionate love of beauty.”48 Montgomery therefore represents Walter as the heir to Anne’s aesthetic sensibility and love of poetry, thereby crossing the gender divide. 29

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Montgomery also presents Walter as someone his classmates consider effeminate: “He was supposed to be ‘girly’ and milk-soppish, because he never fought and seldom joined in the school sports, preferring to herd by himself in out-of-the-way corners and read books – especially ‘po’try’ books.”49 Independently of the judgment of his peers, Walter also despises fighting: “as for the trial by fist, Walter couldn’t fight. He hated the idea. It was rough and painful – and, worst of all, it was ugly. He never could understand Jem’s exultation in an occasional conflict.”50 More fit to become a poet, Walter is by nature different from Jem, and temperamentally no soldier. This does not, however, mean he is a coward. To protect the honour of his friend Faith Meredith and his mother, Anne Blythe, Walter eventually does get into a fist-fight with his classmate Dan Reese, even drawing blood. Lefebvre argues that Walter fights not only because of Dan’s insults regarding Faith and Anne, but because of the questioning of his masculinity, which will follow Walter into adulthood:51 “Walter’s repeated blows and the savageness with which he fights illustrate his unconscious desire to prove his masculinity, to react against the feelings of inadequacy that Dan instills in him.”52 Walter therefore can fight when necessary, and successfully, but he never stops finding it ugly and disgusting: “It had been so ugly, and Walter hated ugliness.”53 Upon the outbreak of war, however, a man’s nature does not matter – only his biological sex, which marks him as a combatant. Margaret Randolph Higonnet and other editors observe that “war must be understood as a gendering activity, one that ritually marks the gender of all members of a society, whether or not they are combatants.”54 In his book From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity, Leo Braudy claims that war simplifies and reifies what defines someone as a man: “Wartime masculinity is a top-down and bottom-up effort to emphasize a code of masculine behavior more single-minded and more traditional than the wide array of circumstances and personal nature that influences the behavior of men in non-war situations.”55 In Rilla, being forced to make a choice about enlisting leads Walter to confess that “I don’t want to go. That’s just the trouble. Rilla, I’m afraid to go. I’m a coward,”56 a state that leads him to conclude later that “I should 30

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have been a girl.”57 This thought is intriguing. Walter’s doubts and public humiliation regarding his manliness actually raise the thought of wanting to change genders to escape the demand to enlist. In her essay “L.M. Montgomery’s Great War: The Home as Battleground in Rilla of Ingleside,” Laura M. Robinson lists this lament of Walter’s as one of several examples that destabilize fixed gender roles, and suggests that “nestled within this deeply traditional narrative, and troubling it, is a startling gender ambiguity.”58 The clash between the public pressure to fight and his own self-perceived unfitness to become a soldier leaves Walter in moral and emotional agony. Meanwhile, at Redmond College, “The boys of my year are going – going. Every day two or three of them join up.”59 In time, the inciting white feather, when combined with peer pressure, causes Walter to doubt his gender identity, feel dishonoured as a coward, and ultimately to “join up” to escape those feelings. A closer analysis reveals, however, that Walter’s hatred of war is not the result of his troubled masculinity but arises from his keen insight into war’s essential nature: its arousal of terror, its abject ugliness, and especially, its aim to destroy fragile human bodies. Walter seems to be fully aware of the vulnerability of the body – an insight that historically came in the First World War’s aftermath, since the jingoism of the Great War era tended to obscure the realities of war in this regard. As Owen Dudley Edwards and Jennifer H. Litster point out, “Walter’s terror is closer to the realism of writing during and after the First World War.”60 Furthermore, in keeping with Susan Sontag’s much later assertion of the importance of imagining pain in Regarding the Pain of Others, Walter fully grasps the dark reality of war through his vivid imagining of pain: “I don’t think I’m afraid of death itself – it’s of the pain that might come before death – it wouldn’t be so bad to die and have it over – but to keep on dying! Rilla, I’ve always been afraid of pain – you know that. I can’t help it – I shudder when I think of the possibility of being mangled or – or blinded. Rilla, I cannot face that thought. To be blind – never to see the beauty of the world again – moonlight on Four Winds – the stars twinkling through the fir trees – mist on the gulf. I ought to go – I ought to want to go – but I don’t – I hate the thought of it – and I’m ashamed – ashamed.”61 This acute sense of pain and fear of blindness indicates that Walter is remarkably 31

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attuned to the reality of war, which is not a parade or an adventure, but institutionalized, sanctioned slaughter. And yet, despite these real risks to combatants, the patriotic ideology of the time branded as “cowards” not just those who did not want to die for their country, but also those who realized what the experience of war would actually be. Recognizing this branding as a denial of the truth, through Walter, Montgomery exposes this scheme, and critiques the unfairness and reprehensible dishonesty surrounding what it demanded from men. In this regard, Walter’s brother Jem works in counterpoint. “Montgomery deliberately makes Walter completely unlike his older brother Jem,” Lefebvre writes, casting them as “total opposites.”62 Within his society, Jem is highly masculine. Even as a schoolboy, he can handle himself physically: “He is such a fighter – he could finish Dan off in no time. But Walter doesn’t know much about fighting.”63 Jem eagerly looks forward to war. At the end of Rainbow Valley, he says, “I’d love to be a soldier – a great, triumphant general. I’d give everything to see a big battle,”64 and in Rilla, now as a university student, Jem exults about the coming war: “What an adventure it would be! … We’ll see some fun.”65 Montgomery clearly presents Jem as a romantic, fearless, and highly conventional young man, and as a foil to Walter, who says to Rilla, “I envy Jem,”66 and confides to her his fear – and his knowledge: “War isn’t a khaki uniform or a drill parade – everything I’ve read in old histories haunts me. I lie awake at night and see things that have happened – see the blood and filth and misery of it all. And a bayonet charge! If I could face the other things I could never face that. It turns me sick to think of it – sicker even to think of giving it than receiving it – to think of thrusting a bayonet through another man.” Walter writhed and shuddered. “I think of these things all the time – and it doesn’t seem to me that Jem and Jerry ever think of them. They laugh and talk about ‘potting Huns’! But it maddens me to see them in the khaki.”67 Because they lack Walter’s vivid ability to imagine pain and injury, or his curiosity and deeper insight into the realities of war, Jem and his 32

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friend Jerry think of it as an adventure, which allows them enlist without hesitation. Significantly, what ultimately leads Walter to enlist is not a desire to prove his manhood, but a horrific marine tragedy in May 1915. He admits it to Rilla: “I couldn’t live any longer on such terms with myself as I have been since the Lusitania was sunk. When I pictured those dead women and children floating about in that pitiless, ice-cold water – well, at first I just felt a sort of nausea with life. I wanted to get out of the world where such a thing could happen – shake its accursed dust from my feet forever. Then I knew I had to go.”68 In a definite muddying of gender-conditioned responses, Montgomery repurposed her own words in her journal for Walter’s speech: “when I read of those scores of murdered babies and pictured their dear little dead bodies floating about in that pitiless ice-cold water I felt a hideous nausea of life. I wanted to get out of a world where such a thing could happen and shake its accursed dust from my soul.”69 While still deeply troubled, Walter here becomes a mouthpiece for his author. After the sinking of the Lusitania, Canadian society in general was aflame with anger and indignation, and social pressure to enlist increased heavily for those not already in khaki. Walter cannot endure this increased pressure, and concludes that, given the ugliness of this event, he cannot forgive himself for being a bystander any longer. “I’m going for my own sake – to save my soul alive,” he confides to Rilla, “It will shrink to something small and mean and lifeless if I don’t go. That would be worse than blindness or mutilation or any of the things I’ve feared.”70 Walter therefore decides to go because he now recognizes the enemy as war itself: “It’s not death I fear – I told you that long ago. One can pay too high a price for mere life, little sister. There’s so much hideousness in this war – I’ve got to go and help wipe it out of the world. I’m going to fight for the beauty of life, Rilla-my-Rilla – that is my duty. There may be a higher duty, perhaps, but that is mine. I owe life and Canada that, and I’ve got to pay it.”71 He then makes a telling admission: “Rilla, tonight for the first time since Jem left, I’ve got back my selfrespect. I could write poetry.”72 Shamed masculinity is therefore not the reason for his joining the fight. Only when Walter finds his own 33

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cause – to protect women, children, and the beauty of life from the horror of war – does he decide to enlist. Nevertheless, Walter’s decision is also a symbolic suicide. He gives up living as he is, choosing death through war, because he cannot live outside contemporary gender norms if he wishes to defend what he values. He does not fight to live any longer, because current life is not beautiful to him, and the pressure to conform to his demanded gender, to play his designated role in order to defend the defenseless and beauty itself, is too strong. He therefore challenges this rigid gender norm ironically by fulfilling it, heading to the battlefield and an honoured death to fight against the cruelty of both. At first, Rilla cannot accept her beloved brother’s enlistment, but when she hears his reasons from his own mouth, she changes her mind: “she knew that it had to be. She accepted the fact then and there. He must go – her beautiful Walter with his beautiful soul and dreams and ideals. And she had known all along that it would come sooner or later.”73 At this moment, Rilla understands that, to keep his soul alive, Walter has no other choice but to enlist and prepare for death. But then, in a remarkable move, Montgomery has Rilla realize that “Amid all her pain she was conscious of an odd feeling of relief in some hidden part of her soul, where a little dull, unacknowledged soreness had been lurking all winter. No one – no one could ever call Walter a slacker now.”74 This is a significant moment. Even while fearing Walter’s enlistment because he is so beloved to her, at the very bottom of her heart Rilla has been ashamed of having a “slacker” brother. As McKenzie argues, “Rilla’s emotional response to Walter’s dilemma demonstrates the depth of suffering and the complexity of women’s response to war.”75 Rilla too is bound by the rigidity of contemporary gender norms. Just as Walter accepts while despising his prescribed role as a man, Rilla therefore also comes to accept her woman’s role as a soldier’s sister. In social terms, Walter’s enlistment not only grants him a publicly acknowledged manliness, but also bestows upon Rilla full emotional maturity: “From that night Rilla Blythe’s soul was the soul of a woman in its capacity for suffering, for strength, for endurance.”76 Walter enlists “to save [his] soul alive,”77 and to save “girls as sweet and pure as you in Belgium and Flanders.”78 34

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His shame, though painful, is not enough in itself to force him to fight, and he goes overseas only when he can convince himself that he will be fighting “for the beauty of life,”79 and to protect girls like Rilla and the future of Canada. This grants him self-respect, and he finds he can write poetry again. For her part, Rilla understands her brother’s decision, and ultimately accepts, and even embraces it. But this is no victory. Walter embodies the agony of men who must go to war against their will, while Rilla signifies the suffering of women who must dispatch and lose their loved ones. Male or female, war brings suffering to all. In the twenty-first century, some of us have the opportunity to hold or debate different views of war, or to serve a country in ways other than becoming a combatant. In 1919, just after a devastating world war, Montgomery recognized that British Canada was a jingoistic and patriotic society with a rigid gender system, which offered an eligible man no path other than becoming a combatant to prove his valued manliness and save his honour. To Montgomery, the choice of becoming a “conscientious objector” was not a tolerable one.80 Walter’s only choice ultimately is to choose spiritual survival by embracing physical pain and death. Through his helplessness, Montgomery depicts the cruelty inflicted not just by the enemy, but by the social gender norms during the First World War – and not just upon men, but women as well, who were forced to endure, and sometimes even demand, the loss of their loved ones. In fact, Montgomery gives one more twist to this issue of the white feather. While fighting in France, Walter bravely saves a comrade’s life in combat. He is therefore awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, not for killing the enemy, but for saving his comrade. When she learns about his heroism, “Rilla was beside herself with delight. It was her dear Walter who had done this thing – Walter, to whom some one had sent a white feather at Redmond – it was Walter who had dashed back from the safety of the trench to drag in a wounded comrade who had fallen on No-man’s-land.”81 But even when overwhelmed by joy at Walter’s exploit, the white feather still recurs in Rilla’s thoughts, suggesting just how severely she was hurt by the imputation of cowardice placed on her dearest brother, which surfaces through her happiness that he has redeemed himself. “What a thing to be the sister of such a hero!”82 she 35

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cries, suggesting that it is much better to have a brave brother – even if he should end up dying as a hero – than a coward at home. For men and for women and in a war society, honour is deemed more important than life, and by earning the medal and proving his bravery, Walter can finally rest assured that his manliness is recognized by his society. Before he dies, he writes a poem called “The Piper,” which much like John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” (1915), is supposedly widely read, and expected to last forever. The night before his death, seeing the “Piper” again and knowing he will die the next day, Walter writes a last letter to Rilla, which is his testament not only to her but also to her contemporaries and the next generation, for the future of Canada. “I’m not afraid … I’ve won my own freedom here – freedom from all fear. I shall never be afraid of anything again – not of death – nor of life, if, after all, I am to go on living. And life, I think, would be the harder of the two to face, – for it could never be beautiful for me again. There would always be such horrible things to remember – things that would make life ugly and painful always for me. I could never forget them … I am not sorry that I came. I’m satisfied. I’ll never write the poems I once dreamed of writing – but I’ve helped to make Canada safe for the poets of the future – for the workers of the future – ay, and the dreamers, too … the future, not of Canada only but of the world.”83 He continues, “And you will tell your children of the Idea we fought and died for – teach them it must be lived for as well as died for, else the price paid for it will have been given for naught. This will be part of your work, Rilla. And if you – all you girls back in the homeland – do it, then we who don’t come back will know that you have not ‘broken faith’ with us.”84 Through these wrenching last words, he leaves Rilla and others the legacy of the war and entrusts to them the future of Canada and the world. And in the end, in Courcelette, he dies “a glorious (and painless) death in battle”85 – not the “long dying” he had feared for so long. Sensitive Walter dies a true war hero. Given the detailed critique she offers through Walter of heroism, shame, pride, manliness, and femininity, why did Montgomery give Walter this beautiful, indeed tragic, death? Lefebvre claims that “[h]is death symbolizes the larger sacrifice made in defence of the British Empire.”86 36

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By enlisting, Walter himself had concluded that death is ultimately more beautiful than life in a hideous world at and after war. Rilla comes to honour her brother’s sacrifice, keeping his memory alive by telling his story to her children – and in the process, performing her troubling role as a woman who must raise the next generation to inherit the soldierly legacy, with its ideals of sacrifice. I would suggest that because Montgomery herself suffers Walter’s agony and sympathizes with him, she wants to make his death, if not the reasons for it, honourable and beautiful. Montgomery observed that she wrote Rilla “as a tribute to the girlhood of Canada. So it’s my only ‘novel with a purpose.’”87 To the girls, wives, and mothers of the next generation, Montgomery displayed how much suffering men and women experience during war. Walter’s agony over enlisting is cruel, but in a larger sense no crueller than the last goodbyes offered to other beloved brothers, sweethearts, and sons. If the reader should think that Walter’s, and in her way Rilla’s, is the harder fate, it is only because of the added shame and agony of being perceived a slacker, or having one’s loved one perceived as one, during wartime, when there is no sympathy for such feelings. As for Montgomery herself, only after the war could she acknowledge and write about this pain – the inner suffering of the individual – as opposed to the “collective consciousness in the 1920s and 1930s,”88 which is the province of history. As a minister’s wife, Montgomery was asked to serve as the president of the local Red Cross. She too recited patriotic poems at many recruiting meetings, helping to send local boys off to battle. In the jingoistic English Canada of those days, as historian Jonathan Vance observes in Death So Noble, “a vision of the war as a nation-building experience of signal importance” prevailed.89 Montgomery assumed her mandatory role. As McKenzie argues, “Montgomery does not question this dominant myth [Canada as a unified nation born out of the sacrifice and fires of war]; to do so would be to render the entire anguish of the War, as evidenced in her journal, as futile and purposeless.”90 Nevertheless, when alone, she wrote in her journal that “I thank God that Chester [her first son] is not old enough to go – and as I thank Him I shrink back in shame, the words dying on my lips. For is it not the same thing 37

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as thanking Him that some other woman’s son must go in my son’s place?”91 This feeling of maternal guilt was also part of Montgomery’s motive for writing Rilla. In a letter to Weber on 12 January 1916, she wrote that “[r]ecruiting meetings are in full swing every night. In Uxbridge … about seventeen of our finest boys have enlisted right here in our little rural community. Our church on Sunday is full of khaki uniforms and oh, the faces of the poor mothers! The church is full of stifled sobs as my husband prays for the boys at the front and in training.”92 Her own response was dutiful, and profoundly ambivalent. “On Xmas eve I gave a dinner party for the boys who have enlisted from our church and as I looked at the splendid young fellows my heart ached and I wondered how many of them would ever sit at my table again and how many would be sleeping ‘in one red burial blent’ in the Balkans or Flanders next Christmas.”93 She put all these heartaches and sorrows into Rilla. Though at a glance it may seem to be a pro-war novel written in the flush of victory, it also contains early and unmistakable signs of Montgomery’s burgeoning anti-war sentiment.94 Some 619,636 young Canadian men enlisted with the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the war, and approximately 424,000 served overseas, including in the terrible battlefields of Ypres, Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, and the Somme. At the war’s end, Canada’s total casualties stood at close to 61,000 killed and another 172,000 wounded.95 For a country with a small population, Canada bore huge losses during the war. In almost every Canadian town, war memorials still testify to those tremendous wartime sacrifices and sufferings.96 Canada paid too high a price. Montgomery was keenly aware of that, and Walter became the embodiment of Montgomery’s anxiety and ambivalence toward war.97 Her thoughts about wartime sacrifice inform Rilla, and Walter is the symbol of this sacrifice. He is Canada. Mongomery’s anti-war sentiments are further evident in “The Aftermath,” the last poem in The Blythes Are Quoted, which is attributed to Walter.98 They are also expressed in Anne’s later comment about “the futility of the sacrifice they made then mirrored in this ghastly holocaust.”99 Montgomery read many history books such as Edward Gibbon constantly, as Mary Henley Rubio points out, and Montgomery was 38

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“well aware of mankind’s repetitive engagements in war.”100 Based on her deep knowledge of war and history, Montgomery sought in Rilla to convey to her readership that, behind the noble cause and sacrifice, war brings agony to both men and women, in part because of their entrapment within the rigid expectations of dominant gender ideology. Planned and set in motion by a handful of elite men, the Great War was a toxically masculine activity. Ordinary men and women were exploited by these war elites in the name of a higher cause. All kinds of coercive means, including the white-feather campaign, inflicted psychological pressures on men, driving them into combat to prove themselves – to demonstrate, through visible external action, the absence of cowardice, a black mark from which, in the eyes of a society at war, a man could not hope to escape by any other means. And women, like Rilla, were in turn psychologically damaged on the home front, losing loved ones in war, and sometimes even helping to make this happen. While Rilla superficially seems to reinforce gender roles, it also exposes their arbitrariness. Men, irrespective of their temperament and beliefs, are expected to become soldiers. Women, regardless of their character or opinions, are expected to play a supporting role. The undeniable inhumanity of this way of treating individuals constitutes Montgomery’s critique of war and its related social norms, which points to the suffering these forces of destruction demand through and beyond nationalities and genders.

No t e s 1 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 5. 2 Montgomery, ri, 48. Donna Coates points out that “Rilla’s observation about gendered activities in wartime is astute; a man can respond to a ‘roll call,’ whereas a woman has to devise her own ‘role’ without benefit of manuals or reference books which prescribe her duties.” “The Best Soldiers of All,” 67. For Montgomery’s creative process during the composition of Rilla, see Readying Rilla: L.M. Montgomery’s Reworking of Rilla of Ingleside, edited by Elizabeth Waterston and Kate Waterston. 3 Rilla is the sixth novel in the chronology of publication. 4 Fisher, Boys, 211; Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 117. 5 Goldstein, War and Gender, 2. 39

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26

27 28 29 30 31 32

Ibid. Montgomery, afgg, 62. Gullace, “The Blood of Our Sons,” 77. Stevens, “Flight of the White Feather,” 20; Gullace, Blood, 77. Kuhlman, Petticoats, 1. Evans, Mothers of Heroes, 82–3. Stevens, “Flight of the White Feather,” 8. The scene of the white-feathergiving appears in the tv drama Series Downton Abbey, season 2, episode 1. I am grateful to Yuka Kajihara for her kind support for my research on the white feather. Ibid. See also Beckett and Kendall. Lefebvre and McKenzie, “Glossary,” ri, 380. Harper, “White Feather,” Online Etymology Dictionary. Gullace, “White Feathers,” 188–9. Mason, The Four Feathers. There is no mention of the book The Four Feathers or the “white feather” in Montgomery’s Complete Journals. The novel has been filmed seven times, and is still popular, with the most recent film directed by Shekhar Kapur in 2002, starring Heath Ledger as the main character. “The White Feather,” Toronto World, 15 April 1915, 5; “‘The White Feather’ as Popular as Ever,” Toronto World, 21 March 1916, 3. Gullace, Blood, 73. Ibid. Ibid. Kuhlman, Petticoats, 1. Toronto Daily Star, 12 September 1914, 5. Two weeks later, the paper ran another article about the white feather in Folkestone, this time on the front page: Toronto Daily Star, 28 September 1914, 1. Cleghorn, Four Lights, 6 February 1917, sr reel 23.01, Woman’s Peace Party Papers, Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Quoted in Kuhlman, Petticoats, 1. Kuhlman, Petticoats, 1. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, 182. Gullace, “White Feather,” bbc, Imperial War Museum, bbc Great War Series Correspondence, 181n12. Also quoted in Gullace, Blood, 78–9, 219. Mrs J. UpJohn to bbc, 15 May 1964, Imperial War Museum, bbc Great War Series. Vol. uda-vos, fol. 32. Quoted in Gullace, Blood, 78–9, 220. Beckett, “The Men Who Would Not Fight,” Guardian. G. Backhaus to bbc, 15 May 1964, Imperial War Museum, bbc Great War Series. Vol. bap-bap, fol. 18. Quoted in Gullace, Blood, 95, 224. 40

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33 “In January 1916 the Military Service Act was passed. This imposed conscription on all single men aged between 18 and 41, but exempted the medically unfit, clergymen, teachers and certain classes of industrial worker. Conscientious objectors – men who objected to fighting on moral grounds –  were also exempted, and were in most cases given civilian jobs or non-fighting roles at the front. A second Act passed in May 1916 extended conscription to married men.” “Conscription: The First World War,” uk Parliament. 34 Michael MacDonagh, In London During the Great War, 80. Quoted in Gullace, Blood, 93. To avoid receiving a white feather through incorrect recognition, the “silver war badge,” “a pin designed to be worn on civilian clothes after early discharge from the army,” was first issued in 1916. It was also retrospectively awarded to those who had already been discharged since August 1914. Imperial War Museums, “Silver War Badge and King’s Certificate of Discharge.” 35 Mrs Kathleen Langmuir to bbc, 9 June 1964, Imperial War Museum, bbc Great War Series. Vol. lab-laz, fol. 140. See also Mrs Thyra Mitchell to bbc, 16 April 1964, Imperial War Museum, bbc Great War Series. Vol. mil-mit, fols, 475–9. Quoted in Gullace, Blood, 76, 219–20. 36 Gullace, Blood, 96. 37 Ibid., 73 38 Gullace, “White Feather,” 198. 39 MacDonagh, In London, 80. 40 See also the article by Doody, “L.M. Montgomery: The Darker Side,” in Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict, 25–49. Tim Kendall, whose expertise is poetry of the First World War, states that “I suspect that most women were opposed to the actions of the feather girls … and it’s undoubtedly true that the White Feather campaign has been criticized out of all proportion to its numbers of participants.” Then he introduces the poem titled “The Jingo-Woman” by Helen Hamilton as her wartime assault on the campaign. Kendall, “Downton Abbey.” 41 Montgomery, ri, 106. 42 Ibid., 118. 43 Edwards, “L.M. Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside,” 134. 44 Fisher, Boys, 213. 45 Toronto Daily Star, 10 August 1915, 5. In Wencer, “Historicist.” 46 “White Feathers,” Wetaskiwin Times, 8 June 1916, 5. Another newspaper article about the white feather appeared earlier, on 7 January 1916, in the Nicola Valley News in Merritt, British Columbia, under the title “Contemptable” [sic]. “A local young man who has had one brother killed in the war and another twice wounded and who is assisting the prosecution of the war by paying in-

41

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47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

stead of fighting has received a contemptible ‘white feather’ letter asking why he does not enlist,” the column writer reports, and proceeds to condemn further the sender: “The letter, addressed from Merritt, not Flanders, is in disguised handwriting – the self-confessed coward’s signature – but as the writer was not clever enough to complete the disguise we state that unless an explanation is immediately sent exposure in these columns will be made in scathing terms.” The Nicola Valley News: The Home Paper for the City of Merritt and The Nicola Valley, 7 January 1916, 1. Quoted in Stevens, 57. Montgomery, sj 2:309; Lefebvre, Afterword, bq, 515. Montgomery, rv, 17. Ibid. Lefebvre argues Walter’s love of poetry in detail in his essay “Walter’s Closet.” Ibid., 111. Lefebvre, “Walter’s Closet,” 10. Ibid. Montgomery, rv, 125. Higonnet et al., Introduction to Behind the Lines, 4. Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism, xvi. Montgomery, ri, 61. Ibid. Robinson, L., “L.M. Montgomery’s Great War: The Home as Battleground,” 115. Montgomery, ri, 106. Edwards and Litster, “The End of Canadian Innocence,” 37. Montgomery, ri, 61. Lefebvre, “Walter’s Closet,” 8. Montgomery, rv, 121. Ibid., 224. Montgomery, ri, 29. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 153–4. Montgomery, sj 2:166. Montgomery, ri, 154. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 155. Ibid. McKenzie, “Women at War?” 196. Montgomery, ri, 155. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 155. 42

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79 Ibid., 154. 80 Due to space limitations, I cannot discuss conscientious objectors in Canada in this chapter. For example, see Shaw, Crisis of Conscience. 81 Montgomery, ri, 214. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., 245. 84 Ibid., 246. 85 Vance, Death So Noble, 175. 86 Lefebvre, “Afterword,” bq, 515. 87 Montgomery, afgg, 88. 88 Vance, Death So Noble, 4. 89 Ibid., 10 90 McKenzie, “Women at War,” 84, 100. For the Canadian myth, see Vance, Death So Noble. McKenzie also states that “[i]n Montgomery’s thoughts, then, the soldiers who died became Christ, sacrificing their lives for the good of humanity’s future.” McKenzie, “Introduction,” L.M. Montgomery and War, 10. 91 Montgomery, sj 2:160. 92 Montgomery, afgg, 60. 93 Ibid. 94 Fisher observes that “We have come to view the First World War as a pointless bloodbath  …  Yet during the war years and indeed for decades after, many Canadians thought otherwise.” Fisher, “Canada and the Great War,” 224. Vance, Death So Noble, 266. 95 Canadian War Museum, “The Cost of Canada’s War,” accessed 20 April 2021, https://www.warmuseum.ca/firstworldwar/history/after-the-war/legacy/thecost-of-canadas-war. I am grateful to Craig Howes for his generous support, especially for his suggestions that Walter is Canada. 96 See Mary Beth Cavert, “To the Memory of,” 35–53. 97 See Caroline E. Jones, “The Shadows of War,” 167–83; Amy Tector, “A Righteous War?” 72–86; Edwards, “L.M. Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside,” 126–35. 98 Montgomery, bq, 510. 99 Ibid. McKenzie observes: “The anguish that Montgomery had felt during the War is transformed to the bitterness of disillusionment; her own sons threatened by enlistment in a new war, she recognizes that the First World War’s bloodshed and sacrifice cannot be justified.” McKenzie, “Women at War,” 103. 100 Rubio, Lucy Maud Montgomery, 285–6. Rubio further observes that “Maud’s reading of Gibbon demonstrated all too clearly how the religious concepts of Good and Evil had been used throughout history to mobilize people to fight.”

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2 From “Uncanny Beauty” to “Uncanny Disease” Destabilizing Gender through the Deaths of Ruby Gillis and Walter Blythe and the Life of Anne Shirley

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n “Death is gendered,” conclude Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster

Goodwin. “Probably without exception  …  representations of death bring into play the binary tensions of gender constructs, as life/death engages permutations with masculinity/femininity.” Drawing upon Maurice Blanchot’s “analogy between corpse and image,” whereby “both the corpse and a representation are ‘uncanny’ in that they suspend stable categories of reference and position in time and space,” Bronfen and Goodwin investigate “the complex ways works of art may at once both represent and interrogate prevailing ideologies.”1 Their understanding of the “uncanny” corresponds with that of Sigmund Freud:

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the “uncanny” belongs to “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar.” Because “something must be added to the novel and the unfamiliar if it is to become uncanny,” writes Freud, “the uncanny that we find in fiction – in creative writing, imaginative literature – … is above all much richer than what we know from experience.”2 The uncanny can therefore be observed when gender constructs are destabilized, and so rendered unfamiliar and disruptive, as life meets death in the liminal spaces created by representations of disease, dying, and dead bodies. This chapter focuses on the uncanny representations of two deaths in L.M. Montgomery’s fiction  –  those of Ruby Gillis and Walter Blythe – to examine how gender constructs are destabilized through the subversive framing and unravelling of two conventional death scripts – the consumptive maiden and kalos Thanatos, respectively  –  and how these deaths shape Anne Shirley throughout her life. Montgomery problematizes the familiar bifurcated gendering of death in three interrelated ways: she parodies the nineteenth-century “domestication of death”3 and images of a domesticated afterlife; she questions the prevailing western perception of death as masculine and the dead body as feminine; and she challenges conventional gendered death plots through metafictive framing and rescriptings. With Ruby’s and Walter’s deaths, representations of diseased and dead bodies and narratives of dying and death destabilize traditional gender binaries by providing a nuanced dialogue between “uncanny beauty” and “uncanny disease”4 that informs the philosophical and psychological changes of Anne, which are indicative of Montgomery’s growing concern with a wider social malaise, characterized by life-denying ennui and despair. As a literary consumptive, is Ruby Gillis fated to die? She has several of the hallmarks of what Susan Sontag describes as the beautiful young woman undergoing “a decorative, often lyrical death” by consumption, common in the literature and visual art of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.5 The aesthetic “gendering of consumption” had become so prevalent by the end of the nineteenth century that there was a widespread belief, including within the medical community, that women were more prone to the disease, although statistical or 45

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scientific evidence failed to support such a conclusion.6 Because “the most dreaded disease” in the first two decades of the twentieth century on Prince Edward Island was still tuberculosis, and it remained “the leading killer,”7 Montgomery would have been well aware that consumption was not exclusively – or even predominantly – a female disease; thus, the consumptives within her literary canon cover a wide spectrum. Melissa Prycer pairs four Montgomery characters with four representative “types” identified by Sontag – Cecily King in The Golden Road as “Too Good to Live,” Ruby Gillis in Anne of the Island as “Passionate Patient,” Douglas Starr in Emily of New Moon as “Artistic Genius,” and Cissy Gay in The Blue Castle as “Beautiful Invalid” – to demonstrate that “Montgomery creatively transformed the conventional images of consumption to reflect a medical world in flux” and, with Ruby, “to teach a moral lesson about the folly of being shallow.”8 When Ruby is contextualized beyond the staging of her illness and deathbed scene in Anne of the Island, however, it becomes clear that Montgomery challenges the image of the uncannily beautiful consumptive maiden and the narrative of her death not only for realistic and moral ends but also with parodic and disruptive consequences. In Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination, Katherine Byrne discusses the “pathologising of femininity” in the nineteenth century with the “rise of the tubercular aesthetic” that “glamorised consumptive women and portrayed them as ethereal rather than emaciated, graceful rather than ghostly.”9 Byrne and other scholars investigating this tubercular aesthetic return to the ideals of beauty in the late-Victorian period reflected and affected by, among others, George du Maurier’s novel Trilby (1894) and the pre-Raphaelite iconography of Ophelia, Elaine, and the Lady of Shalott. The latter is of particular interest in considering Ruby’s death by consumption in relation to Anne’s development.10 While the scenes of Ruby’s illness and death in Anne of the Island may reflect typical Victorian images and narratives of consumption, when these scenes are considered within the context of Anne’s and Ruby’s contrasting roles in two scenes from Anne of Green Gables – chapters 11 and 12, which depict Anne’s first appearance on the Avonlea stage, and chapter 28, “An Unfortunate Lily Maid” – the 46

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destabilizing of the “uncanny beauty” of the consumptive maiden and the inevitability of her death becomes apparent. Despite the claims of bloggers on Montgomery fan sites who confuse Shakespeare’s characters with Tennyson’s, Ophelia’s suicide is not one of the roles that Anne consciously assumes; however, her debut on Avonlea’s public stage – her arrival at Sunday school with a flower-festooned hat – has drawn the attention of critics such as Seth Lerer for its loose connections with the Ophelia suicide narrative.11 For Victorians, the face of Ophelia was that of the consumptive Elizabeth Siddal.12 When the strikingly red-haired Siddal modelled for John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52), surrounded by strewn flowers associated with the Shakespearean character’s insanity and pending death, she was not yet the well-recognized face she would become, primarily through the paintings of her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Byrne maintains that Rossetti and other pre-Raphaelite artists exploited Siddal’s consumptive appearance, especially her “unusual, unearthly beauty which personified the tubercular aesthetic,” her “delicate, emaciated features” and “extreme pallor, made more dramatic by her vivid red hair.” Moreover, her “romantic aura” and “desirability” lay with this fragility: “she always seemed hovering on the verge of death, and looked as though she was not quite of this world.” Byrne sees paintings such as Beata Beatrix, painted a year after Siddal’s death in 1862, as “a visual representation of the epitome of the consumptive sublime. In it, the moment of death is romanticised and aestheticised … this is the Victorian ‘good death’ personified, the end of life conceived of as a moment of beauty and tranquillity.” After Siddal’s death, “the tubercular look soon became the prevalent form of fashionable beauty.”13 What is noteworthy about Anne’s Avonlea debut scene is her appeal to a narrative that would be more familiar and elicit greater sympathy from Marilla than would a histrionic, mad-Ophelia entrance – death by consumption: “Maybe you’d better send me back to the asylum. That would be terrible; I don’t think I could endure it; most likely I would go into consumption; I’m so thin as it is, you see.” Later in the novel, Marilla reads “Anne’s death warrant by consumption” unless she “scrupulously obey[s]” the doctor’s 47

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prescription, one that reflects current practices of treating consumption, to allow “that red-headed girl” plenty of fresh air.14 In chapter 28 of Anne of Green Gables, which takes place the summer before her tuberculosis scare, Anne discovers that, as a prop, Elaine’s sacrificial white lily complements her life-affirming nature no better than the ostentatiously decorative pink roses and yellow buttercups of the earlier Sunday-school scene. Ann Howey argues that Montgomery affords her red-haired lily maid the opportunity to “rewrite” Elaine’s narrative in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King by “reading and ultimately manipulating the literary model to make the story work” for her on her own terms.15 Anne may resemble Tennyson’s Elaine through what Elisabeth Bronfen refers to as “an act of selftextualisation” when “by letter and by body” Elaine is able “to impress her name, her image and her story on to the memory of her survivors,”16 but unlike Elaine, Anne resists the death warrant of so many self-sacrificing women, especially Victorian aesthetic consumptives with their “uncanny beauty.” In the “Unfortunate Lily Maid” scene, golden-haired Ruby refuses to assume the role of Elaine drifting down the river, because she would “die really of fright,” and even though Anne “mourn[s]” that “it’s so ridiculous to have a red-headed Elaine,” she somewhat reluctantly plays the part. Diana thinks Anne will make a suitable Elaine because Anne’s complexion is “just as fair as Ruby’s.” Of Anne’s uncanny, “still, white little face,” Ruby whispers nervously, “Oh, she does look really dead.”17 “Albescence indicated … a delicate nature, coeval with death and ready to pass over at a sigh,” writes Katherine Ott in Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870.18 One of the earliest visual representations inspired by Tennyson’s Elaine is that of American Toby Rosenthal, whose 1874 painting “created something of an ‘Elaine’ cult” in both the United States and Europe, after which “pale and dead Elaines floated toward oblivion year after year” at American and European art galleries and exhibitions.19 Among these paintings of Elaine-waifs are those based on Tennyson’s Elaine-inspired narrative, “The Lady of Shalott,” with John William Waterhouse’s three paintings being the most recognized images. In 48

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Waterhouse’s 1894 and 1915 images, before the Lady sets off down the river, she is clearly a brunette, but in the widely known 1888 version, she appears to have red hair, perhaps even the dark red hair that, in the “Unfortunate Lily Maid” chapter, Diana assures Anne she now has. Furthermore, as Bram Dijkstra observes of this painting, despite the Lady of Shalott’s “decorously wan and helplessly insane” appearance, she deviates from the Tennyson original, as she is sitting up rather than lying down.20 Active and resourceful Anne seems to take her cue from Waterhouse rather than Tennyson when the boat begins to leak, and “Elaine [must] scramble to her feet, pick up her cloth of gold coverlet and pall of blackest samite.” The letters written by the Lady of Shalott and Elaine are read posthumously in a male voice; conversely, the story of Anne’s avoidance of drowning is at least partially told in her own voice when she relays her survival story, one that reflects “her selfpossession,” to Mrs Allan the next day.21 The parodic treatment of this scene has been discussed by several Montgomery scholars, including Howey, who concludes that, in this episode, Anne “make[s], and not just receive[s], meaning.” Whereas “the iconic image of Elaine is not of her life but of her death” – of “female beauty and tragic, self-sacrificing devotion” – Anne’s story is one that destabilizes the “linguistic construct” of beauty and “problematize[s] the concept of romance and its dependence on female passivity,” underpinning the hypotexts’ female death narratives.22 Anne resembles Emily Byrd Starr, another potential consumptive in Montgomery’s canon, whose father, Douglas Starr, dies of the disease. Byrne notes of the consumptive male that an “important exception” to the compromising of masculinity due to invalidism was the “consumptive artist,” who remained “culturally acceptable” because the disease and “position of social outsider which accompanied it, were believed to facilitate creativity.”23 Prycer argues that Emily’s father is “a typical ‘Artistic Genius.’”24 Although he is a journalist and lover of books, there is no indication that he is a creative writer; indeed, it is his daughter, Emily, who has the potential to become an “artistic genius.” Emily tells Perry that her father has declared her a genius, and that a genius is “a person who writes poetry.” Like Anne, Emily challenges 49

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the “death warrant” of the consumptive script: as Emily writes in one of her “living epistles” to her dead father, she has “too much ginger” to be “frightened of dying of consumption.”25 She refuses to behave “like any good consumptive” because, as she inscribes in her diary, “I believe in myself … I’m not consumptive, and I can write.”26 Ruby Gillis is not, therefore, fated to die because of her appearance. It is Anne, with her understated, white-June-lily beauty, rather than Ruby, with her showy red-peony beauty (to reference Mrs Lynde),27 who has the uncanny consumptive aesthetic so revered by late-Victorian society. Montgomery also challenges the consumptive’s script in terms of lifestyle. Ruby may be a flirt and given to gaiety, but surely Aunt Atossa’s verdict that Ruby’s “gadding off to Boston” is “to blame” for her illness, because “consumption’s catching,” is a parody of dissipated-lifestyle explanations of consumption, which attributed the disease to everything from “gallivanting” to female vanity and adherence to “decadent female fashions” of bared flesh.28 Montgomery frames Ruby’s death scene – in chapter 14 of Anne of the Island, entitled “The Summons” – with humorous scenes, such as the one with Aunt Atossa in chapter 11, “The Round of Life,” during which Anne and Diana are en route to pay a visit to the ailing Ruby. Another narrative threaded into Anne of the Island at this point is the saga of “Averil’s Atonement” (chapter 12), Anne’s melodramatic story, destined for Rollings Reliable Baking Powder Company’s promotional material, interspersed with Anne and Diana’s humorously metafictive conversations about the potentially happy-versus-unhappy fate of the story’s characters. Anne is loath to kill off any of her characters, because one of her professors has declared that “nobody but a genius should try to write an unhappy ending.” As the characters begin to command their own lives, it is the villain, Maurice Lennox, who must die, but even this is up for comical debate. The humorous treatment of attitudes to death continues in the next chapter, “The Way of Transgressors” (chapter 13), when Davy spends the Sabbath fishing with the Timothy Cottons, the children of a consumptive father. Later that evening, Davy confesses his sins to Anne in his usual disarmingly funny manner. In sentimental fiction, especially of the evangelical sort, moral earnestness tends 50

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to block humour. The framing of “The Summons” with these scenes, however, undercuts onerous gravity and excessive sentimentality in the contextualization of the death of a consumptive maiden. Chapter 14 itself even ends with Anne and Davy’s humorous conversation about the merits of smoking to ward off germs and untimely death, a conversation prefaced by his questions about whether Ruby will “laugh as much in heaven as she did in Avonlea.”29 Despite the nuanced contextualization of consumption, despite Anne’s rescripting the consumptive plot by resisting the fated death of an uncannily beautiful consumptive, despite its humorous framing, why might Montgomery deem “The Summons” “a total failure,” as she declared in a journal entry for 1 March 1930?30 I propose two interrelated explanations: first, as a stand-alone chapter, “The Summons” is sentimental in its conventional treatment of Ruby’s death, and, second, Anne’s perspective on death is a nostalgic throwback to a previous era. Whereas Emily and Anne have “too much ginger” to die the death of a literary consumptive, Ruby is given to hysterics rather than ginger. In all the major scenes in which Anne takes risks and/or defies convention – from breaking the slate over Gilbert’s head, to accepting the dare to walk the ridge pole, to assuming the role of Elaine – Ruby succumbs to hysterics.31 Discussing “new pathologies of femininity,” Byrne observes that consumption “became viewed as the concrete physical manifestation of psychological problems: a kind of hysteria made flesh.”32 Ruby does not have the resources to rewrite the consumptive script. When the first signs of galloping consumption develop, Ruby is in denial and continues her frenzied social calendar. With a beauty made “even handsomer than ever” despite her too “lustrous” eyes, her “hectically brilliant” cheeks, and hands so thin that they are “almost transparent in their delicacy,”33 Ruby soon displays all the characteristics of the “uncanny beauty” of someone nearing death from consumption found in medical and literary sources. Quoting from an 1876 medical source, Ott identifies the following features of the “consumptive look,” all of which Ruby displays: “extreme emaciation … bright eyes of pearly whiteness, transparent skin … hectic flush [which] gives an unnatural beauty to the countenance.”34 51

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As Ruby awaits “The Summons,” “the hectic flush was gone for the time, leaving her pale and childlike.” Gone too are the hysterics as Ruby, now reconciled, even submissive, meets her bridegroom – not her latest suitor, Herb Spencer, but the Romantic Thanatos, “a kindly friend to lead her over the threshold.”35 In his extensive study of the “gender of death,” Karl Guthke observes that death, while occasionally non-human or androgynous, is figured dominantly as a masculine image in most western cultures. In protest against the “fearful and gruesome” masculine images of death, primarily biblical, the Romantic Age adopted “the Death of Antiquity, Thanatos, stylized as the gentle, friendly youth.” Death was thus domesticated “as a friend … a bridegroom” with “a secularizing reminder of Jesus as the bridegroom of the truly Christian soul.”36 In her “splendid white velvet casket” at her funeral, where one of her sisters serves not as bridesmaid but as mourner with her “uncontrolled, hysteric grief,” the bride, the “white-clad” Ruby, attains a new kind of beauty through death, which appeals to the conventional tastes of Avonlea. “The handsomest corpse she ever laid eyes on,” exclaims Rachel Lynde, who has, in the past, found Ruby’s bloom – her “snap and colour” – “common and overdone” in contrast to Anne’s pallor. Death has “touched” and “consecrated” Ruby’s beauty.37 In his conclusion to Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease, Clark Lawlor observes that “the praise of spiritualised women fading into God’s glory is rarely, if at all, to be found after the 1880s … The poetry of consumption was closely connected with Evangelical sentimentality, a force that declined in the 1880s. Secular science began to displace religion and the accompanying notion of the good death, a shift accelerated by quick and brutal deaths on a mass scale in the First World War.”38 What Lawlor observes of the “poetry of consumption” is equally true of late-nineteenth-century literature in general; therefore, the conventional Victorian scripting of Ruby’s death, both religiously and romantically, and the voyeuristic scrutinizing of the “uncanny beauty” of her corpse, seem out of place in the second decade of the twentieth century. Unlike the death of Old Grandmother in Magic for Marigold, which Elizabeth Epperly discusses in chapter 16 – “the cresting wave of the 52

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story about an impending death has a darkly comic and revealing undertow”39 – the depiction of Ruby’s “summons” is simply an undertow, pulling back to a previous time. While, with Anne, Montgomery has created a character whose “ginger” enables her to defy a consumptive’s death script, with Ruby, she falls back on Victorian images and narratives. Moreover, as she begins to write Anne of the Island in September 1913, Montgomery understands that even Anne is a reversion to a time whose “atmosphere” she has “outgrown” and is “out of fashion with [her] later development.”40 She is at odds with this outmoded atmosphere, including Anne’s domesticated version of death and an afterlife – “bridging the gulf between the two lives and making of death a mere passing from one dwelling to the other” – characteristic of the sentimental consolatory literature of the previous century.41 Montgomery parodies these ideas in many earlier and later texts, from the Avonlea girls’ discussion of what they will wear in heaven and Anne’s delight that she will be able to wear pink to Davy’s conviction that heaven is in Simon Fletcher’s garret and Miss Cornelia’s hope that it will be a big kitchen.42 Here, however, Montgomery delivers these ideas straight, through Anne’s musings at Ruby’s deathbed. Because Anne fails to see them as “comforting falsehoods,” she finds “silent sympathy” with Ruby more fitting “than broken, imperfect words.” While she believes that “the new ideas that had vaguely begun to shape themselves in her mind, concerning the great mysteries of life here and hereafter” are indicative of her passing from childhood to adulthood,43 she is still in thrall to old Victorianisms, which Montgomery only too clearly understood. For Anne, it is not the deaths of Matthew, Ruby, the infant Joy, or Captain Jim44 that bring her into the twentieth century, but that of Walter, her uncannily beautiful soldier son, with his uncannily beautiful vision of life – and of death. In Rilla of Ingleside, Walter Blythe is represented as one of the over fifty thousand Canadian casualties of the First World War who died in combat overseas. What happens when there is no body for the dead soldier’s survivors to mourn in conventional ways? Because bodies could not be repatriated from war zones, countless families were left with only an ossified memory of a young soldier son, husband, or father, 53

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and – perhaps – a public war memorial, honouring the fallen collectively.45 Many of these memorials attempted to keep the ideal of sacrifice alive through the Homeric kalos Thanatos, which informed the medieval chivalric ethos prevalent throughout the nineteenth century, largely due to the popularity of Tennyson’s Arthurian poetry. Ana CardenCoyne sums up the Homeric code when she discusses “the corporeality of classical war monuments [lending] itself to a profoundly gendered representation of death as masculine and beautiful, and the renewal of life in peacetime, as feminine and maternal.” In Homeric songs and medieval romances, “a warrior’s passage to heroic immortality occurs when he ‘dies young and stays pretty.’” Carden-Coyne continues: “What the ancients referred to as ‘beautiful death’ (kalos thanatos), invoked the ideals of noble sacrifice bound up with the beauty of youthful masculinity”; furthermore, affirming the “gender of death,” kalos Thanatos ensured “fame, glory and eternal youth.”46 The plot of kalos Thanatos – a beautiful warrior’s beautiful death – not only dominated postwar memorialization but also became part of the lure for young men to enlist, especially during the first half of the Great War. Moreover, it dominated the Presbyterian attitudes of leaders like General Douglas Haig and recruitment sermons of ministers, as represented by Rilla of Ingleside’s Reverend John Knox Meredith. “‘We lament too much over death,’ Haig said, quoting approvingly his own chosen army pastor, Reverend George Duncan of the Church of Scotland, whose services he attended. ‘We should regard it as a [welcome] change to another room … Three years of war and the loss of one-tenth of the manhood of the nation is not too great a price to pay in so great a cause.’”47 “Everything  …  has to be purchased by self-sacrifice,” Mr Meredith says, elaborating on his sermon based on the text “Without shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.” On Black Sunday, he bases his text on “He that endureth to the end shall be saved” – that is, “endureth” in principle and be “saved” at the Second Coming.48 It is not surprising, therefore, that the draft notice was euphemistically referred to as “the summons.”49 War was equated with death – manly, chivalric death – entered into by noble warriors.50 Although Walter seems to conform in several ways to the kalos Thanatos motif, Rilla of Ingleside and 54

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The Blythes Are Quoted introduce a nuanced interrogation of its relevance in modern warfare – and modern life – through suggestions of his potential death wish when he finally enlists and then, compounded by possible shell shock, once he encounters first-hand the realities of war. Throughout Rainbow Valley, Walter is slighted for his “feminine” appearance and interests, a self-perception he seems to have adopted as he enters adulthood. When the other Island boys embrace “The Sound of a Going” (title of chapter 5, Rilla of Ingleside), Walter hesitates and declares to Rilla that he is a “coward” and “should have been a girl,” especially because of his aversion to “thrusting a bayonet through another man.” After Walter empathizes with the women and children torpedoed on the Lusitania, his empathy for the men he will be killing seems to wane, engendering a fearlessness that conforms to the kalos Thanatos prototype. This is seen in his idealistic reasons for enlisting (chivalric sacrifice), his decorated heroism on the battlefield, his unwavering commitment to “the Idea,” and his clean death – “killed instantly by a bullet during a charge at Courcelette.” His “immortal” poem, “The Piper,” a “classic from its first printing,” brings him fame. It is then used as a propaganda tool to inspire more idealistic young men to enlist, thus perpetuating the manly warrior image and narrative.51 There have been various interpretations of Walter’s piper – Mary Rubio discusses them in The Gift of Wings, the Scottish bagpiper of Rainbow Valley “morph[ing] into a more mysterious figure in Rilla,” “the deadly ‘Pied Piper’ of the children’s fairy tale”52 – but there is another possible precursor, that of J.M. Barrie’s androgynous Peter Pan, which destabilizes Walter’s associations with kalos Thanatos. Granted, Peter Pan’s view of death as life’s last big adventure may seem more appropriate for Jem’s pursuit of “high adventure” through enlisting.53 The implications of Peter Pan’s words, however, have great relevance for Walter, his death, and the problematizing of manly death. Peter Pan’s bravado was exploited for recruitment during the war, especially after the dying words of Charles Frohman, the producer who had brought Peter Pan to the stage with Maude Adams in the lead role, circulated in the press. As he went down with the Lusitania, Frohman is reported as paraphrasing Peter Pan: “Why fear death? It is the most beautiful 55

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adventure life gives us.” Peter Pan’s retreat into a Neverland of deferred aging has been interpreted as a death wish.54 In Rilla of Ingleside, when Ken leaves for war, the narrator (filtering through Rilla’s sense of loss) comments, “Brothers and playmates and sweetheart – they were all gone, never, it might be, to return. Yet still the Piper piped and the dance of death went on,” equating the piper’s alluring call-to-war with death. The clearly male piper in Walter’s letter to Rilla morphs metaphorically into a Peter Pan–ish death wish as Walter envisions the piper “marching across No-man’s-land.” Walter insists that this “tall shadowy form, piping weirdly” followed by “a shadowy host … boys in khaki” is real, not an illusion.55 Thus a possible reading of Walter’s poem “The Aftermath” is as the persona’s death wish: after all, it is “a stripling boy,” a possible “brother slim and fair,” a “pale and pretty lad” – reminiscent of the many references to Walter’s beauty – that the persona runs through with his bayonet: “I killed him horribly and I was glad.”56 The collective “we” of the voice of the poem not only comprises both slayer and slayed but also extends this death wish beyond Walter to all those idealistic young men who have witnessed and engaged in actions that leave them in a world to which they can no longer commit. Kalos Thanatos no longer carries meaning in this world. It may seem a stretch to read Rilla of Ingleside through the lens of Sandra Gilbert’s argument that no man’s land is a place where men become “unmen,” as the soldier understands that his body is a mere instrument of the war effort and that he is “an inhabitant of the inhumane new era and a citizen of the unpromising new land into which this war of wars had led him.” However, Eric Leed’s argument that no man’s land is a liminal space where “the traumatic experience of combat itself and the wholesale shattering of the conventions and ethical codes of normal social life turned ordinary civilians into ‘liminal men,’ men living beyond the limits of the accepted and the expected,” is applicable to Walter’s situation.57 In Death So Noble, Jonathan Vance addresses within a Canadian context the role of “strict censorship and government control of the press,” among other factors, in contributing to the disconnect between nineteenth-century images of the “Happy Warrior” on a battlefield “full of vitality and colour” rendered through the 56

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“discourse of High Diction” – the “only frame of reference” that those in the homeland had – and the bleak reality of a no man’s land littered with dead bodies and machines.58 Walter displays not only a death wish but also possible signs of shell shock in his letter to Rilla and in his poem “The Aftermath” in reaction to this uncanny liminal space, further destabilizing the manly warrior image. At the time, shell shock was considered a form of hysteria, the “most epidemical of all diseases,” and “a manifestation of childishness and femininity,” to cite pei-born (Sir) Andrew Macphail, who became renowned for his literary, military, and medical contributions. Shell shock was, Macphail maintained, “closely allied with … the desire for self-inflicted wounds.”59 Later research, such as that of Martin Stone and Mark Humphries, reveals shell shock in the Great War to be a “mass epidemic” with 40 to 50 per cent of those invalided out of heavy fighting zones by the end of 1916 being soldiers suffering from various forms of war trauma. Both Stone and Humphries discuss how courage being exploited as a recruitment tool and a mechanism to foster camaraderie in the trenches contributed to a feminized “pathology of shellshock” that challenged “idealized masculinities.”60 In Rilla of Ingleside, Walter earns his Distinguished Conduct medal by “dash[ing] back from the safety of the trench to drag in a wounded comrade who had fallen on No-man’s-land.” Once at the front, Jem is often “sick with fear,” but Walter seems immune from fear, his colonel declaring him to be “the bravest man in the regiment.”61 Although shell shock was generally viewed as a retreat into sickness to escape the sickness of fear and even military duty, for others, albeit a small minority, shell shock manifested itself as an escape from life.62 Before he was hospitalized for shell shock, Siegfried Sassoon exhibited such “reckless enthusiasm” – indicative of “a possible death wish” – that he earned the nickname “Mad Jack.”63 Has Rainbow Valley’s “Miss Walter” – whom Faith Meredith considers her “knight,” her “Sir Galahad,” when he fights Dan Reeves over a matter of honour – become “wild-cat” Walter, as he did years before, when “a savage fury and a joy in the struggle” are unleashed?64 Has Walter, like the family cat, become increasingly “Hyder” – more crazed, more murderous  –  with every German victory? On Armistice Day, 57

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Mr Hyde disappears forever and, as the title of the penultimate chapter suggests, “goes to his own place” – an allusion to Susan’s belief that the family’s hell-cat has taken up his final abode where he belongs. Walter enlists knowing that war is “a death-grapple,” “a hellish, horrible, hideous thing – too horrible and hideous to happen in the twentieth century between civilized nations” with “its threat to the beauty of life.”65 His vision of war is confirmed, although he never reveals the extent of the horror in his letters home, this inability to share frequently being a contributing factor to shell shock.66 He may maintain the facade of the manly warrior, but the implications of the disconnect between this manliness and the potentially traumatic effects of those clinging to this manliness are dire. “None of them came back [from war] just as they went away, not even those who had been so fortunate as to escape any injury,” observes the narrator of Rilla of Ingleside. Miller Douglas returns with an amputated leg; Carl Meredith with one blind eye; Ken Ford with a narrow white scar on his face; Jem Blythe with a “barely perceptible limp” and “grey hairs in [his] ruddy curls.” The memory of the “shadow army” – euphemistically, the “army of the fallen” – is equally maimed. After Rilla falteringly qualifies that Walter’s death is “not too high a price for freedom” if the survivors “keep faith,” and Gertrude breaks the ensuing silence by reciting Walter’s “The Piper,” Mr Meredith toasts the dead as a “silent army.”67 Had this invisible army remained a “silent army,” as Mr Meredith suggests, the image of a beautiful soldier-boy and script of a beautiful death may have calcified in the collective memory.68 Unlike the frenetic Mr Hyde, who is “heard of no more” after Armistice Day, the dead Walter is heard of and heard from through his poetry, but it will not be the jingoistic “Piper,” with his “sweet and long and low” piping perpetuating the kalos Thanatos ideal of willingness to sacrifice life for “Freedom,” that resonates with survivors and future generations.69 The “Au Revoir” section of The Blythes Are Quoted comprises four poems by Walter. The first two centre on the persona’s desire to revert to a time and place of solitude and beauty, a past dead and gone: in “I Want,” it is “a sweet dim night / In an old tangled garden” with its “scented darkness,” a reversion to childhood and “home”; in “The 58

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Pilgrim,” it is an “eternal quest” for beauty in the face of “black rain clouds in the west,” seeking “some fair uncharted way, / Where I shall meet my dead / Dear dreams of yesterday.”70 The final two poems centre on the persona’s desire to progress – rather than regress – to this deathlike existence. In “Spring Song,” the persona expresses confidence (“I know”) that spring will follow winter; however, this confidence is undermined by Anne’s pondering “how we could live through [winter] if it were not for the hope of spring.”71 The final poem in this final quartet, “The Aftermath,” reinforces this uncertainty with “evermore / Must spring be hateful and the dawn a shame.” Anne reads this poem, which was among the papers she received after Walter’s death, only to Jem, the other son to have witnessed death during war, and says to him, “I am thankful now … that Walter did not come back. He could never have lived with his memories … and if he had seen the futility of the sacrifice they made then mirrored in this ghastly holocaust …”72 Montgomery wrote these words sometime in the months before she died on 24 April 1942, midway through another world war. This faltering, incomplete sentence, Anne’s response to Walter’s poem, is the final statement – the final words – that Montgomery would pen for her habitually ebullient heroine, whose imagination and optimism once sustained her through many deaths and their aftermaths. An earlier poem, Anne’s “Come, Let Us Go,” could be construed as indicative of her own – both Montgomery’s and Anne’s – and her society’s death wish. Although it opens with a description of “friendly meadows touched with spring,” it concludes with “the gentle night will be kind to me /… And I shall find when that step is crossed / A secret of peace that the world has lost.”73 Montgomery’s journal entries are marked by an increasing sense of despair after the First World War, and, by 1937, she fears “going mad” and talks of “the calm of despair” and wanting to die because “the bitterness of death … is not to be compared to the bitterness of life. Bitterness like some gnawing incurable disease.”74 In breaking silence has Walter, like other soldier-poets – Charles Hamilton Sorley, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney, Robert Graves, and others, whose poetry “has coalesced, beyond literary history and cultural memory, into a recognisable structure of 59

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feeling” – failed to keep faith in a manly warrior script by exposing the ugliness and madness of war?75 Canadian war artist Fred Varley encapsulates the futility of keeping the “idea” alive in the wake of the taint war has inflicted with the two-word title of his 1918 painting For What? and in a letter to his wife: “We’d be healthier to forget [the war], & that we never can. We are for ever tainted with its abortiveness & its cruel drama … To be normal … well it’s forgetfulness.”76 Walter once believed that an “unfitness” of soul rather than body – “it’s a taint and a disgrace” – prevented his enlisting;77 a poem such as “The Aftermath” suggests, however, that his war experiences have unleashed an unfitness of soul that would have prevented his ever returning home to marry Una – another Arthurian character who, by the end of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, marries her Redcrosse Knight after rescuing him from despair and the temptations of escape from life’s miseries through suicide. The myth to which so many clung was that “it was unthinkable that the twentieth-century crusader could have been transformed into an animal or an empty shell by fighting God’s battles,” that the “soldier’s soul” could not be hardened or changed in any way.78 Walter is tainted, and thus no longer fit to sit before the hearth in domestic harmony with the extended Blythe household twenty years later. Jem says that “Walter never bayonetted anyone, mother. But he saw … he saw …” and then cites Matthew Arnold’s “Absence”: “We forget because we must.”79 Anne, who once greeted each day with a thrill at the promise it brings – “to-morrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet”80 – is now thankful that Walter has died and need not experience the same desire for eternal oblivion as she. Montgomery’s soldier-characters resemble those of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, of which Margaret Higonnet writes that “the young men who have seen battle return as a mystery to others: they are both familiar and unrecognizable, both ‘new’ and ‘dimly familiar,’ uncanny bearers of the sign of death.”81 While true of the returning soldiers in Rilla of Ingleside – Jem and Ken, in particular82 – this is equally true of the “shadow army,” who are kept alive not just in memory but through letters and poems read posthumously that undermine the images and script of kalos Thanatos. The only way that the “shadow army” can 60

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escape the taint is to remain unchanged in the memories of the survivors by remaining silent. And this they do not – cannot – do. Walter’s death can, therefore, be seen as joining those deaths in texts by other women writers of the First World War in which “‘heroic death’ … is redefined as an uncanny disease that invades the social body and corrupts the collective psyche.”83 The “ghastly holocaust” that Anne observes is an uncanny reminder of “the futility of the sacrifice” made by those who clung – and cling – to outmoded ideas of beauty and death.84 Discussing the “uncanny beauty” of representations of death – “Every representation of death necessarily represses what it purports to reveal” – Bronfen and Goodwin conclude that there is always a “what else” underlying the representation.85 For Montgomery, the “what else” is, as Byrne writes of the “myths and metaphors” of consumption, a means “to reflect and indeed produce the anxieties and preoccupations of its community.”86 As the consumptive Ruby crosses the threshold to join her bridegroom, Death, and as Walter follows the Piper over the top into “no man’s land,” binaries – peace and war, the home front and battlefront, life and death, feminine and masculine – are destabilized. The “uncanny beauty” of the bodies of both the feminine consumptive and the masculine warrior is superseded by their own and their society’s “uncanny disease,” a disease that has infected even the most life-affirming of characters – Anne Shirley.

No t e s 1 Bronfen and Goodwin, “Introduction,” 20 (emphasis in original), 12, 19. They root their discussion in Blanchot’s “Two Versions of the Imaginary.” 2 Freud, Uncanny, 124, 125, 155. 3 This is the title of the sixth chapter of Ann Douglas’s controversial study, The Feminization of American Culture. It is generally conceded that, despite the highly polemical stance Douglas takes toward nineteenth-century women writers and readers in her book’s thesis, she provides valuable insights into religious and literary trends of mid-nineteenth-century America. 4 Bronfen and Goodwin, “Introduction,” use these terms (19, 15). 5 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 20. 6 Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination, 31.

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7 Cusack, A Magnificent Gift Declined, 4, 1. 8 Prycer, “Hectic Flush,” 264, 265, 267. Sontag does not actually use the labels around which Prycer structures her argument, instead discussing variants of the metaphor of tuberculosis, some with “contradictory applications” (Sontag, Illness, 25). While Prycer acknowledges that the “types may overlap,” the distinctions she makes between “Passionate Patient” and “Beautiful Invalid” seem particularly arbitrary, not only because Ruby and Cissy display characteristics of both, but also because, as the following discussion will demonstrate, Prycer’s arguments that “the ‘Passionate Patient’s’ consumption was caused by an innate passion, whether political, moral, or sexual” and that “the disease … became a kind of judgment on the individual” simply do not apply to the depiction of Ruby’s illness and death (“Hectic Flush,” 264). 9 Byrne, Tuberculosis, 6–7. 10 Montgomery knew and admired du Maurier’s Trilby. In a journal entry for 20 December 1904, she records rereading the novel and refers to it as a “dear delightful book where three of my very dearest friends live – ‘Taffy’ and ‘The Laird,’ and ‘Little Billee’” (cj 2:114). These are the three British artists who become increasingly enamoured of the beauty of the consumptive model Trilby: “Day by day she grew more beautiful in their eyes, in spite of her increasing pallor and emaciation – her skin was so pure and white and delicate, and the bones of her face so admirable!” (du Maurier, Trilby, 244). Discussions of Trilby’s feminine consumptive aesthetic can be found in Byrne, Tuberculosis, 105–23; Silver, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body, 127–35; and Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 34–6. Montgomery records another rereading of Trilby, 18 September 1922 (sj 3:71). 11 Lerer, “I’ve got a feeling for Ophelia,” gives a very different reading of this scene than mine, concluding that Anne of Green Gables “offers a lesson in the ways that a dramatic imagination shapes the lives of female children” by treating their theatrics dismissively as “ridiculous” and insane (20–2). 12 There are several different interpretations of Siddal’s disease and cause of death; however, until recently, she was usually considered to be consumptive. 13 Byrne, Tuberculosis, 99–101, 7. 14 Montgomery, agg, 131, 281. In his book on Dalton Sanatorium in Emyvale, twenty-five kilometres west of Charlottetown, Leonard Cusack discusses the attempts to educate the general population about preventing and treating tuberculosis. To exemplify the resistance to these reforms by the older Islanders, he draws upon the scene from Emily of New Moon in which Dr Burnley “forcefully tell[s] Aunt Elizabeth that Emily should be in the open air all the time for health reasons.” Cusack adds: “Due to her mother’s death from tuberculosis and the high rate of tb in the province, Montgomery would have been aware of the Islanders’ attitude regarding the current 62

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

treatments for the disease” (Cusack, Magnificent Gift, 7–8; Montgomery, enm, 219–20). Howey, “Reading Elaine,” 100. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 153. Montgomery, agg, 253–5. Ott, Fevered Lives, 13. Dijkstra, Idols, 41. Ibid., 39. Montgomery, agg, 256, 257. Howey, “Reading Elaine,” 86, 90–1, 98, 96. Byrne, Tuberculosis, 35. Prycer, “Hectic Flush,” 268. Prycer interprets Douglas Starr autobiographically, arguing that “Montgomery may have fulfilled her own desires to have the opportunity to say goodbye to a parent dying of consumption … Longing for memories of her mother, she gives that gift to Emily, who also must live as a survivor of the ravages of consumption” (ibid., 268). Montgomery, enm, 151–2, 252. Montgomery, ec, 217, 76 (emphasis in original). Montgomery, agg, 281. Montgomery, ai, 83. Clark Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, provides examples of “consumptive fashion and self-fashioning” from the lateeighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries (158–61; emphasis in original) and of “dire warnings,” such as that of David Humphreys, who in an 1804 poem asks, “Will ye, blest fair! adopt from every zone / Fantastic fashions, noxious in your own? / At wintry balls in gauzy garments drest, / Admit the dire destroyer in your breast?” (quoted in ibid., 159). That such attitudes lasted well into the nineteenth century is demonstrated by medical treatises such as Edwin Alabone’s The Cure of Consumption, already in its sixth edition by 1880, which also links these feminine afflictions with sexual immorality and consumption (Byrne, Tuberculosis, 25–9). Montgomery, ai, 88–9, 102–3, 111. Montgomery, sj 4:41. This is in response to a review in her clipping-service file that praised the chapter. Montgomery, agg, 154, 222, 260. Byrne, Tuberculosis, 6. Montgomery, ai, 79–80. Ott, Fevered Lives, 10; cf. ibid., 71. Lawlor, Consumption, 5–6, notes the same characteristics in earlier sources. Montgomery, ai, 105, 109–10. Guthke, Gender of Death, 4–5. Montgomery, ai, 110; Montgomery, agg, 280–1. 63

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38 Lawlor, Consumption, 189. 39 Epperly, “Magic for Marigold,” this volume, 335. 40 Montgomery, My Dear Mr. M, 68 (emphasis in original). In all her journal entries tracking the writing of Anne of the Island  –  from initial blocking (1 September 1913) to actual writing (18 April 1914) and finishing (20 November 1914) – Montgomery laments its nostalgia, sentiment-deterring humour, and sentimentality. Receiving her copy of the novel (26 July 1915), she states, “There is less of real life in it than in any of my other books” (L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals, Ontario Years, 1911-1917, 130, 155–6, 172, 201). 41 Montgomery, ai, 107. Anne’s vision of heaven is not as literal or proprietary as the extreme examples that Douglas provides from the nineteenth century, such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar (1868): “The occupants of Phelps’s heaven – engaged in good works, keeping up with earthly news, redecorating their homes, falling in love, and gratifying their various tastes  –  live in a celestial retirement village” (Feminization, 226). In 1897, Montgomery mentions reading The Gates Ajar, noting that Phelps’s “conception of Heaven seems a helpful and reasonable one.” Despite desiring to accept Phelps’s “pleasing conception” that a heavenly life will be just like an earthly one until we slowly “expand into perfect holiness,” Montgomery cannot will herself into believing this vision of a celestial afterlife (cj 1:382). 42 Montgomery, aa, 105–6, 133–4; Montgomery, rv, 103–4. The conversation that Anne, Susan, and Miss Cornelia have in Rainbow Valley seems to be testing other ideas about the “everlasting rest doctrine” of an afterlife when Anne counters with a perception of death as opening a gate and going “through – on – on – to new, shining adventures” (ibid., 103). As Tara Parmiter develops in this volume, chapter 15, Montgomery also critiques a specific kind of consolation literature – “the scripts for responding to a mother’s anguish” – in the impact that the infant Joy’s death has on Anne in Anne’s House of Dreams, the writing of which came out of Montgomery’s “lived experience” of the stillborn death of Hugh on 13 August 1914 (“Like a Childless Mother,” 325, 328; emphasis in original). See note 40 for the dates pertaining to the writing of Anne of the Island. 43 Montgomery, ai, 106–7. 44 Matthew’s death is recorded in chapters 36 and 37 of Anne of Green Gables, infant Joy’s and Captain Jim’s in chapters 19 and 39, respectively, of Anne’s House of Dreams. 45 Vance, Death So Noble, 60–2. 46 Carden-Coyne, “Gendering Death and Renewal,” 40–1. Carden-Coyne’s examples are Australian. Interspersed throughout Jonathan Vance’s Death So Noble are examples of war memorials, both overseas and in Canada, often located in beautiful, serene, garden-like locales; many memorials draw upon 64

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47

48

49 50

51

52 53 54

55 56 57 58

nineteenth-century conventions of “Happy Warrior” iconography and “High Diction” discourse to “keep the faith.” Hochschild, To End All Wars, 180; Hochschild cites Haig’s diaries, housed in the National Library of Scotland, and De Groot, Douglas Haig, 241, in which the word “welcome” appears. Montgomery, ri, 50 (emphasis in original), 235. Although there are no specific references to Mr Meredith’s recruitment sermons in Rilla of Ingleside, Presbyterian ministers used the pulpit for recruitment. For Ewan Macdonald’s involvement with recruitment and “survivor guilt,” see Rubio, Lucy Maud Montgomery, 188, 192–3, 199, 203, 205, 211. Mr Meredith certainly believes in “the Idea,” as is evidenced in his conversations throughout the novel: see, for examples, ri, 165–6, 179, 268. That Montgomery was well aware of the moral and psychological implications of recruitment is revealed when Cousin Sophia declares that she “could never speak at a recruiting meeting,” because she would never be able to “reconcile it to [her] conscience to ask another woman’s son to go, to murder and be murdered” (ibid., 152). Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 22. See Vance, Death So Noble, chapter 2 (“Christ in Flanders”), for various spiritual metaphors that Canadian church leaders, literary writers, and the media applied to the soldier: Prince of Peace, Saviour, Knight of the Round Table, Crusader, and so on. For Walter’s hesitations about and then his enlisting, see Montgomery, ri, 46–8, 118; for the announcement of his death, see ibid., 190; for his poem’s bringing him fame and being used as a propaganda tool, see ibid., 167, 179. Rubio, Lucy Maud Montgomery, 285–6. Montgomery, ri, 207; cf. ibid., 20. Literary Digest, 22 May 1915, quoted in Robertson, “To Die Will Be an Awfully Big Adventure,” 57. For a discussion of Peter Pan’s death wish and Barrie’s revisions of this line, see Maria Tatar’s annotation of this passage in Barrie, The Annotated Peter Pan, 108, and Clement, “Introduction,” 10–11. See also Adams, Great Adventure, 86–8, which includes a reference to Theodore Roosevelt’s introductory statement in his The Great Adventure (1918): “Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are parts of the same Great Adventure” (1). Montgomery, ri, 139, 191. Montgomery, bq, 509–10 (“The Aftermath,” lines 8–12; see also line 32). Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart,” 198 (emphasis in original); Leed, No Man’s Land, back cover. Vance, Death So Noble, 90–1, 94–5.

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59 Macphail, Official History, 273. It was at the Macphail homestead in Orwell, pei, that Montgomery met Earl Grey in 1910. In preparation for meeting Macphail, Montgomery read his antifeminist Essays in Fallacy (1910): “a very fascinating and stimulating volume, with a good deal of disagreeable truth in it,” comments Montgomery (cj 2:307). 60 Stone, “Shellshock and the Psychologists,” 245, 248–9, 263; Humphries, “War’s Long Shadow,” 506–10, 513–14, 517–18. 61 Montgomery, ri, 166, 274–5. 62 Humphries, “Wilfully and with Intent,” 371. 63 Hipp, Poetry of Shell Shock, 26–7. 64 Montgomery, rv, 120–2, 124. 65 Montgomery, ri, 219, 34, 20. 66 Stone, “Shellshock,” 263–4. Vance, Death So Noble, mentions “self-censorship” among Canadian troops as a general practice “to allay the fears of loved ones” (96). 67 Montgomery, ri, 272–6, 260, 267–8. 68 Vance, Death So Noble, writes: “Eric Leed remarked that silence was a dominant characteristic of Great War veterans, caused either by a neurasthenic reaction to the horror of war or by an intellectual inability to convey the realities of battle. Both variants exist in the Canadian canon” (52; Leed, No Man’s Land, 190–2, 208). 69 Montgomery, ri, 270; bq, 3 (“The Piper,” lines 2, 11–12). 70 Montgomery, bq, 502–3 (“I Want,” lines 14–17, 29–30), 505–6 (“The Pilgrim,” lines 27–8, 2, 14–16). 71 Ibid., 507–8 (“Spring Song,” lines 3, 7, 11). 72 Ibid., 509–10 (“The Aftermath,” lines 25–6); ellipses in original. 73 Ibid., 367–8 (“Come, Let Us Go,” lines 1, 25–30). 74 Montgomery, sj 5:143. For postwar malaise, including suicides, and Montgomery’s “growing frustration with a world that did not reward noble thoughts and good deeds,” see Rubio, Lucy Maud Montgomery, 203–4. 75 Das, “Reframing First World War Poetry,” 4. Canada did not produce a similar body of antiwar poetry by soldier-poets – perhaps because well into the interwar period many “considered the antiwar vision as simply the product of sick minds … [and] as a real threat to Canadian life” – although there are examples of ambivalent critiques of outmoded mythologizing of war (Vance, Death So Noble, 190; cf. ibid., 77, 92–3, 174–5, 186–97, 236–8). 76 Oliver and Brandon, Canvas of War, 5. 77 Montgomery, ri, 90. 78 Vance, Death So Noble, 53–4. 79 Montgomery, bq, 510 (ellipses in original). 80 Montgomery, agg, 214. 66

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81 Higonnet, “Women in the Forbidden Zone,” 202. 82 When Ken returns, Rilla does not know who he is: “there was certainly something very familiar about him … he was so much changed.” Only Dog Monday greets Jem and recognizes his master immediately. Anne is “afraid to take her eyes off him lest he vanish out of her sight” (Montgomery, ri, 276–7, 273–4). 83 Bronfen and Goodwin, “Introduction,” 15. 84 Montgomery, bq, 510. 85 Bronfen and Goodwin, “Introduction,” 19–20. 86 Byrne, Tuberculosis, 11.

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3 Barney of the Island Nature and Gender in Montgomery’s The Blue Castle

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n In Montgomery’s novels, the natural world in some way saves the

heroines. Anne Shirley has had a horrific childhood, caring for multiple sets of twins, with a drunk father figure looming over her; once she moves to Green Gables, she arguably enters a somewhat carefree existence, in part by being in nature.1 Anne sets the tone for the rest of Montgomery’s heroines: Kilmeny of the Orchard is best able to express herself through her violin while in an orchard;2 The Story Girl is like a pagan goddess, wearing flowers in her hair and going barefoot as she weaves stories;3 Jane of Lantern Hill throws off her grandmother’s restrictive authority, influential only in urban Toronto, during her time on the rural Prince Edward Island.4 These protagonists are able to foster their own connection to nature, generally through time spent outdoors, and this affiliation serves to support their identity and therefore their agency. No one provides their “bridge” to the natural world; instead,

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these heroines’ abilities to commune with nature appears to be innate. In fact, their connection to nature seems to stem from their femininity, just as the natural world is often gendered feminine.5 This trend takes a different form with the advent of Valancy Stirling in Montgomery’s 1926 novel, The Blue Castle. Valancy is fond of nature, though she has never experienced it first-hand. She encounters the natural world through the nature books of John Foster, the nom de plume of Barney Snaith, her eventual husband. Within this chapter, I argue that nature saves Valancy, delivering her into a domestic space that offers her freedom, but only because the feminized Foster/Barney connects her to the natural world. While it is not unusual for Montgomery to have feminized male characters,6 in The Blue Castle it is because of the feminized Foster/Barney that Valancy is able to step into an “idealized domesticity.” This domesticity is common in Montgomery novels; Laura Robinson calls it “a dialogue” between two positions, “one stressing conformity for the heroine and one allowing agency.”7 In this way, Valancy learns to navigate social expectations, while still exercising a level of freedom.

Valancy and John Foster At the beginning of the novel, Valancy is not the spirited Montgomery heroine to which readers are accustomed; in fact, she is more like Jane Austen’s “too silent … model of domestic virtue” Fanny Price8 than Anne Shirley. Valancy’s femininity is demure, cowed by the patriarchy. In part, this timidity is due to her dictatorial mother, who, as Jackie Stallcup observes, traps Valancy with her “steel webs of social expectations.”9 Unlike Montgomery’s orphaned heroines, who have, as Gabriella Åhmansson phrases it, “no immediate role model of feminine behaviour,” Valancy is “torn between what Mother expects and what Mother forbids.”10 For Valancy there are no options: she does what is expected of her. Despite her dutiful obedience, her family apparently does not care about her, often ridiculing Valancy’s appearance and old-maid status. Mrs Stirling forces Valancy into the restrictive “angel in the house” role, derived from Coventry Patmore’s poem,11 which details the Victorian ideal woman. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar observe, the angel “has no story … [which] is really a life of death.”12 69

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This pronouncement feels true for Valancy whose days centre around her mother’s demands: sleeping, eating, cleaning, quilting, all as Mrs Stirling dictates. However, in rebellion, Valancy cultivates a rich inner world; she invents the imaginary “Blue Castle,” a fairy-tale-like “castle of blue sapphire,”13 where she can live as she wants. Unlike the situation in her actual home, she has a voice as the queen of this castle, and despite her determined spinsterhood, she has regular suitors. There is then a tension between Valancy’s desired femininity – which contains some element of agency – and that which her mother has forced upon her. In particular, this agency allows Valancy to choose how she defines “proper” womanhood, despite what society might dictate to the contrary. Furthermore, Mrs Stirling restricts Valancy to being indoors. If Valancy goes outside, she must put on the armour of the flannel petticoat to protect herself from the elements. For the Stirlings, nature is unsafe, a realm that cannot be controlled or domesticated. Staying inside keeps Valancy under her mother’s authority and, ultimately, under the dictates of society. Nature is more than just a wild force, though. As Elizabeth Epperly observes, Montgomery “focused on nature as a way to understand and to illustrate the human heart.”14 Separated from nature, Valancy cannot, in Epperly’s words, understand her own heart or act on her desires. Valancy’s rose bush illustrates her disconnect from the natural world. While the rose bush is a thriving plant, it has never produced a bloom, just as Valancy has grown into adulthood, yet her life lacks what she believes matters: someone to care for and a home of her own. John Foster’s books alone connect Valancy to nature, and his words likewise attribute influence to the natural world: “It is no use to seek the woods for any motive except sheer love of them; they will find us out at once and hide all their sweet, old-world secrets from us.”15 Foster’s words imply that, in true communion with nature, readers might access something hitherto unknown, the “old-world secrets,” which are perhaps the key to understanding themselves. Thus, in keeping Valancy from nature, Mrs Stirling prevents Valancy from “blossoming” into her true self. Not only is Valancy trapped indoors; she is also trapped by fear: “All her life she had been afraid of something.”16 Perhaps this fear comes from being confined within her mother’s house away from the natural world, a 70

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“Yellow Wallpaper”–like existence. Just as in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story,17 in which the heroine’s suffering is caused by adhering to a culturally constructed, constricting femininity, so too is Valancy being suffocated. Valancy’s room even echoes Gilman’s, with its “yellow-painted floor” and “one stiff, yellow chair.”18 Whereas Gilman’s heroine eventually gives in to a sort of madness, Valancy’s powerlessness breeds a general fear of everything. Valancy’s first recollection is of being frightened by her female Cousin Stickles’s story of an imaginary bear who lives in a closet. While this fictionalized bear is certainly something that might frighten a child, it also represents the danger that lurks in the domestic space. In staying in the home, away from nature, and being forced to aspire to idealized womanhood, Valancy is vulnerable. That the menace takes the form of a bear could be interpreted as the unknown and therefore dangerous natural world, or perhaps even unbridled masculinity, against which the angel in the house has no defence. The latter interpretation correlates with what Shirley Foster and Judy Simons call “ideologies of masculine perfection [which] threaten women, as well as how certain aspects of femininity – such as extreme submissiveness – encourage and even collude with this [masculine] tyranny.”19 In her habitual obedience, Valancy has no defence against either threat the bear might represent. This “extreme submissiveness” is present not just in Valancy’s fears of the imagined bear in the closet, but also in her real-life relationships with her family: she is “dumb in their presence merely because she is afraid of them.”20 Her male relatives, in particular her wealthy Uncle Benjamin, pose a threat to Valancy. He holds traditional patriarchal power, both in the family and in society, causing Valancy to be “afraid of offending Uncle Benjamin,”21 lest he should cut her out of his will. As Valancy is unmarried, and her mother is forced to economize what little they have, Valancy is dependent on her Uncle Benjamin’s future generosity. Consequently, Valancy is surrounded by imaginary and real-life bears, or threats, to her well-being. Valancy’s illness is a symptom of the “[f]ear [that] has prevented [Valancy] from emerging as a person, a subject in her own right.”22 She is trapped within the confines of her own “Yellow Wallpaper” existence, and this pain around her heart, rather than madness, is the result. For Kate Lawson, Valancy’s illness is key 71

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to her eventual freedom: “the illness … is harnessed by her to escape from this tedious existence.”23 However, I argue that, while her illness is key to Valancy claiming agency, it is merely a catalyst. Instead, the influence of the natural world is central to Valancy’s recovery. Without direct access to nature, as Holly Pike observes, Foster’s books offer a “tonic” similar to that of “an actual sojourn in the woods.”24 Ultimately, Foster’s words mobilize Valancy, aiding her in overcoming her timidity. Valancy’s fear forces her into a submissive state most of the time. She obeys her mother and cousin without resistance, despite her desire to disregard their demands. However, her illness brings her to town for the new Foster book and to visit the doctor. Upon arriving, Valancy is afraid of angering her family by patronizing someone other than the family doctor (who is, in fact, one of the family), emphasizing the patriarchal influence in Valancy’s life and, therefore, the weight of her disobedience. As Valancy debates whether to see the “forbidden” doctor, she reads “the paragraph that changed her life”: “Fear is the original sin … Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something.”25 The words become almost sacred to Valancy, serving as her “inner voice”26 during moments of indecision. Foster’s passage leads to Valancy defying her patriarchal family, while also reframing her transgression with the belief that fear, not disobedience, is sinful. Valancy can then challenge the model of the angel in the house, who, as Gilbert and Gubar note, has “no story.”27 Unlike Gilman’s husband/doctor who assures his wife that nothing is wrong, Valancy’s doctor tells her (incorrectly) that she has one year to live. Both characters receive a false diagnosis, but Valancy’s ultimately serves to free her from the fear fostered in her mother’s house: “she, who had been afraid of almost everything in life – was not afraid of death.”28 Foster’s words empower her to receive a diagnosis, which in turn gives Valancy the agency to choose her own lifestyle.

Valancy and Domesticity The nature-bound femininity that Valancy eventually claims is closely related to the role of the nineteenth-century angel in the house. Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly note that, even after Montgomery’s 72

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authorial success, “[she] continued to adhere to the values of traditional domestic femininity, holding on to the power of women in the Victorian household.”29 Thus, it is unsurprising that the inclinations of Montgomery’s adult heroine are centred in the home. While still in her mother’s house, Valancy exclaims, “I do want to be married. I want a house of my own – I want a husband of my own – I want sweet, little fat babies of my own.”30 Valancy’s dreams are not of a career or independence, but rather to enter the traditional roles of wife and mother. Just as her mother has denied Valancy access to the outside world, so she has denied Valancy agency. Valancy is not permitted to redecorate her bedroom, despite the fact that “[t]he only thing Valancy liked about her room was that she could be alone there at night to cry.”31 Valancy’s room, which holds the family’s unwanted things, symbolically represents her: “Valancy and her room are in total agreement with each other since she is also useless, inadequate, cracked and unwanted.”32 Valancy is not a necessary part of the household. Even her chores are superfluous, as she sweeps rooms that are not dirty and makes quilts that are unwanted. Embedded into the idealized angel-in-the-house figure is the task of being there for others, serving them. Valancy is denied even this part of femininity: “Valancy wondered pitifully what it would be like to be wanted by some one – needed by some one. No one in the whole world needed her.”33 This separation from womanhood, as defined by nineteenth-century ideals, leads to Valancy leaving the only domestic space she has known in search of feminine fulfillment. Upon leaving her mother’s house, Valancy enters an interim domestic realm. Caring for Cissy, the “bad” girl of the neighbourhood – she had a child out of wedlock – fulfills Valancy’s desire to be needed. It is at Cissy’s house where Valancy begins to clean rooms that are dirty and cook for people who are hungry. While these events are intermediary in the overall plot, they work together to broaden the scope of accepted femininity. Valancy tending to Cissy, while simultaneously defying her family, contributes to the novel’s challenge of societal norms. Perhaps having sex outside of marriage is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps defying a demanding family in order to have independence is acceptable, even commendable.34 Valancy’s chosen behaviour (and 73

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femininity) is judged by the patriarchal authority in her family, Uncle Benjamin, for whom Valancy has “lost all sense of decency.”35 As decency is synonymous with societally acceptable femininity, Valancy is now an outsider. While Valancy might be temporarily on the fringes of society, Barney Snaith is decidedly there. Most of the town, Valancy’s family especially, view Barney as a criminal. However, Valancy defends Barney’s lifestyle during a family gathering: “the only crime [Barney] has been guilty of is living to himself and minding his own business.”36 Valancy’s perceived connection to him, “a subtle fascination in the subject,”37 inspires the usually meek Valancy to argue with her family. Just as John Foster gives Valancy the courage to act with agency, so Barney becomes Valancy’s key to independence. Not only does she speak out on his behalf, but after Cissy’s death, Barney is Valancy’s opportunity to fulfill her place in the cult of domesticity, what Nina Baym defines as “fulfillment … in marriage and motherhood.”38 By choosing Barney, Valancy chooses a lifestyle that ostensibly challenges the cult of domesticity. Crossing gender lines, Valancy proposes marriage to Barney: “Of course, with my bringing up, I realise perfectly well that this is one of the things ‘a lady should not do.’”39 Valancy is aware that she is disrupting traditional gendered behaviour. Her proposal is not met with disdain, just surprise; Barney accepts with conditions. Valancy wants to experience life, and, as she frames it, loving Barney means that “[l]ife was no longer empty and futile, and death could cheat her of nothing. Love had cast out her last fear.”40 The fear that John Foster’s words helped her combat is officially vanquished by her love for Barney. Reading through a modern feminist lens, marriage is not an obvious choice for woman’s liberation. However, Stallcup notes that Montgomery’s novels often contain such contradictions: “Montgomery’s work partakes of a domestic or maternal feminism that focuses on the power that women can accrue within the domestic space.”41 In having access to a home of her own, Valancy is able to take the final step of claiming her independence. Upon first arriving on Barney’s island, “Something seemed to sweep over [Valancy’s] soul. ‘My Blue Castle!’ she said. ‘Oh, 74

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my Blue Castle!’”42 Not only does Valancy identify this somewhat run-down cabin as her dream castle, the narrator describes the place in extraordinary terms: “They left behind the realm of everyday and things known and landed on a realm of mystery and enchantment where anything might happen – anything might be true.”43 This scene takes on several layers of significance: Valancy now has her long-desired house of her own, along with someone  –  a husband  –  for whom to care, while this ordinary place offers possibilities heretofore present only in her imagination. Almost as proof of the island’s enchanted opportunities, Barney offers a domestic life physically separated from patriarchal society by a lake and woods. Barney describes the “uninhabited island” as “too good to be true.”44 One of Barney’s marriage conditions is that they live on the remote island, to which Valancy replies, “That’s partly why I wanted to marry you.”45 Valancy wants to be removed from the rules and regulations that previously restricted her. However, on the island Barney keeps secrets from Valancy. He mysteriously spends much of his time in a small room, where Valancy is not permitted, and which consequently Valancy names Bluebeard’s Chamber, alluding to the fairy tale in which Bluebeard keeps his wives’ corpses in a locked room.46 While the novel eventually reveals that Barney writes Foster’s books in this room, Valancy’s chosen metaphor hints at an unbridled, violent masculinity. In some ways, Bluebeard’s Chamber represents the dark alternative that might have been Valancy’s fate. Had Barney not been feminized and, more importantly, morally good, but instead a masculinized, Bluebeard-like villain, Valancy’s tragic ending would have confirmed that women who venture outside of society’s prescribed boundaries are punished. In fact, the heroine of “Bluebeard” receives her happily-ever-after only because her brothers save her, not through agency of her own,47 agency which Valancy claims for herself through Barney and their lifestyle on the island. As Catherine Clark notes elsewhere in this volume, Valancy’s “life at the Blue Castle is a rejection of the feminine chores … central to fairy tales.”48 While Valancy’s new life on the island, her real-life “blue castle,” resembles a fairy-tale existence, her “happily ever after” with Barney subverts those stories’ patriarchal themes. 75

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Monika Hilder argues, “Montgomery celebrates a domesticity that is, in some important ways, essentially non-gendered.”49 Readers see this home structure in the ways that Barney and Valancy spend their days. Valancy is able to sleep late, because Barney cooks his own breakfast. Barney does not want Valancy to tidy the house, stepping away from the stereotype of a bachelor marrying a woman to keep house for him. In fact, Barney is the one who often secludes himself in a room to work, in opposition to the image of a woman confined to the kitchen, or even Gilman’s heroine confined to a bedroom. There is a freedom to how Valancy spends her time, sometimes remaining in her swimsuit all day or reading by the fire. On other days, she and Barney explore the woods and sleep outdoors because they ventured too far from home. Valancy cooks and cleans, but it is not in the same framework as in her mother’s house. It is with the natural world surrounding her, providing a more liberated domestic space. Stacy Alaimo argues that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women writers often “looked outward toward a natural realm precisely because this space was not already designated as ‘truly and unequivocally theirs’ and thus was not replete with the domestic values that many women wished to escape.”50 While Alaimo’s argument is not in reference to Montgomery’s novels, Valancy’s use of outdoor space in which to conduct domestic chores complements Alaimo’s idea of using nature to reimagine domesticity. In fact, Alaimo labels nature as “undomesticated … in the sense that it is untamed and thus serves as a model for female insurgency.”51 The wildness of their remote island home then serves as a clear metaphor for Valancy’s insurgence of patriarchy’s standards. A further illustration of the role of the domestic in The Blue Castle is the symbol of the “dust-pile.” When Valancy was at school, the girls built dust piles, at which Valancy was “good.”52 However, the other girls forced Valancy to add her pile to her cousin Olive’s, as Olive was not only the popular girl at school, but “the wonder girl of the whole Stirling clan.”53 In reflecting on this memory, Valancy notes that the dust pile is “symbolical of her life,”54 as she was often forced to sacrifice for others. Furthering this analogy, before Valancy leaves home she looks toward Barney’s island, wishing “that I may have one little dust-pile before I die.”55 When she realizes her desire with a home of her own, 76

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Valancy builds a literal dust pile. On this island where she lives outside of the bounds of “acceptable” femininity, Valancy “heaped up the sand in the little island cove in a tremendous cone and stuck a gay little Union Jack on top of it.”56 Valancy claims the dust pile with a symbol of colonialism, the Union Jack, yet she appropriates the flag, using its patriarchal representation to assert space wherein she and Barney can disrupt gender norms. The dust pile embodies this contradiction: to create the pile, Valancy must sweep the dust, mimicking the feminine-coded household chore, but she also conquers the land by shaping it into a pile, a masculine-coded capability. As Stallcup asserts, “Montgomery … establish[es] the domestic space as one in which women are figures of authority and power.”57 Valancy uses the dust pile to establish this authority; however, her dust pile and her authority are not confined to the domestic space, but rather encompass the island as a whole, her own land, where she has claimed autonomy apart from society. In living on Barney’s island, she is “exorcising an old demon”58 of having to submit to Olive, whom the Stirling clan praises for her “beauty, popularity, love,”59 and for adhering to societal expectations. Only now is Valancy able to criticize Olive for having “something lacking,” “like a dewless morning.”60 Valancy’s dust pile brings her to the realization that the angel-in-the-house figure represented by Olive is really a shell of a woman. Despite the argument from Sharyn Pearce that Montgomery, in Anne, “impl[ies] that with womanhood comes a softening, a gentleness … reconciled to women’s domestic role in the patriarchal world,”61 Valancy exists in contrast to this model. Instead, she leaves this softening, or perhaps silencing, behind when she steps into the role of homemaker and wife. Valancy’s dust pile legitimizes her alternative domesticity, utilizing the colonial, even patriarchal, Union Jack to do so.

Barney as the Feminine As I have observed, Barney and his work as John Foster have been central to Valancy stepping into this idealized womanhood. Arguably, Barney was able to influence this change because Barney is feminized. Feminized male characters are not unusual for Montgomery, from the gentle and nurturing Matthew Cuthbert62 to the generous and 77

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poetically inclined Cousin Jimmy.63 Barney is both a romantic hero and connected to nature. Each of Montgomery’s heroines has a reputation for “defin[ing] herself through a highly idealized perception of natural beauty.”64 In The Blue Castle, this perception of the natural world belongs to Barney, not Valancy; even after Barney has taught her about the outside world, her senses are never “heightened.” However, there are several distinctions between Barney and typical Montgomery heroines. Whereas Montgomery heroines often take ownership of nature by naming it, Barney coexists with nature. In part, perhaps, because the naming of the natural world has already been done, at least scientifically, by males, Barney does not need to add his own names in order to justify his connection to nature. There is also no sense of his needing to dominate or tame the land around him, further identifying him with the feminine. Even the crows that he has raised from birth come and go with the seasons; Barney has not placed them in captivity, just as he has not imprisoned Valancy. Instead, he is able to offer her further communion with the natural world: “[Barney] could always find trail and haunt of the shy wood people … [Valancy] learned to know every bird at sight and mimic its call – though never as perfectly as Barney.”65 This intrinsic knowledge of the natural world is usually given only to Montgomery heroines. For example, Anne serves as Diana’s bridge into the natural world. When Anne firsts meets Diana, Diana spends more time reading than playing outside,66 but over the course of their friendship, Diana connects with nature, making believe in their outdoor “playhouse,” Idlewild,67 and naming one of their special walks the somewhat “plain” Birch Path.68 In a similar way, albeit to a more successful end, Barney introduces Valancy to nature. Barney is still coded as masculine in some ways, which to an extent can be seen in his nature writing as John Foster. The appeal perhaps is that the non-fiction books are not limited to descriptions of the natural world: “It was not John Foster’s uncanny knowledge of wild creatures and insect life that enthralled [Valancy]. She could hardly say what it was – some tantalising lure of a mystery never revealed – some hint of a great secret just a little further on – some faint, elusive echo of lovely, forgotten things – John Foster’s magic was indefinable.”69 Foster, and 78

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thereby Barney, has access to nature in a way that Valancy does not. In fact, this connection is something other Montgomery heroines do not have. While some of Montgomery’s heroines, such as Anne and Emily, are published authors, it is always of fictional works rather than nonfiction nature books. They are able to access nature as it corresponds with the imagination, never in a scientific sense, barring heroines from what patriarchal society often labels a masculine knowledge, and therefore valuable. Even Barney’s knowledge of nature is depicted as a form of writing: “Barney knew the woods as a book.”70 As a result, Barney’s nature writing legitimizes his connection to nature, at least in the eyes of society. Uncle Benjamin observes, “I heard a lecturer from Toronto say that John Foster’s books had put Canada on the literary map of the world.”71 Barney’s connection to nature is validated because he is able to write about it, furthering Gilbert and Gubar’s observations of the pen as a metaphorical penis, with the pen serving as a patriarchal “instrument of generative power” when wielded by the male author.72 However, most of Foster’s “writings” are taken from Montgomery’s set of four nature essays on “The Woods.”73 This real-life authorship adds a complicated layer to the conversation surrounding the dismissal of Montgomery’s writing because it is “feminine.” By giving her nature writing to Barney/Foster, a well-respected, Romantic writer, in some ways Montgomery proves that, despite her gender, she also deserves this accolade. Foster’s works, while filled with observations of nature, are still in some ways more philosophical than Montgomery’s typical nature narration, a reflection of the “Romantic-inspired writers,” such as Emerson, for whom Montgomery had a particular affinity.74 Thus, it is no surprise that her fictional Foster contains hints of these Romantic authors.75 Yet this writing is not strictly a masculine mastering of nature. As Åhmansson observes, Foster’s nature books “deal with nature in opposition to civilization,” which allows Valancy to “dream[] of a different place, a place outside society.”76 Just as Barney lives away from others, so his nature books dwell on the outskirts of this same society, while still receiving approval from literary critics, one might assume, because of his masculinity. 79

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Barney’s gendering becomes even more complicated when viewed alongside his relationship with Valancy. Barney serves as Valancy’s saviour in numerous capacities. In her oppressive life with her mother, Foster’s books were her only escape. In Valancy’s words, “John Foster’s books were all that saved my soul alive the past five years.”77 It is not nature itself that keeps Valancy alive, but Foster’s descriptions, his penned translation of the natural world that allows her soul to flourish, or at the very least, not to wilt. Valancy’s heart condition, what begins her initial freedom from her clan, is then cured inadvertently by Barney. One evening, Barney is caught out in a storm. Valancy, believing that he could be dead, keeps an all-night vigil for him. When he returns in the morning, the joy of his still being alive “cures” her.78 Valancy describes her reaction: “It was as if I had died and come back to life.”79 This phrasing echoes the Christian concept of being “born again,” in which, through the sacrifice of Christ, the person is born into a new spiritual sense of being. Christ is often coded with feminine qualities, particularly through his sacrifice for others, something the angels of the house were expected to do without qualms.80 While Barney does not necessarily sacrifice anything, beyond sharing his life with Valancy, his ability to survive in the woods during a winter storm highlights a particular affinity with nature in Valancy’s eyes. Barney exists as Valancy’s connection to the natural world, with which he proves able to exist congruently. In this way, Barney aligning as a pagan-like, nature-based saviour for Valancy reaffirms him as feminine. However, Barney’s gender coding changes when he saves Valancy from the train tracks. In a scene straight from a stereotypical romance novel, Valancy’s high-heeled (feminine) shoe gets stuck in a train track. With a train coming, Barney must save her from instant death. Upon doing so, he realizes his love for Valancy. In stepping into this role of traditional “knight in shining armour,” Barney is able to save himself, or at least realize Valancy’s influence over him. No longer does he have to keep secrets (his identities as Bernard Redfern and John Foster). No longer does he need to hide from his father and the judgment of society. At the end of the novel, Barney tells Valancy, “After being homeless all my life it was beautiful to have a home. To come home hungry at 80

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night and know there was a good supper and a cheery fire – and you.”81 Valancy represents the traditional (indoor) domesticity that Barney has lacked throughout his childhood and adulthood. Barney has given Valancy her “blue castle,” but she has made it a home. He has also given her access to the natural world, which in turn has enriched her life, both literally and metaphorically, causing her once-dormant rose bush to blossom. These different ways of being, with Barney representing nature and Valancy representing the home, come together to create an idealized, nature-bound domesticity. Despite the text’s generally positive portrayal of Barney as feminine, this position is undercut by forcing Barney into the traditionally masculine role of rescuer to ensure their romantic future together. This role reversal seems to suggest that, in order for a romantic relationship to be successful, there must be the ability to conform to traditional gender roles. For the remainder of the novel Barney is absent. It is not until the end, when Valancy has ostensibly left him, that he appears on the page, beseeching Valancy to return to their marriage. In a reversal of her initial proposal, the decision is now Valancy’s, perhaps setting the stage for a “happily ever after” cemented by traditional gender roles. In Montgomery’s novels, the courtship itself rarely appears on the page. Marah Gubar argues that in the Anne series, “heterosexual love proves to a large extent unwritable.”82 This view might explain why Barney does not become masculinized until the end of the novel, replacing Montgomery’s typical “ellipses” of romantic talk83 with a brief romance-filled ending. However, in this perspective, it seems that this love is only possible when both people adhere to strict gender roles. Because the first two-thirds of the novel utilize a more complex understanding of gender, arguing that Barney must be masculine and Valancy feminine in order for their romance to succeed does not do the story justice. However, in stepping into these expected roles, if only to achieve a romantic ending, both Barney and Valancy prepare themselves to re-enter society, with the potential to live with ease both on their subversive island and in the patriarchally-bound city. This marital ending complements what Holly Pike argues, that although Montgomery might challenge “gendered behaviour norms,” ultimately “she implicitly 81

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supports those processes by ending her stories with heterosexual marriages.”84 While technically Valancy and Barney are already married before the ending occurs, not until the ending do they both know the truth about one another (including the fact that this marriage will last beyond the first year). They are in a sense recommitting to one another, and in doing so, to an extent committing to gender expectations by embracing marriage as it was understood in the early twentieth century.

Conclusion: What’s in a Name? As Roberta Trites observes, naming offers power over the object being named.85 Throughout Valancy’s life, her father’s family and her mother have called her by the nickname of “Doss,” which Valancy believes is “childish.”86 Interestingly, Åhmansson ties the name further to Valancy’s past submissive self, by making the connection between “Doss” and “docile.”87 Important to breaking ties with her past self and her family, Valancy renames herself, choosing her own name, a reclamation of her true self, a rebirth into adulthood. Valancy’s maternal grandfather named her, which ties in a masculine, yet matriarchal, power that is not afforded her in her father’s family. When Valancy’s family criticizes her free speech, they compare Valancy to this grandfather. The wealthy Uncle Benjamin comments, “He talked all his life exactly as Valancy did today.”88 Valancy takes this comparison as a “compliment”: “I remember Grandfather Wansbarra. He was one of the few human beings I have known – almost the only one.”89 This kinship that Valancy shares with her maternal grandfather, the similarities that her family sees between her and this grandfather, further cement her outside-ness to her patriarchal family, who require “Doss-ile” behaviour. Barney gives her a new legal name: Valancy Snaith. Valancy attributes this renaming to her further change, a “rebirth”: “It was as if [the injustices and disappointments] had all happened to some other person – not to her, Valancy Snaith, who had always been happy. ‘I understand now what it means to be born again.’”90 Valancy takes the journey from “Doss” to her true self as “Valancy” to her happier state as “Valancy Snaith.” Interestingly, just as Valancy can be linked to a matriarchal lineage, so can the name “Snaith.” Barney has changed his name: from 82

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Bernard Snaith Redfern, to simply Barney Snaith, his mother’s maiden name. He has given up his father’s millions for a life devoted to nature and writing. In many ways, Barney’s retreat is a return to his true self. His father makes several references to Barney’s maternal similarities, and even Valancy observes “that Barney must resemble his mother.”91 Barney notes this separateness from his father on an even deeper level: “I was a sensitive child and I was even more sensitive as a boy. No one ever knew what I suffered. Dad never dreamed of it.”92 Sensitivity is a characteristic often attributed to Montgomery’s child heroines, or her feminized male characters; it separates Barney from his father, as well as from traditional masculinity. Furthermore, despite his opulent upbringing, Barney describes his favourite day when, as a child, he visited the country. For Barney, returning to nature, abandoning his father and his father’s wealth, was returning to that childhood delight, leaving behind his patriarchal lineage. In some ways, Barney’s identification with the feminine opens the door to both Barney’s and Valancy’s abilities to exist in the feminine realm. Barney offers the freedom of nature to Valancy, while she remains in the “safe” domestic space of wifehood. She can say outlandish things to her family and defy tradition because, at the end of the day, Barney can return to being Bernard Redfern and she, Mrs Redfern. They can keep their island on Mistawis, while Doc Redfern’s money also provides them with a farm outside of Montreal. Valancy’s family accepts her husband (and her behaviour) once they learn that she is “the daughter-in-law of a millionaire”;93 her husband’s last name represents power bounded by money, something her patriarchal family can respect. Barney and Valancy’s boundary-pushing behaviour is deemed acceptable because they have been endorsed by the patriarchy. As stated above, traditional gender roles are the vehicle for the two to be united for their “happily ever after.” Nevertheless, I agree with Mary Rubio’s claims that The Blue Castle works with the Emily series to “form[] a critique of patriarchal society.”94 The love between the feminized Barney and the nature-bound/domestic Valancy offers an alternative to the patriarchal love story, taking Montgomery’s generally boundary-pushing gender roles to a new height. 83

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No t e s 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Montgomery, agg. Montgomery, ko. Montgomery, sg. Montgomery, jlh. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, 646. Cf. Foster and Simons, What Katy Read, 163; Hilder, “The Ethos of Nurture,” 217. Robinson, “Pruned Down and Branched Out,” 35. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, 165. Stallcup, “She Knew She Wanted to Kiss Him,” 125. Åhmansson, A Life and Its Mirrors, 75. Patmore, The Angel in the House. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, 25. Montgomery, bc, 21. Epperly, “Visual Imagination,” 85. Montgomery, bc, 18. Ibid., 13. Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings. Montgomery, bc, 2. Foster and Simons, What Katy Read, 48. Montgomery, bc, 51. Ibid., 13. Åhmansson, “Textual/Sexual Space,” 151. Lawson, “The Victorian Sickroom,” 234. Pike, “Propriety and the Proprietary,” 194. Montgomery, bc, 25–6. Ibid., 100. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, 25. Montgomery, bc, 37. Gammel and Epperly, “L.M. Montgomery and the Shaping of Canadian Culture,” 9. Montgomery, bc, 23–4. Ibid., 3. Åhmansson, “Textual/Sexual Space,” 147. Montgomery, bc, 17. Cissy serves as revision of the “romantic myths” that “consumption in the ‘fallen woman’ was … the physical manifestation of – and appropriate

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

retribution for – her sexual sin.” Whereas typically these heroines repent before death, “the disease is not credited with changing or redeeming Cissy,” further complicating the novel’s morality (Prycer, “The Hectic Flush,” 270). Montgomery, bc, 81. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 61. Baym, Woman’s Fiction, 26. Montgomery, bc, 127. Ibid., 111. Stallcup, “She Knew She Wanted to Kiss Him,” 121. Montgomery, bc, 134. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 127. Perrault, “Bluebeard.” Ibid., 147. Clark, “Sex and the Revisionist Fairy Tale,” this volume, 243. Hilder, “Ethos of Nurture,” 214. Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground, 16, emphasis in original. Ibid. Montgomery, bc, 40. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 71, emphasis in original. Ibid., 159. Stallcup, “She Knew She Wanted to Kiss Him,” 122. Montgomery, bc, 159. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 56, emphasis in original. Pearce, “Constructing a ‘New Girl,’” 243. Montgomery, agg. Montgomery, enm. Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 11. Montgomery, bc, 154. Montgomery, agg, 132. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 149. Montgomery, bc, 9. Montgomery, bc, 154. Ibid., 203. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, 3. 85

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73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

Epperly, Through Lover’s Lane, 160. Epperly, “Visual Imagination,” 85. Epperly, Through Lover’s Lane, 160. Åhmansson, “Textual/Sexual Space,” 153. Montgomery, bc, 163. Ibid., 182. Ibid., 169. Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 130. Montgomery, bc, 213, emphasis in original. Gubar, “Where Is the Boy?” 64. Ibid. Pike, “Cross-Dressing,” this volume, 192. Trites, Waking Sleeping Beauty, 31. Montgomery, bc, 16. Åhmansson, “Textual/Sexual Space,” 152. Montgomery, bc, 68. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 210. Ibid., 204. Rubio, “Subverting the Trite,” 31–2.

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n Elizabeth Epperly argues in The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass that

“Montgomery enshrines home as a sacred centre for family and for the developing self” as “the physical house reifies each heroine’s perception of beauty, honour of tradition, and sense of self,” but notes that domesticity can be “unrecognized imprisonment” or “undeniable liberation.”1 The possibility of domestic space – the family home in particular – being less than ideal has also been explored by Christiana Salah, who argues in “Girls in Bonds: Prehensile Place and the Domestic Gothic in L.M. Montgomery’s Short Fiction,” that Montgomery depicted “sites of unease and even terror” that embody “a commentary on the threat of domestic entrapment faced by the adolescent women of her early twentieth-century provincial society.”2 Salah notes that “preoccupations that run deeply” through Montgomery’s oeuvre include “the female relationship to the sphere of the home, the shift from adolescence to womanhood, and the issue of class mobility as it pertained to the women of her culture.”3 In this section, writers engage with such gendered experiences of domestic space in Anne of Green Gables and the Emily trilogy, particularly with how girls were expected to use and access domestic space. Despite the domestic realm being considered peculiarly the realm of women, that connection was problematic in a society in which women were less likely than men to have the freedom to choose between domesticity and other paths or to own property. Bonnie J. Tulloch in “The Robinsonade versus the Annescapade: Exploring the ‘Adventure’ in Anne of Green Gables” questions what constitutes domestic space and how texts are gendered according to patriarchal definitions of adventure and domesticity. Tulloch argues that Anne tries to “oppose the limitations of patriarchal domesticity” by renaming the external world and creating “a new register of

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experience” in order to redefine and fully participate in the community she inhabits.4 In “Soliciting Home: The Cultural Function of Orphans in Early Twentieth-Century Canada,” Mavis Reimer examines “discourses of fostering and adoption”5 at the time Anne of Green Gables was published, analyzing the inherently classist and gendered descriptions of both children and potential homes, uncovering assumptions that would have shaped what the first readers of Anne of Green Gables might have understood by an orphan girl finding a home. Rebecca J. Thompson focuses on “real” space in “‘That House Belongs to Me’: The Appropriation of Patriarchal Space in L.M. Montgomery’s Emily Trilogy,” in which she argues that the “houses and rooms Emily inhabits” become “agents of her growth as she gains mastery over her patriarchal heritage.”6 In her introduction to “Theorizing Space and Gender in the 21st Century,” Theda Wrede asserts that “space is never neutral but always discursively constructed, ideologically marked, and shaped by the dominant power structures and forms of knowledge. In other words, even if a manifestation of the ‘real’ world, space is both created and articulated through cultural discourse, including gender discourse.”7 The writers in this section start from the assumption that space is not neutral, and that gender is performed partly through what Barad calls the “spatiality of regulatory practices.”8

No t e s 1 Epperly. 2 “Girls in Bonds,” 99. 3 Ibid. 100. 4 Tulloch, “The Robinsonade versus the Annescapade,” 104, 104. 5 Reimer, “Soliciting Home,” 120. 6 Thompson, “’That House Belongs to Me,’” 153. 7 Wrede, “Introduction,” 11. 8 Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 89.

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4 The Robinsonade versus the Annescapade Exploring the “Adventure” in Anne of Green Gables

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n In his article “Island Homemaking: Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadi-

an Crusoes and the Robinsonade Tradition,” Andrew O’Malley observes that Defoe’s wilderness survival narrative, Robinson Crusoe, and those like it, known as robinsonades,1 are actually stories about homemaking. While O’Malley admits that “robinsonades like Canadian Crusoes undeniably participate in the masculinized world of the adventure story,” he notes that “they also very often operate in the feminized register of the domestic story.”2 Domesticity, he explains, lies at the heart of colonial adventure: “If colonization involves the attempt to reproduce one culture and superimpose it on another, then domesticity in Europe can be seen to have performed an internal colonizing function before it

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was ever exported to the colonies.”3 These parallels between colonization and domestication, however, expose the challenge of articulating a “feminine register” within a male-dominated society. After all, if domesticity and adventure are understood in relation to the patriarchal vision of home they promote, then they are both masculine-coded concepts and, as such, limit one’s ability to identify a true feminine register in any traditional children’s text, including those specifically classified as “girls’” and “boys’” stories. One might even ask: do these gendered conceptions of genre prevent readers from recognizing alternative representations of adventure and domesticity within these texts? Such a question is especially significant when considering a novel like L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), a narrative known for its conflicting attitudes toward female domesticity. While it is generically categorized as a girls’ story or a domestic story,4 many scholars and readers view Montgomery’s novel in an adventurous light. Samantha Ellis, for example, reflects that Anne “is a girl who can even make waiting at a train station an adventure,”5 and Elizabeth Waterston compares Anne’s adventures to “those in all the folk tales of quester heroes.”6 Speaking in similar terms, Roderick McGillis observes that “[w]hat makes the first Anne book – Anne of Green Gables – so interesting is its attempt to depict Anne as an adventurer.”7 And yet, the fact remains that Montgomery’s novel is not an adventure story in the traditional or masculine sense. Susan Drain notes that, for Anne, “[i]ncidents beyond the domestic sphere are rarely very active … When she does do something physically active or even risky, it is not something that she has herself initiated.”8 Correspondingly, Mary Rubio remarks that, “Montgomery’s artificial medium is chiefly the domestic romance,”9 and Janet Weiss-Town comments that, “Anne has the sort of plot usually found in girls’ books, a plot quite different from a boy’s book like Treasure Island.”10 The question, therefore, remains: how and why are Anne and her story often viewed as adventurous? The answer, it seems, lies in notions of domesticity. Where the adjective is concerned, Anne is adventurous because she challenges the domestic norms associated with nineteenth-century and earlytwentieth-century patriarchal values. Conventionally speaking, she 90

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does not fit the image of the ideal child or the ideal female – a reality on which Mrs Rachel Lynde and Marilla frequently reflect. From this standpoint, Anne is adventurous precisely because she does not always operate in the prescribed “feminized register”11 of the domestic story in which she finds herself. As Rubio notes, “The energy in [Montgomery’s] books comes partly from these collisions between genre and subject.”12 To the extent that Anne’s vision of home transforms the community of Avonlea, it upsets the pattern of male dominance imposed by colonialism. She is neither adventurous nor domestic in the patriarchal sense, but in a different sense. “Anne herself,” Weiss-Town notes, “is not stereotypically female, with stock female weaknesses and sex-linked characteristics.”13 The young orphan imagines and defines home for herself, a process that involves translating concepts of domesticity and adventure into her own terms. That leaves scholars and readers with the problem of articulating those terms within a literary system that classifies stories based on patriarchal conceptions of adventure and domesticity. In contrast to some of the heroines of female robinsonades,14 Anne does not adopt specifically masculine traits to gain her adventurer status. “For the most part,” Drain observes, “Anne does not so much do the unusual, as do the usual differently. Chiefly that difference consists of her being unlike her female peers, without being at all like the male.”15 In searching for the right typology that would communicate the full meaning of Anne’s adventure, and finding none that satisfies, this study takes a cue from the heroine herself and creates its own. As Anne states to Matthew, “When I don’t like the name of a place or a person I always imagine a new one and always think of them so.”16 Thus follows this exploration of what will be called the “Annescapade.” Anne’s adventure may not involve domesticating a deserted island, but it does involve opening up an already domesticated island to the possibility of social change. By “imagin[ing] things different from what they really are,”17 the orphan deconstructs the patriarchal binaries associated with gendered representations of adventure and domesticity. In doing so, she undermines the “internal colonizing function” 18 of colonial ideology and builds a home where she is free to be herself. 91

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In order to describe how Anne’s adventure deviates from that of the robinsonade and other boys’ stories, this analysis adopts a postcolonial theoretical lens, one that specifically focuses on the relationship between domesticity, childhood, and colonization. O’Malley observes that it is “worth noting that the act of domesticating can be applied to what parents do to children,”19 and Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer suggest that children’s literature “represents an effort by adults to colonize children: to make them believe that they ought to be the way adults would like them to be, and to make them feel guilty about or downplay the significance of all the aspects of their selves that inevitably don’t fit the adult model.”20 While Nodelman and Reimer have both acknowledged the inexact nature of this analogy, in The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature Nodelman explains that he still finds the comparison between colonization and domestication productive in describing the hierarchical mindset that governs adult-child relations.21 Drawing on the work of Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Elisabeth Wesseling notes that, historically, “colonial regimes in the overseas territories were often patterned after parent-child and teacherchild relationships in the metropolis. Raising children and ruling natives were structured as kindred practices.”22 Given this connection between colonization and domesticity, post-colonial theory offers an effective framework through which to outline some of the cultural power dynamics at work in Anne of Green Gables. On the one hand, its understanding of colonial hierarchies allows for the identification of different marginalized groups within society. On the other, its awareness of this hierarchy problematizes any attempt to equate the oppression experienced by different groups of people. Thus, it is with the acknowledgment that Anne’s experience of domestication differs considerably from that of other colonized peoples (e.g., the Indigenous Peoples of Canada) that I proceed with this analysis.23 Within the context of Montgomery’s novel, a post-colonial perspective reveals the importance of survival to the act of Anne’s home-building adventure. The fight for existence underlies the tension Anne experiences as a marginalized subject, one who navigates the power structures that separate Avonlea insiders from outsiders, adults from children, and 92

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men from women. In fact, one of the main points of contention within Anne scholarship is whether or not Anne’s individuality – her rebellious imagination, ambition, and bold personality – survives the novel and its sequels. Here scholars are not as concerned with Anne’s survival in the physical sense as they are with her survival in the spiritual sense. After all, it is through her spirited imagination that Anne resists the patriarchal register of female domesticity and builds herself a home in Avonlea. In her essay in this collection, Mavis Reimer cites the theory of Pierre Macherey to point out that what a work like Anne of Green Gables “wants to say” is conditioned by the historical context underlying its creation, which provides its “means of expression.”24 Anne’s heroism, it is true, may be limited by the historical context that conditions her possibilities as a literary character. However, it is her spoken awareness of some of these conditions and her attempts to challenge them that allows readers the “textual margin[s]” 25 to imagine the possibilities of alternative conditions. The heroic legacy inspired by Anne with an “e” is one of love, hope, and progress. The outspoken girl motivates change by challenging the patriarchal means of expression through which she is constituted, thereby increasing the “scope”26 of her own story so it encompasses new visions of adventure and domestic life. Still, the question remains: how does the robinsonade genre figure into the socio-historical and cultural context that shapes Anne of Green Gables? Gail Edwards and Judith Saltman note that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, “narratives of adventure and survival predominated in children’s books with a Canadian setting.”27 Given the challenges associated with colonization, it is unsurprising that robinsonades would have resonated with early settlers navigating the Canadian wilderness. Although Defoe’s novel is generally considered “a manly adventure,”28 one of the most famous nineteenth-century Canadian robinsonades, Canadian Crusoes (1852), actually features a female protagonist. Traill’s novel details the story of three children, Catharine, her brother Hector, and their cousin Louis, who find themselves lost in the Ontario woods. One of the first works of Canadian children’s literature, Traill’s classic 29 directly contributed to the “means of expression” 30 available to Montgomery in the early twentieth century.31 93

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While Traill’s heroine embodies a stereotypical view of female domesticity,32 she nevertheless signifies a deviation in the male-dominated genre. This deviation is part of a marginalized trend of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century robinsonades featuring female protagonists, many of which, unlike Traill’s novel, present alternative visions of adventure, domesticity, and womanhood.33 While Anne of Green Gables does not follow the conventional plot structure of these narratives, there are still similarities between the way Montgomery and these earlier authors reimagine conceptions of adventure and domesticity for women.

The Island Castaway and the Social Castoff These similarities include the authors’ use of the island setting, which plays an important role in the robinsonade genre and in Anne of Green Gables. Susan Naramore Maher notes that the island, “from Defoe on, serves as an archetypal laboratory for a society’s ideology.”34 Removed from civilization, the deserted island creates space for castaways to experiment with the ideas that structure society. Where the majority of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century male robinsonades are concerned, these ideas tend to align with an imperialistic world view. Defoe’s imitators, Maher explains, “recast their Crusoes into quintessential empire builders, create islands that signify a hierarchy of culture and race, and ultimately mirror a conquering people’s mythology.”35 And yet, it is worth noting that some female Crusoes of this period actually “[c]halleng[e] the romantic image of the rugged individualist asserting his will over nature.”36 In her study of German eighteenth-century female robinsonades, Jeannine Blackwell observes that the stories “emphasiz[e] the qualities of egalitarian friendship, communal living arrangements, entertainment and domestic detail to a greater extent than the male’s. The women occupy and dominate social and emotional territory, where the male Robinsons learn to master their geographical surroundings.”37 Thus, while the male robinsonade often involves building an island society that imitates that of the Old World, the female robinsonade often involves building a society that departs from it. Distanced from the ideological confines of a patriarchal civilization, the female castaway is free to discard some of the social conventions that circumscribe her identity. 94

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Anne Shirley, of course, is not a castaway. However, she is a social castoff who has been deserted and rejected by various adult caregivers. An unwanted orphan, she experiences psychological and emotional isolation before and after her arrival on Prince Edward Island. In this respect, her story engages some of the themes of the robinsonade, even as it departs from its generic structure. Although pei is not deserted, it is less populated than the mainland, a detail that reinforces the significance of the small community of people that do inhabit it and the fact that Anne is not a born islander.38 Heightening this sense of remote living is the secluded location of Green Gables, which Matthew and Marilla’s father built “at the furthest edge of his cleared land,” so that it is “barely visible from the main road.” Mrs Rachel Lynde, the domestic authority in Avonlea society, does “not call living in such a place living at all” and attributes the Cuthberts’ eccentric personalities to the situation of their house. She remarks, “It’s no wonder Matthew and Marilla are both a little odd, living away back here by themselves. Trees aren’t much company, though dear knows if they were there’d be enough of them.”39 Combined with the narrator’s observations, Mrs Lynde’s commentary illustrates how Green Gables functions as both a literal and figurative wilderness. The secluded location of the island home underscores the loneliness the Cuthberts experience prior to Anne’s introduction into their lives. Further increasing Anne’s resemblance to the island castaway are the circumstances of her arrival at Green Gables, which, in their own way, serve as a kind of shipwreck. When Anne learns that the Cuthberts actually had requested a boy, she “[b]urst[s] into tears” and “proceed[s] to cry stormily.” The news of Mrs Spencer’s mistake is “the most tragical thing”40 that has ever happened to her, because it thrusts her back into the psychological identity of an unwanted child. The orphan is so distraught at the news that she refuses to eat, claiming she is in “the depths of despair.” This drowning imagery, while hyperbolic, serves to create the impression that Anne’s arrival is an adventurous event, rather than an unfortunate, but reversible, error. Literally speaking, Anne is not on a deserted island, but figuratively she may as well be. The “painfully bare” nature of the room she must sleep in at Green Gables possesses “a rigidity not to be described in words” and “sen[ds] a shiver 95

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to the very marrow of [her] bones.” These dramatic descriptions, including the “tempestuous appearance of the bed” once Anne occupies it and the fact that she “dive[s] down into”41 it after saying good night to Marilla, reinforce the psychological connection between the castoff and the castaway. Anne might not find herself a female Crusoe on a remote island, but she does find herself momentarily abandoned in an inhospitable environment. While Green Gables possesses the domestic amenities necessary for physical survival, the house lacks the love that would make it the orphan’s long-desired home. Matthew and Marilla are, as Mrs Rachel Lynde observes, living without really “living.”42

The Role of the Wilderness Viewed from this perspective, the psychological wilderness of Green Gables poses more of a challenge to Anne’s home-building endeavours than the physical wilderness of the island itself. Like the female Crusoes that Blackwell mentions, the orphan is confronted with the task of “occupy[ing] and dominat[ing] social and emotional territory.”43 Unlike them, however, Anne must challenge the pre-existing social and emotional structure of an already-established community. Instead of contributing to the hardships of this task, the natural world provides her with the means through which to endure it. When she awakens on her first morning at Green Gables, the beauty of her surroundings quickly eclipses the fact that she is unwanted. “Anne,” the narrator observes, “dropped on her knees and gazed out into the June morning, her eyes glistening with delight. Oh, wasn’t it beautiful? Wasn’t it a lovely place? Suppose she wasn’t really going to stay here! She would imagine she was. There was scope for imagination here.”44 As this passage reveals, the wilderness of pei possesses a natural hospitality that the Green Gables house lacks. Looking at the farm’s landscape, Anne feels a sense of belonging. Her affiliation with nature allows her to transcend the feelings of loneliness and rejection she faces upon her arrival. The window in her bedroom serves as a glimpse into another world, where she is able to envision the possibility of a different life. Herein lies an important distinction between the robinsonade and the Annescapade. In Robinson Crusoe and many of its imitations, 96

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nature is something to be mastered, whereas, in Anne of Green Gables, it is something to be embraced. Unlike the original Crusoe, or the other protagonists that followed him, Anne does not have to physically construct a shelter, hunt for food, or defend herself against wild beasts and unexpected storms. For her, the outside world is more of a refuge than a threat. Nevertheless, in both narratives, nature still serves as a metaphor for the protagonists’ inner life. Saltman notes that “[c]ertain types of realistic fiction, such as historical fiction and the survival story or journey story, are naturally allied to a strong sense of place. They concentrate on the protagonist’s relationship with the landscape, which – in the Robinson Crusoe-style story, for example – is often crucial to the story’s plot.”45 The main difference between Crusoe’s and Anne’s relationship with the landscape of their islands is the way they interpret it in light of their own human natures. For Crusoe, the wilderness reflects the undesirable parts of himself that must be brought to order, whereas, for Anne, nature reflects the most desirable parts of herself that should be celebrated (i.e., her wild imagination). Thus, while the island of Defoe’s novel and the island of Montgomery’s both convey “a strong sense of place,” 46 each moves its story’s plot along in different ways. While the island often functions as a place of desolation in the adventure genre, in Anne of Green Gables it functions as a place of consolation. Anne tells Marilla, “[t]he world doesn’t seem such a howling wilderness as it did last night.” Although the orphan still feels that she has to “bear up under affliction,” she finds it easier to do so “on a sunshiny day.”47 While Anne’s harmonious connection to the outside world resembles that of female Crusoes who demonstrate an “aesthetic appreciation of nature,”48 the different context of her situation has significant implications. Instead of constructing a home in the wilderness, the wilderness becomes inspiration through which Anne can imaginatively reconstruct the domestic space of the house itself. This reconstruction involves conquering the challenges posed by Marilla, whose own rigidity is reflected in the east gable room’s “red velvet pincushion” that looks “hard enough to turn the point of the most adventurous pin.”49 Anne is, like an adventurous pin, trying to penetrate Marilla’s tough exterior. She tells Marilla, “It’s all very well to read 97

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about sorrows and imagine yourself living through them heroically, but it’s not so nice when you really come to have them, is it?”50 Anne’s reflection provides the conceptual foundation for her home-building adventure. In this exchange with Marilla, she recasts heroism as the ability to survive the challenges of everyday life, including those she experiences at Green Gables. Like the robinsonade, then, the island in the Annescapade functions as a kind of ideological laboratory. Marilla even describes her and Matthew’s adoption of Anne as an “experiment.”51 The island setting, however, is complicated by the fact that it is a fictional representation of a real place. Elizabeth Rollins Epperly notes that “Montgomery gives us an island that is geographically undeniable and is at the same time almost incredibly, exquisitely lovely.”52 In this sense, there are two islands represented in Montgomery’s novels. There is the real pei, which readers associate with the practical world view of the Avonlea community, but there is also another, fictional island, the fantastic island they associate with Anne’s (and Montgomery’s) imagination.53 The existence of these two islands sets up an interesting dialectic that underscores the ideological struggle between Anne and her community. Drawing on the work of Northrop Frye, Virginia L. Wolf observes that, while the island in children’s literature is often associated with the myth of an earthly paradise, it can also serve as a “demonic landscape,” in which “the hero demonstrates his worth.”54 Both of these associations are at work in Montgomery’s novel, where the island functions as a microcosm of society and a reflection of Anne’s individual psyche.55 While the orphan’s vision of the island appears to offer the security of paradise, it simultaneously threatens to destroy the long-held views of island residents. Conversely, the views of island residents threaten to disrupt Anne’s paradisiacal vision of the island and the imagination that drives it. One of the ways Montgomery conveys Anne’s romantic view of the island is through the orphan’s love of trees. Unlike Mrs Lynde, Anne considers them great company and is “gladder than ever”56 when Mrs Spencer informs her that they surround Green Gables. The beautiful cherry tree outside Anne’s bedroom window resembles the one she had decided to sleep in had Matthew not retrieved her from the train 98

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station.57 The orphan feels a natural kinship with trees, because she recognizes that, like her, they need certain conditions to grow. She describes the trees at the asylum as “a few poor weeny-teeny things out in front with little whitewashed cagey things about them” that “looked like orphans themselves.” Observing them, she “know[s] just exactly how [they] feel.”58 Anne’s description of the asylum trees, which precedes her introduction to the bare “whitewashed walls”59 in the guest room at Green Gables, further highlights the psychological isolation she experiences as an unwanted child. Like the asylum trees, she is trapped in a kind of cage. Staying in the bare guest room reminds her that she is a social castoff, whereas the beautiful cherry tree outside her window allows her mind to escape the limitations of that socially constructed identity. The healthy trees surrounding Green Gables emphasize how the island itself functions as Anne’s personal Eden.

The Demonic Adventurer And yet, the fact remains that Anne’s paradisiacal view of pei does not please Avonlea residents as much as it disturbs them. Far removed from their experience of reality, her romantic imagination fits their conception of a “demonic landscape.”60 The words “wicked” and “irreverent”61 are frequently ascribed to Anne’s uncensored speeches and fantasies. While socially alienating at times, the orphan’s transgressive reputation contributes to the perception that she is an adventurer. In his study of adventure narratives in Western culture, Paul Zweig observes that epic heroes like Beowulf possess a demonic nature, one that is characterized by “forbidden energies.”62 From the perspective of Avonlea society, Anne’s creative energies lead her to engage in “forbidden”63 acts. Marilla tells her, “I don’t believe in imagining things different from what they really are … When the Lord puts us in certain circumstances He doesn’t mean for us to imagine them away.”64 Viewed in this light, Anne has spent her entire life engaging in blasphemous behaviour. Unlike the pious Crusoe, her imagination instils in her what Zweig describes as the “ethos of adventure.”65 The orphan’s hopeful mind defies the harsh reality she has endured, allowing her to maintain her faith in human nature, despite the ill treatment she has received.66 Ungodly as it may 99

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appear to people like Marilla, the orphan is able to see beyond her circumstances to imagine a better future. Anne’s imagination, therefore, enhances her status as a cultural other within the conservative community of Avonlea. From the moment of her arrival, she is positioned as an outsider, one who is further marginalized on account of her orphan identity, sex, beliefs, and hair colour.67 Theodore F. Sheckels points out that Anne is viewed as “less-thanhuman”68 for being an orphan, and Drain notes that, in Avonlea, “[t]o be a girl is to be a disappointment, not only because one is not the boy that society actively values, but because the reality of conventional girlhood in Avonlea is so pallid.”69 Increasing Marilla’s initial dismay at receiving Anne instead of the expected boy, however, is the fact that the orphan is “next door to a perfect heathen.”70 Anne claims that her disregard for religion is due to her hair colour. She tells Marilla, “You’d find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair … People who haven’t red hair don’t know what trouble is. Mrs. Thomas told me that God made my hair red on purpose, and I’ve never cared about Him since.”71 A primary symbol of her difference, the orphan’s hair reinforces her status as an adventurer and an outsider; it “is her visible and identifying sign: it is what gives her her mythopoetic power.”72 Montgomery’s choice of hair colour, Juliet McMaster observes, aligns Anne with “Prince Edward Island’s red roads,” and “connects her not only with the earth but with blood, passion, and creativity.”73 Figuratively and literally speaking, it gives roots to the impression that Anne’s imagination is a demonic landscape. Certainly, red hair carries many cultural connotations that form an important subtext to Montgomery’s novel. Throughout history it has been associated with evil, adventure, witchcraft, and anger.74 Given these cultural associations, it is no surprise that Anne is described as a “freckled witch,” who is capable of “bewitch[ing]” and “casting a spell” 75 over people with her words. As Marilla’s earlier admonition implies,76 the orphan’s imagination is subversive, because it imitates the act of Creation. She speaks her world into existence in order to change the circumstances handed to her by Providence. “Like Adam,” Rubio notes, “Anne Shirley’s first important act after coming to Avonlea is to rename the external world which she finds.”77 Upon her arrival, Avonlea landmarks such as 100

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the Avenue and Barry’s Pond immediately become “the White Way of Delight and the Lake of Shining Waters.”78 Through this act of renaming, the orphan establishes her own personal claim to the island. “Fatherless (and motherless),” Temma F. Berg observes, “Anne takes upon herself the power of the father – signification.”79 The redhead’s main transgression is that she recognizes the imaginative power of language and uses it to change the way she, and others, experience life.

Religion and Colonization Anne’s subversion of religious norms serves as another important point of comparison between the Annescapade and the robinsonade genre. Christianity, after all, plays a central role in the colonizing mission associated with conventional island adventure narratives. Religion is often used to create civilized society on the islands and sometimes results in the conversion of the non-Christians encountered.80 Montgomery’s novel, however, upsets this pattern. To Avonlea inhabitants, Anne is the one in need of civilizing. And yet, it is through the orphan’s supposedly uncivilized behaviour that Montgomery challenges preconceived notions of what it means to be a civilized human being. By renaming the world around her, Anne, the female Adam,81 embraces the opportunity to re-envision society. This re-envisioning involves introducing a new understanding of God to Green Gables. Her mythopoetic power allows her to imaginatively redefine the scope of faith to include unconventional representations of God and ways of relating to Him. In her attempts to articulate a different register of experience, she challenges the religious practices that limit the means of expression available to her – means of expression that include narrow-minded interpretations of the Creator Himself. Nature, once again, provides Anne with an outlet for exploring this aspect of domestic life. In particular, it offers her a means through which to express her alternative understanding of God. She tells Marilla that she would rather commune with Him outdoors than by her bedside, where she could “look up into the sky – up – up — up – into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness” and “just feel a prayer.” Anne’s reverence for God, in this sense, is best 101

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expressed through her delight in His creation. Far from disrespecting His authority, her form of prayer demonstrates her awe for His presence, which, like the sky, has “no end.”82 Significantly, the thought of communing with God in this way is one of the few things that renders Anne speechless. While her preferred method of prayer contributes to Marilla’s perception that she is a heathen, it also demonstrates the way Montgomery uses the natural world to question the religious legalism that circumscribed many pei communities of the time. Rubio notes that “[i]n Cavendish, and the fictional Avonlea, people believed – just as their strict Scottish forebears had – that humanity’s chief goal on earth was to prepare for entrance into Heaven. Religion was at the centre of their world and their daily consciousness (as was the case, of course, in other denominations, too).”83 In this passage, Montgomery targets the religious views that try to limit the “daily consciousness”84 of Anne’s world, including the orphan’s understanding of God. Whereas Anne’s style of prayer communicates freedom (e.g., freedom of personal expression), Marilla’s style of prayer communicates confinement (e.g., conformity to a pre-approved behavioural script). Juxtaposed in this way, the character of Anne forms an interesting contrast to the character of Marilla, who is uncomfortable exploring a relationship with God outside the dictates of religious structures. While the older woman seeks to know God with her head, the younger woman’s approach is to know Him with her heart. Staring at a picture titled “Christ Blessing Little Children,” Anne imagines herself as the lonely girl in the corner, who looks as if “she hadn’t any father or mother of her own.” She imagines that Christ would notice the little girl, that “He would look at her and put His hand on her hair and oh, such a thrill of joy as would run over her!” When Marilla accuses Anne of being “positively irreverent,” she replies, “I felt just as reverent as could be.”85 Unsettled by the intimacy of Anne’s musings, Marilla’s response is to tell her that “it doesn’t sound right to talk so familiarly about such things” and to go and memorize a prewritten “prayer off by heart.”86 In this exchange, Montgomery, as in other of her writings, “takes aim at those whose practice of religion misses its spirit.”87 Looking at the picture of Christ, Marilla’s religiosity leads her to miss the spirit of 102

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unconditional love He conveys. Like many of the Avonlea residents, the older woman’s spiritual reverence is driven by a strong sense of religious duty and obligation, rather than passionate devotion and grace.

The Adventure of Love Viewed from this perspective, the adventure of the Annescapade is essentially the quest for love. Montgomery’s writings, Rubio notes, “tak[e] us where the real action comes from, someplace in the unfathomable mysteries of the human heart.”88 Anne’s response to the image of Christ emphasizes her longing for love and acceptance. Before she arrives at Green Gables, the orphan is already prepared to love it. She exclaims to Matthew, “But I’m glad to think of getting home. You see, I’ve never had a real home since I can remember. It gives me that pleasant ache again just to think of coming to a really truly home.” Anne’s love, in this respect, provides the material for her home-building. Long before Green Gables is actually a “real home,”89 she recognizes its potential. More importantly, she succeeds in helping Matthew and Marilla recognize its potential as well. She tells the former, “Oh, it seems so wonderful that I’m going to live with you and belong to you. I’ve never belonged to anybody – not really.”90 Anne, therefore, does not embrace the “conquering people’s mythology”91 of the robinsonade. In fact, the title of Montgomery’s novel presents a different myth altogether.92 From the narrative’s outset, Anne is prepared to be “of ” Green Gables – she is prepared to exist as part of something that is bigger than herself. The orphan belongs to the home she helps create as much as it belongs to her. Anne’s desire for love and her ability to give it provides the conditions through which she can create a new register of experience. Masculinecoded conceptions of adventure and domesticity are premised on power hierarchies that privilege control and subjugation. Rationality, as understood through the logic of the mind, is viewed as superior to the logic of the heart. By returning to a biblically based view of Christian love as sacrificial and unconditional, Montgomery undermines the ideological force of some of the strict religious beliefs associated with patriarchal society. Anne’s love for the Cuthberts transforms their hearts as much as their love transforms hers. Marilla may adopt Anne against the logic 103

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of her better judgment, but she grows to love the little girl with an affection that she fears is almost “sinful”93 in its intensity. Reflecting on the adoption years later, Matthew remarks: “She’s been a blessing to us, and there never was a luckier mistake than what Mrs. Spencer made – if it was luck. I don’t believe it was any such thing. It was Providence, because the Almighty saw we needed her, I reckon.”94 Although adopting Anne introduces greater uncertainty into their lives, the Cuthberts find themselves grateful for the adventure she brings. The potential risks of raising a strange orphan girl are inconsequential to the rewards they experience. The love she brings into their lives opens their minds to greater possibilities. Their “experiment” 95 yields impressive results. At first glance, of course, love does not seem like a huge thematic departure from the traditional girls’ story. And yet, it nevertheless provides the means through which Montgomery recasts domestic life as an adventure and Anne as an alternative kind of adventurer. Anne’s need for self-love is as important to her home-building journey as her need to love others and be loved by them. Learning to love herself, however, involves resisting the restrictive labels imposed on her by society. While Anne of Green Gables does not contain the kind of action that characterizes masculine conceptions of adventure, it does contain speech acts that are, in their own way, just as important. If the orphan is to oppose the limitations of patriarchal domesticity, she has to resist the language, institutions, and authority figures that enforce it. Accordingly, it is no coincidence that she rages at her red hair – the symbol of her creative power – being associated with “carrots,” 96 and that the two perpetrators are Mrs Lynde, the Avonlea icon of female domesticity, and Gilbert Blythe, Anne’s potential love interest. Anne resists their insults and challenges their ability to name her, thereby asserting her right to define herself. While she reluctantly accepts the designation given to her at birth, she rejects Marilla’s interpretation of it as “a real good plain sensible name” when she insists on spelling it with an “e” just because “[i]t looks so much nicer.”97 The orphan recognizes language as an ideological construct that influences how people view and experience the world. The added “e” represents her imagination, her individuality, and her resistance to the “sensible”98 restrictions placed on her by others. 99 10 4

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That being said, Anne’s sensitivity and defensiveness regarding her appearance simultaneously demonstrate her own struggle for selfacceptance. Internally, she fights against the patriarchal standards of femininity that she is measured against. Moments after meeting Matthew, she tells him, “I don’t ever expect to be a bride myself. I’m so homely nobody will ever want to marry me – unless it might be a foreign missionary.”100 Anne’s insecurities culminate in her anxiety about her red hair – the very symbol of her uniqueness. “Anne’s intense sensitivity about her hair and its colour,” McMaster observes, “is part of her developed awareness of the multitudinous social codes and taboos, popular and otherwise, with which her culture surrounds her.”101 The orphan tells Matthew she “can’t feel exactly perfectly happy”102 because of it, and, after experiencing Marilla’s initial rejection, asks: “If I was very beautiful and had nut-brown hair would you keep me?”103 Anne’s words betray her internalization of patriarchal ideals of beauty that trap her in the identity of an unwanted person. The challenge these ideas pose to her self-acceptance is evident in her self-comparison to Diana, who is “a very pretty little girl.”104 Anne tells Marilla, “Don’t you think Diana has got very soulful eyes? I wish I had soulful eyes.”105 Readers, of course, are aware that Anne does possess soulful eyes; the narrator describes them as “full of spirit and vivacity.”106 Figuratively speaking, Anne must learn to see herself, like the world around her, in a new way. In order to fully embrace her potential as a human being, she must learn to accept and appreciate the aspects of herself that distinguish her from others. The most difficult person she must win over in her fight for love is herself.

The Annescapade This fight for love and acceptance forms the central plot-point of the Annescapade. In order to love herself, Anne has to reconceptualize her society’s understanding of self-worth. To do so, she must escape the limitations of patriarchal visions of domesticity, something that Zweig observes is characteristic of male adventurers as well. In their flights from domestic life, heroes undergo a struggle “against the triple presence of woman: as domestic binder, as demonic adversary, and as 105

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shaper of the adventurous character itself.”107 Anne, too, attempts to escape these female-types, only her escape is a psychological battle with the roles they represent. Unlike the male heroes Zweig describes, she is being groomed to adopt the position of a domestic binder, and as someone who exists outside the home (an imaginative orphan), she is viewed as a demonic adversary to Avonlea society. Both of these roles affirm the “masculine” shape of the adventurous character. Unsurprisingly, Anne finds neither of them completely satisfactory. Marilla observes that the orphan’s “most serious shortcoming seemed to be a tendency to fall into daydreams in the middle of a task and forget all about it until such time as she was sharply recalled to earth by a reprimand or a catastrophe.”108 Discussing her problematic nature, the redhead states, “There’s such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I’m such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn’t be half so interesting.”109 Here Anne reveals the problem with the stereotypes that restrict her; they are unrealistic and reductive. The depth of her character reaches far beyond the presence allotted to her as a woman – beyond the roles of domestic binder and demonic adversary. Interestingly, this escape from female stereotypes is a key characteristic of various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century female robinsonades. Speaking of nineteenth-century English girls’ adventure fiction, Thomas Fair notes that “later texts challenge the perception of traditionally defined social roles for women and create a female protagonist who retains the feminine while displaying the intellectual abilities and physical skills associated with men.”110 In their display of these different qualities, such heroines “capably merge the domestic with the adventurous to embody a new female identity as an amalgam of the traditional Angel of the House and the New Woman.”111 Michelle J. Smith, for instance, points out that the nineteenth-century heroine, Robina Crusoe, “actively desires adventure.”112 These traits are also characteristic of some of the German eighteenth-century heroines that Blackwell describes, who are “well-educated, moral, competent and headstrong young women.”113 These adjectives certainly apply to Anne, and yet the fact remains that she expresses her desire for adventure 106

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primarily through daydreams.114 Describing one such dream, the narrator states, “adventures wonderful and enthralling were happening to her in cloudland – adventures that always turned out triumphantly and never involved her in scrapes like those of actual life.”115 As this passage reveals, Anne’s daydreams stem partly from her dissatisfaction with her own imperfections. Fantasy functions as a means through which she can escape her flaws and the real “scrapes” 116 they create. Anne’s fantasies, however, are intricately connected to the speech acts through which she undermines patriarchal visions of her life. Both are “shaped by her early reading of sentimental and chivalric poems and stories.”117 The orphan, Epperly explains, “has learned to imagine herself as the heroine of her own continuing private fiction, created to counteract the dullness or harshness of the real world around.”118 Through her imaginative revisioning of the world she inhabits, Anne attempts to rewrite her story.119 While it is tempting to read her self-narrative as proof that she affirms romantic stereotypes of the sentimental female, such a reading misses the power of her ability to think of herself in new ways. Anne’s pleasure lies in creating fantasies more than in fulfilling them. “Most frequently,” Laura M. Robinson points out, “Anne inadvertently undermines the content of the romances she reads.”120 When Gilbert rescues Anne from the sinking dory, for example, she rejects a romantic reading of the situation. While Anne enjoys having the imaginative power to step into the lives of characters like Tennyson’s Elaine, she does not want to inhabit their worlds permanently. Consequently, she possesses a level of control over her self-narrative that conventional romantic heroines do not. “The confined heroine of the eighteenth century,” Blackwell observes, unlike the female Robinsons, “cannot create the tools to produce herself: she cannot generate her own story and write herself up as its heroine.”121 Unlike this female archetype, Anne is more than capable of writing her own story. In fact, part of Anne’s story involves letting go of stereotypical, romantic fantasies and developing new ones based on her real-life experiences. She exchanges the thrill of romantic daydreams for the thrill of pursuing her endless “ambitions.”122 As the narrative progresses, Anne’s dreams stop functioning as an escape from her life and start 107

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functioning as her direct engagement with it. McGillis notes that “[f]antasy has a strong tendency toward subversion, or transgression. It is unheimlich. At its best it shows us that our true home is elsewhere, not in the local communities in which we live day by day.”123 Growing up as a social outcast, Anne’s first step to building a home involves envisioning an “elsewhere”124 where she can belong. However, as the orphan receives the love of those around her and learns to love herself, she no longer needs to flee her domestic life in the way she once did. While Anne’s imagination initially disturbs Marilla, the older woman’s feelings toward it change, so much so that she misses its “queer ways”125 as Anne matures. Over the course of their relationship, love overcomes Marilla’s fear at not being able to fully “understand” 126 Anne. At the same time, it is her love for and acceptance of Anne’s eccentricities that removes the orphan’s need to dream up a fantastic existence. The Cuthberts’ love provides Anne with a “true home.”127 Through this process of acceptance, Green Gables becomes a place where the many “different Annes” 128 are free to speak and be interesting. When Marilla remarks on the changes she sees in Anne, the redhead tells her: “I’m not a bit changed – not really. I’m only just pruned down and branched out. The real me – back here – is just the same.”129 This arboreal imagery references Anne’s earlier identification with the “poor weeny-teeny” 130 trees outside of the asylum. A beloved daughter, she no longer resembles the orphan trees as much as she does the beautifully cared-for cherry tree outside her window at Green Gables. There is even a linguistic association between that tree, named “Snow Queen,” and Anne, the soon to be “Queen’s Girl.”131 By the end of the novel, Anne is, like the tree, blossoming with the self-confidence and assurance she lacked at the beginning of her journey. After tying with Gilbert Blythe for first place on the Queen’s entrance exam, she prays a prayer that stands in direct contrast to the one she first prays at Green Gables: “There was a thankfulness for the past and reverent petition for the future; and when she slept on her white pillow her dreams were as fair and bright and beautiful as maidenhood might desire.” The orphan is no longer an unwanted outcast. Consequently, she now prays from a place of security, rather than a place of insecurity. Her dreams of her 108

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future at Queen’s replace her previous dreams of a fantastic, romantic existence. Anne’s “fair and bright and beautiful”132 aspirations are connected to her desire to learn new things and achieve goals outside the domestic sphere. Montgomery’s redhead, in this respect, is more than a combination of traditionally feminine and masculine traits. She is not an adventurer by virtue of her being inserted into the plot structure of a traditional adventure story, although she herself has tried this in her daydreams. No, she is adventurous because she calls into question the seemingly natural divisions between men and women, transcending these distinctions through her concept of “kindred spirits.” 133 The Annescapade operates in a different register, one that is driven by the imaginative force of Anne’s own psyche and passion for living. The “forbidden energies” 134 of her imagination are creative energies that call into being a new reality. The redhead, Rubio notes, “introduces a new vitality to all of Avonlea. She looks at its landscape and people through fresh eyes, finds new words to describe it, and creates a new reality for the people who live there.”135 Reflecting on the impact Anne has had on her own life, Marilla states, “there’s one thing certain, no house will ever be dull that she’s in.”136 Eliminating the “dullness” of domesticity, Anne infuses the concept with the “scope” 137 it had previously lacked. By the end of the novel, her room is “a very different place from what it had been” when she first entered it. “Changes,” the narrator observes, “had crept in, Marilla conniving at them resignedly, until it was as sweet and dainty a nest as a young girl could desire.”138 In the end, the adventurous pin wins its battle with the hard cushion. Anne builds a home where love frees her to dream new dreams.

Sur vival That being said, the question remains as to whether Anne eventually exchanges this alternative register for the conventional “feminized register of the domestic story.”139 Epperly notes that “Anne’s vocal self-dramatizations and spontaneity charm the stodgy establishment of Avonlea, but then, having won her right to speak, Anne gives up passionate articulation in favour of a conventional, maidenly dreaminess 109

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and reserve.”140 Viewed from this perspective, the young girl’s voice is curbed by maturation. She tells Marilla, “I don’t know – I don’t want to talk as much … It’s nicer to think dear, pretty thoughts and keep them in one’s heart, like treasures. I don’t like to have them laughed at or wondered over.”141 The metaphor of buried treasure in this passage carries repressive implications. In losing her ability to talk freely, Anne loses her ability to act. Like her personality, her hair colour also becomes more conventional. She informs Marilla, “people are nice enough to tell me my hair is auburn now.”142 Having lost the imaginative attributes that once characterized her, Anne thus appears to lose her power. Succumbing to social pressures, she becomes what T.D. MacLulich refers to as “a potential rebel.”143 The conservative, one-dimensional young woman casts shadows of the other dimensions her character once possessed. At least, that is one interpretation of the novel’s ending. Reading about Anne’s decision to sacrifice her scholarship and stay with Marilla, it is easy to feel that the redhead’s adventures are at an end. Yet, throughout her story, Anne reminds readers “that [their] perception of reality often becomes the blueprint for [their] lives.”144 Anne might appear to be “a potential rebel”145 when viewed through the conventional blueprint of masculine-coded concepts of adventure and domesticity, but what happens when one attempts to view her through an alternative blueprint? What happens when one reads her using a different register? Blackwell notes that German eighteenth-century female robinsonades carry a different “imaginative momentum” than the male robinsonades. According to her, this momentum “differs from previous adventures by creating a new type of female consciousness and a revised plot framework for women characters living in the ‘objective’ world outside.”146 Part of this revised plot framework involves an emphasis on community: “the woman castaway survives through communal effort and nurtures long, deep female friendship.”147 A central theme in Montgomery’s novel, female friendship has the power to change the way one views Anne’s decision. Drain notes that, by choosing to stay with Marilla, Anne “confirms her place by knowingly taking on the network of responsibilities that belonging entails.”148 By sustaining 110

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the most important female bond she has formed during her time in Avonlea (i.e., her mother-daughter relationship with Marilla), Anne sustains her own identity. The significance of this decision in relation to Anne’s survival becomes clearer when considered against the endings of German eighteenth-century female robinsonades. Blackwell notes that “[t]he female Robinson’s quest is for an orderly social world with rich rewards, friendship, and harmony. She can achieve that world only by breaking away from Europe, establishing an egalitarian existence, but can bring it back to Europe only through the intervention of a noble man who solidifies her material gains. And rescue means a return to Europe, to the stifling social order, one not transformed by her new consciousness.”149 Unlike this female Robinson, Anne is able to maintain her egalitarian existence on the island of her dreams by choosing to rescue Marilla. While Gilbert offers her the Avonlea school, his actions are unnecessary. She is fully capable of carrying out her plans to teach at Carmody. Anne, in this respect, takes action in relation to her own life. She adopts the role of rescuer. Unlike many of the female Robinsons, she does not need the security of a male presence to secure her happiness. Anne and Marilla will, and do, survive together without a man at Green Gables. Read in this way, Anne fully embraces her new consciousness by choosing to stay. Unlike the beginning of the story, she is now in a position to make that choice for herself. Her love has transformed Green Gables into the home she has always desired. Marilla does not demand that Anne sacrifice her scholarship; on the contrary, she tells her, “I can’t let you sacrifice yourself so for me. It would be terrible.” To which Anne responds, “There is no sacrifice. Nothing could be worse than giving up Green Gables – nothing could hurt me more.” Anne’s response to Marilla offers readers the revelation that, for Anne, deserting the home and family she has built would be the real sacrifice. Green Gables is the fulfillment of her greatest dream, because it is the place where she has found love and acceptance. Confirming this fact, Marilla selflessly seeks to protect Anne’s dreams and ambitions above her own comfort. Anne, however, reassures her by saying, “I’m just as ambitious as ever. Only I’ve changed the object of my ambitions. I’m going to be a good 111

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teacher – and I’m going to save your eyesight. Besides, I mean to study at home here and take a little college course all by myself. Oh, I’ve dozens of plans, Marilla.”150 Anne’s enthusiastic response demonstrates the success of her home-building adventure; the security of Marilla’s love gives her the freedom to make her own choices regarding her future. The orphan is no longer a castoff who can exist only in the safety of her imagination, but a cherished daughter whose dreams are anchored by the real love of a mother who believes in her ability to achieve them. Moreover, to the extent that Anne’s plans include working as a teacher while independently “study[ing] everything that [she] would at college,” they are actually more ambitious than before Matthew’s death. When Mrs Lynde warns Anne, “you’ll kill yourself,” the latter replies, “Not a bit of it. I shall thrive on it,” and goes on to say, “I’ll have lots of spare time in the long winter evenings, and I’ve no vocation for fancy work.”151 The energetic force of Anne’s future plans suggests how she is still “just the same”152 girl. She cannot be completely the same, because any person with her desire for knowledge must change over time if she is to remain “interesting.” 153 In fact, it is Anne’s ability to remain interesting that makes her a superior adventurer to Crusoe. Zweig describes Defoe’s hero as someone with a “lack of imagination,” whose “energy is lacking.”154 According to him, Crusoe’s story “undermines the ethos of adventure” because “[i]t does not glory in the episodic life.”155 This cannot be said of Anne, who quickly adjusts to the changes introduced by this last episode of Marilla’s failing eyesight. Unlike Crusoe, she delights in the thought of the “bend in the road”156 ahead of her. Anne views the change in her circumstances as an adventure that will invite other adventures into her life. Rather than fear these changes, she embraces them with courage, determination, and optimism. She has faith that, whatever figurative and literal territories she must traverse, they will be glorious ones. Perhaps, then, when all is said and done, Anne does not give up the right to speak that she fought so hard to obtain. Perhaps she no longer feels like she has to fight so hard to be heard as she once did, or that she has to try so hard to earn the acceptance and approval of others. Perhaps. Readers who are privy to the narrative bends that occupy Montgomery’s sequels might not agree with these observations. Anne, 112

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after all, eventually gives up her teaching career to become a wife to Gilbert and a mother to their children. She becomes a homemaker. But then again, wasn’t she always? Maybe Anne’s greatest achievement as a homemaker was to create an alternative vision of adventure and domesticity – to present readers with a different blueprint for belonging and a different “myth through which to live”157 from that of colonial domination. Maybe Montgomery’s greatest achievement was to succeed in conveying the adventurous nature of life and the quest for love that drives it. The “I” lands of the human imagination are the most important places people will ever inhabit. While the robinsonade highlights the ideological forces that seek to control people’s lives, the Annescapade highlights the heart that gives life meaning. The energy that drives Anne’s adventure operates in a different register than masculine-coded interpretations of the boys’ story and the girls’ story. Anne of Green Gables is a human story, and it is in the humanity of Montgomery’s heroine that readers find the “scope” 158 to redefine their visions of home.

No t e s 1 The term “robinsonade” is applied to texts resembling Daniel Defoe’s novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719). Examples include books such as Canadian Crusoes (1852), The Coral Island (1857), Treasure Island (1883), and Peter Pan (1911). 2 O’Malley, “Island Homemaking,” 70–1. 3 Ibid., 72. 4 See Weiss-Town, “Sexism Down on the Farm,” 14. 5 Ellis, How to Be a Heroine, 33. 6 Waterston, Kindling Spirit, 30. 7 McGillis, “Fantasy as Adventure,” 20. 8 Drain, “Feminine Convention and Female Identity,” 42. 9 Rubio, “Subverting the Trite,” 14. Here Rubio is referring to Montgomery’s work as a whole, but this classification certainly extends to agg. 10 Weiss-Town, “Sexism Down on the Farm,” 14. 11 O’Malley, “Island Homemaking,” 71. 12 Rubio, “Subverting the Trite,” 34. 13 Weiss-Town, “Sexism Down on the Farm,” 12.

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14 See Maria Nikolajeva, Power, Voice, and Subjectivity, 96. Nikolajeva notes that in outdoor survival narratives, “typically masculine traits of the protagonist are emphasized: strength, activity, independence, rationality, analytical and quantitative thinking, and so on.” Consequently, “[i]n a female Robinsonnade, the character must necessarily hover between maintaining, or even developing, masculine traits and values on the one hand, and, on the other, retaining or affirming her femininity.” Unlike these heroines, Anne’s adventurous nature does not depend on her adopting traditionally masculine traits and behaviours, but, rather, redefining what is considered adventurous. 15 Drain, “Feminine Convention and Female Identity,” 42. 16 Montgomery, agg, 70. 17 Ibid., 104. 18 O’Malley, “Island Homemaking,” 72. 19 Ibid., 84. 20 Nodelman and Reimer, The Pleasures of Children’s Literature, 97. 21 See Nodelman, The Hidden Adult, 164. Nodelman cites Reimer’s understanding of the limitations of the colonial metaphor in children’s literature, noting himself that, “while the parallels between Orientalist thinking and adult conceptions of childhood are inexact, they are extraordinarily suggestive.” 22 Wesseling, “Introduction,” 9. 23 While this essay does not explore the experiences of colonization of Indigenous people in Canada, it is interesting to note that the cbc Netflix series Anne with an “E” used Montgomery’s story to engage in discussions of the Canadian Indian residential-school system. See Maggs, “Great and Sudden Change.” 24 Macherey, as quoted in Reimer in this volume, 119–20. 25 Ibid. 26 Montgomery, agg, 65. 27 Edwards and Saltman, Picturing Canada, 24. 28 Blackwell, “An Island of Her Own,” 5. 29 Elgaard, “Canadian Crusoes,” 40. 30 Macherey, as quoted in Reimer in this volume, 120. 31 Traill was included in a published collection titled Courageous Women (1934), which described the lives of important historical female figures within and outside the Canada context. Although Montgomery did not write the chapter on Traill’s life featured in this collection (Lefebvre, L.M. Montgomery Reader, 1:298), she did contribute other chapters to it, and would likely have been aware of the author. For more on Courageous Women, see Gammel and Epperly “Introduction,” 7. 32 O’Malley, “Island Homemaking,” 82. See also, Smith, “Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes,” 170. Speaking of Traill’s character, Smith writes: “The heroine of this novel, however, is entirely unfit for survival in the wilderness.” 114

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33 See Blackwell, “An Island of Her Own”; Fair, “19th-Century English Girls’ Adventure Stories”; and Smith, “Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes.” 34 Maher, “Recasting Crusoe,” 169. 35 Ibid. 36 Fair, “19th-Century English Girls’ Adventure Stories,” 144. Fair is citing Jeannine Blackwell’s study of German robinsonades in this passage. 37 Blackwell, “An Island of Her Own,” 14. 38 See Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 31. Elizabeth Rollins Epperly notes that “Anne herself has come ‘from away’ (as local pei dialect dubs it) to this place.” 39 Montgomery, agg, 55. Emphasis in original. 40 Ibid., 74, 76. Emphasis in original. 41 Ibid., 78, 79, 79–80. 42 Ibid., 55. Emphasis in original. 43 Blackwell, “An Island of Her Own,” 14. 44 Montgomery, agg, 81. 45 Saltman, “Encounters and Adventures: Realistic and Historical Fiction,” 671. 46 Ibid. 47 Montgomery, agg, 83 48 Smith, “Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes,” 171. 49 Montgomery, agg, 79. 50 Ibid., 83. 51 Ibid., 98. 52 Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 31. 53 For more on this relationship between the realistic and fantastical island space, as well as its relationship to Anne, see Epperly, The Fragrance of SweetGrass, 31. See also, Waterston, Magic Island, 1. 54 Wolf, “Paradise Lost,” 53. 55 See Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 31. Epperly observes that: “Eventually, with the constant reinforcement of the identification of narrator and Anne, we identify Anne herself with Prince Edward Island and with all the enchantment of its moods and features.” 56 Montgomery, agg, 68. 57 Ibid., 64. 58 Ibid., 68. 59 Ibid., 79. 60 Wolf, “Paradise Lost,” 53. 61 Montgomery, agg, 65, 105. 62 Zweig, The Adventurer, 41. McGillis also references Zweig’s work when discussing the topic of adventure in agg, although he focuses more on Zweig’s discussion of nineteenth-century adventure fiction. See McGillis, “Fantasy as Adventure,” 18–19. I apply different aspects of Zweig’s work in my analysis. 115

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81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

93 94

Ibid. Montgomery, agg, 104. Zweig, The Adventurer, 113. See, for example, Anne’s compassionate attitude toward Mrs Thomas and Mrs Hammond. Montgomery, agg, 92. Waterston comments on Anne’s outsider status when she writes: “In Anne of Green Gables, the world of dour propriety is assaulted by the daemonic force of a red-headed child brought miraculously from ‘off the Island.’” See Waterston, “Lucy Maud Montgomery 1874-1942,” 58. Sheckels, The Island Motif, 4. Drain, “Feminine Convention and Female Identity,” 44. Montgomery, agg, 101. Ibid., 99. Emphasis in original. McMaster, “Taking Control,” 58. Ibid., 63 See Roach, The Roots of Desire, 15. Montgomery, agg, 67, 80, 86. Ibid., 104. Rubio, “Satire, Realism, and Imagination,” 34. Montgomery, agg, 77. Berg, “A Girl’s Reading,” 158. Berg is referencing Lacan in her discussion. See, for examples, Blackwell, “An Island of Her Own”; Fair, “19th-Century English Girls’ Adventure Stories”; Maher, “Recasting Crusoe”; O’Malley, “Island Homemaking”; and Smith, “Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes.” Rubio, “Satire, Realism, and Imagination,” 34. Montgomery, agg, 100. Emphasis in original. Rubio, “Scottish-Presbyterian,” 100. Ibid. Montgomery, agg, 105. Ibid., 105–6. Rubio, “Scottish-Presbyterian,” 97. Ibid., 99–100. Montgomery, agg, 71. Ibid., 65. Maher, “Recasting Crusoe,” 169. In her discussion of Anne, Rubio also highlights the way she introduces a new “myth” to Avonlea society. See Rubio, “The Architect of Adolescence,” 74. Building on Rubio’s observations, I discuss this myth in greater detail in another article. See Tulloch, “Canadian ‘Anne-girl[s].’” Montgomery, agg, 271. Ibid., 305. Emphasis in original. 116

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95 96 97 98 99

100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

115 116 117 118 119 120

Ibid., 98. Ibid., 112, 154. Ibid., 76–7. Emphasis in original. Ibid., 76. The “e” in Anne’s name draws attention to her individuality and has come to symbolize her distinct personality, which is why it forms the title of Holly Blackford’s edited collection, Anne with an “E”: The Centennial Study of Anne of Green Gables, as well as the title of the most recent cbc/Netflix television series, Anne with an E. Irene Gammel also speaks of the importance of the “e” in her discussion of Anne’s distinction from other literary “Anns.” See Gammel, “Wildwood Roses and Sunshine Girls,” 12. Reflecting on this distinction, Gammel writes: “Anne’s insistence on the ‘e,’ however, demands her distinction from the more common name … so the ‘e’ in Anne’s name is like a personal code, reflecting the vision of L.M. Montgomery that transcends formula writing.” Montgomery, agg, 66. McMaster, “Taking Control,” 58. Montgomery, agg, 68. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 64. Zweig, The Adventurer, 80. Montgomery, agg, 102. Ibid., 200. Fair, “19th-Century English Girls’ Adventure Stories,” 142–3. Ibid., 143. Smith, “Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes,” 173. Blackwell, “An Island of Her Own,” 9. At times, L.M. Montgomery also chose to express her desire for adventure in daydreams inspired by the books that she read. See “My Favorite Bookshelf,” 155. She writes: “And this – yes, it is really a boy’s book of adventure which is to me as manna in the wilderness when I grow tired of ordering my household with a due regard for calories and desire wildly to start out with a battle-axe, or go hunting for buried treasure, or shooting grizzly bears.” Montgomery, agg, 270. Ibid. Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 24. Ibid. See Robinson, “Anne and Her Ancestors,” 135. Ibid.

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121 Blackwell, “An Island of Her Own,” 21. Here Blackwell is speaking specifically of Sentimental eighteenth-century female protagonists. 122 Montgomery, agg, 309. 123 McGillis, “Fantasy as Adventure,” 20. Emphasis in original. McGillis cites the work of Rosemary Jackson in this discussion. 124 Ibid. 125 Montgomery, agg, 304. 126 Ibid., 80. 127 McGillis, “Fantasy as Adventure,” 20. 128 Montgomery, agg, 200. 129 Ibid., 304. Emphasis in original. 130 Ibid., 68. 131 Ibid., 86, 303. 132 Ibid., 293. 133 Ibid., 183. 134 Zweig, The Adventurer, 41. 135 Rubio, “The Architect of Adolescence,” 74. 136 Montgomery, agg, 148. 137 Ibid., 83. 138 Ibid., 294. 139 O’Malley, “Island Homemaking,” 71. 140 Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 17–18. 141 Montgomery, agg, 285. 142 Ibid., 324. 143 MacLulich, “L.M. Montgomery and the Literary Heroine,” 9. 144 Rubio, “Satire, Realism, and Imagination,” 34. 145 MacLulich, “L.M. Montgomery and the Literary Heroine,” 9. 146 Blackwell, “An Island of Her Own,” 8. 147 Ibid., 17. 148 Drain, “Community and the Individual,” 19. 149 Blackwell, “An Island of Her Own,” 16. 150 Montgomery, agg, 328. 151 Ibid., 329–30. 152 Ibid., 304. 153 Ibid., 200. 154 Zweig, The Adventurer, 113. 155 Ibid. 156 Montgomery, agg, 334. 157 Rubio, “The Architect of Adolescence,” 74. 158 Ibid., 83.

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5 Soliciting Home The Cultural Function of Orphans in Early-Twentieth-Century Canada

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n Broadly speaking, there are two questions that literary critics need to

pose simultaneously, according to Pierre Macherey in A Theory of Literary Production, the 1966 book in which he develops the idea of gaps in literary texts. The first is the question of how the work coheres. Macherey represents the critic engaged with this question as reconstituting, recalling, and recognizing “scattered” elements of theme and structure as the central motifs of the work.1 This is what the work “wants to say.”2 Critics asking this question address not only the question of textual coherence, but also the question of historical coherence. They seek to identify the history that the “emergence of the work require[s],” because a work builds its “principle of reality” in its invocation of a particular history,3 and the “means of expression” of the work are supplied by that

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history.4 The second question follows from the question of historical location; this is the question of the “conditions of the possibility” of the created textual world.5 In asking this question, the critic considers “what the work is compelled to say in order to say what it wants to say.”6 For Macherey, these conditions are always immanent to the work itself – the work is “haunted” by them, he says – but also lead to “that which haunts it,” “the play of history beyond its edges, encroaching on its edges.”7 Literary critics have long asked and answered the question of how L.M. Montgomery’s first novel, Anne of Green Gables, coheres as a work. One recurrent line of inquiry has considered such motifs as belonging, adapting, kinning, and homing. Irene Gammel’s suggestion that the motto of the novel could be said to be “For the child that needs a home and the home that needs a child” – the heading used for a series of articles on children available for adoption published in the Delineator of New York in September of 19078 – encapsulates this focus in the critical literature. This, we might say, using Macherey’s terms, is what the work wants to say: children need homes and homes need children for each to be what they ought to be. As Gammel’s formulation also makes clear, what the work wants to say is intimately connected to its historical locations. It is my contention that the discourses of fostering and adoption current in Canada at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century not only supplied Montgomery with the “means of expression” she needed to build her powerful idea of home, but also reveal the limits to the idea of home – “the conditions of the possibility” of home – that made this powerful idea expressible.

The Conditions of the Possibility of Home There is a puzzling short passage in the first chapter of Anne of Green Gables: it comes in the opening conversation between Marilla and Rachel Lynde about the orphan boy being sent from the Hopetown asylum to live with the Cuthberts. Marilla is justifying her decision to apply for a child to her neighbour. In her explanation, she distinguishes between different kinds of boys who might be expected to be available for farm work on the Island: “you know how desperate hard it’s got to be to 120

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get hired help. There’s never anybody to be had but those stupid, halfgrown little French boys; and as soon as you do get one broke into your ways and taught something he’s up and off to the lobster canneries or the States. At first Matthew suggested getting a Barnardo boy. But I said ‘no’ flat to that. ‘They may be all right – I’m not saying they’re not – but no London street Arabs for me,’ I said. ‘Give me a native born at least. There’ll be a risk, no matter who we get. But I’ll feel easier in my mind and sleep sounder at nights if we get a born Canadian.”9 Before the end of the chapter, readers are given a glimpse of “the child who was waiting patiently at the Bright River station at this very moment,”10 the child who turns out to be the irrepressible, loquacious girl Anne. The interest readers are invited to take in the gender confusions of the first stretch of the novel makes it easy to pass over the details of the passage about boy workers. Arguably, however, the conversation between Marilla and Rachel can be read as a textual margin in the sense in which Macherey uses the term. Every work, Macherey maintains, “has its margins, an area of incompleteness from which we can observe its birth and its production.”11 It is within these margins that a critical reader can find the conditions of possibility of a text. As Macherey predicts, the enumeration of types of boys in the passage points to histories encroaching on the edges of the text. There is the allusion to the relations of French and English Canadians in the Maritime provinces after 1763, when the Acadians were forced from their lands as the colony of Canada was transferred to British governance. There are the references to “Barnardo boys” and “street Arabs”: as Cecily Devereux notes in the Broadview edition of the novel, “Barnardo boys” is a general term used to name the “many children from Britain – often, but not always, orphans – who were sent to the settler colonies as labourers throughout the nineteenth century,”12 and “street Arabs” is a term “used throughout the nineteenth century to refer to homeless children living in the streets of a city – often, but not always, London.”13 These references, while clearly identifying events that can usefully be explored in relation to the novel, seem understandable. The puzzle of the paragraph for me was the logic of Marilla’s assumption that an orphan who was “born Canadian” obviously was different from 121

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a London orphan. Why would Marilla imagine that this explanation might clinch her argument for adopting a child from Hopetown and satisfy Mrs Rachel Lynde, the neighbour who has already been introduced to readers as the arbiter of “decency and decorum” in Avonlea?14 I found an answer to my question in an archive of newspaper clippings housed in the provincial archives of Ontario and collected by John Joseph Kelso, the first superintendent of neglected and dependent children in Ontario when he was appointed to that position in 1893 and, as of 1897, also the inspector of juvenile immigration agencies in Ontario.15 The Kelso archive allowed me to chart some of the shifting discourses about orphans, fostering, adoption, and juvenile emigration current in Canada during the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Reformers such as Kelso, who sought to move public opinion away from regarding orphaned children merely as cheap farm or domestic labour and toward accepting such children as full members of the family, succeeded in part because Canadian public opinion turned against the young British emigrants.16 Dominant discourses began to separate these dependent British children conceptually from dependent Canadian children, relegating the foreign young people to the ranks of what Victorian society considered the “undeserving poor” – in the most extreme examples, as garbage – thereby reserving the status of the “deserving poor” for Canadian young people. A notorious cartoon published in the Toronto World in 1895, for example, shows Dr Barnardo piping effluent from London to Canada, despite public protests.17 An 1894 editorial from another daily Ontario newspaper employs a similar rhetoric, although the verbal image is not as scurrilous as the visual image: “How can we in justice to ourselves, our children and our country, permit our shores to be used as a dumping ground for little outcasts, when we are already surrounded by wretched suffering little ones appealing to us for pity and protection?”18 At the same time, the discourses surrounding neglected, indigent, orphaned, and dependent children became more clearly gendered discourses, moving from privileging the figure of the sturdy, willing boy worker as the ideal child (a dominant strain of the discourse when emigrant societies were seeking to place the British orphans as domestic and farm workers) to 122

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privileging the pretty, innocent infant girl as the ideal child (the emerging discourse as children were being positioned as adoptable subjects). In Anne of Green Gables, Marilla borrows the logic of the newspaper accounts, although not the images, to explain herself to her neighbour. As I conclude in the essay in which I outline these discourses in detail, Montgomery can create the picture of the happy child Anne in the happy home of Green Gables because she refuses to imagine other children (lone child emigrants, racialized lower-class children, and child labourers, for example) in place inside the home of the family and the nation.19 Such exclusion is one of the conditions of possibility for Anne’s story. As Macherey might say, this is what the work is compelled to say; this is its “undisguised (which does not mean innocent) relation with history.”20 In my work with the discourses of fostering and adoption current in Canada during the time Montgomery was writing the Anne series, I initially focused on Macherey’s second question, that of the conditions of possibility of the text. In doing so, I passed quickly over the first question of what the text wants to say and largely ignored the question of the “means of expression” Montgomery found to build her powerful idea of home. To return to this first question, I take up another collection of Kelso’s papers: this is a collection of material, housed in the National Archives in Ottawa and assembled by Kelso, on the work of the Children’s Aid Societies, which he was instrumental in forming in Ontario and influential in forming in the rest of Canada.21 To organize and analyze this material, my research assistant and I paid particular attention to the way in which images, especially photographs, were used in the various reports, newspaper articles, and flyers collected by Kelso. While we sought to focus on material dated between 1880 and 1920, we discovered that much of the material is undated and that similar items from across a wider range of decades are often grouped together. In my initial mapping of the material, I have identified three kinds of recurrent images. These are overlapping rather than discrete categories, but they identify several important threads in the discourse. I have entitled these Advertising Children, Documenting Success, and Soliciting Home. Each of these kinds of images can also be found in Montgomery’s 123

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verbal depictions of one or more of the many orphans who appear in the Anne series. In her study of Montgomery’s “visual imagination,” Elizabeth Rollins Epperly makes the point that Montgomery’s verbal imagery often replicates her photographic imagery, and that both are part of “larger stories about beauty and belonging.”22 While I focus on photographs taken by others and reproduced in public media, I borrow Epperly’s method of regarding Montgomery’s verbal images as indicative of her “patterns of seeing.”23 Specifically, I argue that Montgomery’s work builds its “principle of reality,” to use Macherey’s term, through its invocation of images found in contemporaneous discourses of fostering and adoption in Canada.24 In the discussion that follows, the descriptions of the archival material necessarily occupy much of my attention, but, at the conclusion of each section, I point to passages in the Anne series in which Montgomery uses these culturally available motifs, to demonstrate that Montgomery imagines the child who is capable of fully inhabiting home as an orphan. To some extent, she also assumes and uses the gendered discourses current in her culture in which boys are figured as physical workers and girls as emotional workers, although such gendering is complicated in her narrative accounts. Montgomery’s iconic status in the canon of Canadian children’s literature, I speculate in my conclusion, is one indication that the orphan figure continues to inform national understandings of home.

Advertising Children To a twenty-first-century reader, one of the most surprising things about the publications authored and collected by Kelso is the utter disregard for the privacy of personal information about the children left to the care of charitable institutions or the state. Historian Veronica Strong-Boag, who has written extensively on fostering and adoption in Canada, notes that it was not until well after the Second World War that rules about the information that could be registered in adoption records were codified in Canada.25 The evidence of the Kelso archive is that it was quite acceptable at the beginning of the twentieth century to publish both pictures and information about orphans available for adoption in all manner of public media.26 12 4

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For example, a photograph that appears on the first page of a pamphlet entitled Homes Wanted for Homeless Children, published by Kelso in 1895 (fig. 5.1), depicts a young girl who is used as a generic representation of “the homeless or dependent child” who would thrive by “grow[ing] up in a natural atmosphere and in the enjoyment of the natural experiences of childhood,” as the first paragraph under her picture puts it. In this sense, she can be read as an allegorical figure or type, just as the figure of a mother in the etching that appears on the page opposite to the photograph in the pamphlet is an allegorical figure. In this case, the mother is a type of Christ: she takes the conventional position of Jesus in illustrations of the scene of Jesus blessing the children, a scene reproduced in much Sunday-school literature. But a photograph, unlike an etching, also has an indexical function as a figure, as C.S. Peirce observes.27 That is, a photograph might symbolize an idea, but it also ties that idea to a historical referent. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes identifies the “singular adherence” to its referent as the “genius” that distinguishes photography within “the community of images”:28 “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me.”29 In this sense, “[e]very photograph is a certificate of presence,”30 verifying, as Susan Ash puts it, “that someone has seen this body ‘in flesh and blood.’”31, 32 Photographs in the Kelso archive clearly serve both iconic and indexical functions. In a small, undated broadside entitled Conservation of Childhood, for example, a photograph of three young girls illustrates the message (delivered and authorized through a long quotation from a speech of President Roosevelt) that the most important thing patriotic citizens can do is to ensure that they leave “a proper heritage,” which, the president explains, means to leave “the right type of children, children of such character and living their lives under such conditions that they shall be fit to enjoy and make use of their heritage.”33 The girls in the photograph, looking straight before them and out to the viewers of the photograph, seem prepared to head into the fit and proper future being imagined for them. While the represented children are understood to be emblematic of “the right type of children” generally, it is instructive 125

5.1 | “Homes Wanted for Homeless Children,” broadside.

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to note that the children are all girls, their dresses providing the opportunity for the symbolic use of white – or what appears to be white in a black-and-white image – to assert their innocence and, therefore, their suitability for a good future. The photograph simultaneously can be read as an advertisement of the pictured children specifically. Indeed, the same photograph, cropped to omit the most robust-looking girl of the trio, appears in a 1913 journal article above the caption, “Waiting for a Good Home.”34 Another photograph, published in a regional Ontario newspaper in the 1890s, depicts two babies sitting on a chair and explicitly invites viewers to undertake a double – iconic and indexical – reading. The caption begins, “Two of the babies in the Toronto Infants’ Home waiting for adoption,” a sentence indexing these particular “flesh and blood” babies, but continues, “They speak not only for themselves but for seventeen others,”35 a sentence gesturing to the iconic or symbolic function of the babies. In many of the cutlines and vignettes accompanying the photographs of children, the marketing rhetoric is explicit and direct. A 1927 item published in the Toronto Daily Star, for instance, is headed “Nice Little Boys for People Who Want Them” (fig. 5.2), and tells a short story about “[t]hree attractive lads” who have been waiting for a year to be welcomed into friendly homes. As practiced members of a consumer society, contemporary readers probably recognize this language of persuasion. The “goods” are described (the “lads” are first named generically and then as individuals – Elmer, Eddie, and Robert, introduced with their birthdates), characterized (these are “attractive lads,” “nice little boys”), and their quality authenticated (through the visual certification of the pictures); the potential “buyer” is flattered (taken to be “friendly” and “welcoming”); and the beginning of a narrative is sketched, a narrative which the consumer/reader can readily complete by supplying the missing action (welcoming the boys into the homes for which they have been waiting). In his study of the emergence of advertising systems in Canada, Russell Johnston documents the promotion of each of these techniques as effective advertising in the extensive literature on marketing that appeared in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The form of the “politely phrased announcement,” in which advertisers 127

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“made it known that particular goods or services were available,” of a specified quality and at a specified price, was the standard of advertising before 1880, and remained the basis of other forms.36 To this basic description of the goods for sale were added descriptions that could appeal to the emotions of the potential buyers. Johnston describes Timothy Eaton at the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, as wanting “his goods described honestly,” but at the same time wanting them “to be desirable.”37 This meant that Eaton assumed that descriptions of “qualities beyond what was empirically observable” were also “acceptable talking points” in his advertisements.38 Eventually, the new advertising professionals recognized that the focus of attention should be “the people reading the ad” and should “address them in a familiar voice,” privileging “the consumer’s desires over the product itself.”39 After academic psychologists entered the field of study of advertising practices in the 1890s, the focus on the consumer intensified. In particular, the notion that “suggestion” could be employed to encourage the reader “to participate in the formulation” of the desirable outcome was widely taken up.40 Advertising was explicitly embraced by Kelso as a strategy to promote the work of the Children’s Aid Societies, making contemporaneous marketing strategies a useful lens through which to understand the archival photographs. The 1927 vignette featuring Elmer, Eddie, and Robert is preserved in a second location in the archive, in one of Kelso’s scrapbooks, where it is annotated by Kelso: “It pays to advertise/Especially when you get the adds [sic] for nothing/In three months placed twenty-five little boys in free homes.”41 A 1916 advertisement of “Little Teddy” carries a similar handwritten note – “Have always contended that if children well-advertised, many desirable homes may be found” – and a scrapbook page that includes a number of different photographs of children bears the note, “Pictures help to find homes for many children.”42 Notably, the annotations speak to the success of Kelso’s marketing strategy. Kelso obviously read his audiences well and, indeed, his achievements as a publicist were widely praised. For example, a typescript also preserved in the archive is titled “Value of Publicity” and reads as a citation for an award: “[f]rom his first 128

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5.2 | “Nice Little Boys,” Toronto Daily Star.

entry into journalism in 1885, right on through his career, [J.J. Kelso] …  realized the importance of wide publicity for any reforms he wished to bring about … Often, in a few days of quiet propaganda, he would have the whole city, indeed the whole Province, insidiously educated to approve of, and advocate various forms of social advancement.”43 What likely strikes contemporary ears as odd words to pair with the idea 129

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of “social advancement” – such as “propaganda” and “insidiously” –  reveal very different attitudes to the heady possibilities of advertising in the early days of mass marketing. The adeptness of Kelso and his associates in using subliminal suggestion to encourage the desired response from readers is obvious in the “Nice Little Boys” vignette, in particular through the iconography and design of the three photographs. The arrangement of the pictures on the page is that of a triptych that might be used as an altarpiece or as a private aid to devotion: the framing of the photographs implies the hinges of a three-part folding screen, while the lunette above Eddie is a conventional sign of innocence often associated in Christian iconography with the Virgin Mother, an innocence extended to the boys in this image.44 This range of reference reminds viewers that fostering and adopting children is God’s work, a repeated theme in the Kelso archival material. For example, the caption under the etching of the mother-Christ in Homes Wanted for Homeless Children explicitly asks, “reader, Do you want to have a part in a grand and Christlike work?” All three boys in the 1927 photograph are positioned in relation to chairs, a metonymical sign of their appropriateness for domestication45 – unlike, for example, hired hands, who might be expected to sleep in the hayloft of the barn or, as in Anne of Green Gables, on a couch in the kitchen chamber – and they are properly shod, in sturdy but polished boots and good stockings, suggesting that they are healthy lads, but are not to be seen primarily as field or farm workers. As this analysis suggests, signalling that these boys are children fit for adoption requires an iconography that simultaneously undoes earlier cultural imagery and asserts new linkages. Variations on such advertisements abound in the collection, many of them featuring individual children under such titles as “Fine Boy for Adoption,” “Gordon Wants a Home,” and “Boy Wants Home,” the last of these accompanying an article in which “sunny-dispositioned” four-year-old Leslie is said to have lost his parents in a house fire and to be owed “something” by life. The children pictured are regularly described as being of high quality: they are “bright,” “nice,” “fine,” “healthy,” “attractive,” “sturdy,” even, occasionally, “splendid.”46 130

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That Montgomery knew this discourse is obvious in the Anne series. In Anne of Green Gables, Anne mimics the newspaper advertisements of adoptable orphans when she replies to Marilla’s question about the child Mrs Spencer has brought to the Island from Hopetown: “She brought Lily Jones for herself. Lily is only five years old and she is very beautiful. She has nut-brown hair.”47 Perhaps the most interesting of the uses of the rhetoric of advertising children in the series, however, comes in Anne of Ingleside (1939). Orphan Jenny Penny has learned not only to market herself in the superlative terms of advertising, but also to manipulate the gazes to which orphans are expected to submit in order to produce advertising copy for their benefactors.48 “She was not pretty,” the narrator tells us when readers first meet Jenny, “but her appearance was striking … everybody looked at her twice. She had a round creamy face with a soft glossless cloud of soot-black hair about it and enormous dusky blue eyes with long tangled black lashes. When she slowly raised those lashes and looked at you with those scornful eyes you felt that you were a worm honoured in not being stepped on.”49 This fascinating orphan is “quite out of the question” as a friend for the Blythe children,50 the adult Anne thinks to herself, at the same time acknowledging that thinking so makes her uncomfortable.

Documenting Success The child-saving movement of which Kelso was a part was an international movement, and it is evident, both from his biography and from his papers, that he kept himself up to date on the methods of other reformers, particularly those in the United States and in Britain. Necessarily, one of the primary functions of the child-saving societies was sustaining themselves. At their origins, the societies were charitable institutions, and depended on financial contributions from benefactors, but even when some of the societies began to receive core funding from government, they needed to demonstrate that they were successful at their appointed and self-appointed tasks. Among the most popular of the techniques for doing so was the use of before-andafter photographs. This was a technique pioneered by Thomas Barnardo in London,51 the same Barnardo whose name became the generic 131

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identifier in Canada for the eighty thousand unaccompanied young people who arrived in the country between 1868 and 1925, although there were more than a dozen different groups that sponsored their emigration from Britain to Canada.52 Seth Koven, one of many critics who have discussed Barnardo’s use of photography, observes that this kind of visual “documentation of social evils to raise money for benevolent schemes” flourished in what was, at the time, “the largely unregulated practice of commercial advertising,” but that the excesses of such practices eventually contributed to raising questions about what “truth in advertising” meant or should mean.53 Before-and-after photography was a genre enthusiastically taken up by Kelso, not surprisingly, given his confidence in the efficacy of pictures. An undated postcard produced by the Children’s Aid Society with the footer “Help Us Do It” (fig. 5.3), reveals a number of the conventions of this genre. First, the photographer and compositor obviously understand the indexical function of photographic figures, the way in which photographs tie an image to history: the group of girls on the postcard is tagged as having been snapped first “as we get them” and then “one week later.” It seems quite possible that these images were, in fact, both taken on the same day – as it is known that Barnardo did when he staged his “before” and “after” pictures in a studio at his London institution – since the girls appear to be shot in exactly the same location. Nevertheless, as allegorical figures, they can be read as marking the distance between neglect and care, between being “not wanted” and “now in a good home,” as other captions to before-and-after photographs in the archive put it.54 The photographs simultaneously certify that these bodies – dirty, unkempt, inadequately clothed, and unhappy “as we get them” – can be transformed into clean, well-groomed, smiling children, clothed in warm, appropriate clothing, within a very short time. Composition, shot distances, lighting, and framing all help to tell the story. For example, the girls are a tight group – a huddled mass – in the first picture, spread out into an orderly row in the second. Each girl can now be seen as an individual, and their different coats and bonnets distinguish them further. Where the girls do touch or overlap in the second photograph, these connections appear to be motivated 132

5.3 | “Children’s Aid Society - Help Us Do It,” postcard.

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and expressive of a relationship rather than the result of their crowded circumstance. The camera is set up farther from the girls for the second photograph than for the first, so that more of the girls’ bodies can be seen. Many of them have acquired feet, signifying their wholeness and their potential mobility. The horizontal lines of the clapboard wall against which they are shot are more pronounced in the first than in the second photograph, an effect of the lighting: these lines hold the children in place in the first picture, confine them. The framing of the photographs reinforces the immobility of the first group and the promise of mobility for the second: the oval frame within the photograph in the first contains the girls, while the extension of the second photograph to the edges of the frame speaks of continuation elsewhere. The before-and-after photographs of Barnardo emphasize the “clean break from their pasts” that is needed to ensure “a truly happy ending” for the child, as Lydia Murdoch observes in her study of the melodramatic structures of Evangelical conversion narratives that underlie these photographs, but also affirm the possibility of a child taking on “a completely new identity.”55 Carol Singley, who has written about adoption in American literature, similarly notes that the structure of Puritan conversion narratives is easily exported to adoption narratives, in part because of the shared valuation of self-improvement and progress in those two kinds of stories.56 Kelso’s Canadian photographs work within the same valences of meaning. A somewhat different pictorial strategy to document the success of the Children’s Aid Society is used in a series of before-and-after photographs reproduced in a sixteen-page pamphlet written by Kelso (fig. 5.4).57 The length of the document suggests that it is intended as an official report, rather than as an advertisement or an appeal. (In general in Canada, before-and-after photographs appear to be used more often in reports or extended articles about the work of the Children’s Aid Societies, which are directed to social, political, and philanthropic leaders, than in the broadsides and newspaper items advertising children available for adoption that are directed to potential parents and society volunteers.) The tight focus on the face of the little girl in the photographs in the pamphlet suggests the 13 4

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emphasis on her personality as an individual. Here, again, colour symbolism carries part of the message of repair and transformation, with the child clothed first in a dark dress and in the later photos in lighter clothing that reads as white dresses. As Murdoch observes about Barnardo’s photographs, such changes in clothing symbolize the “newfound purity, religious salvation, and social acceptance” of the figured child.58 In the case of the images in Kelso’s pamphlet, the change from bound to increasingly unbound (although not unkempt) hair in the three photographs of the young girl also signifies that her new condition is an entry into or a return to a “natural childhood,” an emphasis confirmed by the flowers on her dress in the middle picture and in the stylized twining vine and flowers that connect the pictures on the page. This series of images relies in part for its effect on the assumption that there is an obvious link between girlhood and “natural childhood,” although “natural childhood” was the aspirational goal for all Canadian neglected and dependent children. This aim was repeated in both the verbal and the iconographical discourses of the child-savers. In the debate about whether heredity or environment was most determinative of a child’s moral and intellectual character, the child-savers came down firmly on the side of environment.59 Before-and-after photographs, such as those in the set featured in Kelso’s pamphlet, assert that, properly trained and cared for, any child can become a “natural” child. But “natural childhood” was often a less complete condition in its instantiation than the stirring rhetoric might suggest. Relinquished children were, after all, often the offspring of the poorer classes, and a life of useful service, albeit as members of middle-class families, was widely considered a good outcome for fostered and adopted children. In the Anne series, Montgomery’s negotiation of the discourses of adoption and “natural childhood” is seen most clearly in Mary Vance’s story, which recapitulates the trajectory of the popular “before-andafter” narrative. When the manse children first find Mary in Mr Taylor’s “old tumbledown barn” in Rainbow Valley (1919),60 the description given of her by the narrator encapsulates the condition of neglect and misery communicated in many “before” pictures: she is shaky and 135

5.4 | The Children’s Aid Society, pamphlet.

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faint from starvation, pale, with “half defiant[], half piteous[] eyes,” “barefooted and bareheaded,” “clad in a faded, ragged, old plaid dress, much too short and tight for her,” and apparently wearing no underclothing at all.61 Her “scrawny arms and thin hands” are “chapped almost to rawness” and “black with bruises.”62 Some weeks after Miss Cornelia has adopted her, she appears in Rainbow Valley in “a new blue velvet cap with a scarlet rosette in it, a coat of navy blue cloth and a little squirrel-fur muff … [h]er hair [] elaborately crimped, her face [] quite plump, her cheeks rosy, her white eyes shining,”63 an outfit that stirs some jealousy in Faith and Una Meredith, whose widowed father is entirely indifferent to their appearance. Yet twelve-year-old Mary, who has been the constant companion of the Blythe and Meredith children while she lived at the manse, and who is the same age as the eldest children of both families, is now only occasionally permitted an afternoon of play as a “treat”;64 she is kept almost fully occupied as housekeeper to the Elliotts. She is not represented as resenting the work: living in a home without fear of being beaten seems like “heaven” to her,65 and Miss Cornelia insists that Mary is “a born worker” and “doesn’t want to go to school.”66 Mary does eventually attend school, but, most importantly, she remains part of the Elliott household, confident in her position, indeed, often overbearing from the point of view of the Blythe children. In Rilla of Ingleside (1921), she is to be married from the Elliott home to the wounded soldier Miller Douglas, although Miss Cornelia is not initially convinced that he is a worthy suitor of Mary, whom she represents as having “had a good bringing up” and being “a smart, clever, capable girl.”67 As these examples suggest, the final two novels of Montgomery’s series are deeply ambivalent on the question of whether Mary’s rescue and training have given her – or, indeed, should be expected to give her – full access to the state of “natural childhood.” The ambivalence is exacerbated by the imperatives of narrative. Structured by sequences of events, narratives suggest the passage of time and raise the spectre of pasts haunting presents. The punctual form of photographs, on the other hand, stops time and can control the implications of temporal sequence more completely. 137

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Soliciting Home In 1868, at the time of the arrival in Canada of the first young British emigrants, children of the lower classes were generally seen as potential workers and, specifically, in the young dominion of Canada, as much-needed contributors to farm and domestic labour. But the dominant view of childhood was shifting. Anna Davin notes that, in Britain, “[f]rom the mid-nineteenth century, with dependent and sheltered childhood firmly established for the middle class, reformers extended similar standards to working-class children.”68 By the early decades of the twentieth century, the normative view was that the child was “economically useless but emotionally priceless” to adults, in the words of Viviana A. Zelizer.69 When children were seen as workers, sturdy young lads were the most desirable of dependent children, as suggested by Marilla’s complaints about the impossibility of finding reliable young boys for farm work. When children became “emotionally priceless,” however, the most desirable children for what historians sometimes call “sentimental adoption” were infants, especially infant girls. Among the newspaper clippings in the Kelso archive, for example, is a 1929 article entitled “Blue-Eyed Baby Stock Rises with Little Girls Preferred,” which explains that “there is no such thing as a business slump” at the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto. Prospective parents invariably come into the society wanting to adopt a “cute little girl of two with curly blond hair, dimpled cheeks and a winning smile,” according to the supervisor of the home, but can also be won over by the “chubby little sonny boys” once they have actually seen and met them.70 In 1931, Kelso supplied a set of pictures for a Children’s Aid Society advertisement in the Toronto Weekly Star that visualized exactly such a shopping scene. In it, four photographs of babies and toddlers are arranged to look like paintings in a gallery. Three young couples (drawn in pen and ink) stand before the photographs, their backs to the reader, scrutinizing the children intently and happily, above the cutline, “Is it Any Wonder That People Are Eager to Adopt Such Bright Little Children as These?”71 Infants or very young children were seen as blanker slates than older children, less likely to have been shaped by bad environments and more likely to become the “natural children” of 138

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the child-saving rhetoric. Girls were particularly “attractive for sentimental adoption,” Zelizer suggests, because of “established cultural assumptions of women’s superior emotional talents.”72 As Zelizer also points out, the “priceless child was judged by new criteria,” particularly by “its physical appeal and personality.”73 The photographs in the Kelso archive suggest the great care that is taken to stage the babies and young girls as winsome and pretty. In an early article about the work of the Children’s Aid Society, Kelso frankly explains that his wife often dresses the babies in their own children’s clothes before displaying them to prospective adoptive parents.74 Clothing might confirm the worth of the children, but the rhetoric of the society clearly emphasizes their intrinsic emotional value to adults. For example, in an undated broadside, “Childhood Charms,” Kelso describes the “bright, smiling faces of children” as “inspiring,” and illustrates that sentiment with the picture of a young doll-like girl. The “limpid eyes” of the child speak the language of heaven, according to the text accompanying the picture, offering the adult viewer/reader access to “the purity, candor, sympathy and tenderness which are the true coinage of heaven before earth’s sordid influences defile and destroy.”75 The child also speaks the language of the heart. On a broadside entitled “Heart – Hunger” (fig. 5.5), a cherubic, white-clothed baby reaches out toward the implied viewer, apparently inviting that viewer’s embrace. The text into which the illustration is inserted once again resorts to economic metaphors to express the value of the priceless child: “it is so easy and natural for us to regard children as the most suitable subjects for the investment of our best love – the richest treasure God has entrusted to us.” In some cutlines, the appealing voice of the child is ventriloquized. In a photograph reproduced on a circular, for example, the infant is made to ask, “Don’t You Want to Adopt Me?” The child’s solicitation of home, it seems, is meant to awaken in adults a longing that resonates with and responds to the longing of the child. But, at the same time, the ascription to the desirable child of such features as “purity, innocence, [and] emptiness” constructs the child as available for inscription by the adult. James Kincaid has notoriously and disturbingly argued that this is precisely the function of 139

5.5 | “Heart – Hunger,” broadside.

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the rhetoric of “child-loving” in both Victorian and contemporary culture.76 Tellingly, when Kelso published Protection of Children, his 1911 monograph about the early history of the Children’s Aid movement, the image of a pretty young girl standing on a chair, clad in a white dress, arms open and slightly raised, apparently needed neither caption nor title to communicate its meaning (fig. 5.6).77 The iconography of the photograph eloquently speaks for itself in its solicitation of home. In Montgomery’s Anne series, the fullest exploration of the power of babies to evoke sympathy, tenderness, and love from adults is the account of Rilla’s fostering of the war-baby Jims in Rilla of Ingleside. Mothering Jims makes vain, frivolous Rilla into “a woman altogether beautiful and desirable” as a wife by the end of the novel.78 Children who not only yearn for home, but eventually call into being homes fit for them, recur in the Anne series. Not all these children are orphans in the sense that they have lost both biological parents, but they can all be seen as orphans in the child-rescue discourse of the day, which grouped relinquished, vagrant, neglected, and dependent children, particularly those of the lower classes, into this category. Because parents were systematically erased from the dominant child-welfare narratives, Murdoch, working with the British records, has called these children “imagined orphans.” In Montgomery’s work, “imagined orphans” appear in all classes of society. There is Paul Irving in Anne of Avonlea (1909), who has “the most beautiful little face [Anne] had ever seen in a child” and whose smile reveals “the outflashing of a hidden personality, rare and fine and sweet.”79 Cared for physically by his grandmother, Paul nevertheless is what Kelso might call heart-hungry: his longing for a mother and a home is answered by the end of the novel. There is the unloved, motherless Elizabeth Grayson in Anne of Windy Poplars (1936), whose intense, although often silent, longing for Tomorrow and the Island of Happiness ultimately allows her father to recognize her as “a treasure [he] didn’t know [he] possessed.”80 In Rainbow Valley, the motherless Meredith children could also be included within the broad definition of “orphan” current in early-twentieth-century discourse, as Mrs Alec Davies’s offer to adopt Una makes the distracted Reverend Meredith realize. And, of course, 141

5.6 | Protection of Children, monograph.

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there is Anne herself, in the first novel of the series, who, even before she has seen Green Gables, confides to Matthew that “it seems so wonderful that I’m going to live with you and belong to you”81 and whose “beauty-loving eyes” claim the island as home from the very beginning of the novel.82 Anne’s passionate and articulate imaginings of home eventually make a mother of the crabbed spinster Marilla and a true home of the “painfully clean” and under-used house of Green Gables.83 While dominant discourses of neglected, indigent, orphaned, and dependent children of Montgomery’s day were clearly gendered discourses, moving from privileging the figure of the sturdy, willing boy worker as the ideal child to privileging the pretty, innocent infant girl as the ideal child, Montgomery herself saw both girl and boy children as able to solicit home. The question of gender was not as important to her as the quality of some children – indeed, of some human beings – to keep faith with their desire for and claim to the spiritually and emotionally satisfying place of home. But Montgomery did use the “means of expression” available in the cultural discourses surrounding adoption and fostering to develop her most vivid verbal pictures of such children through “orphans,” children who do not inherit home by right but who call home into being out of need. The facts of Montgomery’s early life – her loss of her mother as an infant, her subsequent abandonment by her father, and the emotional unavailability of the grandparents who fostered her – offer obvious biographical explanations for the intensity of the longings for home expressed by Montgomery’s imagined orphans. The canonical status of her Anne series – and, in particular, of the first novel in the series – suggest, however, that the figures of orphans she produced work at cultural, as well as at personal, levels. Daniel Coleman has argued that the popular literary forms of early-twentieth-century Canada allow readers “to observe remarkably overt instances” in which allegorical figures “mediated fundamental concepts of Canadianness that have since become reified assumptions of Canadian culture.”84 While Coleman does not address Montgomery’s work, many of his observations could be applied to her work. 143

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Cultural Functions of Orphans In June 1902, with the Boer War under way in South Africa, the Globe of Toronto published an article about the work of the Children’s Aid Societies under the heading, “Some of Ontario’s Children” (fig. 5.7). The two photographs that accompany the piece, labelled “Neglected Ontario Boys” and “The Same Children Later On,” identify the article as participating in the child-rescue conversion narrative. Of particular interest in this vignette is the final element of the “after” photograph, the Dominion flag held proudly aloft by the tallest boy at the end of the row. One of the repeated motifs exploited by the child-savers internationally in their discourses was the linking of the health of the nation to the condition of its children. In Child, Nation, Race, and Empire, Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel demonstrate the linkage between the discursive construction of the “pure and innocent child,” “a creature of nature and simplicity,” and the discursive construction of the nation in child-saving rhetoric in Britain, Canada, and Australia: “the state of childhood,” they conclude, “increasingly serv[ed] as a barometer for the moral standing of the nation.”85 In the Globe article, the f lag references and produces that connection, verifying that orphaned Canadian children can become good, even ideal, citizens of, and contributors to, their country if they are properly cared for in the home of the nation. That the idea of home refers not only to the place that houses family life but also to the community of the nation is a common understanding, one which we performatively affirm whenever we sing the national anthem in English: “O Canada, our home and native land.” Anne of Green Gables is the iconic novel of English-Canadian children’s literature and, arguably, the novels that follow in the series are variations on the first. Anne represents Canada internationally: it is, for example, the only Canadian text discussed in Julia Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone’s The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, for which scholars were asked to take up works that had been judged to be “rightly deserv[ing of] a place” within the international canon of children’s literature.86 Anne also established what can, in retrospect, be seen as the dominant narrative patterns of Canadian children’s literature. Award-winning 14 4

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5.7 | “Some of Ontario’s Children,” The Globe.

Canadian fiction for young people in English rarely shows children leaving and returning home, as in the circular-journey plot that is conventional in children’s literature. Rather, it typically describes a pattern in which the child’s story begins in the “away” phase of the journey, with only a brief glimpse of an originary home, and closes with the “away” place becoming home, because the central child character chooses it as home. Homes, moreover, are more often affiliative assemblages than filiative structures, made up of a collection of people, some of whom might be biological kin, but others of whom are related by affinities or circumstances.87 The iconic child character of EnglishCanadian children’s literature, in other words, is an orphan – a contingent family member – who does not inherit and cannot assume a 145

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home, but must repeatedly solicit home, call a home into being. This scenario makes the orphan’s performance the act that constitutes home. It is in this sense that the orphan is the child who can most fully inhabit home. The story of calling a home into being is, of course, the immigrant story, and, to some extent, Canadians share it with other nations built on immigration. But the congruence of the time in which new attitudes to fostering and adoption were being contested and negotiated in Canada (and elsewhere) and the time of the development of the national narrative of Canada has, I speculate, made this story foundational for us.88 The internal time of the Anne series spans the period from approximately 1870 to 1918. This is the period that closely follows the formal establishment of the country through the British North America Act of 1867 and lasts through the First World War, the event that popular history takes to be the moment at which Canada moves from being a colony to being a fully-fledged nation. The time of the Anne series, in other words, is also the time of the nation. National narratives are built on select inclusions and exclusions. Indeed, this is, in part, why they are such powerful ideas, as Benedict Anderson notes in his discussion of the role of “three institutions of power” – census, map, and museum – in imagining the nation.89 The inclusions and exclusions on which the idea of the Canadian nation is founded are becoming increasingly evident to Canadians in the wake of the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the Indian Residential School system. There are also intimations of a new willingness in this country to re-learn our history and to re-story the nation. Those of us who have learned to see ourselves as orphans who have called a home into being out of our need are now being called to rethink how that narrative collides with and silences the narratives of First Nations peoples who claim this land as home by inalienable right.90

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No t e s 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19

20 21

22 23 24 25 26

27 28

Macherey, Literary Production, 93. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 94. Ibid. Gammel, Looking for Anne, 238. Montgomery, agg, 58–9. Ibid., 61. Macherey, Literary Production, 90. Montgomery, agg, 58n1. Ibid., 58n2. Ibid., 53. Jones and Rutman, In the Children’s Aid, 64, 66. Blackford discusses the way in which Marilla embodies this discourse at the beginning of Anne of Green Gables in “Unattached Women Raising Cain” (41). The cartoon was published under the heading “Stop the Polluted Stream.” I reproduce and discuss the cartoon in the editorial essay, “The Child of Nature and the Home Child.” “To Save Little Ones. The Door to Canada Should Close for a Time,” Daily British Whig, C. 4 May 1894. Special correspondence, rg 29-75, Reel 2-4, Scrapbooks on Child Welfare Issues, 1893–1940. Archives of Ontario, Toronto. The essay, “A Daughter of the House: Discourses of Adoption in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables,” appears in Mickenberg and Vallone, The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature. Macherey, Literary Production, 92. My research assistant, Paula Kelly, an ma student in the Curatorial Practices stream of the Cultural Studies program at the University of Winnipeg and a filmmaker, ably undertook the work in the archives for me. Epperly, Through Lover’s Lane, 8. Ibid. Macherey, Literary Production, 93. Strong-Boag, Finding Families, 36. Notably, this remains a widespread practice of international adoption agencies. Thanks to my colleague Jenny Heijun Wills, who responded to an early version of this argument and reminded me of these continuing practices. Peirce, Selected Philosophical Writings, 6. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 6, 3. 147

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29 30 31 32

33

34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42

43

44 45 46

Ibid., 80. Ibid., 87. Ash, “Barnardo’s, Benevolence, and Shame,” 181. A number of critics who have written about the photographs used by Dr Barnardo as part of his child-rescue work have used Barthes’s commentary on photography as an entry into their analysis. See, for example, Ash and Nunn. Theorists are rethinking this indexical function in the era of digital photography, with its enhanced ability to manipulate images. See, for example, Nunn, “Emotional Death,” 289–91. Conservation of Childhood. n.d. Broadside. Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E, “Broadsides” series, container 36, file name – “Conservation of Childhood, n.d., no. 277.” Kelso, “The Visiting of Children in Foster Homes.” Article. November 1913. National Humane Review. John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E, “Broadsides” series, container 24, file name  –  “Newspaper Clippings, Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children, 1893, 1898, 1908, 1912–13, 1922.” Chapman, “The Children that Nobody Wants,” 11. Johnston, Selling Themselves, 145. Ibid., 149. Ibid. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 161. “Nice Little Boys for People Who Want Them.” Toronto Daily Star, 11 February 1927. Advertisement. Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E, “Notebooks, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings” series, container 11, scrapbook, 1918–1934. “Wants a Home.” n.d. Newspaper advertisement. Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E, “Notebooks, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings” series, container 12, scrapbook, 1920–1927. Kelso, “Value of Publicity.” n.p., n.d. Article. Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E, “Subject files” series, container 4, file name – “Children’s Aid Society, Ontario – Notes, Activities, n.d., 1906, 1929.” See Wilkins, Stott, and Olszewski for discussions of these elements of Christian iconography. See Boman for a discussion of Victorian photographers’ use of domestic re-enactments. “Brothers Want a Home.” n.d. Newspaper advertisement. Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E, “Notebooks, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings” series, container 14, scrapbook, 1916–1936; “Nice Little Boys for People Who Want Them,” Toronto Daily Star, 11 February 1927.

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47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65

Advertisement. Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E, “Notebooks, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings” series, container 11, scrapbook, 1918–1934; Homes Wanted for Homeless Children. 1895. Broadside. Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E, “Broadsides” series, container 36, file name – “Homes Wanted for Homeless Children, 1895, no. 304”; “Wants a Home.” n.d. Newspaper advertisement. Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E, “Notebooks, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings” series, container 12, scrapbook, 1920–1927; “Wouldn’t One of These Kiddies Gladden Your Home?” n.d. Newspaper advertisement. Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E, “Notebooks, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings” series, container 12, scrapbook, 1920–1927. Montgomery, agg, 77. See Koven’s essay for a discussion of the ways in which London street kids produced and performed the discourses of Barnardo’s photographs. Montgomery, ain, 163. Ibid., 165. Examples of Barnardo’s before-and-after photographs can be found online at the Barnardo Photographic Archive, Luminous-Lint.com. Bagnell, The Little Immigrants, 9, 122; Parr, Labouring Children, 11. Koven, “Dr. Barnardo’s ‘Artistic Fictions’: Photography, Sexuality, and the Ragged Child,” 11. Kelso, The Children’s Aid Society, 6, 8. Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, 36. Singley, Adopting America, 10–11. Kelso, The Children’s Aid Society, 11. Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, 37. The Kelso archive contains a number of newspaper clippings that argue for this position: presumably Kelso kept these references to use in his own speeches and papers. For example, in one broadside, entitled “Heredity or Example, Which?” which appears to be an appeal to the public to join a group attempting to form a Children’s Aid Society, the author (possibly Kelso himself) asserts that “[t]he seed of evil lies buried in the human heart (who can doubt it?) but the cultivation of that seed never was, or ever will be, due to heredity.” Montgomery, rv, 29. Ibid., 29–30, 31. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 63.

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66 67 68 69 70

71

72 73 74

75

76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

Ibid., 84–5. Montgomery, ri, 8. Davin, Growing Up Poor, 4. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, 14. “Blue-Eyed Baby Stock Rises with Little Girls Preferred.” 1929. Article. Library and Archives Canada. John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-E, “Notebooks, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings” series, container 14, scrapbook “Infants,” 1923–1934. “Is it Any Wonder That People Are Eager to Adopt Such Bright Little Children as These?” Toronto Star Weekly. May 1931. Article with handwritten note by J.J. Kelso. Library and Archives Canada, John Joseph Kelso Fonds, R5352-0-3-E, “Notebooks, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings” series, container 29, scrapbook “Infants.” Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, 194. Ibid., 193. Chapman, “The Children that Nobody Wants,” Article, September 1919, Farmer’s Magazine, John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E, “Autobiographical files” series, container 31, file name – “Miscellaneous Clippings, 1892–1934, 1961, 1970, no. 15.” Kelso, Childhood’s Charms. n.d. Broadside. Library and Archives Canada. John Joseph Kelso fonds, R5352-0-3-E, “Autobiographical files” series, container 24, file name – “Childhood’s Charms by J.J. Kelso, n.d., no. 285.” Kincaid, Child-Loving, 5. Kelso, Protection of Children: Early History of the Humane and Children’s Aid Movement in Ontario, 1886–1893, Monograph (Toronto: L.K. Cameron, 1911), Library and Archives Canada, Amicus No. 38582600, hv745. Montgomery, ri, 277. Montgomery, aa, 34. Montgomery, awp, 252. Montgomery, agg, 65. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 56. Coleman, White Civility, 37. Swain and Hillel, Child, Nation, Race and Empire, 4. Mickenberg and Vallone, The Oxford Handbook, 6. I have argued in detail for the predominance of this pattern through an examination of twenty years of award-winning English-Canadian fiction for children in a 2001 essay written jointly with Anne Rusnak, entitled “The Representation of Home in Canadian Children’s Literature/La représentation du chez soi dans la littérature de jeunesse canadienne.”

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88 Strong-Boag has discussed the relation between “adoption in the domestic sphere” and “immigration in the national context” in the Introduction to Finding Families, vii–xvii. 89 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 163. 90 In chapter 11 in this volume, Carole Gerson discusses Montgomery’s relatively few engagements with Indigeneity in her novels, despite evidence in her diaries and scrapbooks of her encounters with Indigenous people and her knowledge of the work of her contemporary, E. Pauline Johnson.

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6 “That House Belongs to Me” The Appropriation of Patriarchal Space in L.M. Montgomery’s Emily Trilogy

REBECCA J. THOMPSON

n “Externals always had a great inf luence upon her  –  too great

perhaps.”1 With these words, the narrator of L.M. Montgomery’s Emily trilogy reveals a foundational truth about Emily Byrd Starr’s relationship to the spaces around her. Throughout the trilogy, Emily is perpetually both influenced by and an influencer of the “externals” that surround her. In many ways, she embraces these externals, including the houses and their inherent histories, appropriating the elements that will strengthen her. However, as mainly patriarchally-controlled spaces, many of the houses and their rooms exert unwelcome pressure on her as a woman and as a female artist. Rather than capitulating to this pressure, Emily finds ways to subvert it, balancing rebellion and conformity as she matures. The various spaces – and, more specifically,

“THAT HOUSE BELONGS TO ME”

the houses and rooms Emily inhabits – become not only echoes of her conflicted duality as woman and writer but also agents of her growth as she gains mastery over her patriarchal heritage by appropriating the spaces designed to confine her. The impact of patriarchal society on Emily has been explored from a variety of perspectives. Many scholars2 have examined the effects of gendered expectations and their impact on not only Emily but also the other characters. Judith Miller and Kate Lawson specifically point to the strong women in Emily’s family history, and Lindsey McMaster draws out the legacy of female anger that results from patriarchal restrictions and Emily’s appropriation and subversion of both her matriarchal and patriarchal heritage.3 Emily’s inheritance of female power – and the resultant conflicting power dynamics – echoes Montgomery’s subversion of genre and societal expectations, and is a core aspect of Elizabeth Epperly’s analysis of Montgomery’s subversion of the romance plot,4 Mary Rubio’s argument for Montgomery’s subversion of the domestic-fiction genre,5 and Elizabeth Waterston’s discussion of the trilogy in Magic Island. Most Montgomery critics, including those referenced above, refer regularly to the significance of the setting and spaces in which Montgomery’s narratives take place, but few have made it the focus of their discussion. Epperly forefronts the importance of place in Through Lover’s Lane as she discusses the impact the visual world has on the creative, internal world, noting that “Montgomery’s houses have personalities all their own, and they reflect and sometimes shape the personalities within them.”6 In Faye Hammill’s examination of Canadian novels, she argues that “[a]s an artist, Emily is shown to be defined and shaped as much by place as by gender,”7 and Kate Lawson’s analysis of the “Disappointed House” links the locations in which Emily’s psychic and uncanny experiences take place to her creative self.8 While each of these has laid invaluable groundwork, they do not focus exclusively on the connection between the different spaces and their impact on Emily’s development, both as an artist and a woman. In addition to referencing the importance of place, most literary criticism dealing with Montgomery’s Emily trilogy includes biographical commentary, much of which highlights the patriarchal restrictions 153

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Montgomery herself faced as a woman and an artist. This has been and continues to be a fruitful avenue of study; however, in order to focus more fully on the text and Emily’s character as separate from Montgomery, this article will be a close analytic discussion, using the lenses of feminist and spatial theory. This analysis is particularly indebted to Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s foundational work The Madwoman in the Attic, Patricia Meyer Spacks’s The Female Imagination, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, each of which adds to the theoretical framework necessary for discussing a female author’s dual roles as artist and woman. In addition, Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space provides useful language and constructs through which to view the significant impact of space on identity.

The Parlour From her earliest days at New Moon, Emily finds herself restricted by the patriarchal expectations associated with the parlour, but she repeatedly subverts these restrictions. She confides in a diary-letter to her father, “I am afraid of the parlour,” because “the walls are hung over with pictures of our ancesters [sic].”9 This fear is amplified by the way Aunt Elizabeth uses the parlour’s atmosphere to sustain her own authority. She uses the room as a “tribunal,” since “she felt obscurely that the photographs of the Murrays on the walls gave her a backing she needed.”10 However, when Aunt Elizabeth attempts to use the parlour to bring Emily to task for the contents of her diary-letters, Emily’s passion for writing and indignation at the invasion of privacy affords her the ability to subvert the patriarchal space. She flips the trial on its head, taking the role of chastiser rather than supplicant. In addition, Elizabeth’s humble request for forgiveness, which notably takes place in Emily’s lookout room rather than the parlour, underlines the loss of the parlour’s power over Emily. McMaster argues that their interchange “disrupts the repetitive cycle of patriarchal tyranny that has thus far bound Elizabeth’s authority to [her father’s] abuse of power,” further suggesting that “from this point forward, Emily’s supernatural inheritance comes not so much from patriarchal Archibald but from her mother’s female forbears.”11 After all, as 15 4

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Woolf notes, “a woman writing thinks back through her mothers” not through her fathers.12 Emily’s writing helps her break the patriarchal hold of the parlour, and in future parlour tribunals, Emily and Elizabeth meet as equals.13 Rather than merely rejecting the parlour, Emily also claims and reframes it. Even while the parlour at New Moon is still a source of dread and patriarchal oppression, Emily insists on including one in the playhouse she builds with Ilse in Lofty John’s Bush. In fact, she feels so strongly about it that it leads to her first fight with Ilse.14 Emily creates her own version of the parlour, determined to craft it to her own desires and specifications. Her appropriation is accentuated by the fact that she and Ilse have claimed a man’s property to build their playhouse and create their own female-centric “living” space.15 This sets the stage for the markedly different reaction Emily has to the Wyther Grange parlour during her visit to Aunt Nancy. While the New Moon parlour is closed in and bound by male ancestors, the Wyther Grange parlour is filled with curiosities from the wider world and situated in a house that is firmly under matriarchal rule. Because of this, Emily views the parlour and its contents as entertainment and diversion rather than containment and formality. She is even allowed to claim some of the items as her own (though she won’t possess them until after the matriarch’s death).16 These reframings and reversals allow Emily to appropriate the parlour’s formality when it suits her purposes. An example of this subversion takes place in Emily’s Quest, when Emily sees Ilse and Teddy for the first time in two years. Emily feels betrayed by Teddy, and so, instead of meeting them in the garden, sitting room, or kitchen, she goes “in to the stately, stiff, dignified parlour of New Moon, pale, queenly, aloof.”17 While it might be pointed out that her friends are already waiting for her there, it is worth noting that Emily does not usher them into the more comfortable spaces where they were wont to spend their time together in previous years. In fact, this is the only instance in the trilogy where Emily meets with Teddy or Ilse in the parlour. The scene makes it clear that Emily uses the space to place distance between herself and her friends, particularly Teddy. 155

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Emily also uses the restraint of the parlour in her Aunt Ruth’s house to keep her cousin Andrew at a distance. Although it is a “proper” place for courtship, Emily welcomes its restriction due to her distaste for Andrew’s pursuit. She even actively employs the parlour when Andrew attempts to propose. He seeks her out in the fir grove, but Emily hurries him back to the restriction of the parlour in a move that might seem counterintuitive because of the room’s connection to patriarchallydefined roles.18 Rather than allowing Andrew to appropriate the romance of nature, Emily subverts his plan and instead uses the parlour to reject not only an unwanted suitor but also the male who will inherit New Moon, effectively defying patriarchal influence and control on several levels. Emily repeatedly takes the patriarchally-coded space of the parlour and turns it to her own advantage or to fulfill her own desires.

Aunt Ruth’s House Although Emily is eventually able to appropriate parts of Aunt Ruth’s house, it is, as a whole, the only other space more restrictive than the New Moon parlour and the most difficult to influence. Coming from New Moon, a space that Emily has embedded with her influence, the Shrewsbury house feels particularly hostile. She declares in despair, “This room is unfriendly – it doesn’t want me – I can never feel at home here.”19 Of all the failings of the house, however, the fact that her bedroom door does not close is most symbolic, representing the lack of privacy Emily faces both in the house and in Shrewsbury at large. Woolf notes the difficulty of a woman writing without “a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room,” going on to say “that a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself.”20 Once she took up residence in the New Moon lookout, Emily has had this quiet room of her own, but in Aunt Ruth’s home she loses both privacy and the ease with which to think for herself. She initially finds it difficult to deal with the way her actions are scrutinized by Aunt Ruth, her classmates, and Shrewsbury society at large, “where shrewish older women watch and criticize the teen-aged writer.”21 Yet, Emily does not allow herself to be cowed by the house or its atmosphere. Although she never becomes fully comfortable, nor is she able to completely claim 156

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the space, she does become much more the influencer than the influenced. In her analysis of Anne of Green Gables, Paige Gray states, “[i]magination for girls and women can be seen as a tool for initiating change because of its transformative ability.”22 Bonnie J. Tulloch also points out the subversive nature of Anne’s transformation of her circumstances in her chapter in this volume, noting the way Anne uses her imagination to create her own space in the gendered expectations of Avonlea.23 In a similar way, Emily uses her imagination, passion, and creativity to become a sought-after member of the school and town community. She even manages to transform Aunt Ruth’s house and, by extension, Aunt Ruth herself, albeit in minor ways. Emily hangs her own pictures on the walls of her unfriendly room and clutters its surfaces with the tools of her trade as a writer.24 Notably, it is not only through her writing that Emily appropriates the space. She also uses the domestic creativity and knowledge gained from her heritage as a Murray woman to create gifts for Aunt Ruth that go on display in the house.25 Gilbert and Gubar argue that “the fact that the angel woman manipulates her domestic/mystical sphere … reveals that she can manipulate.”26 Emily’s use of her domestic gifts, gifts inculcated in her by Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Laura, prove to be a type of manipulation she uses, whether intentionally or subconsciously, to illustrate her growth as a woman, not just a writer. The gifts become visual markers of her acceptance into Murray womanhood, an acceptance confirmed by Aunt Ruth’s defence of Emily’s honour.27 The scrutiny of her public life is echoed in the scrutiny Emily begins to encounter in her life as a writer, and, just as she gains acceptance through her creativity as a woman, so too Emily is able to gain greater acceptance through her creativity as an author. However, this isn’t an easy path. Although Aunt Elizabeth disapproves, Emily’s writing has been, up to this point, mainly ignored or supported. When Emily begins to consistently pursue publication, she finds that with the exposure of her private thoughts and words comes inevitable criticisms and rejections, which add to the discomfort she faces in a house where she is a stranger. In her analysis of the adolescent female, Spacks points to “the adolescent’s central problem: to find the proper balance between self and others. The self can dwell in fantasy, but others represent 157

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unevadable reality.”28 Reality, represented both by Aunt Ruth and the critical eyes of peers and publishers alike, cannot be evaded in Shrewsbury. Emily’s agreement with Aunt Elizabeth to forgo writing any fiction during her time at High School places an additional restriction on Emily’s life as an artist. It is through the struggle and forced restraint, however, that Emily is able to begin developing the necessary balance between fantasy and reality, between her dreaming and thinking self, between her roles as artist and woman. She even comes to realize that her “promise to Aunt Elizabeth has helped” her to grow as a writer, just as the physical restrictions placed on her by her High School classes and her Aunt Ruth have helped her to mature as a woman.29 Eventually, it is Emily’s writing that proves her equality to Aunt Ruth, as well as to other members of her family. When Emily is paid forty dollars for the publication of her story The Woman Who Spanked the King, “her clan began to take her writing mania with some degree of seriousness and Aunt Ruth gave up, finally and for ever [sic], all slurs over wasted time.”30 The income legitimizes what has previously been perceived by her family as useless scribbling. As Woolf notes, “[m]oney dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.”31 Earning an income through her pen also allows Emily the beginnings of independence, as she is able to buy her own books and begin paying back the money expended by relatives for her schooling. This is a turning point in Emily’s relationship with the Murray clan. Not only do they begin to realize that she might be able to make a living as an author, but they also begin to realize that she is becoming an adult, with the right to make her own decisions. Emily no longer allows herself to be intimidated by her relatives’ perception of her, and, though they never truly understand her, her relatives become onlookers rather than directors of her affairs. This illustrates the power Emily has gained as she subverts and appropriates each space she encounters and defies the patriarchally-defined role family and society expect her to take. Above all, Emily’s sojourn in her aunt’s house at Shrewsbury teaches her the value of New Moon in a way nothing else could have. Her separation from New Moon makes Emily realize that, as Bachelard states, “we feel calmer and more confident when in the old home … than we 158

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do in the houses on streets where we have only lived as transients.”32 When Miss Royal invites Emily to move to New York in pursuit of her writing career, the thought of leaving New Moon finalizes Emily’s decision to stay on the Island. Hammill points out that “Emily’s home figures increasingly as the inspiration for her creativity and source of her integrity,” both of which are diminished when she is separated from it.33 Hammill also notes that “[a]s she gets older, Emily comes to see New Moon as primarily a nourishing rather than a restricting place.”34 Emily’s temporary exile from New Moon is integral to this transition of perception and in helping her fully understand the influence of the space’s heritage on her selfhood and her writing.

The Lookout Room Of all the spaces in New Moon, the lookout room is the most freeing and the most influential, since it only requires reclaiming rather than full appropriation. When Emily first arrives at New Moon, the room is a forbidden space, having been locked up by Archibald, the family patriarch. Once this restriction is removed by Aunt Elizabeth, however, Emily is able to find a place that is, for the most part, free of patriarchal influence. Woolf notes that “[i]ntellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom … That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.”35 By having a room of her own and material objects that connect her to her matriarchal line, Emily is able to write and create and, eventually, earn money, which allows her to be even more independent. In Through Lover’s Lane, Epperly points out that, by allowing Emily entrance to the lookout, “Aunt Elizabeth is actually inviting orphan Emily to meet her own dead mother in a space resounding with cultural and familial echoes.”36 The admission into her mother’s room by the female head of the New Moon household gives Emily direct access to a “matrilineal heritage of literary strength,” the lack of which Gilbert and Gubar point to as a concern for many female authors.37 In fact, the room itself becomes a surrogate mother, described as being “almost like a living thing to her.”38 When speaking of tower rooms, Bachelard says, “no one will be surprised to learn that the tower room is the abode of a gentle 159

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young girl and that she is haunted by memories of an ardent ancestress … keeping watch over the past in the same way that it dominates space.”39 By reconnecting with her mother’s memory, Emily reclaims the dreaming nature of the lookout. Although the lookout is not actually a tower room or lookout, the space is appropriated as such by its naming.40 In addition, the lookout is saturated with the connotations of seeing and perception indicated by its name, so much so that almost every reference to the room is combined with a description of Emily looking out the window and writing or dreaming.41 The lookout offers Emily a vantage point from which she can clearly see into her dreams and desires, write and stretch her creative boundaries, and grow in body, mind, and spirit, all while nestled in the comfort of her mother’s memory and psychically tangible presence. Spacks states that “[f]antasy allows for expansion of the personality, providing a secret sphere of possibility in which the young woman cut off by social restriction from full public expressiveness can test her nature in interior dialogue, interior exploration – not exploration of the self, necessarily; but imaginative investigation of others.”42 Emily’s poems, stories, essays, and profiles allow her this exploration and expansion while she is safe in the lookout, which is perpetually and almost exclusively connected to her writing. Due to this connection to her creative self, the room falls out of the narrative and then back into focus at the same time as Emily’s writing. When Emily uses her personal fireplace to burn A Seller of Dreams after Dean condescendingly dismisses it, her room becomes “like a prison,” and she flees, falling down the stairs and injuring herself.43 During Emily’s convalescence and subsequent engagement to Dean, about one-fifth of the final book, the lookout is referred to in passing only twice. Because of the integral nature of the lookout with Emily’s creative self, when she falls under the patriarchal control of Dean, Emily also loses the matriarchal haven and protection of her room. It is not until she rejects Dean, breaking off her engagement and the accompanying psychological fetters, that both the lookout and her writing come back into focus. Almost immediately after ending the engagement, Emily is found back in her room, where she joyously exclaims, “a miracle has happened … when 160

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I was leaning out of my window … the flash came – again – after these long months of absence … And all at once I knew I could write.”44 She reclaims the space with her wonder moment, freeing herself from the tainted act of destruction and, from the same window, soon begins planning the book that will bring her greater literary success. A sanctuary in the midst of patriarchal society, the lookout allows Emily to access her creativity in a powerful way. However, in order to “mature and succeed, Emily will have to master the Murray legacy, a legacy which becomes more insistent as she matures.”45 The lookout provides her with the space to bring A Seller of Dreams into reality, but that narrative is tainted and ultimately destroyed by Dean’s patriarchal influence. After breaking free from Dean, the lookout again offers Emily the space to channel her energies into writing, this time producing The Moral of the Rose, a more mature novel born, not out of a moment of romantic thrill, but from her love and dedication to her family as she strives to connect her womanly heritage to her creative gift. Not only does the novel allow her relatives, and most specifically her Aunt Elizabeth, to understand and connect with the heretofore-alien aspect of Emily’s life, it also gives Emily a solid foundation of creative power. Unfortunately, the lookout is too entrenched in the patriarchy to become a permanent place of refuge. As Elizabeth and Laura grow older, Cousin Andrew begins to put on “proprietary airs,” talking of the improvements he will make to the house with a complete lack of concern toward family history or sympathy to the house’s personality.46 The women of New Moon “[lack] the patriarchal privilege of true ownership of the home” and, therefore, “cannot will New Moon to Emily.”47 In addition to the restriction created by Andrew’s right of inheritance, New Moon (and the lookout specifically) is also the place where Emily most often waits for and hears Teddy’s commanding whistle. These layers of patriarchal connection limit the fullness of freedom available in the New Moon space, including the lookout. Emily cannot come fully into her own as a woman so long as she lives in a house where the patriarchy holds final sway. In order to truly master the Murray legacy, Emily must subvert the final vestiges of patriarchal power, and this can only be done through the claiming of her own space. 161

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The Disappointed House An exploration of Emily’s connection to the Disappointed House offers an answer to the problem of the patriarchally-controlled home and an alternative to the argument of Teddy’s dominance. This is not to say that Emily’s relationship with Teddy is not fraught with difficulty. Scholars have long argued whether their union leads to Emily’s capitulation to patriarchy or if there is hope for future creative work in her life.48 However, Emily’s eventual and complete appropriation of the Disappointed House tips the argument toward her artistic freedom. In many ways, the Disappointed House is a dream house and, as Bachelard posits in The Poetics of Space, a dream house “must possess every virtue.”49 Emily is able to craft around the Disappointed House whatever dream she needs at the moment. Bachelard expands on this idea in Poetics of Reverie, stating that a “dreamed world teaches us the possibilities for expanding our being within our universe. There is futurism in any dreamed universe.”50 When Emily first sees the Disappointed House, she notes that “[i]t had never been finished.”51 Because the house is not completed, it can embody Emily’s dreams for the future and echo her current disappointments. Initially, she simply furnishes and peoples the house in her imagination, in itself an act of subversion, as she appropriates a space created by a man for his bride. Then, in one of her first concrete statements of ambition, Emily claims the house, saying, “When I grow up and write a great novel and make lots of money, I will buy the Disappointed House and finish it.”52 Simply being published, though an important dream, is not her ultimate goal. Her full desire is to use her artistic skills to own and create her own space, specifically in the Disappointed House. This dream becomes more fully articulated when Emily and Teddy sneak into the house and talk of owning it together in the future.53 This is also the first time the house becomes a tangible space shared by someone with similar ambitions and desires. The connection forged between Emily, Teddy, and the Disappointed House is one that continues to hold them together, even when they are separated by physical and emotional distance. As well as being a holder of Emily’s dreams, the Disappointed House also becomes a tool for the projection of Emily’s internal struggles and 162

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deepest feelings. In fact, the descriptions of the Disappointed House consistently echo Emily’s own emotional and psychological state. Lawson argues that the “disappointed house with its sense of doom thus speaks strongly to Emily’s psyche because it corresponds to a place of emptiness, loss, and disappointment at the center of Emily’s own life.”54 An example of this comes early in the narrative of Emily’s Quest, when Emily notes that the Disappointed House is “boarded up, unfinished, heart-broken, haunted by the timid, forsaken ghosts of things that should have happened but never did.”55 After mourning the desolate state of the house, Emily immediately and abruptly transitions to her personal disappointment that Teddy’s “letters are full and jolly and Teddy-like … But lately they have become rather impersonal,” musing, “They might just as well have been written to Ilse as to me. Poor little Disappointed House. I suppose you will always be disappointed.”56 The fluidity with which she moves from house to self to house again illustrates the way she projects her feelings onto the Disappointed House, often in an unconscious fashion. Because the Disappointed House is so interconnected with Emily’s dreams and inner life, it makes sense for Dean to attempt to gain mastery over Emily by purchasing it. Although he claims to have bought it for Emily, and finishes and furnishes the house with Emily’s assistance, his proprietary jealousy rises regularly. When Emily exults in the house, Dean tries to claim her response and draw her attention back to him, insisting, “Don’t ever talk so to any other man, Emily.”57 Gilbert and Gubar state that “male sexuality is integrally associated with the assertive presence of literary power” in which “women exist only to be acted on by men, both as literary and as sensual objects.”58 Dean forefronts this objectification of Emily through his choice of a nickname. He calls her “Star,”59 a dismissal by which, Sardella-Ayres argues, “Dean reduces her to pretty object, not an equal intellect as he refuses to take her writing and financial independence seriously.”60 This oppression of her creative spirit is echoed by Dean’s attempted control of the physical space of the Disappointed House as he condescendingly allots Emily a mere “corner between the windows” for her writing desk, indicating that he tolerates her writing now only because he can demand 163

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precedence over it.61 In this way, Dean relegates Emily solely to the role of “angel” of the house, “wholly passive, completely void of generative power,” because the “arts of pleasing men … are not only angelic characteristics … they are the proper acts of a lady.”62 Emily’s role now, in Dean’s eyes, is to please him, and in doing so, he believes, be pleased herself. Emily even tries to convince herself this is true, telling Aunt Laura, “Here I am, going to be married, with a prospective house and husband to think about. Doesn’t that explain why I’ve ceased to care about – other things?”63 Add to this the fact that Dean’s dismissal of Emily’s writing started the chain of events leading to her acceptance of his proposal, and it is no wonder Emily feels like “an exile from her old starry kingdom.”64 Epperly notes that “[i]n struggling against [Dean], Emily Starr is fighting against the collective weight of male privilege.”65 Emily’s acquiescence to Dean’s control is not only a suppression of her writing self but also a relinquishment of her dreams as a woman. However, in the midst of her temporary compliance, Emily unconsciously and even unwillingly continues to connect the Disappointed House to her true personal dreams. She admits to herself that “her little grey house” means “more to [her] than Dean does … in a three-o’clock moment of stark, despairing honesty.”66 Note her use of the possessive in regard to the Disappointed House. Even though Dean bought and owns the house, Emily continues to claim it as her own. She even imagines “herself there in the future … sitting hand in hand with Teddy at the fireplace,” a Freudian slip she quickly quashes.67 As Spacks notes, “[c]onfronting a restrictive environment while powerless to effect significant change in it, a woman may find herself driven inward, to a realm where she can assert the omnipotence life denies her.”68 Emily’s inner thoughts, projected on the Disappointed House and augmented by her psychic vision, allow her to see the truth and reclaim a small amount of power, even as she admits that “[h]er fetters were of her own forging.”69 However, because she is so aware of her own complicity, “[i]t will take all Emily’s psychic power and spiritual introspection to enable her to throw off the image Dean has constructed for her and that her own culture – through its advocacy of marriage and domesticity and romantic myth – reinforces.”70 Her personal acknowledgment of 16 4

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willingness makes it that much harder for her to reject her “fetters,” as they are not merely something placed upon her, but intentionally taken on through her own choices. Emily’s psychic power is integrally connected to the Disappointed House, and this psychic connection allows the Disappointed House to become the catalyst of her awakening from the self-imposed dream state, leading to a breaking of her engagement and a return to her own sense of self. This element of Emily’s character acts in some ways as the “monster” correlate in Gilbert and Gubar’s angel/monster dichotomy, with the uncanny monstrousness of her psychic vision allowing Emily to break free from the role of domestic angel that inhibits her. When Emily goes to the Disappointed House in an attempt to work through her conflicted feelings surrounding her impending marriage to Dean, she shudders that “here in the little house what a silence there was! Something strange and uncanny about the silence. It seemed to hold some profound meaning … Yet fear suddenly left her.”71 The Disappointed House exposes the silencing of her inner self, which has threatened to consume her since agreeing to marry Dean and, by revealing it to her, allows her to release her fear and move forward. Almost immediately following this loss of fear, Emily has her final psychic experience of the narrative, which reiterates her link to Teddy. That this takes place in the Disappointed House, a space already strongly associated with her desires for the future, only enhances their connection and the impact of her vision, while keeping the power firmly in Emily’s hands. Emily’s connection to the Disappointed House remains after the dissolution of her engagement to Dean, and her perception of it during the following years of solitude reveals her discontent with the standing of her life as a woman, even in the midst of success as an artist. Emily enters a period of limbo in her romantic life – a fact that distresses and confounds the patriarchal society surrounding her – in order to focus on her artistic endeavours and regain her sense of self as a writer. During this period of solitude, Emily achieves her greatest creative triumph to date, channelling her energies into the writing of The Moral of the Rose, the book that brings her financial stability and fame. However, despite this authorial success, the Disappointed House 165

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reveals the dissatisfaction Emily feels toward the other aspect of her life. She describes the Disappointed House as “[w]aiting there on its hill – waiting – dumb – blind,”72 and she sighs over “[h]ow neglected – how lonely – how heartbroken it looked.”73 The house temporarily loses its connection to future hopes and becomes, when she needs it to be, a picture of lost dreams and bitter disappointment, allowing her to expose the emotions she can barely articulate to herself. As painful as this period of romantic denial is, however, Emily clearly sees it as necessary, as she cannot truly be happy in a romantic relationship if she is not also satisfied in her artistic life. This is one thing her engagement with Dean made clear. Emily refuses to place a claim on Teddy based solely on her psychic saving of his life, even when provided an opportunity to return to him. Waterston notes that “[a]s if in passive denial of society’s fiat, Emily lets slip the chance of turning to Teddy. Rather, she moves through a series of repressions and rejections of his love.”74 By rejecting Teddy and the very real possibility that an acceptance of his proposal at this point would simply lead to another repression as his muse and angel, Emily allows herself time to “examine, assimilate, and transcend the extreme images of ‘angel’ and ‘monster’ which male authors have generated for her.”75 She must not only establish her own position in the world but also be comfortable enough in that space to remain autonomous while in a relationship. Spacks states that most women “seem to understand that publicly acknowledged achievement is a mode of power. The puzzle of how power relates to love in a woman’s experience is central to the dilemma of the woman as artist.”76 With the publication of her novel, Emily is now on at least even footing with Teddy. The question is how love and her life as woman will fit with the power gained through her life as author and whether that power can be retained in a marriage to any man. Perhaps this is why some scholars77 have argued that, to some extent, Emily’s marriage to Teddy will return her to a state of patriarchal repression. It is not until Teddy returns as a supplicant that Emily is willing to accept him, retaining the power in their relationship. Although he comes with his well-known whistle, his speech to Emily is filled with pleadings and admissions of Emily’s continuous place of power in their 166

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relationship.78 Although some might interpret Teddy’s “Don’t tell me you can’t love me – you can – you must” as commanding, it can just as easily be interpreted as imploring, particularly when followed by his narrative of how he has been following, waiting, and longing for her.79 While the narrative does seem to hint at a happily ever after, Gray notes that “Montgomery refuses to present marriage or domesticity as an easy or exemplary choice.”80 Montgomery joins a host of other female authors who, “[i]n their investigations of internal and external female experience … question, overtly and covertly, marriage as a happy ending.”81 The broken engagement with Dean and delay of reconciliation with Teddy complicate the traditional, “appropriate” marriage ending. Emily’s choice of Teddy is not perfect. It is not even the only choice she could make. However, it is the one she willingly chooses for herself. Epperly argues that “[t]his belonging to someone else is very different … from Dean’s notion of ownership. Montgomery underscores the difference by making Emily, minutes later, inspired with the idea for a story.”82 While this inspiration references the earlier incident in the Old John House, the principle remains the same. Where Dean quenches Emily’s artistry, Teddy inspires it, and there is little evidence that this would somehow change in the future, particularly when considered in light of Emily’s acquisition of the Disappointed House. The Disappointed House remains a space remarkably free from patriarchal influence and, therefore, is the perfect place for Emily to build a home of matriarchal artistry. Although the house was originally built by a man for his bride and then purchased by Dean for Emily, in both cases the woman rejected the man, upsetting the standard patriarchal pattern. As Emily prepares for her marriage to Teddy, she receives from Dean “a deed to the Disappointed House and all it contain[s],” notably addressed to Emily alone.83 Dean cedes complete control of the house to Emily, acknowledging her rightful claim and relegating himself to an “old corner in [her] house of friendship.”84 Rachel McMillan asserts that Dean retains the power in their relationship through his use of the word “claim.”85 However, even more significant is his use of the word “corner,” which echoes the earlier language used when restricting Emily’s writing to a mere “corner.”86 Their roles are now reversed, and 167

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Dean relegates himself to the corner, accepting Emily’s rightful ownership and control of the house. While New Moon will revert to male control, the little grey house offers a new matriarchal home, a space of creativity and hope for the future, especially since Emily “will likely be more successful artistically and financially than her husband.”87 It is true that Teddy is taking a position as vice-principal of an art school, and Rubio argues that Teddy “has been made even more respectable” by this offer.88 However, it is equally possible that this is a sign his career is headed away from the artistic heights and into more prosaic work, while Emily’s writing career appears to be just beginning. It is also significant that Emily and Teddy do not plan to live full time in the Disappointed House. This could be offered as proof that Emily is submitting to the control of Teddy and his career, but the fact that the Disappointed House becomes a permanent refuge belonging to Emily alone can also be used to illustrate its strong connection to Emily’s dreams and writing self and Emily’s ability to support herself independent of Teddy’s salary. Bachelard states that it is “a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later … It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.”89 The impermanence of Emily’s life in the Disappointed House allows it to continue as a place for dreams of the future, while simultaneously fulfilling the dreams of her past. In her analysis of The Blue Castle, Ashley Reese argues that Barney’s island, Valancy’s “Blue Castle,” is an “ordinary place,” which contains “possibilities heretofore present only in her imagination.”90 In a similar way, the Disappointed House is simply a house, an ordinary and domestic space, yet it contains the years of otherness Emily has poured into it through her dreams and imaginings. It is not the house where she will settle as a wife and, potentially, a mother, but a separate space, directly tied to her artistry and reclaimed from patriarchal rule. At the close of the story, Emily is a landowner,91 a house owner, and a successful author, who has rejected the oppressive patriarchal influence of a man who tried to control her and has, instead, chosen to be joined with a fellow artist who has always encouraged her artistic pursuits. The idea that she is relegating herself to mere muse, as Rubio suggests, 168

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seems unlikely.92 As Sardella-Ayres argues, “it is possible for Emily to be wedded to her art and wedded to a man simultaneously.”93 The acceptance of one does not necessitate the denial of the other. In the last paragraph of the trilogy, Emily is waiting for Teddy, who is “coming to her,” rather than the other way around, while she looks with joy at “the little beloved grey house that was to be disappointed no longer.”94 Throughout the trilogy, Emily draws strength and wisdom from the spaces she inhabits. As those spaces affect her, so too does she affect them in return. Emily’s growth is reflected in the rooms and houses with which she comes in contact, and they ultimately help her to mature as both an artist and a woman. Although she resists and often rejects patriarchal control, Emily also uses or subverts its power to complete her own purposes. Her ultimate success as an author and confident choosing of a partner come through her appropriation of and connection to the spaces that are such an integral part of her life.

No t e s 1 Montgomery, eq, 86. 2 Menzies, “Moral of the Rose”; Lawson, “Adolescence and the Trauma of Maternal Inheritance”; Sardella-Ayres, “Under the Umbrella”; Miller, “The Writer-asa-Young-Woman and Her Family”; and Miller, “Montgomery’s Emily: Voices and Silences” to name those most pertinent to this analysis. 3 McMaster, “The ‘Murray Look.’” 4 Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass. 5 Rubio, “Subverting the Trite.” 6 Epperly, Through Lover’s Lane, 101. 7 Hammill, Literary Culture and Female Authorship, 103. 8 Lawson, “The ‘Disappointed’ House.” 9 Montgomery, enm, 98. 10 Ibid., 309. 11 McMaster, “The ‘Murray Look,’” 63. 12 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 97. 13 Montgomery, ec, 80–5, 304. This is shown when Elizabeth and Emily, with the help of Cousin Jimmy, negotiate the terms of Emily’s attendance at Shrewsbury and when Elizabeth acknowledges Emily’s right to autonomy in choosing whether to go with Miss Royal or not.

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14 Montgomery, enm, 118. 15 In addition, this claiming of Lofty John’s Bush foreshadows both Emily’s saving of the bush later in this novel and her eventual purchase and permanent claiming of the property: Montgomery, eq, 157. 16 Montgomery, enm, 249. Aunt Nancy promises to bequeath Emily the gazingball, the chessy-cat door knocker, and her gold earrings. 17 Montgomery, eq, 41. 18 Montgomery, ec, 314–15. 19 Ibid., 96. 20 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 52, 106. 21 Waterston, Magic Island, 124. 22 Gray, “Bloom in the Moonshine,” 173. 23 Tulloch, “The Robinsonade versus the Annescapade,” chapter 4 in this volume. 24 Montgomery, ec, 103, 107, 112–13. 25 Ibid., 165–6. 26 Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 26. 27 Montgomery, ec, 282–3 28 Spacks, The Female Imagination, 114. 29 Montgomery, ec, 323 (italics in the original). 30 Ibid., 262. 31 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 65. 32 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 43. 33 Hammill, Literary Culture and Female Authorship, 106. 34 Ibid., 103. 35 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 108. 36 Epperly, Through Lover’s Lane, 93. 37 Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 59. 38 Montgomery, enm, 316. 39 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 24. 40 Montgomery, enm, 283. 41 A few examples of the connection between the window in the lookout and Emily’s dreaming and writing are Montgomery, enm, 338–9; Montgomery, ec, 1–2, 220; eq, 105, 144. 42 Spacks, The Female Imagination, 125. 43 Montgomery, eq, 53. 44 Ibid., 102. 45 Lawson, “Adolescence and the Trauma of Maternal Inheritance,” 28. 46 Montgomery, eq, 150. 47 McMaster, “The ‘Murray Look,’” 53. 48 Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 174–5; Lawson, “The ‘Disappointed’ House,” 85–6; MacLulich, “Portraits of the Artist,” 466; McMaster, “The ‘Murray 170

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49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

Look,’” 69; Menzies, “Moral of the Rose,” 48, 55, 57; Rubio, “Subverting the Trite,” 28–33; Sardella-Ayres, “Under the Umbrella,” 103, 109–11; Waterston, Magic Island, 147–9. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 65. Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, 8. Montgomery, enm, 65. Ibid., 213. Ibid., 287–8. Lawson, “The ‘Disappointed’ House,” 85. Montgomery, eq, 16. Ibid., 16–17. Ibid., 74. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 8. Montgomery, enm, 267–8. Sardella-Ayres, “Under the Umbrella,” 108. Montgomery, eq, 78. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 21, 24. Montgomery, eq, 85. Ibid., 78. Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 148. Montgomery, eq, 80. Ibid., 82. Spacks, The Female Imagination, 160. Montgomery, eq, 87. Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 175. Montgomery, eq, 87–8. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 224. Waterston, Magic Island, 147. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 17. Spacks, The Female Imagination, 160. Waterston, Magic Island; Rubio, “Subverting the Trite”; Menzies, “Moral of the Rose”; Lawson, “The ‘Disappointed’ House.” Montgomery, eq, 225–7. Ibid., 226. Gray, “Bloom in the Moonshine,” 175. Spacks, The Female Imagination, 77. Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 177. Montgomery, eq, 228. Ibid.

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85 McMillan, “The Bitter Laugh” (paper presented at the 12th Biennial lmmi International Conference, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, 24 June 2016). 86 Montgomery, eq, 78. 87 Sardella-Ayres, “Under the Umbrella,” 111. 88 Rubio, “Subverting the Trite,” 29. 89 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 61. 90 Reese, “Barney of the Island,” this volume, 75. 91 Montgomery, eq, 157. Emily becomes a landowner through the purchase of Lofty John’s Bush out of her earnings as an author. 92 Rubio, “Subverting the Trite,” 31. 93 Sardella-Ayres, “Under the Umbrella,” 111. 94 Montgomery, eq, 228 (italics in the original).

172

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n André Narbonne argues that in Anne of Green Gables humour

“both complicates and humanizes characters by indicating the incongruity between their inner and outer selves,”1 claiming elsewhere that the novel produces “genial laughter … Anne’s critique of Avonlea is one that Marilla shares but cannot express except through laughter.”2 In a similar vein, Monika B. Hilder describes Montgomery as an “ingeniously comic iconoclast”3 in her depiction and implicit critique of “patriarchal religion” in Anne of Green Gables.4 These critics both take for granted Montgomery’s status as a humorous writer, a stance supported by Montgomery’s own assessments in her journals and letters. While working on Anne of the Island, Montgomery notes in her journal, “My forte is in writing humour. Only childhood and elderly people can be treated humorously in books,”5 and, in a letter to G.B. MacMillan discussing religious ideals, Montgomery says that the writer of humour “is doing quite as much for humanity as if he wielded a more serious pen,” as “often times a truth can be taught by a jest better than by earnest.”6 These statements suggest that, when Montgomery does use humour, she is deliberately undercutting expectations and assumptions. The chapters in this section explore Montgomery’s use of humour and comedy to subvert the gender stereotypes and expectations of her time. In “Cross-Dressing: Twins, Language, and Gender in L.M. Montgomery’s Short Fiction,” E. Holly Pike examines some of Montgomery’s magazine fiction in relation to her novels directed at a younger audience, arguing that, while Montgomery implicitly questions the gender binaries of her time through her humorous depictions of male-female twins in magazine stories, her fiction for young readers is far more likely to support those gender stereotypes. Montgomery’s skill at comedy is the focus of Wanda Campbell’s

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“‘I’m Noted for That’: Comic Subversion and Gender in L.M. Montgomery’s ‘The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s’ and ‘Aunt Philippa and the Men.’” Campbell focuses on the disjunction between realism and romance that Montgomery’s first-person narrators must navigate in these stories. Examining the stories through Bakhtin and Bergson, Campbell demonstrates how Montgomery “uses humour to undermine both the sense of danger and the sense of devotion women may have felt regarding the gender roles that governed their lives in the first decades of the twentieth century.”7 By renaming and reassigning characteristics commonly considered gender-specific, Campbell argues, Montgomery routinely subverts gender stereotypes. On the other hand, Vappu Kannas, in “‘Nora and I Got Through the Evening …’: Gender Roles and Romance in the Diary of L.M. Montgomery and Nora Lefurgey,” demonstrates how women create spaces in their relationships that redefine traditional gender roles, creating primary relationships with other women and allowing them the freedom to critique the world they encounter and “write oneself into a position of power.”8 In this case, that space is created in a joint comedic diary Montgomery wrote with her friend Nora Lefurgey during the winter Lefurgey boarded with Montgomery and her grandmother.

No t e s 1 Narbonne, “Lucy Maud Montgomery and Stephen Leacock’s Shared Canadian Figure,” 84. 2 Narbonne, “Carlylean Sentiment and the Platonic Triad in Anne of Green Gables,” 438. 3 Hilder, “That Unholy Tendency to Laughter,” 35. 4 Ibid., 44. 5 Montgomery, sj 2:133. 6 Montgomery, My Dear Mr. M., 21 7 Campbell, “’I’m Noted for That,’” 198–9. 8 Kannas, “Nora and I Got Through the Evening,” 225.

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7 Cross-Dressing Twins, Language, and Gender in L.M. Montgomery’s Short Fiction

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n In the Anne series, Anne is famously associated with twins. Part of

the life story she tells Marilla is her experience with the three sets of Hammond twins; she is again involved with the care of twins when Marilla adopts Davy and Dora in Anne of Avonlea; and she spends a day caring for the Raymond twins in Anne of Windy Poplars. In each case, with the exception of Anne’s own twin girls in Anne of Ingleside and Rainbow Valley, twins are trouble, as Elizabeth Waterston notes.1 Readers do not know the biological sex of the Hammond twins, but the other twins Montgomery depicts are male/female pairs, as are the twins in Jane of Lantern Hill (“the George twin and the Ella twin”) and the twins depicted in Montgomery’s short fiction. In her depiction of male/female twins, Montgomery suggests that such twins form a

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complementary unit of stereotypically gendered attributes, with particular behaviours sometimes being ascribed to the male twin and sometimes to the female twin. Montgomery plays with assumptions about gender in these stories to produce light comedy for the entertainment of adult readers for whom the binarism of the time was self-evident. More importantly, Montgomery shows through the depiction of twins in her magazine fiction that gender attributes are learned, and often learned through reading of precisely the kind of fiction that was published in magazines. The publication of Montgomery’s original accounts of twins in general-readership magazines such as Star Monthly, Gunter’s, Holland’s, and Blue Book gave her opportunities for humorous questioning of gendered expectations that would not be available once her fame tied her to girls’ stories,2 but that ultimately leave those binaries intact. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler asserts the primacy of behaviour in conceptions of gender: “This ‘being a man’ and this ‘being a woman’ are internally unstable affairs. They are always beset by ambivalence precisely because there is a cost in every identification, the loss of some other set of identifications, the forcible approximation of a norm one never chooses, a norm that chooses us, but which we occupy, reverse, resignify to the extent that the norm fails to determine us completely.”3 Montgomery’s first twin story, “A Patent Medicine Testimonial,” published in 1903 in Star Monthly, establishes her pattern of using the depiction of boy-girl twins to draw attention to the instability and the norms that Butler references, depicting commonly “gendered” behaviours as belonging innately to both male-identified and female-identified bodies in a binary system. In this story, the boygirl twins are young adults, and the female narrator outmanoeuvres a crusty old uncle to get his support for her brother’s college education, which she will share, not because of a desire for an education, but because “I couldn’t be separated from him.” The division of attributes between the siblings is ascribed to her being like their mother’s people and him being like their father – suggesting a genetic basis for aspects of personality – with the uncle ultimately reminding the young woman, “But in future you’ve got to remember that in law you’re a Melville 176

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whatever you are in fact.”4 While the underlying assumption is that genetic heritage may determine some personal characteristics, it is clear that social constructs, such as a family name, can force an individual to mask innate characteristics. Gender roles are most specifically questioned in the second, chronologically, of Montgomery’s twin stories, “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand,” originally published in Gunter’s Magazine, a magazine devoted to romantic fiction, in 1905. In a split narrative, in which each twin tells part of the story of their attempt to manoeuvre their minister and their aunt into marriage, characters’ names and clothing are presented as aspects of a deliberate construction of social and gender relationships. While the twins call the Reverend Stephen Richardson “Dick” between themselves, their mother significantly will not allow their father, the minister’s college friend, to call him “Stephen,” as “it would set a bad example of familiarity to the children”5 by encouraging them to ignore the behaviour expected in interactions with a minister, who has a defined social role. This deliberate masking of his “college friend” persona with his public role as minister draws attention both to the way behaviour must be modelled and learned and to the fluidity and construction of social roles. The twins have renamed Reverend Richmond to suit their conception of him, as he is young, active, and good-looking, unlike the other ministers they have known, and the familiar nickname “Dick” expresses their sense of his accessibility, differentiating him from their existing conception of “minister.” Just as the twins have renamed the minister to fit their conception of him, their father has nicknamed his sister “Tommy,” though her name is actually Bertha, “and she likes it.”6 This nickname suggests that he perceives her and she perceives herself as not conforming strictly to the category “woman,” that they both perceive the category “woman” less absolutely than others do, and that they refuse to accept a binary male/female system of identification. The name also recalls the term “tomboy,” to describe a girl who does not behave “like a girl.” The story further draws attention to the fluidity of gender and other social constructs through Dick’s conversations with the twins. Jack is sent to tell Dick the version of Aunt Tommy’s relationship with “the 177

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man in New York” (actually her uncle) intended to make him jealous; this is his task instead of Jill’s, as “it was better for a man to do it,”7 suggesting that Jill understands that homosocial and heterosocial relations may differ. In that conversation, Dick addresses Jack as “old man” and “old chap,” comically including him in the world of men, and of old school friends in particular, which Dick shares with Jack’s father. However, in addressing Jill, when she comes to confess the scheme, Dick suggests that he, like her, has the option of wearing a dress, telling her to sit in the green chair, because “I am sure it was created for a pink dress and unfortunately neither Mrs Dodge nor I possess one.”8 The reference to the possibility of Dick having a dress is comical,9 expressing Dick’s willingness to humour a child. However, Jill is careful to explain to the reader that her own wearing of a pink dress is a strategic choice based on the role she is about to perform: “when you are going to have an important interview with a man it is always well to look your very best.”10 Jill may be Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s “‘female female impersonator,’ whose masquerade of ‘femininity’ ironically comments on the fictionality of the ‘feminine’ even while implicitly fetishizing a vanished ‘womanhood.’”11 However, Dick’s response casts doubt on whether addressing a man means what Jill thinks it does. If it is possible for him also to have a pink dress, her strategy in dressing for him may not have its intended effect, as her understanding of gendered behaviour may not reflect the full range of options that Montgomery suggests is possible. Jill must set things right between Dick and Aunt Tommy, as the twins do not want “Pinky” Carewe for an “Uncle Tommy.” The twins have given him the name “Pinky,” with its feminine associations, because “we couldn’t bear him,”12 in contrast to the friendly and explicitly manly “Dick.”13 It is significant, too, that Aunt Tommy’s potential husband is identified by her name rather than by his own, humorously reversing the traditional pattern of a woman taking her husband’s name at marriage. While the names the twins use clearly are intended to express their attitudes toward the individuals named, it is notable that both Aunt Tommy and Dick are masculinized, while “Pinky” Carewe is feminized to indicate his lack of suitability as a mate for Aunt Tommy. 178

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Although the feminization of Pinky, because it complements the masculinization of Aunt Tommy, could position the couple as appropriate heteronormative mates, the twins’ clear disdain for Pinky indicates that they do not share that point of view, but ascribe superior value to some version of masculinity, which would be consistent with the values of the period. Dick’s willingness to playfully accept the twins’ world view, in which names signify a value judgment, is indicated in his addressing Jill as “Miss Elizabeth,” a form giving her the status of a young lady, as opposed to the diminutive “Jacky,” which he and Jill had used in reference to her brother. Aunt Tommy later signifies her approval of Jill’s confession of the scheme by calling her Elizabeth, as Dick had done.14 As Butler notes in her discussion of Willa Cather’s fiction, “Names fail fully to gender the characters whose femininity and masculinity they are expected to secure.”15 However, in this case, the names are intended not to secure, but to question the femininity or masculinity of the character and thereby to either include or exclude the character from homosocial and heterosexual bonding. The feminized Pinky is excluded from heterosexuality, while the masculinized Tommy and Dick are valorized and rewarded by forming a heterosexual marriage, the usual resolution of the romantic-fiction plot. The story of Aunt Tommy’s engagement is complete only when Jack’s and Jill’s complementary first-person narratives are read and reveal the extent of Jill’s manipulation of the others based largely on assumptions arising from her familiarity with the clichés of romantic fiction. Jill thinks that this knowledge of heteronormative discourse makes her more mature than the oblivious Jack. When she tells Jack that he will understand when he is older, he admits that “sometimes I think [Jill] is older.” Jack’s narrative specifies that fiction is the source of Jill’s information on romantic relationships: in reference to her statement that Dick looks like a Greek god, he says, “I’m sure Jill couldn’t have known what a Greek god looked like, but I suppose she got the comparison out of some novel.” However, Jack himself is not immune to literature, for he describes watching Dick and Tommy’s romance as “like reading a serial story,” and the idea of Tommy and Dick being in love “was a good deal like a book.” When he asks if Jill’s plan to make Dick jealous in 179

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order to speed things along will work, she assures him, “It always does in novels,” and for him “that settled it, of course.”16 Part of the comedy of this narration lies in the adult reader’s awareness of the disparity between real life and fiction, a gap of which Jack and Jill are oblivious. While Jack refers to the novels that influence Jill’s decision-making, his narrative does not replicate their language; however, when Jill begins her part of the narration, she deliberately uses the language of romantic fiction to “re-describe” Aunt Tommy “the way it is always done in stories,” creating a stereotypical description in elaborate language. Because the story is, in fact, a magazine story, published in a magazine dedicated to romantic fiction, it is appropriate to the publishing context that Jack displays a stereotypical male mystification in the face of relationships that leads him to rely on Jill’s interpretation of events. Similarly, it is appropriate to the context that Dick behaves like a stereotypical hero in being prepared to renounce Aunt Tommy due to a sense of his own unworthiness when he believes that he has a rival. Because of her knowledge of fiction, Jill knows that Aunt Tommy’s excessive high spirits hide her misery over Dick’s apparent defection, knows what a narrative climax is, and identifies Dick with “Lord Algernon Francis in the splendid serial in the paper cook took [sic].” Jill’s reliance on fiction as a source of information on human behaviour is explicitly referenced when, seeing Aunt Tommy apparently cheerful, despite Dick’s failure to walk her home from prayer meeting, she asks Jack, “What does this mean?” and he responds, “You’d better get another novel from the cook and find out.”17 Other literary references in the story serve to undermine gendered assignments of behaviour. Jill’s Cupid’s-bow allusion describing Aunt Tommy’s mouth, while classical, is also a cliché that is probably taken from the fiction that is the source of her assumptions about romantic relationships. This allusion also confuses gender assignments, as the comparison is with the bow that Cupid (a male) uses to shoot his arrows (obviously phallic), so the bow is male equipment (potentially male genital equipment), and its metaphoric use to describe a woman’s mouth further weakens any necessary connection between gender expression and the body. When Jill prepares to go to Reverend Richmond and 180

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explain what she and Jack have done, Jack says, “With your shield or upon it, Jill,” which she parenthetically identifies as a classical – i.e., literary  –  allusion. While Jack’s use of the classical allusion may reflect the traditional difference in male and female education (though Jill has already used a classical allusion herself), this speech nonetheless reverses the gender roles of Plutarch’s original: Jack is the Spartan mother and Jill is the warrior son whose gear is specifically referenced. This gender reversal reflects how Montgomery’s original audience might have read Jill’s leadership within the dyad as comically unfeminine and inappropriate. While the children themselves acknowledge that Jill is the “older” and more knowing of the two, the adults around them seem to think that the male twin should take more responsibility than the female twin, and therefore Jacky is still in disgrace after Jill has been forgiven. Furthermore, when he knows the whole story, Dick uses his authority as minister – his socially defined role – to declare that Jill reads too many novels and that he will seek her mother’s help in limiting her reading in future,18 suggesting that the female should not actively seek the kind of knowledge Jill has gained, and that by acting on this improperly acquired knowledge, Jill has violated some behavioural norm. The terms that both Jack and Jill use to stimulate Aunt Tommy’s and Dick’s interest in each other also reflect a gendered version of values. While Jack attests to how pretty Aunt Tommy is, to impress Dick, he tells him that she is “the jolliest girl I know,” “can play games as good as a boy,” “never gets mad,” and “can cook awfully good things,” attributes which he assumes will help her fit into the world of “men.” To make Dick attractive to Aunt Tommy, he also uses terms that suggest he is thinking of “masculine” values: “bully,” “preaches splendid sermons,” “magnificent muscle,” “swims like a duck.” Taking Jack’s description at face value, it seems that both adults are informal, active, good-natured, and skilled at what are perceived as their primary, gendered roles. Their gender difference, from Jack’s perspective, is seen only in their “careers.” To readers of a magazine of romantic fiction, however, Jack’s version of what is attractive to women might well be comic. Jill, however, praises Dick and Aunt Tommy to each other using precisely the clichés of 181

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romance and fiction. Dick is “as handsome as a prince,” “has a heavenly tenor voice” and “poetical eyes,” and “looks just like a Greek god,” while Aunt Tommy is “as beautiful as a dream,” “does the most elegant fancy work,” and “plays and sings divinely.”19 The references to divinities and other “higher” beings such as poets and princes form a deliberately comic juxtaposition with the names Dick and Tommy to undercut the reading of Montgomery’s story as stereotypically romantic in the way of the stories Jill references, and therefore to undercut the stereotypically gendered depictions those stories employ. Jack focuses on shared, functional behaviour, judged by a masculine standard, while Jill focuses on performative aspects of gender roles that entirely omit the practical necessities of daily living and interaction. Butler argues that “[i]nsofar as heterosexual gender norms produce inapproximable ideals, heterosexuality can be said to operate through the regulated production of hyperbolic versions of ‘man’ and ‘woman.’”20 Jill’s elaborate and fanciful description of Aunt Tommy, which contrasts sharply with Tommy’s name and with the actual behaviour ascribed to her, results from Jill’s awareness of heterosexual gender norms and her assumption, based on her knowledge of fiction, that men and women must adhere to these norms to attract each other. Montgomery thus draws attention to the production and performance of gender and the gendered norms of the genre she is writing – romantic magazine fiction – in order to suggest that they are norms or expectations that interact through a complex of mechanisms, rather than inherent aspects of human behaviour. The existence of norms that differentiate knowledge and behaviour by gender is also central in “The Twins and a Wedding,” first published in Holland’s Magazine in 1908, in which another set of ten-year-old twins is instrumental in arranging a marriage. In this case, the twins, trying to get to the wedding of a cousin, end up in the wrong town and thereby facilitate the wedding of a young couple, Una and Ted, who are arguing over the reasonableness of marrying on short notice before Ted has to leave the country because of his job. The twins’ desire to attend a wedding is based on both gendered and shared attributes. Sue, like Jill, performs femininity through clothing and wants to see her cousin’s wedding clothes and to wear a “pale blue shirred silk hat and [a] blue 182

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organdie dress and … high-heeled slippers.”21 One of Jill’s motives in getting Aunt Tommy engaged is to force an early wedding at which she can be flower girl and “wear pink silk clouded over with white chiffon and carry a big bouquet of roses.”22 Johnny is motivated to attend by a supposedly gendered love of food (“Boys are like that, you know”),23 and they both long to recite the wedding ode that Sue has written, Johnny having helped with the rhymes.24 This literary production further connects these twins to Jack and Jill, who had been in the habit of constructing poetry about their previous minister’s nose during his long, dull sermons.25 “The Twins and a Wedding” is narrated entirely by Sue, who, like Jill, understands the norms of romantic fiction. When she learns that they have got off the train in the wrong town and will miss their cousin’s wedding, Sue reports that she “burst into tears, as the story-books say.” She describes Una at first sight as “tall and stately, just like the heroine in a book,” and subsequently by using stereotypical language from romance fiction – “lovely curly brown hair and big blue eyes and the most dazzling complexion”26 – as Jill does with Aunt Tommy. Unlike Jill’s account of manipulating Jacky, however, Sue’s narration suggests that she sees Johnny’s dominant role as natural: Johnny comes up with the plan of travelling to the wedding, while Sue “trust[s] everything blindly” to him. She is willing to accept Johnny’s statement that Ted would not have returned to marry Una later, as “Johnny ought to know, because Johnny’s a boy,” though the need to explicitly identify Johnny as male implies that names, as in “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand,” are not to be taken as absolute indicators of gender. Unlike Jacky, though, Johnny apparently is able to read the feelings of the adults; when Una asks Sue to decide whether she should marry Ted on an hour’s notice, Sue responds affirmatively, and reports “Johnny says she knew I would say that when she left it to me.” Sue’s interest in the outward signs of femaleness (dresses, hats, high heels) is countered by her desire to be seen as exhibiting the traditionally male qualities of “sporting blood,” “grit,” and “spunk”; when Johnny proposes the trip to the wedding, she asserts that she is “all spunk.”27 “Spunk,” which in its earliest uses meant “spark,” by the late-eighteenth century had acquired the 183

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figurative meaning “spirit, mettle; courage, pluck” (the quoted examples in the oed all referring to male behaviour), and by the late-nineteenth century had also come to mean “seminal fluid.”28 Whether Montgomery was aware of this last meaning must be a matter of conjecture, but undoubtedly some of her readers, especially of the 1915 republication of the story in Maclean’s, would have been aware of and amused by it. In any case, the second meaning carries specifically male connotations, and Sue is valued by her brother for behaviour that she claims arises from a masculine essence. Just as in “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand,” even though the attributes associated with each gender may have shifted somewhat, the typically masculine attributes are valorized. Montgomery also uses twins to explore the assignment of types of behaviour by gender in “The Punishment of the Twins,” published in Blue Book magazine in 1909, and in her reworking of that story and the beautiful blond twin dyad through Davy and Dora.29 When Davy and Dora are introduced in Anne of Avonlea (1909), their behaviour exemplifies almost perfectly the traditional division of attributes by gender. As Waterston puts it, drawing attention to the artificiality of these expectations, “In a small community, energy, effervescence, and honesty are seen as ‘male’ virtues, to be loved in a Davy, but not to be expected in a Dora, who must be pretty and pleasing.”30 This division remains constant throughout their appearance in the Anne series, with Davy adjusting himself somewhat to social expectations, but remaining the active, curious, grubby, dominant, entertaining partner, in contrast to Dora’s quietness, cleanliness, and submissiveness. In Anne of the Island (1915), Montgomery emphasizes these aspects of each character in the chapter titled “The Way of Transgressors,” in which Davy and Dora skip Sunday school and church in order to spend time with the Cotton family. Davy is the instigator of this escapade, while Dora is blackmailed into participation through an appeal to her sense of propriety. Davy fishes, climbs, yells, and generally does as he pleases, despite apparent twinges of conscience, while Dora tries to keep herself clean and longs to be at church. In the novel, the story functions as another step in Davy’s socialization, as the third-person narrator makes clear through commentary on Davy’s feelings when their adventure is over: 18 4

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he claims “defiantly” that they had a good time, although “his conscience was beginning to give him salutary twinges” and he “did not enjoy his dinner.”31 The chapter ends with him confessing the whole escapade to Anne and accepting that he cannot really enjoy activities that his conscience tells him are wrong. Dora, of course, needs no such socialization. In the original story that was reworked to present Davy and Dora’s stereotypically gendered behaviour, saintly-looking blond twins who are staying with an unsympathetic great-aunt do similar things, but with the gender roles reversed. Billy, who is the narrative focus of the short story, knows that, despite her “cherubic” appearance, “the more saintly Priscilla looked the worse, as a rule, she was feeling,” establishing a comic disparity between appearance and behaviour, and while hesitant to break Sunday rules, he ultimately “cast dread and conscience to the winds” to join Priscilla in rebelling. For Sue and Jill of the previous short stories, feminine clothing is desirable. In Priscilla’s case, however, feminine clothing – she was “garbed in spotless white, crisp and fluted and ruffled. She had on white silk gloves and a lingerie hat”32 – conforms to social requirements rather than her desires. When Priscilla and Billy accept the invitation of the family of supposedly disreputable Dixon boys, both of them request clothing to change into, Priscilla willingly accepting boy’s clothing, since there are no girls to borrow from. She enjoys wearing male clothing, saying, “You boys don’t know how well off you are, never having to fuss with skirt and frills,” though one of the boys asserts, “you look just as pretty in them things as in dresses.”33 Dora from the Anne books, on the other hand, who enjoys her explicitly feminine garb, as Sue and Jill do, will not borrow even an apron from Mirabel Cotton, tries to “keep her boots clean and her pretty white dress free from rents and stains,”34 and deplores the whole escapade, unlike Priscilla, who leads in all the activities: “fishing, wading, paddling, jumping,” climbing the barn, jumping into the straw, and playing tag,35 all active rather than quiet pursuits. The narrator asserts the possible mixture of usually gendered attributes in any individual by noting, “sex has its limitations after all. Priscilla could wear masculine garments undauntedly but her 185

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feminine soul recoiled from worms.” Even if her soul is “feminine,” it does not recoil at fighting, and she fights Pete Dixon, who finally gets the upper hand by pulling her hair, though initially she is “killing” him. The gender attributes shift freely here, with Pete pulling hair (usually thought of as a girl’s way to fight) and being designated sarcastically by his brother as “a beauty” for “fighting with a lady,” and Priscilla being described as a “sport” and claiming “triumphantly” to have given Pete a black eye.36 When Priscilla reflects happily that now she knows for sure that she can fight a boy, having been afraid that her brother has always been “giving in” to be polite, the comment shows both that she habitually fights Billy and that she is aware of the social rules about how men are supposed to treat women. However, as one of the boys thinks, when Priscilla proposes to eat an entire jar of pickles, while “such a dose of pickles would probably kill any ordinary girl, Priscilla was perfectly safe since she was no ordinary girl.” In other words, these boys regard Priscilla as innately different from other girls, despite her definitively female appearance, but they regard her favourably nonetheless. The boys admire Priscilla because she proposes putting the baby in the hen coop, jumping in the straw, and using the collection of sermons to produce the synopsis required to prove attendance at church. When Billy says, “I don’t think it’s fair that you should have got all the brains in our family,” Priscilla responds, “Well, you see, I had to have some advantages to make up for being a girl.” This recognition of the limitations placed on female behaviour, linked with the rewarding of Priscilla’s “transgressions” (their punishment is to be sent to live with the poor aunt they love), suggests that breaking the gender norms through performances such as cross-dressing is a good thing. While Priscilla does not share Sue and Jill’s knowledge of fictional conventions, she does share their knowledge of compulsory heterosexuality. When she confesses to having taken the sermon synopsis from a book rather than from their minister’s sermon, she does so to save him from the charge of heresy and the loss of their aunt’s contribution to his salary, so he will be able to marry “that sweet Miss Sinclair,”37 an outcome Priscilla considers important. Her comic refusal to accept gender norms of behaviour ultimately does nothing to 186

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undercut the heteronormative romantic conclusion. And while the chapter in Anne of the Island is called “The Way of Transgressors,” and Davy does suffer in conscience for his sins, the transgressions are not really “trans” at all, since Dora and Davy act within gender expectations, even while violating social norms for Sunday behaviour. Priscilla is described as being a “sport” and “no ordinary girl,” both of which, along with her pleasure in fighting, initiative in mischief, and comfort in boy’s clothing, suggest that, according to Montgomery’s view, she is essentially unlike other girls. The word “sport” in particular makes this point, for while it may be used to mean “a person who responds well … to teasing, defeat, or a similarly trying situation,” it can also mean “A plant … animal, etc., which exhibits abnormal or striking variation from the parent type … a spontaneous mutation.”38 While, in this story, Priscilla seems to be treated as a spontaneous mutation, in the context of Montgomery’s stories about twins, she is not. Montgomery’s twin stories suggest that, at least as far as supposedly gendered behaviours are concerned, genetic type and behaviour are not connected, at least when used for humorous purposes. Priscilla and Dora may both carry two X chromosomes, and Billy and Davy may both carry an X and a Y (though readers have no way of knowing whether that is actually the case), but that genetic material does not determine which particular attributes on the gendered spectrum each exhibits. Montgomery shows twins in which the female “misbehaves,” twins in which the male “misbehaves,” and twins who share characteristics, suggesting that the full range of human behaviour is equally available to males and females, but that socialization insists on differentiation, and given the plot lines of these stories, does so in the service of heteronormativity. Even when there is no romance plot supported by the actions of the twins, heterosexual norms are a factor in their behaviour. For instance, the Raymond twins depicted in Anne of Windy Poplars (1936) share an angelic appearance and behaviour that is less than angelic, there being no apparent difference at all between their attributes. Geraldine tries to push her brother out the window for sticking his tongue out at her, and Gerald uses the fishing rod to hook Miss Drake’s hat and false hair in a comic scene reminiscent of the schoolteacher’s wig in The 187

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Adventures of Tom Sawyer.39 They join forces to humiliate Ivy Trent, Geraldine because she is jealous of Ivy’s elaborate clothing and Gerald because of Ivy’s insistence that he be her “beau.”40 That is, they are irritated by particular performances of gender: Geraldine by not being allowed elaborately feminine dress or perhaps by Ivy’s claims to superiority based on her dress and Gerald by being forced prematurely into a sexualized male role by Ivy’s insistence that he be her “beau.” It is clear that the Raymond twins have not yet accepted the gendered roles that Ivy has already learned to rely on. While some parts of the chapter are focalized on Anne, this section has an omniscient narrator, who comments on Mrs Raymond’s and Mrs Trent’s choices in dressing their daughters. The narrator suggests that Mrs Raymond “had fairly sensible ideas about dressing children,” while Mrs Trent always dressed Ivy in “spotless white” and blamed “the ‘jealous’ children with whom the neighbourhood abounded” when Ivy came home with soiled clothing. Since jealousy of Ivy’s apparel seems to be shared in the neighbourhood, it must be Ivy who steps outside the norms of the time and place, and clearly Ivy, at seven, is already sexualizing her own behaviour, knowing that her eyes “had a devastating effect on most of the small boys of her acquaintance.” Gerald’s refusal to participate in this sexualizing of child behaviour again suggests that his and Geraldine’s upbringing does not emphasize gendered expectations. However, the behaviour of the twins toward each other is described in what may be read as sexualized language, as they address each other as “darling” and kiss “passionately” when Geraldine rushes into the pond to save Gerald.41 Erotic, or at least romantic, desire is present in Jill of “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand,” but she recognizes that she is too young to expect Dick to wait for her, and therefore assigns him to Aunt Tommy, keeping him in her circle of affections. Erotic desire is denied by Dora, who is coerced by Davy into their truancy because she fears he will reveal that Frank Bell kissed her, an act in which she was an unwilling participant,42 and Sue and Johnny seem to be interested in a wedding only in terms of spectacle and festivity, and as an opportunity for literary performance. 188

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In “The Twins Pretend,” which is the last of the twin stories (Montgomery included it in The Blythes Are Quoted, and its entry in Montgomery’s ledger book suggests a first publication in 1938 or 1939), fiction and understanding of heteronormativity are significant drivers of the children’s behaviour. Twins Jill and P.G. are depicted as highly imaginative children, who are given to role-playing. The literary foundation of their imaginative play is suggested by Jill’s references to pirates and villains, royalty, and haunted poets, the fact that they name the house from a book, and Jill’s description of their neighbour as “transcendently lovely,” in the language of romantic fiction.43 As well, the importance of writing is reinforced in the reference to the “string of magazines” Anthony Lennox owns, his role “shaping public opinion,” and Mrs Blythe’s writing of stories. Just as Jill in “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand” would have liked to have Dick for her own husband, were there not too large an age gap, this Jill “fell in love with [Anthony] at sight,” and just as Dick’s treatment of Jill suggests affection for her (calling her sweetheart and Miss Elizabeth, and kissing her), at his first meeting with this Jill, “the soul of Anthony Lennox was … knit to the soul of Jill, nevermore to be unknitted.” However, at the end of the story, the twins’ mother is (re)united with Anthony, much like Jill’s transference of her interest in Dick to Aunt Tommy, and the reader learns that Jill and P.G. have been pretending all summer that Anthony is their father.44 Thus their behaviour has also been determined by heteronormativity, in that they can perceive of a relationship only within romantic terms – Anthony must be romantically and sexually paired with their mother, since he cannot be Jill’s lover. Much more so than in the other stories, in “The Twins Pretend” both male and female characters ascribe negative characteristics and behaviour by gender. Jill says that it is easy to have fun with the Blythe twins, as “the Blythe twins are both girls … Girls have some sense,” and she knows she can wound P.G. by a reference to his failure to wash thoroughly, as “P.G., for a boy, was fussy about cleanliness.”45 Anthony says, “Nothing about a woman would surprise me,” and Jill wonders if he is being cynical; P.G. tells Anthony that, “being a man,” he should know what P.G. would put in the imaginary property they are discussing; 189

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P.G. says “It’s so like a girl” when Jill makes an apparently (but only apparently) irrelevant remark; Jill calls men “selfish pigs” (incidentally P.G.’s nickname); P.G. quotes Susan Baker to the effect that no woman is worth fighting for; and Jill, bossing the workmen, is described as having “the technique of managing the sex at her fingers’ ends.”46 By showing characters assigning stereotypical behaviours and attitudes to each of the gender binaries, Montgomery seems to suggest a direct connection between biological sex and behaviour, in contrast to the shifting and sharing of behaviours in the earlier stories – but these generalizations are not substantiated within the story. Montgomery further emphasizes the possible genetic basis of characteristics in the references to babies in the story. In reference to Dr and Mrs Blythe’s possible attendance at the housewarming, P.G. says it is necessary to make sure that “nobody has a baby too near the Glen that night.” Jill says that this statement is “indelicate,” but nonetheless follows up with the remark that she intends to have half a dozen babies herself, before asking Anthony how many babies he thinks he and the girl he believes abandoned him would have had. Anthony states that “this type of conversation” embarrasses him, and asks them to stop, which suggests that he has not really thought through all the implications of marriage and procreation. While his response comically depicts him as less adult than the children, it also raises the question of whether his reluctance to think about procreation is the reason he and the young woman he loved failed to get together, though it is stated that the immediate cause was his failure to ask her directly why she was no longer wearing his ring. That is, he lacked “spunk” in both senses, having been afraid to ask his sweetheart her reason for not wearing his ring and having failed to procreate. On learning that her mother is Anthony’s lost love, Jill asks “reproachfully” why she married their father. Dr Blythe’s response, “If she hadn’t, you and P.G. would never have been born,” points out both the necessity for sexual reproduction and its separation from romantic love, as their mother has said that she married their father because “I was lonely … and he was nice and good.”47 As Christina Hitchcock and Kiera Ball argue elsewhere in this volume, romance and sex, in Montgomery’s fiction, are not intrinsically linked.48 Early in the 190

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story, Jill and P.G.’s mother wonders “why Fate had picked her for their upbringing,”49 a humorous phrasing that completely elides the processes of procreation and gives the impression that her children were not the result of sexual reproduction. The characters’ discomfort with or denial of sexual knowledge removes the adult relationships from the sphere of sexual attraction (though Dr Blythe tries to replace them there), and in doing so opens the possibility of romance outside of heterosexuality. If soul knits to soul across generations, as in the case of Anthony and Jill, and sexual reproduction is not necessarily linked to heterosexual romance, as for Anthony and Betty and her first husband, it is possible that romantic love is no more dependent on binary gender roles than is family love. Despite biology, P.G. and Jill, by pretending that Anthony is their father, have tried to insert him into the familial relationship he may have had if his earlier romantic love for their mother had led to sexual reproduction. The possibility of parental love without biological ties, like the possibility of sexual reproduction without romantic love in Betty’s first marriage, suggests that biology and behaviour are not directly linked, and therefore that when classes of people behave in the same way, the force driving that behaviour must be a social force. The comic possibilities presented by identical twins have been freely exploited in literature since the time of Plautus. Montgomery adapts this tradition to use the supposed complementarity of both twin relationships and male and female gendered behaviour to consider her culture’s assumptions about gender and behaviour. As Irene Gammel argues, “As a writer of bestselling fiction in Canada and the United States, Montgomery silenced the sex act and presented her readers with a version of sexuality that seemed safe and inoffensive for family consumption during a period known for its pushing of the boundaries of sexual representation.”50 The limitations placed on the representation of sexuality in family fiction seem to have included representations of gender norms. Certainly, the options available to a writer publishing light fiction in magazines aimed at an adult audience, especially when that writer did not yet have a clearly defined or limited style, were greater than those of a popular writer for a young audience with expectations based on previous works, or of a writer trying to establish a new audience. 191

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In her magazine and her late short fiction, then, through her comic depiction of the behaviour of twins, Montgomery is able to play with her culture’s construction of gender roles and to question the conventions of fiction that associate gender binaries, heterosexuality, romantic love, and procreation. When she uses the same material in her works directed at a young audience, however, she reworks the material to adhere more closely to traditional gender roles and decries overt sexualization. While raising the possibility that gendered behaviour norms are social constructions and that compulsory heterosexuality is promulgated through fiction, she implicitly supports those processes by ending her stories with heterosexual marriages, or, in the fiction explicitly marketed for younger audiences, by maintaining gendered norms. Her use of first-person narration by and focalization on child characters in the magazine stories, which provide humorous depictions of children in the process of learning gendered behaviour and norms, speaks to an audience that has already absorbed those lessons and that therefore can be amused by the disruption of their expectations. In contrast, Montgomery’s use of a more authoritative third-person narrative in the works specifically addressed to young readers seems to perform an explicitly educative task, ultimately supporting the norms that her magazine fiction was free to question. As M. Daphne Kutzer states, “Adults who produce children’s books are nearly always conscious of conveying morals and values to their young audience, and want to ensure that those morals and values are culturally acceptable.”51 Montgomery may well have made a conscious choice to remain within culturally acceptable boundaries in her writing for a young audience, a choice that would be safer for her commercial prospects once she was established as the author of Anne of Green Gables.

No t e s 1 2 3 4

Waterston, “Orphans, Twins, and L.M. Montgomery,” 75. See Gerson, “Dragged at Anne’s Chariot Wheels.” Butler, Bodies That Matter, 126–7. Montgomery, “A Patent Medicine Testimonial,” 17.

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Montgomery, “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand,” 200. Ibid., 201. Ibid., 205. Ibid., 205, 206, 209–10. See Campbell, chapter 8 in this volume, for a fuller discussion of Montgomery’s comic writing. Montgomery, “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand,” 209. Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land, xvi. Montgomery, “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand,” 208. The coarse use of “dick” for the penis is recorded from 1891 in the oed. “Pinkie,” meaning a very small thing (or the little finger), is recorded in the oed from the early nineteenth century. Montgomery, “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand,” 209, 206, 212, 213. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 140. Montgomery, “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand,” 202, 203, 204, 203, 205. Ibid., 208, 209, 207–8, 209, 207. Ibid., 209, 212. Ibid., 204, 203, 203, 204. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 237. Montgomery, “The Twins and a Wedding,” 118, 119. Montgomery, “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand,” 202. Montgomery, “The Twins and a Wedding,” 118. Ibid., 117–18. Montgomery, “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand,” 200. Montgomery, “The Twins and a Wedding,” 119, 120. Ibid., 119, 117, 112, 118. “Spunk,” oed. Aspects of “The Punishment of the Twins” not used in Anne of the Island were reworked in “The Punishment of Billy” in Magic for Marigold, which is presumably more or less the same as the story published under that title in the Canadian Home Journal, February 1929. Waterston, “Orphans, Twins, and L.M. Montgomery,” 71–2. Montgomery, ai, 99–101. Montgomery, “The Punishment of the Twins,” 815, 817, 815. Ibid., 817. Montgomery, ai, 98. Montgomery, “The Punishment of the Twins,” 818. Ibid., 818. Ibid., 819, 821. “Sport,” 7(c), 6(a), oed. Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, chapter 11. 193

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40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Montgomery, awp, 200–1, 203, 205–6, 207. Ibid., 205, 206, 210–11. Montgomery, ai, 97. Montgomery, “The Twins Pretend,” 119, 122, 132, 123, 134. Ibid., 120, 124, 119, 121, 142–3. Ibid., 122, 123. Ibid., 125, 125, 133, 133, 134, 135. Ibid., 138, 138, 143. Hitchcock and Ball, “Orgies of Lovemaking,” this volume, 269–70. Ibid., 119. Gammel, “My Secret Garden,” 40. Kutzer, Empire’s Children, xv.

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8 “I’m Noted for That” Comic Subversion and Gender in L.M. Montgomery’s “The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s” and “Aunt Philippa and the Men”

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Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination1

n Most of the critical attention directed toward L.M. Montgomery’s

work understandably focuses on her novels, but she herself considered the short story “a very high form of art,” admitting in her journal on 17 January 1911 that “it is easier to write a good novel than a good short story.”2 Of over five hundred of her short stories, two that focus extensively on gender roles and expectations are “The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s,” first published in Everybody’s Magazine in

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April 1907 and republished in Chronicles of Avonlea (1912), with postAnne revisions, and “Aunt Philippa and the Men,” first published in the Red Book Magazine in January 1915 with the subtitle “In Which a Man-Hater Joins Hands with Cupid,” integrated with revisions into Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), and eventually republished in At the Altar: Matrimonial Tales (1994). These two stories share many similarities beyond the fact that they appear in more than one version: both main characters are unmarried older women described as “man-haters,” who, in spite of themselves, get caught up in romance, one by inadvertently becoming trapped in the home of a “woman-hater” by a smallpox quarantine, and the other by assisting her young niece to marry the man she loves while remaining a vocal critic of masculine failings. In these two comic stories, Montgomery takes a serious look at gender, gently exposing divisive and destructive stereotypes and reminding us of a shared humanity through humour. Laughter, writes Mikhail Bakhtin, has the power to make an object familiar so one can “turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it.” Because it “demolishes fear and piety” Bakhtin argues that “laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically.”3 Montgomery courageously examines gender roles by adopting a realistic rather than a romantic mode and by employing the comic strategies of repetition, reversal, and reciprocal interference, which, according to Henri Bergson, occurs when a situation belongs simultaneously to two independent series of events leading to two entirely different interpretations. Christiana Salah argues that “Montgomery gave freer rein to her social critique”4 in her short stories than in her novels, and that “we should look at Montgomery as more of a realist than she is sometimes given credit for being, embedding the power imbalances and social complexities of her world into tales that may appear simple.”5 As Holly Pike argues in chapter 7 of this volume, the magazine publication of stories intended for adult audiences allowed Montgomery more freedom to question traditional gender binaries than novels destined for 196

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younger readers. It is not always easy to untangle whether her characters demonstrate conformity or rebelliousness, but as Laura Robinson and other critics have suggested, it is important to focus not merely on one or the other, but rather on how these two positions “dialogue with one another.”6 Through comic subversion of readers’ expectations, Montgomery somehow manages to have it both ways. As Denyse Yeast explains, “Although Montgomery often cannot escape having patriarchal discourse speak through her, many times she is the ventriloquist, throwing her voice into marginal characters who serve as mouthpieces for her subversive message.”7 Two such subversive characters are Miss Peter MacPherson and Aunt Philippa Goodwin. These two proto-feminists are not romantic young women, but rather spinsters in their late forties who demonstrate the challenges women face in a gendered world. Montgomery maintained that “only childhood and elderly people can be treated humorously in books,” and these two women, though not elderly, are well past “the bloom of youth,”8 and therefore candidates for comic treatment. Peter is forty-eight (having aged three years between the 1907 and 1912 versions), and Philippa of the “iron-grey hair,”9 who claims, “I’d rather live fifty sensible years than a hundred foolish ones,”10 is of similar vintage. In her journals, Montgomery describes the “very funny” situation of Tillie Macneill who “always had a quite frantic desire to be married” and in her forty-eighth year “achieved matrimony at last,”11 but unlike the real-life Tillie, both Peter and Philippa appear to be content, capable, and comfortable with their circumstances. Peter lives at “Spinster’s Glory in Amberley”12 (changed to Avonlea in the 1912 version) and Philippa in a vivid green house with “‘Philippa’s Farm’ emblazoned in huge black letters two feet long.”13 Beyond the age of child-bearing, these two women reveal Montgomery’s fascination with “the urge to delay choosing – to put off the instant when one’s life options narrow to a particular set of constraints and compromises.”14 Both stories exploit the contrast between realism and romance, but in different ways. In “The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s,” Peter tells her own story in the first person, and the contrast is between her sensible spinster self and the romantic figure she reluctantly becomes, 197

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but “Aunt Philippa and the Men” is told in the first person by Philippa’s eighteen-year old niece Ursula, who has been sent by her father to Prince Edward Island “to learn some sense,”15 and the contrast is between the romantic young narrator and her more realistic aunt. Anyone familiar with Anne’s House of Dreams will recognize Aunt Philippa’s reincarnation in Miss Cornelia Bryant, right down to her “wrapper of chocolate print with huge yellow roses scattered over it, and a striped blue-and-white apron!”16 though in the novel the roses are pink 17 – perhaps in preparation for the pink roses symbolizing “love hopeful and expectant,” described as Anne’s favourite in chapter 38 of Anne’s House of Dreams.18 Miss Cornelia who personates “the comedy that ever peeps around the corner at the tragedy of life”19 has been called “Montgomery’s most successful comic character since the young Anne of Green Gables,”20 because she excels in verbal irony, apt comparison, and humorous hyperbole. In the novel, the role of Ursula is given to Anne, who is deeply in love and recently married. Similarly, in the 1912 version of “Quarantine,” Anne is cited as the main reason Peter decides to teach the boys’ Sunday-school class rather than the girls’ class: “Anne Shirley was the one living human being I was afraid of. Not that I disliked her. But she had a habit of asking weird, unexpected questions a Philadelphia lawyer couldn’t answer.”21 In the original version, Peter decides to teach the boys’ Sunday-school class because “it is what is best for those boys. I feel that I shall be best for them,”22 and in both versions, she follows up with an intriguing commentary on the role of nurture as opposed to nature in the development of gender roles: “Since they have to grow up to be men it’s as well to train them properly. Nuisances they are bound to become in any circumstances; but if they are taken in hand young enough they may not grow up to be such nuisances as they otherwise would, and that will be some unfortunate woman’s gain.”23 Peter’s investigation of the truancy of one of the boys in her Sunday-school class is the reason she ends up quarantined with Alexander Abraham in the first place, so her surprising choice to teach the boys is significant in terms of both plot and theme. Bakhtin argues that “laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object,” and Montgomery uses humour to undermine both the sense of danger and the sense of devotion women may have felt regarding the 198

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gender roles that governed their lives in the first decades of the twentieth century. Laughter, Bakhtin explains, destroys hierarchical distance when “[t]he object is broken apart, laid bare (its hierarchical ornamentation is removed); the naked object is ridiculous; its ‘empty’ clothing, stripped and separated from its person, is also ridiculous.”24 Montgomery’s contemporary, French philosopher Henri Bergson, explores the mechanics of how this is achieved in his Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, first published in French in 1900 and appearing in an authorized English translation in 1911. There is, Bergson argues, “a certain rigidity of body, mind and character, that society would still like to get rid of in order to obtain from its members the greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability. This rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective.”25 Later in the same work, he explores what he identifies as the three central “methods” of comedy as “repetition, inversion, and reciprocal interference,”26 which apply to the comic in situations, in words, and in character. Montgomery is able to make effective use of all three. Repetition is a common device in comedy, and Montgomery’s two stories are no exception. Bergson acknowledges that there is nothing inherently humorous about repetition, but he equates the comic process to a spring “which is bent, released, and bent again.”27 A comic repetition contains both “a repressed feeling which goes off like a spring, and an idea that delights in repressing the feeling anew.”28 As Genevieve Wiggins points out, “repetition by characters of their own stock phrases” is a key factor in making Anne of Green Gables “a very funny book.”29 The most prominent feature of repetition in these Montgomery short stories are the catch phrases for each of the “man-haters.” Though only present in the revised 1912 version of “The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s,” the phrase with which Peter introduces each of her own outstanding characteristics is “I am noted for that,” whereas in Philippa’s case it is the oft repeated “That’s the men for you,” revised in Anne’s House of Dreams to the question “Isn’t that like a man?” While the phrase “I am noted for that” highlights a significant catalogue of the positive qualities of strong women, most notably those of Peter herself, Aunt Philippa’s “That’s the men for you,” underlines a litany of the negative qualities of men. 199

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According to Bergson, “if you reverse the situation and invert the roles, you obtain a comic scene.” Inversion, or what Bergson refers to as “everything that comes under the heading of ‘topsyturvydom’”30 is a rich source of humour that can be used to challenge the status quo. In her book They Used to Call Me Snow White … But I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor, Regina Barreca draws attention to “a central distinction between women’s comedy and men’s comedy. Whereas men occasionally challenge the idea of reality or the convention of society, women do it regularly. Whereas men occasionally seem to subvert the standing order, women make subversion their business.”31 Apart from an antipathy to men and dogs and a knack for “getting up suppers,”32 the six additional qualities Peter is “noted for” are often traditionally associated with men: independence, tactlessness, decisiveness, a refusal to fail, thoroughness, and a strong sense of duty. And to these we can add preparation, organizational skill, intelligence acquired both through experience and scientific reading, strength, humour, and honesty. Peter is thus prepared to teach a class of wild boys, climb a tree, confront a woman-hater and his dog, restore order, and treat smallpox, all in service of her community. As Peter puts it, “after enduring a woman-hater, and a brindled dog and the early disorder of that house – and coming off best with all three – smallpox seemed rather insignificant.”33 The titular Alexander Abraham, on the other hand, though a capable and generous farmer, is, like his dog Mr Riley, given characteristics more typically associated with women: curiosity, meekness, and physical frailty (albeit due to his illness). In addition, he rejects community by desiring to be left alone, which makes him, as Peter puts it, “the very crankiest kind of crank.”34 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the American colloquialism “crank” is “probably a back-formation from ‘cranky,’” used to describe a person “of capricious or wayward temper, difficult to please; cross-tempered, awkward; mentally out of gear.” Peter admits that being a crank can be “kind of convenient,” because “people are careful how they meddle with you,”35 but also acknowledges the negative aspects of this anti-social behaviour. The reversal of gender expectations is confirmed by the name Peter, meaning rock, which our heroine much prefers to Angelina (the feminine and diminutive 200

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of angelos, meaning messenger), a name bequeathed when “fortunately”36 she turned out to be a girl. This makes her a worthy opponent of Alexander (defender of men) Abraham (father of many), the original Hebrew patriarch. As Pike maintains elsewhere in this volume, when Montgomery’s female characters embrace male names, it indicates a refusal “to accept a binary male/female system of identification.”37 Though Montgomery might appear to be endorsing masculinity as better than femininity, an understandable reflection of the hierarchical era in which she lived, some of the story’s most triumphal moments occur when characters forget their “disposition” and talk “like a human being.”38 Being human, Montgomery contends, is more important than subscribing to cultural constructions of gender. The nine qualities Aunt Philippa associates with men are drunkenness, laziness, lack of loyalty, carelessness, a domineering spirit, stinginess, lack of sense, unreliability, and wickedness. In contrast to the largely admirable “masculine” qualities that Peter is “noted for” in an effort to make women appear less inferior, these overwhelmingly negative qualities seem designed to destroy “hierarchical distance,” and make men appear less superior. “In this plane (the plane of laughter) one can disrespectfully walk around whole objects; therefore, the back and rear portion of an object (and also its innards, not normally accessible for viewing) assume a special importance.”39 To achieve this “uncrowning”40 Aunt Philippa reveals the backside of men’s behaviour, supplying each less-than-heroic quality with a name and an anecdote. Fred Procter, for example, “was one of your wicked, fascinating men. After she married him he give [sic] up being fascinating but he kept on being wicked.”41 Scotty Allan, “the meanest man ever lived in these parts,” digs up his wife’s grave to get the gold brooch that was buried with her.42 But just as Peter is a formidable match for Alexander, Philippa is equipped to manage most creatures. Philippa (the feminine form of Philip meaning “lover of horses”) can certainly handle a horse, using the whip to “control his resultant friskiness with admirable skill.”43 Philippa is also tasked with “the thankless business” of instilling sense into her romantic young niece, Ursula, whose name (“little shebear”) hints at both her level of maturity and her fighting spirit. It is also 201

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worth noting that both Philippa and Ursula are the names of martyred saints; legend holds that Philippa was beheaded in the second century, and two centuries later Ursula was killed along with eleven thousand other virginal handmaidens while on a pilgrimage prior to her marriage. In an exchange rife with italicized words, Ursula tries various tactics to counteract Philippa’s overwhelmingly negative portrait of men, since she happens to be in love with one. “They’re not all like that,”44 Ursula insists, pleading “Don’t you know any good husbands?” Philippa assures her there are plenty in the graveyard, but as to living ones: “Precious few. Now and again you’ll come across a man whose wife won’t put up with any nonsense and he has to be respectable. But the most of ’em are poor bargains,”45 or, as Cornelia puts it in Anne’s House of Dreams, “Oh, there’s a few, just to show that with God all things are possible.”46 When Ursula persists with the question: “are all the wives saints?” Philippa replies, “Laws no, but they’re too good for the men.”47 Though Montgomery makes it clear that “there was a certain dignity about Aunt Philippa in any costume and under any circumstance,”48 her credibility is subtly undermined by the sheer hyperbolic weight of her man-hating tales. In the novel version, Anne “discounts largely” Miss Cornelia’s opinions of the local men, “otherwise she must have believed them the most hopeless assortment of reprobates and ne’erdo-wells in the world, with veritable slaves and martyrs for wives.”49 Philippa’s judgment is further called into question by her selective biblical knowledge (dismissing the floating iron as “a sensational subject” rather than as a reference to 2 Kings 6:6), her ungodly fear of Methodists, and her stubborn unwillingness, after having won the prize for lemon pie, ever to bake another one for fear of losing her reputation. Nonetheless, her “horrible example[s] of matrimonial infelicity”50 that “seemed to strip life of all beauty and love of all reality”51 are so compelling and so common that poor Ursula begins to wonder if “perhaps men possessed neither truth nor constancy.”52 It is precisely this collision between reality and romance that Montgomery uses to create humour while skilfully challenging gender expectations and stereotypes. Another comic subversion Montgomery employs in both stories to further complicate assumptions is a canine/feline dynamic. In “The 202

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Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s,” men and dogs are equated, at least in Peter’s mind, since she was born with an antipathy to both: “The more I saw of men, the more I liked cats.”53 Alexander’s dog, Mr Riley, is called an ugly brute, who is neither polished in his manners nor particular in his affections: “What they want is bones. Cats now, they love disinterestedly.”54 Peter’s cat, William Adolphus, who undergoes quarantine with her, is more physically capable, more handsome, and more loyal than Mr Riley, but when they ultimately lie down together like the lion and the lamb, the situation is both pre-lapsarian and postapocalyptic, suggesting that both Eden and the end-times might actually be within reach. In her journals, Montgomery frequently talks about her fondness for cats, especially one who was “so handsome he was his own excuse for being,” whereas dogs kill kittens “until they gr[o]w big enough to defend themselves.”55 Aunt Philippa further subverts the convention by insisting cats are “too much like the men to suit me,” and dismisses Ursula’s comment that “Cats have always been supposed to be peculiarly feminine”56 by saying it was a man who supposed this. This banter confirms that stereotypical roles, including those surrounding gender, are “supposed” or constructed, rather than real. Throughout both stories, the comic strategies of repetition and reversal are undergirded by moments of farce verging on slapstick, situational comedy, and subtle verbal wit; Montgomery uses laughter to demolish “fear and piety,” thus allowing for “an absolutely free investigation”57 of gender roles. By making men look ridiculous, she makes them less dangerous and more human; by making women look ridiculous, she makes them less deserving of devotion and more human, thereby “uncrowning” roles that compel and constrain. The third comic method Bergson explores is “reciprocal interference,” which he admits is “very difficult to disentangle” because of the variety of forms it can take. He nonetheless attempts to define it as follows: “A situation is invariably comic when it belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time.”58 Bergson defines the ludicrous as the collision of contradictory judgments: “We waver between the possible meaning and the real, and it is this mental 203

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seesaw between two contrary interpretations which is at first apparent in the enjoyment we derive from an equivocal situation.”59 No situation could be more equivocal than Montgomery’s decision to embed a social critique of gender roles within a romance formula. Gabriella Åhmansson contends that with Anne’s House of Dreams, a novel in which the female characters “stand out as stronger, more resilient and more capable”60 than the men, Montgomery was attempting to write “a book about marriage as heaven and marriage as hell, at the same time.”61 Miss Cornelia provides a comic counterpoint to the romantic view of both Anne’s happy marriage to Gilbert and Leslie’s tragic marriage to Dick. By placing the miserable stories of men “inside the framework of comedy, Montgomery can evade the accusation she is portraying marriage (or men) in a derogatory manner.”62 Indeed, readers caught up in Anne’s ongoing romance with Gilbert might have been shocked by Montgomery’s description of her own wedding day: “At that moment if I could have torn the wedding ring from my finger and so freed myself I would have done it! But it was too late – and the realization that it was too late fell over me like a black cloud of wretchedness. I sat at that gay bridal feast, in my white veil and orange blossoms, beside the man I had married – and I was as unhappy as I had ever been in my life.”63 So why, one might ask, do both of these clever critiques of misogyny and marriage end with weddings, which Montgomery described in her journals as “rather vulgar things, stifled in a dust of sweeping and scrubbing and baking and borrowing, with all the various harassments thereof?”64 If Philippa indeed believes “most every man is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,”65 Ursula is puzzled by her apparent change of heart, and asks in the final lines of the story: “Why have you helped me to be married?”66 Having sensibly discovered that Ursula’s beau, Mark, is “decent enough as men go,”67 Philippa admits she is “a hard old customer,”68 who was once in love herself. She repented not running away with her beloved, but is sure she would have repented running away with him if she had, a conundrum she offers by way of explanation to the young newlyweds as they disappear on a fast train to their future on the other side of the world. 204

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Are readers to be completely disappointed that Philippa arranges a marriage, and her reincarnation Cornelia actually gets married, or that Peter accepts becoming the Angelina of Alexander’s house in the end? Wiggins, one of the few critics to comment on the earlier short story, describes the plot thus: “the self-sufficient feminist heroine of ‘The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s’ must lay aside her fierce independence and contempt for men in order to relieve her lonely existence.”69 Roberta Buchanan argues that spinsterhood was not an enviable position at the turn of the century, and that “the loneliness and rootlessness of an unmarried working woman’s life seems to have frightened and depressed”70 Montgomery, who was, in her own words, “so humbled” by the “unhappiness of these past eight narrow, starved years,”71 she was willing to settle for a passionless marriage with Ewan Macdonald. Must Montgomery’s characters choose between the evils of an uncongenial marriage and crippling loneliness, or are there alternatives? Marriage in Montgomery’s fiction, writes Åhmansson, is “closely connected with finding a new home” to such a degree that “the character of the house and that of the suitor coalesce,” making it difficult “for the reader to ascertain whether she is not choosing a house first and the prospective husband that goes with it second.”72 After all, it is Anne’s House of Dreams, not her Husband of Dreams. According to Salah, “Montgomery’s work meditates heavily on the concept of ‘home,’ both as an idealized space of fully experienced selfhood and as a site of stultification or abuse.”73 Housecleaning, redecorating, and restoring houses are recurring themes in Montgomery’s fiction. Despite evading the conventional female roles of marriage and motherhood thus far, both of our “man-haters” turn out to be domestic divas. No one should have to live in dirt and disorder; as Peter says of Alexander, “the wonder was, not that he hated women, but that he didn’t hate the whole human race.”74 Though it is easy to fault Montgomery for not critiquing domestic ideology overtly, Jackie Stallcup contends that “women of the period may have believed that conforming to domestic principles could lend them agency and authority.”75 Montgomery’s “anxieties about the encroachment of patriarchal hegemony into the domestic sphere, and the subsequent devaluation of female-oriented qualities, inform her 205

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re-establishment and revalorization of the domestic sphere as a space where powerful women can integrate all the systems and techniques at their disposal.”76 The transformation of home and man seem to go hand in hand; when Alexander Abraham shows up to ask for Peter’s hand in marriage, he is “so spruced and barbered up”77 she almost does not recognize him. Similarly, in Anne’s House of Dreams, Cornelia, much to everyone’s surprise, ends up marrying a shaved and sheared Marshall Elliott, a Samson-like event78 that is followed by the couple moving into Cornelia’s house and not the other way around, just as, in the short story, Philippa insists that Ursula and Mark are “married respectable under my roof”79 (emphasis mine). Both Peter and Philippa know the value of community. As has been noted, wanting to be left alone makes you “the very crankiest kind of a crank.” Providence, says Peter, “decreed that folks, for their own good, were not to be let alone.”80 Surprisingly, as Bergson points out, “cranks of the same kind are drawn, by a secret attraction, to seek each other’s company.”81 Montgomery, through Peter, reminds us that the man must rediscover the niceness and intelligence he possessed as a boy before being “terribly warped” by society; he must “forget his disposition,” and talk “like a human being.” When both Peter and Alexander are able to overcome the roles they have been given and those they have chosen, they actually “have one or two real interesting conversations,”82 even coming to appreciate each other’s sarcasms. True community requires compromise. Peter makes compromises, allowing Alexander to call her his Angelina and reducing her feline companions from six to one, “for the sake of Mr. Riley.”83 Though Aunt Philippa dismisses the romantic nonsense of elopement, when it becomes apparent that “nobody’ll do you but the one,”84 she insists on a big wedding to which “all the cousins and semi-cousins on the island”85 are invited, and a delicious if less-thanstylish cake is served. She even admits that, if the Presbyterian minister cannot make it, the Methodist minister will have to do. Such is the nature of compromise and community. And once the vows are spoken, she feels free to alert the guests to the fact that the kitchen has been on fire for ten minutes. The minister and groom may head the fire brigade, but it is Aunt Philippa who pumps the water that puts the fire out, at least for now. 206

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Comic subversion is one of the most powerful weapons in Montgomery’s arsenal. “My forte is in writing humour,”86 she claimed in 1913, and Barreca’s description of women’s humour seems an apt description of why Montgomery’s best work remains relevant: “Women’s humor may be undervalued, but it is priceless. It may have been hidden away, but it has been constant. It may have been ignored or challenged, but it has always been a secretly potent, delightfully dangerous, wonderfully seductive, and, most important, powerful way to make ourselves heard, to capture the attention, the heart, and the respect of our audience.”87 Though the nascent feminism of her characters appears to fold under the pressure of romance, they remain rooted in reality and community, at once funny and fearless. Montgomery admits that, among the lost male tribe, there prove to be at least two good men; both Alexander and Mark ultimately prove that they are none of the things that Philippa hates about men and that they appreciate the qualities Peter is “noted for” in the women they love, thus allowing realism to coexist with romance. “The public want the happy ending,” Montgomery wrote to Ephraim Weber in 1936. “The world must have its fairy tales. There is enough sorrow – enough of ‘sad endings’ in human life – one doesn’t want it in literature, too.”88 But as Catherine Clark points out elsewhere in this volume, “rather than destroying the possibility of ‘happily ever after,’ this fracturing of gender roles creates a new model of romance”89 that revises social expectations in complex and challenging ways. In “Why Anne Makes Us Dizzy,” Julia McQuillan and Julie Pfeiffer argue that gender can be explored on the individual, institutional, and interactional level. By “interactional” they mean that “gender is something we do rather than something we are,”90 or as Judith Butler puts it in Gender Trouble, “Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.”91 Butler forces us to consider the question, “If gender is constructed, could it be constructed differently?”92 and this is the question Montgomery raises for contemporary readers in these two stories. According to McQuillan and Pfeiffer, Montgomery’s characters live “in a world still shaped by 207

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gender, but in the way Montgomery writes that world we can imagine a ‘post-gendered’ society,”93 a society in which people can, like Peter and Cornelia, cultivate the “fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically,”94 a fearlessness the world needs now more than ever.

No t e s 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 23. Montgomery, sj 2:36. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 23. Salah, “Girls in Bonds,” 113. Ibid., 114. Robinson, “Pruned Down and Branched Out,” 35. Yeast, “Negotiating Friendships,” 122. Montgomery, sj 2:133. Montgomery, “Aunt Philippa and the Men,” At the Altar, 9. Ibid., 2. Montgomery, sj 2:129. Montgomery, “The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s,” Everybody’s Magazine, 499. Montgomery, “Aunt Philippa and the Men,” At the Altar, 8. Salah, “Girls in Bonds,” 113. Montgomery, “Aunt Philippa and the Men,” At the Altar, 3. Ibid., 4. Montgomery, ahd, 43. Ibid., 213. Ibid., 152. Wiggins, L.M. Montgomery, 59. Montgomery, “The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s,” ca, 123. Montgomery, “The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s,” Everybody’s Magazine, 496. Montgomery, “The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s,” ca, 123. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 23–4. Bergson, Laughter, 21. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 73, original italics.

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29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Wiggins, L.M. Montgomery, 31. Bergson, Laughter, 94. Barreca, They Used to Call Me Snow White, 181. Montgomery, ca, 133. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 135. Ibid. Ibid., 130. Pike, “Cross-Dressing,” this volume, 177. Montgomery, ca, 134. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 23. Ibid. Montgomery, At the Altar, 4. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 6 Ibid., 7. Montgomery, ahd, 51. Montgomery, At the Altar, 7. Ibid., 16. Montgomery, ahd, 131. Montgomery, At the Altar, 9. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 11. Montgomery, ca, 122. Ibid., 137. Montgomery, sj 1:379. Montgomery, At the Altar, 8. Bakhtin The Dialogic Imagination, 23. Bergson, Laughter, 96. Ibid., 97. Åhmansson, A Life and Its Mirrors, 164. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 153. Montgomery, sj 2:68. Ibid., 1:312. Montgomery, At the Altar, 14. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 13. Ibid. Wiggins, L.M. Montgomery, 151. 209

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70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

Buchanan, “I Wrote Two Hours This Morning,” 154. Montgomery, sj 1:322. Åhmansson, A Life and Its Mirrors, 148–9. Salah, “Girls in Bonds,” 112. Montgomery, ca, 133. Stallcup, “She Knew She Wanted to Kiss Him,” 121. Ibid., 130. Montgomery, ca, 138. Åhmansson, A Life and Its Mirrors, 161. Montgomery, At the Altar, 13. Montgomery, ca, 135. Bergson, Laughter, 164. Montgomery, ca, 134. Ibid., 139. Montgomery, At the Altar, 13. Ibid., 14. Montgomery, sj 2:133. Barreca, They Used to Call Me Snow White, 202. Montgomery, afgg, 226. Clark, “Sex and the Revisionist Fairy Tale, this volume, 246. McQuillan and Pfeiffer, “Why Anne Makes Us Dizzy,” 18. Butler, Gender Trouble, 179. Ibid., 11. McQuillan and Pfeiffer, “Why Anne Makes Us Dizzy,” 10. Baktin, The Dialogic Imagination, 23.

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9 “Nora and I Got Through the Evening” Gender Roles and Romance in the Diary of L.M. Montgomery and Nora Lefurgey

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n The co-authored diary that L.M. Montgomery kept with her friend

Nora Lefurgey in 1903 is a peculiar document. To begin with, the diary’s status among the plethora of existing Montgomery documents is unique. The diary was introduced to a wider audience of scholars by Jennifer Litster only in 2002, and an annotated version of it was published in 2005 in The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery, edited by Irene Gammel. Unlike her personal journals, published from 1985 onward, Montgomery did not include this diary in the legal-sized ledgers in which she copied her diaries. The original notebooks containing the secret diary were most likely destroyed by Montgomery, but their

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contents survive in the typescript Montgomery prepared for her sons. Montgomery was thus aware of posthumous readers, since she decided to include the diary in the typescript of her journal. Even in the typewritten version, however, the entries copied from the secret diary are crossed over, indicating that Montgomery was possibly not going to include them in the final version of the typescript. As Litster and Gammel have noted, it is probable that Montgomery copied the diary in its entirety, since longer gaps are usually explained, and, for instance, the misspelling of Montgomery’s first name, Maud, as “Maude,” with its humorous indications, is left intact.1 If the diary is analyzed as a piece of fictional writing, it is not surprising that Montgomery preserved the spelling of her name as “Maude,” since it denotes the fictional character created in the diary both by Maud herself, as well as by Nora. However, knowing whether Montgomery changed the original text while typing it is impossible. Furthermore, through the use of hyperbole and humour, the diary gives voice to anger and social criticism that rarely appear in Montgomery’s personal journals. Nora’s and Maud’s diary offers a surprisingly different portrayal of romance compared to the personal journals, one that is full of satire, scorn, and ridicule. Indeed, the slapstick comedy of the diary defines romantic encounters between men and women anew, thus highlighting the gender inequality of the early-twentieth century. By writing about their lives and surrounding society, Nora and Maud embark on a crusade to expose and mock late-Victorian gender roles, dull suitors, the brutality of the marriage market, and mandatory social events, among other things. It is precisely the unorthodox nature of the diary that allows the exploration of Montgomery’s romance discourse in a broader perspective. While the diary makes fun of the typical heteronormative romance discourse, it simultaneously presents an intimate setting of female interaction and closeness between the two writers. Thus, the diary ultimately presents female intimacy as a more satisfying option than conventional romance, at least on the page, and perhaps in real life too, as can be seen in the case of Montgomery’s husband, Ewan Macdonald, who so often remains in the shadows of Montgomery scholarship. The 212

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secret diary enables an analysis of Montgomery’s representation of her future husband and is the only document in which references to Ewan are most likely spontaneous and untouched by the older Montgomery while editing her life story. Hence, the secret diary brings together seemingly unrelated topics into a miscellaneous whole, which fits with the diary’s burlesque style and nature. The secret diary was written between 19 January and 25 June 1903, and is thus linked to a certain period of time, namely that which Nora spent boarding with Montgomery and her grandmother while teaching in the nearby Cavendish school. Nora Lefurgey also came from Prince Edward Island and was six years younger than Montgomery. On 21 September 1902, Montgomery writes in her journal: “I have made a new friend recently … The person in question is Nora Lefurgey, who is the school teacher here … We ‘took’ to each other from the start and have been enjoying our congeniality ever since.”2 Sharing her friend’s love for writing and literature, as well as her experiences as a teacher in country schools, Nora had plenty in common with Montgomery, which made the two women perfect partners in diary writing. Compared to Montgomery’s personal journals, reading and analyzing the secret diary proves a challenging task at times. As the diary of Nora and Maud consists almost entirely of private jokes, reading it feels like eavesdropping on a private conversation. Additionally frustrating is the fact that a considerable amount of background information is needed in order to grasp even the simplest of details in the diary, such as names of people and places, as well as early-twentieth-century customs, most of which are explained in the published version of the diary.3 The secret diary is a co-authored project in the sense that the two writers – Nora and Maud – jointly create something that resembles an authentic diary by taking turns writing an entry, or rather, a chapter. Often there are two entries for a single day, one from each writer, but mostly only one writer covers each day. Hence, more than anything else, the diary is a collective endeavour, a mock-diary of dialogue, private jokes, and romance. The writers of the diary, the narrators called “Nora and Maud,” enter into a writing battle, in which they taunt each other by making more and more daring jokes, and, by 213

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depicting their escapades, create fictional characters of themselves called “Nora and Maude.” In a sense, the diary is a more public document than Montgomery’s personal journals in terms of audience. As Margo Culley has noted, the sense of audience in diary writing has a crucial influence over what is said and how it is put.4 In the secret diary, the audience – most importantly Nora – is more immediate and co-operative than in Montgomery’s journals. Unlike the journals, in the secret diary the future reading audience is less important and less present, since the diary was not intended to be published or even seen by others, at least not at the time of its inception. The change in audience and objective explains the difference in style between the personal journals and the secret diary. This difference is evident in the 12 April 1903 entry of the personal journal, in which Montgomery refers to the diary for the first time. The narrator of the journals highlights the gap between the narrative voices of the co-written diary and the personal journal: “[O]ne more ridiculous thing is that I should have helped to write them [the pages of the diary].”5 The rest of the 12 April 1903 entry is indeed a far cry from the lively style of the secret diary, written at the same time. Most strikingly, the narrator complains at the beginning of the entry that she has been “dull and depressed – sick of life and of myself” and that she is “tired of existence.”6 In contrast, in this same entry the narrator notes: “When Nora came here we started for sport’s sake a sort of co-operative diary, she writing it one day and I the next. It was to be of the burlesque order, giving humorous sketches of all our larks, jokes etc. and illustrated with cartoons of our own drawing. In short we set out to make it just as laughable as possible.”7 Rather than writing about what happens to occur in their lives, the writer-characters Nora and Maud carefully pick incidents and events that fit the diary’s theme, and even create fictional scenes as material for their sketches. A good example and proof of this method is found in Montgomery’s scrapbooks from this period. As can be noted in the facsimile edition of Montgomery’s “Island Scrapbooks,” the so-called “Red Scrapbook” contains several items relating to the secret diary.8 In fact, a careful scrutiny suggests that the mementoes often work as spadework for the 214

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diary chapters, almost as notes scribbled down by the two women in various situations – such as at a Literary Society meeting9 – which are later reworked into proper entries in the diary. The scrapbook “looting” is mentioned several times in the diary by the two writers, so it makes sense that the two projects, one visual and one literary, went hand in hand. For instance, Maud writes in the entry of 20 January 1903 that she “tried to yank some fur out of his [Russell’s] coat for our scrapbooks,” while Nora remarks in the entry of 17 February 1903 that “Maude and I tried to ‘swipe’ as much stuff as we could but alas, we lost it all!!”10 Unfortunately, only the text of the secret diary survives, since the cartoons Montgomery mentions are lost with the original notebooks. However, the entry of 30 June 1903 in Montgomery’s personal journals tells us something of the visual appearance of the actual diary. At first, the narrator informs her readers that Nora has left Cavendish: “Nora went away a few days ago. She has given up the school. I miss her terribly.”11 She then goes on to record the last moments of the joint diary endeavour: “The night before she [Nora] went away we came up to my den and wrote the last chapters in those two absurd ‘diaries’ of ours. We have bound them in covers of fancy paper, with adornments of gold paint and ribbon, and have illustrated them with ‘home-made’ pen-andink sketches which are so ridiculous that I howl every time I glance over them.”12 The fact that the narrator of the personal journal refers to “the diaries” in quotation marks and notes that they wrote their last “chapters” instead of “entries,” demonstrates that the secret diary was more of a literary experiment than a confessional diary written in earnest. Instead of a private diary of two women, the secret diary could actually be called a diary novel.13 Lorna Martens defines the diary novel as a subgenre of the first-person novel. The genre has a long history that originates in the eighteenth century and shares some common features and roots with the epistolary novel by which it was influenced.14 Martens goes on to note that “[t]he earliest diary fiction [of the eighteenth century] imitated real diaries, and for a long and formative period in its history, the diary novel continued to be subject to the influence of the real diary.”15 This interwoven relationship between the real and the imagined can be found in the secret diary as well. 215

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Reading and analyzing the secret diary as a fictional work, based on real-life characters and events, helps in interpreting it. Even if the readers do not understand all the private jokes in the diary, they can still appreciate the narrative drama created on its pages. Just the fact that thirteen times in total (out of thirty-one days covered) the two women write about the same day from two different perspectives makes these entries indeed seem like chapters of a novel rather than actual diary entries. As an example of this, consider for instance the “entry” dated 10 February 1903, in which Maud purports to give “my version of Sunday”16 in a response to Nora’s previous entry dated “Sunday, Feb. 8th.” Thus, even the entries that do not bear the same date might cover the same events from a different perspective. Even though ultimately writing to each other, Nora and Maud employ the “dear diary” convention by addressing a third narratee, as in this example by Nora: “[N]ever mind, I’ll fix Miss Maude. I hereby swear that I will tell yes, sister, tell, every male creature that comes to this house that she lost her garter!!! I will! I stole her garter, indeed!”17 Interestingly enough, the narrator (Nora) addresses both Maud and the assumed narratee. One could insert “dear diary” (or even “dear reader”) after “never mind” and equate “sister” with Maud. On the other hand, “sister” seems rather to refer to the omnipresent addressee, exemplifying the fascinating sisterly ambiance in the diary, and also brings to mind the language of revival meetings, which highlights the communal atmosphere of the diary. Culley’s point that “‘dear diary’ is a direct address to an ideal audience: always available, always listening, always sympathetic”18 proves valid in the secret diary, since the sympathetic diary narratee seems constantly to be on the side of the author of an entry, a technique that both Nora and Maud repeatedly employ to humorous effect. Despite the sisterly ambiance – or rather, because of it – the chapterentries in the diary play with the stereotypical feminine roles of the time and the code of conduct that defines them. This is a subversive strategy that is not employed only because it gives pleasure, but also in order to empower the writer. As Canadian women’s voices in 1903 were still largely domestic, without much power to change the rules of 216

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society or their own status, women used private texts to gain some standing by commenting on the society they lived in. Mary McDonaldRissanen writes, in her study of the life-writing of Prince Edward Island women, that in local newspapers and later histories, women have been treated as “written subjects” rather than “writing subjects” and their role as members of society has been ignored.19 Furthermore, Felicity Nussbaum claims that since diaries are usually not published, they have the potential to subvert the public scrutiny of a more public text.20 What is more, “the marginalized and unauthorized discourse in diary holds the power to disrupt authorized versions of experience.”21 Especially when dealing with women’s diary writing, this subversive aspect cannot be overlooked. It comes through in the way Nora and Maud deal with their surrounding society and explains in part why they chose the diary mode for their fictional mock romance. McDonald-Rissanen notes that the diary offered women a literary convention in which they could emerge from their silence and play with the male-dominated discourse in creative ways.22 During Maud’s and Nora’s time, the authorized version of experience was to a great extent in the hands of men, and the secret diary offered a much-needed space for dismantling this authority. Maud and Nora lived in a small, Presbyterian countryside community where everybody’s behaviour – men’s as well as women’s – was strictly regulated by unspoken rules and even more strictly observed by the people of the community. Suzanne Bunkers has noted that the technique that most female diarists employ is self-editing and selfcensoring.23 This technique of encoding – “the transmission of the writer’s message in an oblique rather than in a direct manner” – is used, according to Bunkers, in order for the writer to maintain a perceived sense of self in the text.24 She maintains that, although this kind of encoding is by no means unique to women’s writing, it is more common in texts of writers who have been denied the right to speak.25 Self-editing is very much present in Montgomery’s personal journal, and analyzing it in terms of Bunkers’s view has proven fruitful.26 Also, as most older private diaries from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century are full of gaps and silences, decoding is needed. 217

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However, in examining the secret diary, one cannot help noticing that a slightly different strategy of encoding is at play. For Bunkers, encoding is a way of “breaking silences” and finding ways to speak directly or indirectly about what has remained unspoken.27 In their diary novel, the strategy that Maud and Nora adopt is to hold on to the silences, but not by self-censoring. Instead, they highlight the unspoken in society, not only by speaking about it, but also by bringing it to the fore. As they write, Nora and Maud employ all the proper Victorian language codes, but manage to draw so much attention to the language used that it becomes ludicrous. For instance, Maud mentions “the garments not mentionable in polite society” when discussing a lost garter,28 while Nora refers to the same garter as “that dreadful article of female attire.”29 The readers’ attention is drawn to the sentence by the repetition to the extent that the parodying effect is evident. McDonald-Rissanen notes that some gaps in women’s writing do not stem merely from aesthetic reasons, but are “a response to a language that had not been shaped by women’s experience.”30 Both Nora and Maud make ruthless fun of late-Victorian paranoia about certain words and concepts, such as legs, garters, petticoats, and, ultimately, sex. Maud’s and Nora’s response to male-centred language is clear. They bluntly fill the gaps with Women’s Experience in capital letters. There are several examples of this subversive strategy in the diary. The main theme of the diary novel – romance or rather a mock version of it – is a never-ending source of mockery of the unspoken in society. One of the most unspoken concepts is sexuality and the moral codes that surround it. Montgomery writes in her personal journal in the entry dated 7 January 1910 about her Sunday-school teachers’ attitude to “matters of sex,” which, according to the narrator, was that it was “something necessary but ugly – something you were really ashamed of, although you had to have it – or go to hell!”31 Women were not considered sexual beings in the late-nineteenth and early-twentiethcentury Cavendish community, and on several occasions Nora and Maud draw attention to this and the double standard restricting men and women’s behaviour. 218

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One of the extended sexual jokes in the secret diary is the yellowgarter incident, which employs many of the strategies mentioned above. The background story to the garter joke is that Nora has supposedly stolen Maud’s yellow garter – although it is strongly hinted that it is one of Maud’s beaux who has taken it – and for several entries both writers employ the case of the missing garter in order to tease each other. Litster mentions that, fittingly enough, in North American folklore yellow garters were believed to be good-luck symbols and ensure marriage if worn constantly from Easter Monday.32 Since nothing in the secret diary is without a double meaning, the main idea behind the garter joke can be traced back to this symbolic aspect. Garters were also seen as “extremely intimate and sexual garments,” as Ruth Goodman has noted.33 Much of the humour, then, stems from the irony of garters and other “unmentionable garments” constantly being referred to in the diary. Montgomery also employs these “comic strategies of repetition, reversal, and reciprocal interference” in her fiction, as Campbell notes in her essay in this collection.34 “The unmentionable garments” furthermore help in portraying the two female characters as man-crazy and eager to get married. Beginning with the entry dated 22 January 1903, written by Maud, the case of the missing garter demonstrates that, whether it was actually stolen by Nora or not, a trick such as this makes perfect material for the diary novel about two women engaging in mock rivalry with each other. Maud writes: “When I woke up this morning I found that one of my garters was missing and hunt as I might I could not find it … I suppose Nora made away with it out of some mean, malicious petty spirit of revenge. The loss has cast a gloom over my entire day.”35 Nora in turn protests her innocence in the entry of 26 January 1903 by writing a counter-rhyme, and goes on to mention that the “garter discussion has become a dissipation with us, a wily, seductive habit that seems to be growing upon us with marvellous rapidity,”36 which tells something of its contrived nature in the diary’s narrative. Nora continues by characterizing herself as Maude’s moral superior and characterizes Maude as her opposite: “I heaved a sigh of relief when Mrs. C. came to the house for I thought surely delicacy would keep that yellow article out of sight, but not a bit of it. Maude, with that 219

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delightful candor that is so characteristic of her, informed Mrs. C. that I had stolen her garter.”37 The talk about the yellow garter is daring, but once again what is at play here is drawing attention to that which should not be discussed, and then discussing it. Such examples prove that both Nora and Maud were more than familiar with the discourse of the day and the engendered stereotypes it created and helped to support. By bringing them forth in their fictional diary, they were able to not only vent their own frustration, but also present a more realistic version of the lives of women. However, more realism seems to signal less romance, at least in real life. For Montgomery, romance is first and foremost a literary device; in other words, it works on the page and features in the secret diary as a mock version. When real life is considered, romance gives way to realism, as in the case of Ewan Macdonald. Perhaps because Nora and Maud are aware that romance and real life rarely go hand in hand, the main theme of the secret diary is making fun of men as well as clichéd romantic conventions. As Campbell aptly articulates in her essay, Montgomery often employs humour to “undermine both the sense of danger and the sense of devotion women may have felt regarding the gender roles that governed their lives.”38 The numerous beaux who drive Nora and Maud to countryside events, such as prayer meetings, and the narrators’ pretended infatuation with them, are described in embellished and parodic language. Besides making fun of men, Nora and Maud poke fun at the assumption that the entire existence of women during their time was supposed to revolve around securing a husband. Nora’s tongue-in-cheek comment serves as an example: “I forgot to say we had our fortunes told during the eve and mine turned out to be an ‘immediate marriage’ so that is encouraging.”39 There are also a few references to the belief that sleeping with a piece of wedding cake under one’s pillow would make one dream of the future spouse.40 As in the yellow-garter joke, folklore that predicted future marriages for women mirrored the attitudes of the time. Marriage and marriage alone was the acceptable goal for women. Maud and Nora take this idea to the next level by exaggeratingly portraying the courting game. The diary is full of beaux and boy talk, 220

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but the irony stems from the contrast of portraying the two characters as “man crazy,” while simultaneously depicting the men as complete fools. All the men are consistently presented as the wrong suitors, with the two women creating a satirical version of the typical romance plot. By introducing this horror cabinet of men, the secret diary contrasts with and corroborates Montgomery’s personal journals, in which the critique of the marriage market and the romantic conventions is not quite so sharp. Nora and Maud point to the bitter irony of women having to fight over suitable marriage candidates, even if those men do not possess intelligence or wit. For instance, Maud depicts a Thursday night in the entry dated 5 April 1903, which contrasts the genuine-sounding intimate scene with Nora and the mind-numbing entertaining of the suitors: “Thursday evening at sunset … Nora and I started for a ramble through Lover’s Lane. We expected it would be mud to our ears. Instead we found excellent sleighing and banks of snow over the fences … We had not been home long ‘when footsteps were heard at the door’ and in marched our two long-lost, lamented ‘ jays’ [James and Joe]. Then Nora and I had to straighten up and begin to talk small talk. They sat and sat until my resources were exhausted.”41 Only one suitor (George Macneill) provides some entertainment, so that “Nora and I got through the evening without wishing to commit suicide.”42 This is quite a striking contrast to the expected romantic reactions of a woman entertaining her beaux, and it demonstrates that Montgomery was able to express openly the more negative feelings she had toward romance and men in this secret co-authored diary novel. Something of the powerlessness of Nora and Maud in their patriarchal society comes across toward the end of the diary and surfaces much more subtly than the louder tone of parody. Most of the diary makes fun of the efforts of women to find husbands, but its main irony stems from the reference in the final entries to one “real life” romance, the outcome of which is indeed marriage. This is due to the appearance of Montgomery’s future husband, Ewan Macdonald (1870–1943), on the stage. As Gammel explains in the notes to the secret diary, Ewan was inducted into the Cavendish church in 1903, but he did not move to 221

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Cavendish until 1905.43 Ewan was four years older than Montgomery and shared her Scottish background, thus the reference in the secret diary to him as “the Highlander.” Even though Ewan did not yet reside in Cavendish during the writing of the diary novel of Nora and Maud in 1903, according to Elizabeth Epperly, he was active in the Cavendish Literary Society during the three years he served as a minister there between 1903 and 1906.44 In addition to the Literary Society, Maud and Ewan probably came across each other through their church work. When Ewan was inducted, Mabel Simpson, who had been the organist in the church, resigned, and Maud filled her space.45 Maud and Ewan were thus thrown into frequent contact with each other from 1903 onward.46 Rather than being a case of actual infatuation, her engagement to Ewan was more likely a practical choice for Montgomery, who, approaching her thirties, was aware of the helplessness and low social status of unmarried women. The tragic irony in the secret diary thus derives from knowing that no matter how much fun the two writers make of the rules of society in writing, they are unable to escape them in reality. In the early twentieth century, unmarried women were still very much at the mercy of others, and Montgomery knew this intimately. During the writing of the diary, Montgomery contemplates the dreary prospects of her future life in her personal journal in the entry of 12 April, 1903: “I am practically alone in the world. Soon youth will be gone and I shall have to face a drab, solitary, struggling middle age. It is not a pleasant prospect.”47 Even though it is purely coincidental that Montgomery would meet her husband-to-be when composing the secret diary with Nora, it must have tickled the two writers to include in their diary novel mentions of a beau who perhaps stirred some actual amorous feelings, at least in Maud. On the other hand, even though Nora and Maud could not have known when writing their “diary” that Maud would eventually end up marrying “the Highlander,” in hindsight Ewan’s appearance does make an excellent ending for their comic-diary romance. Nora and Maude’s parodic husband-hunting thus actually provides the desired outcome: marriage. The first mention of Ewan in the secret diary is in the 21 June 1903 entry. Maud writes in her romantic schoolgirl voice: “This morning we 222

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had a Highlander to preach for us and he was ‘chust lofely’ and all the girls got struck on him. My heart pitty-patted so that I could hardly play the hymns. It’s weak yet so I shall stop short with this beautiful quotation from Omar Khayam.”48 The voice is not serious in any way – the quotation that follows is a mock pastiche – and without historical knowledge of “the Highlander” it would not seem different from the rest of the mock romances depicted in the diary. The next mention of Ewan is in the entry of 25 June 1903, the last entry in the diary by Maud, in which she explains the change in weather by the appearance of Ewan: “There was a prayer-meeting tonight and perhaps that brought the rain … Those Highlanders must have great influence at the throne of grace.”49 In her version of the same day, Nora teases Maud by writing that “Monday night Maude had to make an ‘ice-cream’ call (you know she has taken up church work since the young ministers have struck the place).”50 Even though, in this same final entry of the whole diary, Nora mentions other beaux and Maud taking wedding cake to one of them, it is still telling that Maud’s interest in Ewan is thus supported from Nora’s perspective too. What is most interesting in these three quotations mentioning Ewan in passing is that they exist at all. It is noteworthy that, even if Montgomery edited the diary text when she was typing it among her personal journals in the 1930s, she did not see the need to omit these girly references to her then-husband. The references to “the Highlander” are quite probably instant reactions rather than highly edited later contemplations, and they showcase the romantic character Montgomery creates of herself reacting to a prospective suitor. Quite unexpectedly, Montgomery openly reveals her flirtatious side in reference to Ewan, and only slightly hides it behind the irony of the diary – something that rarely takes place in her autobiographical writings. However, fiction is often a safer place for Montgomery to handle themes she cannot write about in her life writing. In this respect, Montgomery’s personal journals are more secretive and private than the “secret,” but shared, diary novel of Nora and Maud. Furthermore, just as in Montgomery’s personal journals, the apparently more sincere romantic scenes in the secret diary do not take place 223

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with the male beaux or Ewan, but with Nora. Female intimacy has a firm ground in Nora’s and Maud’s mock diary, since the closeness between the two women is established right from the start. Maud writes in the first entry of 19 January 1903: “I am going to bed. I must make Nora some cocoa first,”51 and she continues on the topic of sharing a bed in the next entry of 20 January 1903: “Last night when we went to bed I put a chair by the bed so that if Nora should kick me out during the night I would have something soft to fall on.”52 Although light in tone and topic, the chapter-entries of the secret diary paint a vivid picture of the shared life of two women. During the cold winter months, Nora and Maud shared a bedroom and a bed, to which Maud refers on several occasions. The diary entails an interesting blend of female rivalry and loneliness when the other woman is away. For instance, Maud writes in the 26 January 1903 entry: “That night I had to sleep alone and actually found myself lonesome,” but in the next paragraph rejoices in “cutting Nora completely out” by securing a ride with Nora’s suitor.53 It is noteworthy that female intimacy is the only romantic topic that is treated sincerely in the diary. Maud writes that “[Nora] is away tonight … and I ought be as happy as a clam but strange to say I am not. I suppose when one has become accustomed to being harried and worried and punned to death one kind of misses it when it is lacking.”54 Even the fact that Nora and Maud are co-authors of their diary novel creates a bond between them, as their writing is a co-operative and intimate endeavour. Furthermore, when Lover’s Lane, the wood path Montgomery immortalized in Anne of Green Gables, is mentioned in the secret diary, it is not in reference to any of the men. Instead, it is Nora and Maud who take walks in nature and revel in doing so. On 2 February 1903, Nora mentions that “Maud and I went away through Lover’s Lane this eve for a walk and I for one enjoyed it very much.”55 Note that Maud’s name is not spelled “Maude,” as usually in the diary, which attests to the sincere tone in this excerpt. Maud’s entry of 5 February 1903 refers to the same walk and brings up the topic of lovers: “We had a bee-yew-tiful walk that night … in Lover’s Lane. The only drawback was that there were no lovers, but we contrived to enjoy life tolerably well even so.”56 224

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Female intimacy also presents itself in the two women flirting with each other on the pages of the diary, so much so that the actual romantic lead couple of this mock-serious romance seems to be Nora and Maud. Even though the women discuss their suitors in pretended earnest, true intimacy exists between them: “When I got home at twelve I was almost frozen and more than glad to crawl into a warm bed beside Nora who speedily thawed me out. We laughed and talked for about two hours.”57 In addition to this sincere-sounding close relationship, there are equally sincere tones of true rivalry between Nora and Maud that surface through the roles of the two writers, for instance when Nora pokes fun at Maud’s supposed superiority as a writer by referring to her real-life status as a published author. Nevertheless, even these examples speak of a mutual bond rather than actual jealousy, since as Montgomery herself notes in a later journal entry, Nora and she had a habit of “ragging” each other, a habit they maintained throughout their friendship.58 A further testimony to the importance of female intimacy in the secret diary is that Maud’s final entry of 25 June 1903 ends with a “toast” that celebrates the two women’s special relationship and presents the men yet again as characters who have no real importance to either Nora or Maud – not even Ewan, even though he came to play an important part in Montgomery’s life: “‘Here’s to two girls who were always in it, / Who never lost their heads for a minute, / Played well the game but knew the limit / And yet got all the fun there was in it.’ Farewell, James, Artie, Bob, Joe, Freddie and all the other heroes whose exploits are set forth in these pages.”59 In her examination of the Prince Edward Island newspapers from Montgomery’s era, McDonald-Rissanen concludes that “how women are depicted and how they depict themselves appear to be two very contradictory stories.”60 The diary novel of Nora and Maud is a perfect case in point. For example, staging the bad girl on the page is a strategy that both writers employ to vent their exasperation.61 Displaying anger in the text shows the ability to write oneself into a position of power,62 which is exactly what Nora and Maud accomplish in their diary novel. They refuse to remain mere objects of desire and admiration but flaunt their position as writing subjects. In addition, as Litster has noted, the 225

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power of the writing subject includes sexual authority.63 In a society where men traditionally held the keys to sexuality, the secret diary is a unique document, in that it shows how the two women claim part of the sexual power for themselves. The meaning of the secret diary is pivotal in understanding all aspects of Montgomery’s writing, including her fictional works. Since most of Montgomery’s novels succumb to general expectations of romance  –  namely that, in the end, the girl gets the boy and they get married  –  it is reassuring to see how, in other, less public, writings, she was able to create alternate fictions and undermine the conventional romance plot. According to Campbell, this also takes place in Montgomery’s short stories in which Montgomery embeds a social critique of gender roles within a romance formula.64 The secret diary even contradicts and complements Montgomery’s own life story by showing that her intimate and romantic relationships were with her female friends, such as Nora, rather than with the male suitors – her future husband included. Interestingly enough, the aspect that most evidently connects the secret diary with Montgomery’s fiction is the subversive strategy of humour, irony, and parody, even outright comedy at times. As Mary Rubio writes in “Subverting the Trite,” humour is Montgomery’s main weapon in dismantling the traditional romance plot and was one of her ways of side-stepping the general public’s expectations and publishers’ wishes.65 Reading the secret diary as, and in relation to, fiction not only shows similarities between the two, but helps to illuminate the diversity and self-consciousness of Montgomery’s writing skills. The depressed journalist in the personal journals and the character of a flirting humorist in the secret diary showcase a skilful writer who manages to skirt around clear-cut definitions and stifling gender roles.

No t e s 1 Litster, “The ‘Secret’ Diary,” 89. Gammel, Intimate Life, 20. 2 Montgomery, cj 2:60. 3 See Gammel, Intimate Life, 19–87. 226

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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Culley, Introduction to A Day at a Time, 11–12. Montgomery, cj 2:69–70; emphasis original. Montgomery, cj 2:67, 69. Montgomery, cj 2:69. Epperly, Imagining Anne, 96, 108, 122. See Epperly, Imagining Anne, 97. Montgomery and Lefurgey, “… Where Has My Yellow Garter Gone?,” 23, 45. Montgomery, cj 2:74. Ibid. See Martens, Diary Novel. Ibid., 25. Ibid. Montgomery and Lefurgey, “… Where Has My Yellow Garter Gone?,” 41; emphasis in original. Ibid., 29; emphases in original. Culley, Introduction to A Day at a Time, 11. McDonald-Rissanen, Sandstone Diaries, 58. Nussbaum,“Toward Conceptualizing,” 136. Ibid. McDonald-Rissanen, “Veils and Gaps: Women’s Life Writing,” 43. Bunkers, “Midwestern Diaries,” 194. Ibid. Ibid. See, for example, McDonald-Rissanen, “Veils and Gaps: The Private World.” Bunkers, “Midwestern Diaries,” 194–5. Montgomery and Lefurgey, “ … Where Has My Yellow Garter Gone?,” 26–7; 22 and 26 January 1903. Ibid., 29; 26 January 1903. McDonald-Rissanen, “Veils and Gaps: Women’s Life Writing,” 43. See also Toker, Eloquent Reticence. Montgomery, cj 2:263. Litster, “The ‘Secret’ Diary,” 95. Goodman, How to Be a Victorian, 63. Campbell, “I’m Noted for That,” this volume, 196. Montgomery and Lefurgey, “… Where Has My Yellow Garter Gone?,” 26. Ibid., 28. Ibid. Campbell, “I’m Noted for That,” this volume, 198–9. Montgomery and Lefurgey, “… Where Has My Yellow Garter Gone?,” 45. Gammel, Intimate Life, 84.

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41 Montgomery and Lefurgey, “… Where Has My Yellow Garter Gone?,” 61; emphasis in original. 42 Ibid., 62. 43 Gammel, Intimate Life, 81. 44 Epperly, Imagining Anne, 96. 45 Rubio, Lucy Maud Montgomery, 115. 46 Epperly, Imagining Anne, 98. 47 Montgomery, cj 2:69. 48 Montgomery and Lefurgey, “… Where Has My Yellow Garter Gone?,” 81. 49 Ibid., 84. 50 Ibid., 86. 51 Ibid., 19. 52 Ibid., 22; emphasis in original. 53 Ibid., 27. 54 Ibid., 32. 55 Ibid., 35. 56 Ibid., 36; emphasis in original. 57 Ibid., 38. 58 Montgomery, sj 4:186. 59 Montgomery and Lefurgey, “… Where Has My Yellow Garter Gone?,” 86. 60 McDonald-Rissanen, “Veils and Gaps: Women’s Life Writing,” 6. 61 Gammel, Intimate Life, 17. 62 Litster, “The ‘Secret’ Diary,” 102. 63 Ibid. 64 Campbell, “I’m Noted for That,” chapter 8 of this volume. 65 Rubio, “Subverting the Trite,” 20–1.

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n In “L.M. Montgomery and Everybody Else: A Look at the Books,”

Virginia A.S. Careless compiles a list of writers and works with which Montgomery’s works have been compared broadly or specifically. She notes that, beyond comparing works, some critics “explain the similarities by positing a historical link” or “a causal effect.”1 Rejecting the notion that Montgomery borrowed directly in creating her fiction, Careless uses her background in anthropology to identify some of the cultural forces at work in creating similarities in character descriptions, themes, and allusions in works published in the same period.2 Going beyond parsing specific correspondences between texts, the writers in this section deal in various ways with the concept of intertextuality, as described by Julia Kristeva in her account of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work: “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.”3 In these analyses it is clear that gender is significant in how texts are created, read, and transformed. The first two chapters in this section examine Montgomery’s works in relation to expectations readers have of certain genres. In “The Blue Castle: Sex and the Revisionist Fairy Tale,” Catherine Clark argues that Montgomery’s “textual faithfulness to the narrative structure of fairy tales legitimizes The Blue Castle’s transformative and even improbable moments,”4 demonstrating that Montgomery’s adherence to narrative expectations actually subverts gender roles in this novel, showing Barney and Valancy’s marriage “as a model of equality.”5 The argument that Montgomery depicts the possibility of liberation from restrictive social expectations supports complex understandings of how Montgomery appears to support, but ultimately undermines, the norms of her time and place. Comparing the depiction of mixedrace women by Montgomery, a writer of settler background, and by

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E. Pauline Johnson, a writer of mixed settler and Indigenous background, in “L.M. Montgomery, E. Pauline Johnson, and the Figure of the ‘Half-Breed Girl,’” Carole Gerson places Montgomery’s works alongside those of her contemporary Pauline Johnson, showing that “her sparse references to Johnson help to contextualize Montgomery in relation to normative racialized gender representations in the Canadian literature of her time,”6 particularly with their surprisingly similar stories about mixed-race women. Comparing the two writers allows Gerson to identify a calcified and racist literary tradition that “most often focuses on women as the embodiment of conflicted identity and cultural fragmentation, in a reductive configuration of race and gender.”7 In the final two chapters in this section, the writers consider how Montgomery uses paradigms created by male writers depicting explicitly masculine systems to create explicitly female versions. In “Orgies of Lovemaking: L.M. Montgomery’s Feminine Version of the Augustinian Community,” Christina Hitchcock and Kiera Ball’s discussion of community in the Anne novels argues that Montgomery reverses the patriarchal conception that women are useful only for procreation, demonstrating that Montgomery creates “a rich, complex, single-sex community.”8 In this non-patriarchal space, women live fulfilling lives outside heterosexual marriage, and women largely replace men as primary partners, with only “feminized” men becoming full participants. Heather Ladd and Erin Spring’s “Feminizing the Seasons: Identity, Gender, and Seasonal Aesthetics in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables” explores Montgomery’s female revision of James Thomson’s work. Ladd and Spring argue that “The relationship between Montgomery’s and Thomson’s imaginative worlds is …  gender-complicated, for identity, particularly subjective female identity, is established in Anne of Green Gables through the heroine’s feeling engagement with seasonal geographies.”9 In these four chapters, examination of intertexts both contextualizes Montgomery historically and demonstrates her strategies for creating new readings of, and identities in, masculinist culture.

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No t e s 1 Careless, “L.M. Montgomery and Everybody Else,” 145. 2 Ibid., 148. 3 Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” 37. 4 Clark, “The Blue Castle,” 236. 5 Ibid., 246. 6 Gerson, “Montgomery, Johnson, and the ‘Half-Breed Girl,’” 252. 7 Ibid., 251. 8 Hitchcock and Ball, “Orgies of Lovemaking,” 269. 9 Ladd and Spring, “Feminizing Thomson’s The Seasons,” 285.

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10 The Blue Castle Sex and the Revisionist Fairy Tale

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n L.M. Montgomery’s 1926 novel, The Blue Castle, is her only book set

entirely apart from the romantically nuanced world of Prince Edward Island. Published almost two decades after Anne of Green Gables, this later novel sold well and, like Montgomery’s previous books, enjoyed international popular success. However, in the period after the First World War, critics increasingly praised experimental Modernist writing over popular, “sentimentalist” fiction.1 Initial reviews of The Blue Castle, while often positive, were extended with rather reductive caveats: The Argus of Australia conceded that “Valancy is an appealing figure” but that “Miss Montgomery’s work is of no very great depth, and comes under that category that women readers describe as ‘sweet’ or ‘pretty.’” The Pittsburgh Press wrote that the novel’s “eventualities are gracefully unfolded with not a little broad humour, and a merciful restraint,” but added that the “story is, of course, exclusively for feminine

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readers.” Cape Times described it as “an innocuous and sentimental tale,” and The Press of New Zealand declared that the “plot is ordinary, very ordinary, but the telling is good enough to make it seem unusual.” Most significantly, multiple reviews (Canadian Bookman, New Zealand Times, and The Times Literary Supplement of London) referred to The Blue Castle as a Cinderella story (either to boost its romantic appeal or to denigrate the author’s lack of imagination).2 Even decades later, Helen Porter’s 1973 reflection on reading Montgomery’s novels for adults in “The Fair World of L.M. Montgomery” unequivocally privileges A Tangled Web over The Blue Castle, lamenting that “Valancy’s romance with Barney Snaith is unbelievable from start to finish” and that “whimsy and humour are present in The Blue Castle but at times they are almost completely overpowered by sentimental mush.”3 However, the technical and literary “weaknesses” that critics consistently point out (the sentimentalism, predictable plot progression, well-worn tropes, and improbable coincidences and romance) are precisely what make it a compelling and subversive fairy-tale romance. As an experienced writer, Montgomery created a text that purposefully draws on and manipulates the structural elements of popular fairy tales in order to interrogate early-twentieth-century gender conventions. In order to establish context for this essay’s close reading of The Blue Castle, it is important to outline trends in fairy-tale scholarship specifically related to the fields of narratology and gender studies. In 1936, Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” praised the fairy tale as the first true form of storytelling: “‘And they lived happily ever after,’ says the fairy tale. The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales.”4 Child psychologist and student of Freud, Bruno Bettelheim, echoes Benjamin in his influential 1976 book, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales: “[O]f the entire ‘children’s literature’ – with rare exceptions – nothing can be as enriching and satisfying to a child and adult alike as the folk fairy tale … [M]ore can be learned from them about the inner problems of human beings, and of the right solutions to their predicaments in any 234

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society, than from any other type of story within a child’s comprehension.”5 Feminist critics and folklorists such as Jack Zipes, Maria Tatar, and Marina Warner have extensively criticized the limitations of these theories without denying the persistent and almost universal appeal of fairy tales. While lauding the inimitability of fairy tales, both Benjamin and Bettelheim subscribe to a patriarchal concept of both storyteller and listener, conflating the multiple versions of each tale, their historical and social contexts, as well as ignoring the diversity of storytellers (for example, in the late-seventeenth century, fairy tales were predominately the domain of French conteuses, female tale-tellers). Zipes points out that “The fairy tales we have come to revere as classical are not ageless, universal, and beautiful in and of themselves, and they are not the best therapy in the world for children. They are historical prescriptions, internalized, potent, explosive, and we acknowledge the power they hold over our lives by mystifying them.”6 However, by the nineteenth century, English translations of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm were widely published, and these versions dominated the public concept of fairy tales; they were established as canon, and sometimes even referred to as originals. It is therefore these popular tales, contemporary to Montgomery, that I will refer to in my reading of The Blue Castle. Scholars in recent decades have acknowledged feminist elements in The Blue Castle, but often conditionally applaud its literary merit as a whole. In The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass: L.M. Montgomery’s Heroines and the Pursuit of Romance, Elizabeth Epperly acknowledges that “The Blue Castle has the shape of a formula romance, but there are enough comic reversals and surprises in the story to keep it from being wholly predictable, and there is as much liberating fairy tale as limiting formula.”7 Mary Rubio praises the novel from a historical perspective in “Subverting the Trite: L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Room of Her Own,’” championing the text as a challenge to turn-of-the century gender norms: “The Blue Castle is an unadulterated and bitter assault on the patriarchal system of Montgomery’s era, one which oppressed women psychologically and economically.”8 Indeed, when considered apart from Montgomery’s popular body of work, the novel can be read as a 235

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compelling revisionist fairy tale, reconciling the disturbance of gender norms noted by recent critics with the clichéd romance and implausible plot developments. Valancy Stirling’s journey from loneliness and oppression to wealth and true love echoes the structure and symbolism of classic fairy tales such as “Cinderella” and “Snow White.” This textual faithfulness to the narrative structure of fairy tales legitimatizes The Blue Castle’s transformative and even improbable moments, tapping into the enduring appeal of folk and fairy tales. The opening chapters, full of Valancy’s idyllic daydreams and oppressive home life, implicitly foreshadow her “happily ever after,” while the metafictional elements throughout the text challenge the reader to compare her with literary archetypes in traditional tales. In the footsteps of Beauty in the Beast’s castle, Dorothy to Oz, Alice through the looking-glass, and Cinderella to the ball, Valancy must cross a threshold into another, magical realm to find her Blue Castle. The fairy tale follows a formulaic structure, and the romantic journey involves a particularly narrow trajectory for the heroine who overcomes hardships to find “true love.”9 Valancy is raised in an oppressive home with an unloving mother figure, who recalls the archetype of a cruel stepmother or absent (often deceased) mother. Early in the story Valancy is “cursed” by her heart condition and faces an early death; in fairy tales, this curse comes in the form of a poisoned apple, a spindle on a spinning wheel, a Big Bad Wolf, a vengeful Beast, or a cannibalistic witch. Her adventure then truly begins when she leaves home and goes into the woods, as seen with Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty, and Hansel and Gretel. Montgomery implicitly conjures a magical “secondary” world apart from the cold, sterile residence of Valancy’s mother. “Valancy … had a sense of stepping from one world to another – from reality to fairyland – when she went out of Port Lawrence and in a twinkling found it shut off behind her by the armies of the pines.”10 Like Snow White, Valancy keeps house for a stranger to escape her (step)mother and home life. Her “call to adventure”11 is foreshadowed via the first directly quoted passage by Montgomery’s fictional author, John Foster; Valancy steals a moment of guilty “idleness” when she 236

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ducks into her room for a thimble. The passage’s metafictional moment serves multiple narrative functions: the glorious synesthesia of Foster’s writing style contrasts sharply with Valancy’s dry, repressed life, and introduces an alternate narrative voice, an initial subtext that will eventually dominate the novel. It also references the crucial role of the forest in folktales and foreshadows the heroine’s transformative journey. “‘The woods are so human,’ wrote John Foster, ‘that to know them one must live with them … [W]e shall learn what poignant loveliness lurks in the wild places and silent intervals, lying under star shine and sunset, what cadences of unearthly music are harped on aged pine boughs or crooned in copses of fir, what delicate savours exhale from mosses and ferns in sunny corners or on damp brook lands, what dreams and myths and legends of an older time haunt them.’”12 Barney Snaith himself (later revealed to be John Foster) lives in the woods rather than among “civilized” society and is viewed by Valancy’s family for most of the novel as dangerous (like the Beast) and licentious, even depraved (like the Big Bad Wolf). Valancy, like Cinderella, attends the requisite ball with a new gown and newly discovered beauty (although Valancy buys her own dress). Her “pretty green crêpe dress with a girdle of crimson beads” gives her “an entirely different appearance,” and her attendance at the party “up back” is greeted with whispers and compliments.13 Around midnight, Barney appears to rescue her from an inebriated suitor, whisking her away in his chariot/car, Lady Jane. At this point, Valancy realizes that she loves Barney: “Valancy had a lightning flash … Life was no longer empty and futile, and death could cheat her of nothing. Love had cast out her last fear.”14 This scene parallels the final climax (discussed in detail later), when Barney tears off her shoe, wedged in a railway switch, and pulls her free from an oncoming train. He later describes this incident also as “a lightning flash,”15 the moment when he realizes that he loves her in return. Like Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel, who are saved from oppression and death by love, Valancy is twice rescued from danger by Barney, her prince in disguise. In the same manner as the Beast and his castle in the woods, Barney is ultimately transformed from his role as commoner and threat to “good” 237

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society at the end, when his fortune is revealed and he declares his love for Valancy. Transformations and mistaken identity are central narrative techniques in fairy tales: the beautiful Queen entices Snow White in the form of an old hag, symbolically revealing her inner character as twisted and malevolent. The Beast and the Frog Prince cannot become handsome humans until they prove themselves worthy of love. Even the series of improbabilities, beginning with the letter mix-up, which incorrectly diagnoses Valancy’s fatal heart condition, is consistent with fairy and folk tales, where a limited number of characters cross paths in highly unlikely ways. In Once Upon a Time, Marina Warner emphasizes that the fantastic-yet-predictable progression of fairy-tale romances heightens the reader’s anticipation of a just conclusion: “Cinderella will be recognized for her true self; Snow White will be jolted on her bier and cough up the piece of apple that’s choking her; the evil stepmother will meet her doom – and this foreknowledge increases rather than decreases our sense of satisfaction at the happy outcome.”16 The Blue Castle’s coincidences reinforce the implication that their romance is predestined, and Barney and Valancy will live happily ever after. In addition to closely following a fairy-tale structure, The Blue Castle is also faithful to the essential symbolism of folk tales. For example, the rose bush that refuses to bloom until the end parallels Valancy’s romantic (and sexual) awakening, while the pearl necklace of hidden value symbolizes Valancy’s misunderstood self-worth. Even her names (Doss, Valancy, and Moonlight) evoke duelling aspects of her identity, and her elusive little dust pile becomes a metaphor for her quest to find her own little corner of the world. However, these symbols also textually link Valancy to fairy tales, conjuring the rose stolen from the Beast as a gift to Beauty, or the dish of lentils emptied into the ashes for Cinderella to sort out before attending the festivities. Each symbol metaphorically contributes to Valancy’s character development and structurally links her to a folkloric narrative tradition. A particularly noteworthy motif is the symbolic mirror, which appears three times in the story, consistent with the numerology of fairy tales, in which events often occur in multiples of three: Cinderella attends three balls, the Evil Queen tempts Snow White three times, 238

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Rumpelstiltskin gives the queen three tries to guess his name, Beauty is the youngest of three daughters and has three brothers, and the threat of death jars Valancy from stasis to action at “three o’clock in the morning – the wisest and most accursed hour of the clock.”17 The mirror first appears as the novel opens and Valancy is seated alone in her room, silently narrating its dismal contents, which include “the spotted old looking-glass with the crack across it, propped up on the inadequate dressing-table.”18 The fractured mirror reflects her own damaged self-image as well as the external world’s dismissive view of her: “this morning she jerked the shade to the very top and looked at herself in the leprous mirror with a passionate determination to see herself as the world saw her. The result was rather dreadful.”19 While the magic mirror in “Snow White” reveals “the fairest of all,” the truths of both mirrors are subjectively based on outward beauty, a standard that Valancy succumbs to without question, quantifying her worth according to external sources. The second mirror is markedly different: It is in Barney’s island cabin, Valancy’s Blue Castle: “between the two side windows hung an old mirror in a faded gilt frame, with fat cupids gamboling in the panel over the glass. A mirror, Valancy thought, that must be like the fabled mirror into which Venus had once looked and which thereafter reflected as beautiful every woman who looked into it. Valancy thought she was almost pretty in that mirror.”20 Separated physically from the oppressive social mores of her family and lightened by her transformative embrace of self and pleasure, the mirror reflects her evolving view of herself rather than the harsher judgment of the cracked mirror at home. The final mirror hangs in her family’s home, where she has returned, defeated and convinced that her marriage is over. Barney pursues her to declare his love and explain his past. “She stood up and pointed tragically to the mirror over the mantel. Certainly, not even [the painter] Allan Tierney could have seen beauty in the woeful, haggard little face reflected there. Barney didn’t look at the mirror. He looked at Valancy as if he would like to snatch her.”21 Here Barney’s own perspective deflects Valancy’s surrender to what she believes is a harsh reality. This mirror functionally recalls the mirror given to Beauty by the Beast, 239

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which does not reflect the image of the viewer, but the actions and faces of loved ones (in the fairy tale, Beauty’s father, and then later, the Beast). Interestingly, in Valancy’s case, the male gaze disrupts tradition by empowering rather than objectifying the female; Barney rejects a secondhand reflected image, even if it is Valancy’s own likeness, because he knows it to be misleading. This scene also implies that Valancy’s true reflection is in Barney, her “kindred spirit,” and not her inverted reflection. Cinderella regains her glass shoe, Snow White emerges from her glass coffin, and Valancy turns away from the looking glass to find her “happily ever after.” While paying homage to the symbolism and structure of fairy and folk tales, Montgomery modifies key elements in the story to subvert their implicit sexual and social values in favour of an alternative path to the prince and “happily ever after.” The Blue Castle destabilizes the narrative sanction of female passivity in the Grimm tales by sparing the heroine a “deep sleep,” as in “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty,” and allowing her to explore the woods without the consequences seen in “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Hansel and Gretel.” Indeed, Montgomery’s text appropriates the symbols for sexual desire as positive representations of sensuality and awakening. While modest by Modernist-era standards, The Blue Castle nevertheless explores sexual agency more explicitly than Montgomery’s other novels.22 Gabriella Åhmansson’s article “Textual/Sexual Space in The Blue Castle” points out that Valancy’s closed, drab room in her mother’s house reflects her “sexual frustration,” where “her room and her body are treated as inseparable entities.”23 Her family disapproves of solitary time as much as they do novels and fiction, regarding Valancy’s desire for privacy with suspicion: “People who wanted to be alone, so Mrs. Frederick Stirling and Cousin Stickles believed, could only want to be alone for some sinister purpose.” So Valancy retreats to her ideal Blue Castle, which is “everything a room should be.”24 Åhmansson addresses these daydreams as repressed eroticism: “Her imaginary lovers have been modelled first according to fairy tales … or Byronic heroes taken from literature.”25 Valancy’s fantasies are repressed desires in fairy-tale form, drawn from a romanticized concept of the ideal lover. 240

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It is worth emphasizing that, pre-Disney, fairy tales often carried latent warnings against sins like gluttony and lust, for which the punishment is often death. For example, in early versions of “Little Red Riding Hood,” the young girl undresses before getting into bed with the wolf (and in one she even does a little strip tease).26 The trope of “true love’s kiss” as the romantic apex in fairy tales has long established women as passive recipients and even victims of masculine sexual dominance. In the seventeenth-century Italian version of Sleeping Beauty, the sleeping princess is raped by a king who climbs into her tower, then leaves. She later gives birth to twins, one of whom awakens her by sucking on her finger to remove the splinter from the flax spindle that had caused her enchanted sleep.27 In The Blue Castle, the ostracized Cissy Gay is likewise viewed by the community as a social warning against sexual “promiscuity.” Kate Lawson points out in “The Victorian Sickroom in L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle and Emily’s Quest” that Valancy’s first true act of rebellion is her commitment to care for Cissy, “a woman of her own age whose life has been lived under the shame of single motherhood, and who is now facing impending death – [a] woman for whom the unwed state is proving a fatal one.”28 However, Valancy embraces the aspects of Cissy’s story that champion love and choice above respectability. As she cares for and defends Cissy, she also internalizes and extends her story. Eschewing a cloak of respectability, Valancy refuses to return home after her role of caretaker is over; she instead moves in with the disreputable Barney. Cissy is ultimately a more nuanced, strong, and sympathetic character than Olive, Valancy’s respectable and traditionally beautiful cousin. Valancy must negotiate these polarized models of femininity during the novel: the fallen woman and the respectable beauty. However, even this dichotomy is eventually deconstructed, as Epperly aptly observes in The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass: “[f]ashionable, beautiful cousin Olive, with her pretty curls and complexion, proves to be the ugly stepsister, and Valancy is Cinderella.”29 Montgomery deliberately undermines the narrative expectations of romantic tales when Cissy’s death launches Valancy’s next act of rebellion. Unlike being a caretaker and friend to a dying girl, which can be justified socially and textually as a traditionally female role, her 2 41

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marriage proposal to Barney blatantly rejects social and literary gender conventions. In contrast to the fairy-tale princess who must be pursued up towers, into the woods, and across ballrooms, Valancy scandalously proposes to her beloved without any assurances of returned affections. Åhmansson observes that when “Valancy sets out to persuade Barney to marry her … [s]he is looking for sexual fulfillment, for a love affair, and that is what the short-term marriage that she proposes really stands for.”30 This pursuit of pleasure is an echo of Cissy’s love affair, rather than a renunciation of it. In her case, Valancy marries and enjoys sex with a man who does not claim to love her, an arrangement that brings pleasure without normative moral repercussions. On the island, Valancy and Barney’s intimate understanding of nature develops a shared sensuality that permeates their daily life. “How pretty blueberries were – the dainty green of the unripe berries, the glossy pinks and scarlets of the half ripes, the misty blue of the fully matured! And Valancy learned the real flavour of the strawberry in its highest perfections … They lifted them by the stalk and ate them from it, uncrushed and virgin, tasting each berry by itself with all its wild fragrance ensured therein.”31 The erotic imagery of this scene is a thinly disguised metaphor for their budding sexual relationship. When she briefly returns to her mother’s house in an effort to liberate Barney from their marriage, her heartache unambiguously includes physical desire: “She ached for him. She wanted his arms around her – his face against hers – his whispers in her ear. She recalled all his friendly looks and quips and jests – his little compliments – his caresses.”32 The novel also diverges from a classical fairy tale in a series of small but significant details. Rubio points out that the outward predictability of a formula romance is misleading, noting that “when Montgomery began the novel in a realistic mode, but shifted to the unbelievable coincidences of romance, she created subversions which eroded the trajectory of romance, while conforming to it outwardly.”33 Valancy’s castle and prince are abstractions; her early daydreams adhere to the traditional fairy tale, but this is not her ultimate reality. “Valancy’s story begins with dreams of chivalry, knights, and castles, and she finds an unshaven scapegrace living on a lonely island.”34 Valancy herself is 242

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aware of the irony as soon as she recognizes Barney’s island as her “Blue Castle,” and Montgomery’s knack for humour and irony is not wasted in these moments. For example, Valancy reflects on her early conversations with Barney: “When her knights came riding to the Blue Castle, Valancy had sent them on many a quest, but she had never asked any of them to get her salt codfish.”35 In addition, Valancy is not initially beautiful: in fairy tales, external beauty symbolizes or reflects internal virtue, both of which win the Prince’s love. In The Blue Castle, Valancy’s inner character develops into outer beauty. Like the Beast, Ugly Duckling, or Frog Prince (all notably masculine parallels), she can only become attractive after achieving love and selfhood. Unlike most fairy-tale heroines, she has significant personal agency: she leaves home on her own without threat or outside persuasion; she is not pursued by any physical evil in the form of an Evil Queen (although one could also make the case that she is fleeing a metaphorical evil); nor has she been sent into the woods to visit her grandmother or to hide from a fairy’s curse. She applies for her job with Roaring Abel and (unlike Snow White) earns money for it on her own terms. She is therefore able to buy her own ball gown, rather than having it created for or given to her. Most importantly, the impetus for her journey is her rejection of silence – she unapologetically finds her voice and resolves: “I shall never pretend anything again. I’ve breathed an atmosphere of fibs and pretenses and evasions all my life. What a luxury it will be to tell the truth!”36 In this way, she rejects the allegorical “deep sleep” of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty as well as the captivity of Rapunzel and Cinderella.37 Her quest for voice and identity includes subversions of gender roles: she cuts her hair and sometimes dresses in men’s clothing; she learns to swim, snowshoe, row, and hike. Unlike her life with her mother, where she performs unnecessary domestic chores, like piecing quilts no one will use, “Valancy toiled not, nor did she spin.”38 Her life at the Blue Castle is a rejection of the feminine chores of weaving and spinning so central to fairy tales like “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Snow White.” She is not expected to cook or clean for Barney unless she chooses: “she could sleep as long in the morning as she wanted to. 243

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Nobody cared. Barney cooked his own breakfast of bacon and eggs and then shut himself up in Bluebeard’s Chamber till supper time. Then they had an evening of reading and talk.”39 Valancy’s flippant references to Bluebeard’s Chamber and Barney’s “dead wives” (his secrets) both provide an intertextual nod to the fairy-tale tradition, and also highlight the dangers of misogyny, especially in marriage. Valancy’s Blue Castle, which she imagines as a shiny sanctuary of romance and beauty, could conversely become Bluebeard’s Chamber (in an alternate story line), where disobedient wives are murdered and collected with impunity. The fairy-tale prince is a traditionally flat character whose main role consists of arriving at the end to kiss the princess and carry her away. Valancy’s prince is unconventional and complex, challenging gender roles himself. This is The Blue Castle’s final subversion of the fairy-tale tradition. Barney’s declaration of love at the end introduces another narrative layer when he recounts his own journey for the benefit of both Valancy and the reader. In fact, the revelation of Barney’s childhood and wealth creates a second Cinderella story, further deconstructing the gender parallels between The Blue Castle and princess fairy tales. Barney, like Valancy, had an unhappy and friendless childhood, and was raised by a single parent. He, too, flees into the woods as an escape and to survive his disillusionment and heartache. Like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, he is born into wealth, but it fails to secure either love or happiness, and it is only after he is rescued himself – which Valancy does with her marriage proposal and companionship – that he can reclaim his riches and experience true love. This metafictional scene is the text’s final deconstruction of the relationship between gender and genre. Romantic fairy tales are structurally dependent on fixed gender roles: since the binary opposition of masculine and feminine are narratively essential to conventional fairy tales, destabilizing the gendered archetypes of the witch, princess, or prince, necessarily subverts the genre itself. The allegorical roles of Valancy as Cinderella and Barney as Prince Charming ultimately defy reader expectations, despite the formulaic narrative structure. In this way, just as Valancy rejects aspects of Victorian femininity, Barney eludes various tenets of masculinity.40 In Magic Island, Waterston 244

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points out that Valancy’s brush with death reverses an essential element of the Cinderella story when Barney rips her “pretty, foolish shoe” off in order to free her from the railroad track: “A magic mirror; a ring of jewelled islands, emerald and amethyst; a masked ball; a silver forest in winter, ‘a spell-bound world of crystal and pearl’: all seem like features of a fairy-tale … In a reversal of the Cinderella story, [Barney] tears Valancy’s shoe off her foot, to save her life from the thundering train.”41 The gendered trope of Cinderella’s slipper becomes a complex transformative symbol. While enacting the role of a knight in shining armour, Barney’s desperate seizure of the “pretty, foolish shoe” frees Valancy metaphorically from the Cinderella role, momentarily reclaiming a part of its fable for himself, then abandoning the shoe as they both fall clear of the approaching train. As the couple recovers from the shock of their brush with death, Barney brings Valancy the new “sensible” shoes she had just purchased, and lets her “put them on without any assistance.”42 In this moment, with a pretty, discarded slipper as the catalyst, Valancy realizes that she does not have a fatal heart condition and Barney understands that he is hopelessly in love with her. Montgomery’s novel is therefore more complex than a mere narrative reversal; Valancy and Barney increasingly inhabit the roles of both princess and prince. Rubio elaborates on the role that Barney plays in the destabilization of gender in The Blue Castle: “the man Valancy has married turns out to be a writer of books which are remarkably like Montgomery’s own. He writes purple passages about nature and he espouses ‘female’ values like sensitivity and nurturing … Valancy’s husband is a woman in man’s clothing. It’s Montgomery’s transvestite trick … playing with the gender stereotypes of her era.”43 Beyond the “feminine” writing of Valancy’s prince, Barney-as-John-Foster is Montgomery herself in drag: Epperly connects many of Foster’s passages in The Blue Castle to nature essays published by Montgomery in the Canadian Magazine over a decade earlier.44 The illusive character of John Foster is a pen name for Barney Snaith, as well as the mimetic presence of the novel’s writer. This palimpsestic layering of author and ghostwriter and character challenges the reader’s understanding of gender roles and narrative genres. 245

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Rather than destroying the possibility of “happily ever after,” this fracturing of gender roles creates a new model of romance. Epperly points out that Barney and Valancy’s courtship is “a continual discovery of their similarities and sympathies,” even down to their belief that they are unlovable and unworthy of the other.45 As their personal differences dissolve, so too do the gender lines, holding up their rapport as a model of equality. While the protagonist and her true love do live happily ever after, their journey to each other is a complex navigation of revised social expectations, including a blooming female sexuality, an embrace of the heroine’s distinctive voice, and a rewritten model of masculinity. In this way, Montgomery’s The Blue Castle skilfully negotiates fairy tales’ timeless explorations of identity, morality, and happiness, while including contemporary criticism of earlytwentieth-century gender dynamics.

No t e s 1 An additional factor that led to mixed reviews of The Blue Castle: During the years after the First World War, L.M. Montgomery’s work was increasingly marketed to children rather than a general readership, a trend that conflicted with her own view of her work as well as the books she wrote during this period specifically for adults. She wrote in August 1920: “I want to write … something entirely different from anything I have written yet. I am becoming classed as a ‘writer for young people’ and that only. I want to write a book dealing with grown-up creatures.” Quoted in Rubio. Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, 289. 2 Reviews are reprinted in Lefebvre, The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: A Legacy in Review, 269–85. 3 Porter, “The Fair World of L.M. Montgomery,” 80. 4 Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 102. 5 Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, 5. 6 Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, 11. 7 Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 235. 8 Rubio, “Subverting the Trite,” 32. 9 For further reference on fairy-tale structures, consult Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, 1928, which analyzes the plot components of folk and fairy tales and identifies their basic narrative elements.

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10 Montgomery, bc, 175. 11 In his foundational 1949 work, Joseph Campbell posits that myths (including fairy tales) across cultures and eras share a fundamental structure, which he terms the “monomyth,” or the hero’s journey. The first of the seventeen stages in the journey is The Call to Adventure, which moves the hero from the known to the unknown: “This first stage of the mythological journey … signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state.” (Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 53). 12 Montgomery, bc, 17–18. 13 Ibid., 102, 103. 14 Ibid., 111. 15 Ibid., 213. 16 Warner, Once Upon a Time, 33. 17 Montgomery, bc, 45. 18 Ibid., 2. 19 Ibid., 12. 20 Ibid., 149. 21 Ibid., 214. 22 While Montgomery’s novels generally treat the subject of sex conservatively, even prudishly, Laura Robinson’s article, “‘Sex Matters’: L.M. Montgomery, Friendship, and Sexuality,” points out that, “in her journals, Montgomery does not remain silent on issues of sexuality” (173). 23 Åhmansson, “Textual/Sexual Space,” 146. 24 Montgomery, bc, 3. 25 Åhmansson, “Textual/Sexual Space,” 149. 26 Little Red Riding Hood takes off her clothes before climbing into bed with the wolf/grandmother in several versions, most notably in Charles Perrault’s “Le Petit Chaperon rouge” (Histoires ou contes du temps passé, 1697). In a later French version, the wolf directs the girl to take of her garments one at a time and throw them into the fire before climbing into bed with him (“Conte de la mère-grand,” collected by folklorist Achille Millien in 1870). 27 “Sole, Luna, e Talia” is one of the fairy tales in the Pentamerone, written by Giambattista Basile in 1634. 28 Lawson, “The Victorian Sickroom,” 239. 29 Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 236. 30 Åhmansson, “Textual/Sexual Space,” 151. 31 Montgomery, bc, 155. 247

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32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45

Ibid., 205. Rubio, “Subverting the Trite,” 33. Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 238. Montgomery, bc, 91. Ibid., 46. In fact, much of the story’s humour derives from Valancy’s unapologetic commentary on those around her. The first major scene after Valancy learns that she is doomed to die young is a family dinner. After methodically picking apart the hypocrisies of her clan with amusement, and being told to hush, she responds: “I’ve hush-hushed all my life. I’ll scream if I want to. Don’t make me want to” (64–5). Ibid., 150. Ibid., 167. In chapter 3 of this volume Ashley Reese’s “Barney of the Island: Nature and Gender in Montgomery’s The Blue Castle” explores the relationship between nature imagery and the complex gendering of Barney and Valancy. In particular, Reese points out that Barney “is both a romantic hero and connected to nature … There is … no sense of his needing to dominate or tame the land around him, further identifying him with the feminine” (78). Waterston, Magic Island, 137. Montgomery, bc, 178. Rubio, “Subverting the Trite,” 32–3. Epperly is quoted in the introduction to Montgomery’s essay, “Seasons in the Woods,” in Lefebvre, The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 1:73. Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 237–8.

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n In one of Montgomery’s last books, Anne of Windy Poplars (1936),

Anne Shirley draws on her knowledge of Canadian literature when a young friend mistakenly attributes the phrase “touched your soul in shadowland” to Shakespeare. “I think it was Pauline Johnson,” Anne gently replies.1 Like Anne, Montgomery must have known Johnson’s work quite well to insert this reference to her poem, “Moonset.” Moreover, there is a subtle allusion to this poem at the end of the book’s first chapter, when Anne closes her letter to Gilbert with the comment that “the moon is ‘sinking into shadow-land.’”2 Given that this line comes from the final version of “Moonset” that appeared in Johnson’s books (The White Wampum [1895] and Flint and Feather [1912]) rather than

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from its initial version in Outing magazine in 1894, we can speculate that Montgomery may have had a copy of Johnson’s Flint and Feather on hand in 1935 when she composed the penultimate Anne book published during her lifetime. Montgomery’s familiarity with Johnson was also evident in her letter to George B. MacMillan of 25 October 1933, where she stated, “Yes, I have heard the legend of the Qu’Appelle. Pauline Johnson, the Indian poetess, wrote it up in a poem.”3 Johnson may have been on Montgomery’s mind during these years because she was included in Courageous Women (1934), to which Montgomery contributed the first three chapters, albeit not the chapter on Johnson, which was written by one of the book’s co-authors, who were Marian Keith and Mabel Burns McKinley. Nonetheless, despite Montgomery’s many publications and extensive archival records, little direct evidence remains of her awareness of Johnson. In contrast to her explicit attention to other Canadian writers such as Bliss Carman, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Robert Service,4 Montgomery seldom mentioned Johnson, in print or manuscript, even though she gave a talk on “Pauline Johnson and her Contribution to Literature” to the Hypatia Club,5 the women’s literary society of Uxbridge (close to her home in Leaskdale), on 2 April 1917, under the epigraph, “Capitulate? Not I,” the final line of one of Johnson’s last poems (“And he said, ‘Fight on’”). A thorough examination of Montgomery’s published works and available biographical documents reveals that while she was not oblivious to Johnson and the presence of Indigenous people in Canada, she chose to omit them from most of her writings. In this regard, she replicated the preference for mainstream ethnic values that Mavis Reimer analyzes in her article in this volume, about the discourse and images surrounding adoption practices in early twentieth-century Canada.6 Montgomery’s connection with Johnson is most evident in “Tannis of the Flats” (1904), one of her few stories set in Western Canada, where she spent a memorable teen-age year in 1890–91. This story resembles Johnson’s stories “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” (1893) and “As It Was in the Beginning” (1899) in its setting, plot, and representation of the determination and bittersweet triumph of a mixed-race woman. Montgomery’s story and those by Johnson participate in a discernible pattern of 250

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literary depictions of part-Indigenous people in early Canadian literature, a theme that often focuses on women as the embodiment of conflicted identity and cultural fragmentation, in a reductive configuration of race and gender. Bringing L.M. Montgomery and Pauline Johnson into conjunction offers an opportunity to explore gaps and intersections between Canada’s two major female literary celebrities of the first decades of the twentieth century. (Their commensurate status was further confirmed when both names appeared in the spring of 2016 on the shortlist of a dozen Canadian women chosen as potential candidates for commemoration on Canadian currency.) Johnson was born in Ontario in 1861, thirteen years before Montgomery, and died in Vancouver in 1913. There is greater reason for Montgomery to have been aware of Johnson than for Johnson to have known of Montgomery, given Montgomery’s love of poetry and her longer life, as the publication of Anne of Green Gables in 1908 occurred just five years before Johnson’s death. One of Canada’s best-known poets, Johnson made a strong impression with her representations of Indigenous culture, on the stage and on the page, drawing on her Mohawk heritage and her charismatic personality. The daughter of an Englishwoman and a Mohawk chief who was both hereditary and elected, she grew up on the Six Nations Reserve about twenty miles from Brantford, Ontario, and was well educated in the English literary classics. Johnson achieved prominence during the 1890s with both her published work and her performances of her sketches and poems across Canada, including a date in Charlottetown on 16 August 1900, a performance that Montgomery did not attend or note in her journals or surviving correspondence. Johnson’s funeral on 10 March 1913 was designated an official day of mourning in the city of Vancouver and received newspaper coverage across Canada, events that Montgomery seems to have allowed to pass without comment. The two writers crossed paths more often in print than in real life, publishing their work in many of the same major Canadian and American periodicals. These included the Halifax Herald; the Toronto-based Globe newspaper, Canadian Magazine, Ladies’ Journal, East and West, and Saturday Night; New York’s Smart Set and Outing Magazine; and 251

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Boys’ World of Chicago. Symptomatic of their synchronicity is the appearance of Montgomery’s poem “You” on page 272 of the July 1913 issue of the Canadian Magazine, opposite the beginning of Isabel Ecclestone MacKay’s article “Pauline Johnson: A Reminiscence” on page 273. Yet for the most part, Johnson and Montgomery seem to have occupied parallel universes. Further contributing to the gap between them is the dearth of critical attention paid to Montgomery’s few writings about the Canadian West, the source of most of her references to Indigenous people. In addition to “Tannis of the Flats,” these pieces include her 1891 essay “A Western Eden,” her 1894 memoir, “High School Life in Saskatchewan,” her letters to Penzie Macneill (in Bolger, The Years Before “Anne”), several minor stories, and occasional comments in her journals.7 These texts and her sparse references to Johnson help to contextualize Montgomery in relation to normative racialized gender representations in the Canadian literature of her time. While Johnson’s audiences and readers in Canada and elsewhere recognized her as a celebrity, she was also regarded as an oddity for being both a Mohawk and a New Woman.8 The following discussion, based on efforts to trace all discernible references to Johnson and to Indigenous people in Montgomery’s publications and archives,9 suggests that, while Montgomery was familiar with Johnson as a fellow Canadian author and occasionally acknowledged the Indigenous presence in Canada, she was rarely at ease in writing about them, including Pauline Johnson. Nonetheless, hints of Montgomery’s awareness of Johnson are sprinkled across her lifetime. In 1902, Ephraim Weber described Johnson’s recital in Didsbury, Alberta, in a letter to Montgomery that Wilfrid Eggleston saw before it disappeared.10 In addition to the two previously mentioned references to Johnson’s poems made during the 1930s, Montgomery’s Red Scrapbook (at the University of Guelph) includes an undated handwritten quotation from Johnson’s “Canadian Born,” pasted on the same page as items dated December 1914 and March 1915. Its lines – “We all have one credential that entitles us to brag / For we were born in Canada beneath the British flag”11 – reiterate a Johnson quotation from the printed Hypatia Club program for 19 October 1914 where “‘We were born in Canada beneath the British Flag’ – P.J.” served 252

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as the opening epigraph for a schedule of meetings that focused on Canadian authors. Montgomery’s sparse references to Indigenous people reflect common tropes of White engagement with Indigeneity. They tend to appear in her stories set in the West, which, according to Rea Wilmshurst, total “a couple of dozen,”12 a few of which appear in Wilmshurst’s thematic collections of Montgomery’s short stories issued in the 1980s and 1990s. In some of the stories reprinted in After Many Days, a generalized Canadian West serves as a distant locale, where Islanders go to seek their fortunes and whence they return to resolve old conflicts. These tales include few geographical details other than mention of making a fortune in the Kootenay (“After Many Days” [1903]) or taking up land in Manitoba. A brief reference to the Saskatchewan area of “Red Butte” occurs in “The Setness of Theodosia” (1901) and another to “Red Deer Hill” in the uncollected story “The Quest of a Story” (1902).13 In such stories, passing comments about Indigenous people contribute regional colour, as in “The Genesis of the Doughnut Club” (1907), which is set in the settlement of Carlton (a place name that resonates in both Manitoba and Saskatchewan) and includes the casual detail, “I got a squaw in to wash and scrub.”14 At times, Montgomery follows a common Canadian pattern of using Indigenous content for narrative convenience. The story “How We Went to the Wedding” (1913) describes the resourcefulness of two White women who successfully trek across the flooded Saskatchewan prairie despite the delinquency of their Cree guide and with some crucial help from a band of impoverished Stoneys; in “The Touch of Fate,” the rcmp response to a “mere squabble among the Indians”15 facilitates the courtship plot. Scattered references to Indigenous people in Montgomery’s pei and Ontario fictions reiterate conventional cultural assumptions that range from the pejorative to the romantic, most of which will be regarded as offensive by readers of today. In The Blue Castle, Valancy’s angry uncle suspects that deceptive Barney Snaith “is half Indian.”16 A White girl’s dark complexion is sometimes associated with Indigeneity: in Pat of Silver Bush, Pat deplores the “Indian” implications of her “brown skin,” and in Magic for Marigold, Paula Pengelly’s colouring is attributed to 253

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undesirable “Indian blood.”17 On the more romantic side, The Story Girl recounts a fanciful legend that erroneously accounts for the name of Shubenacadie as commemorating a pair of tragic Native lovers, Shuben and Accadee, whereas its actual Mi'kmaw meaning refers to a place where wild turnips or potatoes grow.18 In The Golden Road, one of the stories written by the children for their magazine includes “an old micmac squaw” who cares for a sick White man.19 Equally stereotypical is characters’ association of Indigenous people with violence: in Anne of Avonlea, the rambunctious Davy wants “an Injun headdress”;20 in Anne of Ingleside a boy “plays the part of a Red Indian burned at the stake”;21 while in both Rainbow Valley and the story “The Redemption of John Churchill,” boys devise games of “Indian ambush.”22 References to Indigenous history occasionally pop up: in Emily’s Quest, “Teddy betook himself into some northern hinterland with an Indian treaty party to make illustrations for a serial,”23 possibly a reference to Duncan Campbell Scott’s Treaty 9 expedition of 1905, and there is passing mention of the Riel Rebellion in the story “Christmas at Red Butte.” On several occasions, Montgomery’s details involving Indigenous people are bizarre, and it would be of interest to learn whether they are drawn from actual experience. In A Tangled Web, Little Sam “had a harmless hobby of collecting skulls from the old Indian graveyard down at Big Friday Cove and ornamenting the fence of his potato plot with them. He and Big Sam quarrelled about it every time he brought a new skull home. Big Sam declared it was indecent and unnatural and unchristian. But the skulls remained on the poles.”24 Especially intriguing is the peculiarly named “Squaw Baby” of “The Cheated Child,” a little girl whose real name is never revealed. In the full version of this story that appears in The Blythes Are Quoted, we learn that the child’s nickname derives from her appearance. Pat thinks, “You’ve got black little eyes … like the Indian babies up at Lennox Island – and a flat nose and black pigtails” and wonders “what was her name anyhow? … She would never let a stranger call her Squaw Baby.”25 Items in Montgomery’s Blue Scrapbook (now at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown) indicate that she enjoyed a picnic at the Mi'kmaw reserve at Lennox Island on 9 August 1894,26 an outing 254

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not mentioned in her journals. In her unpublished writings, Indigenous people appear in her letters, journals, and scrapbooks primarily in relation to her extended visit with her father and his second family in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, in 1890–91. Consistent with the mode of travel writing, when corresponding with her friend back home, the young author displayed some fascination with the local Indigenous population, telling Penzie Macneill that they “don’t look a single bit like our Indians down home but are much handsomer.”27 When she visited Prince Albert again in 1930, Montgomery noted the disappearance of Indigenous people from its streets and added, “I miss them!”28 Clippings in her Red Scrapbook (also at the Confederation Centre) show that, in January 1903, she came into brief contact with the important Indigenous figure Dr Oronhyatekha (also known as Peter Martin), Mohawk leader of the Canadian branch of the International Order of Foresters, who attended a New Glasgow banquet where the entertainment program included recitations by “Miss Montgomery” and Nora Lefurgey.29 In 1936, Montgomery’s meeting with Grey Owl at a Press Club luncheon sparked a memory of Mi'kmaw people coming to her grandfather’s house. Two years later, when Grey Owl’s true identity as the Englishman Archibald Belaney became known, Montgomery wrote, “I always felt certain he was not pure-bred but I did think he had some Indian blood in him,” a comment that reflects her own inclination to accept Belaney’s performance of the noble savage.30 Closer to home, Montgomery occasionally referred to pei by its Mi'kmaw name of Abegweit, as in the first chapter of Anne’s House of Dreams (1917),31 more for the romantic associations of the word, which means “the land cradled on the waves,” than for a desire to connect with actual Mi'kmaw people. As Montgomery well knew, from the 1890s through the 1930s, to engage with Indigeneity in Canadian literature was to engage in some way with Pauline Johnson – if not as a direct reference then as an implied presence – especially in relation to the figure of the “half-breed girl.” It is no accident that Duncan Campbell Scott, whose poems frequently focused on the complexities facing Indigenous Peoples, was acquainted with Johnson both professionally and personally.32 Johnson also met Gilbert Parker, whose novel Translation of a Savage (1893) confronts issues 255

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of interracial marriage between a part-Indigenous woman and an Englishman. As senior administrator in the department of Indian Affairs, Scott assiduously implemented the assimilation of Indigenous people through education as well as intermarriage,33 yet his poetry about mixedrace people depicts them as torn between their competing identities. In such poems as “The Onondaga Madonna,” “At Gull Lake, 1810,” and “The Half-Breed Girl,” women who are themselves part White, or bear children who are “paler” than their mothers, embody discomfort and suffer accordingly. In the words of Canadian Literature scholar D.M.R. Bentley, the conclusion of “The Half-Breed Girl” depicts her “as a fearful and doomed victim of racial dualism who lives a half-life between a Scottish heritage to which she cannot gain access and an Indigenous existence that part of her being finds odious.”34 In American literature, the figure of the female “halfbreed” is most directly represented in Mourning Dove’s novel, Cogewea: The Half-Blood, written around 1912 but not published until 1924. While saying much about mistreatment of Indigenous and mixed-race people, this novel allows for a happy ending once Cogewea overcomes her betrayal by a beguiling White Easterner and settles for marriage with a fellow rancher who shares her mixed ethnic heritage. In the view of Native American critic Louis Owens, the effect of this conclusion is that “Regardless of what lies on the edges of their borderland world, Mourning Dove’s mixedbloods have claimed the frontier as their space, and within that space they thrive with humor and mutual respect.”35 However, stories by Johnson and Montgomery demonstrate that a similarly comfortable space was seldom available to Canadian mixed-race women. Before writing “Tannis of the Flats,” Montgomery was likely aware of Johnson’s best-known stories about Native mixed-race women betrayed by White lovers, given her addiction to reading and the wide circulation of periodicals from central Canada into the Maritimes. Johnson’s performance programs regularly included “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” a story that is now a major focus of Johnson criticism, which was published in February 1893 in both the Dominion Illustrated Monthly, a prominent Montreal family magazine, and the Toronto Evening Star (under the title “A Sweet Wild Flower”). The second relevant story, “As It Was in the 256

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Beginning,” first appeared in the 1899 Christmas number of Saturday Night, a periodical that Montgomery knew well. Both titles were collected in the posthumous volume of Johnson’s stories, The Moccasin Maker (1913), as was “The Derelict,” published in Toronto’s Massey Magazine in 1896, an ironic tale in which a mixed-race woman offers salvation to a decrepit Anglican clergyman, who chooses to sacrifice his career for her. The main characters in Johnson’s stories stand in sharp contrast to the stereotype of the compliant, self-sacrificing Indian maiden that she scathingly critiqued in her 1892 essay “A Strong Race Opinion: On the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction.” Both “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” and “As It Was in the Beginning” are set remotely on the prairies and focus on a young woman with a Cree mother. Christie Robinson of “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” has a White father, while the father of Esther, in “As It Was in the Beginning,” possesses the “uncertain blood” of a “half-breed” (in Johnson’s words).36 Both heroines make the mistake of trusting White men. Christie marries Charlie Macdonald, a handsome surveyor with a penchant for “Indianology,”37 who weds his “little Indian wife”38 in the same way that he collects his other trophies, only to spurn her when he learns that her parents were married by Indigenous rather than Christian ritual. Esther is taken to a residential school by a cleric named Father Paul, who deprives her of her original culture, but then persuades his nephew not to marry her. Both women refuse to be victims of White treachery. Christie rejects Charlie in turn when he seeks reconciliation, while Esther poisons her weak White lover to prevent him from marrying the Hudson Bay Company factor’s insipid daughter. Hence, rather than yield to their racial and sexual vulnerability, both of Johnson’s fictional women vengefully deploy their gender to assert agency that brings them a degree of satisfaction; while neither enjoys a conventional happy ending, they reach what is perhaps the best conclusion that can be obtained under the circumstances. Montgomery first wrote about the western region that served as the site of Johnson’s stories while a teenager in Prince Albert. In her article in the Prince Albert Times (17 June 1891), titled “A Western Eden,” she described a quest for the “dusky warrior” of the past who “belongs to an extinct species now,”39 and three years later she mentioned colourful 257

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Indigenous passersby in a brief reminiscence about “High School Life in Saskatchewan.”40 A decade later – perhaps inspired by rereading the Prince Albert portions of her journal in January 1904 – she composed “Tannis of the Flats” as a story of the present, with a heroine who resembles Johnson’s “offspring of red and white parentage.”41 Tannis is specifically Metis in her mixture of Cree, French, and Scottish heritages, as well as her last name of Dumont. Drawing on her memory that “the half-breed girls are the prettiest ones going,” as she wrote to Penzie Macneill in 1890,42 Montgomery describes Tannis as looking as if “all the blood of all the Howards might be running her veins.”43 She is as attractive and as vulnerable as Johnson’s heroines, and equally relentless in her refusal to acquiesce to common stereotypes. The attentions of Jerome Carey, a bored Englishman in charge of the telegraph station at the Flats, “a forlorn little trading station fifteen miles up the river from Prince Albert,”44 cause Tannis to fall deeply in love with him, and she is not pleased when the arrival of Elinor, a White woman, turns his affections. While attempting to subdue a fight inspired by Tannis’s brother’s defence of his sister’s honour, Carey is fatally wounded. Tannis initially seems to enact the stereotype of the self-sacrificing Indigenous woman when she braves stormy conditions to bring Elinor to Carey’s deathbed, but she then triumphs after his death when she dismisses Elinor in order to keep her lover’s body and possess his grave. Like Johnson’s Christie and Esther, Tannis appears to fulfil some stereotypes of racialization in her thirst for revenge; one current critic regards her story as confirming that she has “a very thin, but very deceptive, veneer of culture and civilization overlying the primitive passions and ideas of her nature” in the words of Montgomery’s narrator, whose subscription to notions of racial purity appears also in her description of Tannis’s blood as “an atrocious mixture.”45 However, it should be noted that Johnson used similarly essentialist terminology in describing her heroines: Christie’s father warns that, with his daughter, “It’s kindness for kindness, bullet for bullet, blood for blood,”46 while Esther declares, “They account for it by the fact that I am a Redskin, but I am something else too – I am a woman.”47 Indeed, the two writers’ use of normative turn-of-the-century rhetoric of race and gender highlights 258

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the significance of their stories’ endings, in which their heroines resist White social expectations by taking control of the narrative. Tannis, like Christie and Esther, challenges the anticipation of eventual erasure that informed the cultural discourse of the time. In other words, in Montgomery’s most Johnson-like story, she moved beyond the stereotypes that typify most of her references to Indigenous people. This distinction becomes all the more evident when we compare Montgomery’s Tannis with another fictional Tannis, a character in a story by Kate Simpson Hayes that both Johnson and Montgomery might well have read. Titled “An Episode at Clark’s Crossing,”48 it was included in Hayes’s book Prairie Potpourri (1895), and may have appeared earlier in the Regina Leader. This Tannis, a full-blooded Sioux, simply disappears when she learns that she has been betrayed by the English missionary who reneges on his promise to marry her. One might argue that it is her ethnic mixture that gives Montgomery’s Tannis, along with Johnson’s Christie and Esther, the strength to hold her own.49 “Tannis of the Flats” was first published in the Criterion (New York) in April 1904. Montgomery’s sole comment about this story (that I have found) concerns its commodity value, when she informed G.B. MacMillan that the Criterion “is one of the best magazines on my list” and had recently paid her forty dollars for an unnamed story that “was only about 4,000 words long.”50 As well, she pasted the Charlottetown Patriot’s laudatory notice about the story into her Red Scrapbook.51 “Tannis” was reprinted in the Canadian Magazine in January 1914 and later included in Further Chronicles of Avonlea, the unauthorized collection of Montgomery’s stories issued by L.C. Page in 1920. Given all the publicity surrounding Johnson’s death in March 1913 and the subsequent posthumous publication of book collections of her magazine stories, it seems likely that Johnson’s popularity had some bearing on the Canadian Magazine’s reissue of “Tannis.” This 1914 version contains few alterations beyond changing Tannis’s rival, Elinor Carlyle from Montreal, to Elinor Blair from pei, an adjustment likely made by Montgomery herself several years previously, when she edited some of her earlier stories for possible inclusion in Chronicles of Avonlea (1912).52 However, the later version in Further Chronicles includes substantial 259

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revisions that turn it more fully into a pei story, with the addition of introductory paragraphs focusing on Elinor Blair from Avonlea and new pei references sprinkled through the text. According to Mary Rubio, these changes were made in Page’s office and infuriated Montgomery: in her own copy of the book “[s]he bracketed the first three paragraphs of ‘Tannis of the Flats,’ saying that these three paragraphs were a Page interpolation.”53 Moreover, this later version dilutes the focus on Tannis by giving greater visibility to Lazarre, her Metis suitor, and to Elinor’s brother, Tom. While the power of this story commanded attention from the unknown editor who chose to include it in Further Chronicles, its placement within a collection of typical Montgomery stories seems to have posed a challenge. Sitting alone at the end of the volume, “Tannis of the Flats” provides a disconcerting conclusion to the book’s series of pei tales, most of which satisfy the reader with happier endings, thereby providing a cogent illustration of the uneasiness of Indigenous material within Montgomery’s imaginative landscape. Let me conclude with speculation about what Montgomery might have said in her 1917 speech to the Hypatia Club on “Pauline Johnson and her Contribution to Literature.” She would have had access to all of Johnson’s recent publications, including her final collection of poems, Flint and Feather, issued in Toronto by Musson, who kept the book well in print from 1912 onward in various impressions and subeditions. John McClelland (who was Montgomery’s Canadian publisher) did the same with Johnson’s Legends of Vancouver, first produced in Vancouver in 1911, and in his hands by 1914.54 As well, two posthumous collections of Johnson’s magazine stories, The Moccasin Maker and The Shagganappi, were issued in Toronto in 1913 by William Briggs. None of these volumes are directly named in Montgomery’s journals, letters, or archives, but it would be hard to imagine her not paying attention to them, as they were widely advertised and reviewed. While Montgomery might have commended Johnson’s effective representations of Indigeneity, it is important to note that specific Native content features in barely 10 per cent of Johnson’s poems. She wrote extensively about other matters that would have appealed to Montgomery, including appreciative descriptions of nature and patriotic verses that 260

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reference both Canada and the British Empire. It is probably significant that Montgomery’s most overt Johnson references appeared during the First World War, at a time when Montgomery avidly participated in recruitment rallies, where she likely incorporated Johnson’s words into her public recitations that always concluded with John McCrae’s wellknown poem, “In Flanders Fields.”55 This perspective is supported by Montgomery’s few direct quotations from Johnson, noted earlier in this essay. “[B]orn in Canada beneath the British flag” is the chorus in Johnson’s “Canadian Born,” first published in 1900 and quite suitable for appealing to Canadians to support the British war effort. This poem’s first and last stanzas illustrate its patriotic stance that situates Canada within the British Empire: We first saw light in Canada, the land beloved of God; We are the pulse of Canada, its marrow and its blood: And we, the men of Canada, can face the world and brag That we were born in Canada beneath the British flag. The Dutch may have their Holland, the Spaniard have his Spain, The Yankee to the south of us must south of us remain; For not a man dare lift a hand against the men who brag That they were born in Canada beneath the British flag.56 Montgomery’s second Johnson quotation, “Capitulate? not I,” is the final line of “And he said, ‘Fight on’” (1913), publicized as Johnson’s poetic response to the news that her breast cancer was terminal. The poem’s title is taken from “The Revenge” by Tennyson, one of Montgomery’s favourite poets, and its final stanza concludes dramatically: They’ve shot my flag to ribbons, but in rents It floats above the height. Their ensign shall not crown my battlements While I can stand and fight. I fling defiance at them as I cry, “Capitulate? Not I.”57 261

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The determined resistance voiced here by Johnson would have well suited Montgomery’s goal of persuading young Canadian men to enlist for service in the First World War. Montgomery’s other direct citations ref lect additional aspects of Johnson’s work that would have appealed to her. “Moonset” represents Johnson at her most lyrical, and “The Legend of Qu’Appelle Valley” follows the trope Montgomery erroneously assigned to Shubenacadie, of crediting a place name to a tragic Indigenous romance. In the 1920s, when Montgomery enjoyed holidays in Muskoka, she would likely also have enjoyed Johnson’s poems about the region, which are among her most accomplished engagements with the aesthetics of nature.58 Tracing Montgomery’s connections with Pauline Johnson provides one point of entry into an examination of the presence of Indigeneity in Montgomery’s work, an issue all the more pressing in view of the 2015 final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose recommendations for healing the wounds created by Canada’s system of Indian Residential Schools include an honest assessment of our cultural history. As a participant in that history, Montgomery was a woman of her time, whose constructions of race and gender accorded with the norms described in Mavis Reimer’s analysis of early twentieth-century social aesthetics in her essay in this volume.59 Montgomery was evidently familiar with Johnson’s work and “Tannis of the Flats,” one of her most distinctive stories, represents a singular effort to address issues that characterize Johnson’s fiction. Yet overall, while matters of Indigeneity were consistently within Montgomery’s general purview, her scattered references to Johnson and to Indigenous people in her publications and the surviving documentation of her life indicate that they were beyond her comfort level as a writer and remained on the margins of her literary practice.60

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No t e s

1 2 3 4

5

6 7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14

I am grateful to many Montgomery scholars, as well to the archivists at the University of Guelph, the University of Prince Edward Island, and the Confederation Centre for their assistance in researching this topic. In particular, I would like to thank Benjamin Lefebvre, Mary Rubio, Elizabeth Waterson, Elizabeth Epperly, and E. Holly Pike for sharing their knowledge about Montgomery and their thoughts about her relationship with Pauline Johnson. Montgomery, awp, 181. Montgomery, awp, 16. L.M. Montgomery to G.B. MacMillan, 25 October 1933, George Boyd MacMillan fonds, C-10689, Library and Archives Canada (lac). See Montgomery’s letters to G.B. MacMillan, and Rea Wilmshurt’s compilation of “Quotations and Allusions in L.M. Montgomery’s Other Novels” (Toronto: 1990, n.p.). upei Robertson Library. University Archives and Special Collections (uasc) Accession # 2012-075 – R. Wilmhurst L.M. Montgomery Papers. Box 005. (While this was not formally published, Wilmshurst sold photocopies to researchers; I bought mine in 1994.) The Hypatia Club, founded in 1907 as a “book study club” by “seven prominent ladies” of Uxbridge, Ontario, celebrated its centenary in 2007. Montgomery joined in 1912 and was a consistently active member, serving as honorary president in 1916–17. See Ruth Wade, The Hypatia Club, a copy of which is in the L.M. Montgomery fonds at the University of Guelph. Reimer, “Soliciting Home,” chapter 5 in this volume. One of the few critical pieces to attend to Indigenous aspects of Montgomery’s publications, Brooke Collins-Gearing’s essay “Narrating the ‘Classic’ on Stolen Grounds” offers “an Indigenous decolonizing analysis” (165) of Anne of Green Gables without addressing Montgomery’s actual representations of Indigenous people. See Gerson and Strong-Boag, “Championing the Native,” 47–66. I thank Benjamin Lefebvre for his assistance in identifying many of these instances. Eggleston, Green Gables Letters, 17. While Montgomery’s letters to Weber are preserved at lac, his letters to her seem to have vanished. These lines are adapted from lines 7 and 8: “And all have one credential that entitles us to brag – / That we were born in Canada beneath the British flag,” Johnson, Collected Poems, 125. Wilmshurst, Introduction to Against the Odds, 11. Montgomery, After Many Days, 7, 232; “The Quest of a Story,” 292–6. Montgomery, Against the Odds, 50.

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30

31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Montgomery, At the Altar, 178. Montgomery, bc, 145. Montgomery, psb, 168; mm, 207. Montgomery, sg, 215–17. Montgomery, gr, 73. Montgomery, aa, 197. Montgomery, ain, 154. Montgomery, rv, 48; Wilmshurst, Among the Shadows, 213. In a 1902 instalment of her “Around the Table” column in the Halifax Daily Echo, now republished as “[Garrets and Cheerful People],” Montgomery recalls how she liked to “play Indian” as one of the many childhood games she enjoyed in her cousins’ attic; see A Name for Herself, 141. Montgomery, eq, 136. Montgomery, tw, 38. Montgomery, bq, 298, 308. This version includes passages omitted from the version in The Road to Yesterday. Blue Scrapbook, 33–4, reprinted in Epperly, Imagining Anne, 49–50. Bolger, The Years Before “Anne,” 86. For a discussion of Montgomery’s language regarding Indigenous people, see Elizabeth Waterston, Magic Island, 99–101. Montgomery, sj 4:76. Red Scrapbook, 11, 26–7; in Epperly, Imagining Anne, 111, 132–3. This event is also referenced in Gammel, The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery, 23. The prominent Mohawk leader, Oronhyatekha (1841–1907), baptized as Peter Martin, was born on the Six Nations Reserve and graduated from Oxford. See Dictionary of Canadian Biography, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio.php?id_nbr=6976. Montgomery, sj 5:112, 247. She added, “He was certainly clever to hoodwink the world as he has done. And his love for animals was real” (sj 5:247). Grey Owl was the persona adopted by Englishman Archibald Belaney (1888–1938), whose books were received as authentic accounts of Indigenous experiences and perspectives. See Donald B. Smith, From the Land of Shadows. The name Abegweit also appears in her chapter on “Prince Edward Island” (1939) in The L.M. Montgomery Reader 1:352–5, based on her earlier essay “I Have Come Home” (1936). In May 1895, Johnson was a dinner guest at his home: see Walter McRaye, Pauline Johnson and Her Friends, 57. See Salem, “Her Blood Is Mingled with Her Ancient Foes,” 99–117. Bentley, “Shadows in the Soul,” 759–60. Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 33–4. Johnson, Collected Poems, 210. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 190. 264

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39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60

Montgomery, “A Western Eden,” 14. Montgomery, “High School Life,” 95. Montgomery, sj 1:292; Johnson, Collected Poems, 190. Bolger, The Years Before “Anne,” 86. Montgomery, “Tannis,” 276. Ibid., 275. Ibid., 276. See Cecily Devereux, Growing a Race, 132. Johnson, Collected Poems, 189. Ibid., 213. Reprinted in McMullen and Campbell, Aspiring Women, 210–28. Similar strengths appear in Lydia of Johnson’s story “The Derelict” (in The Moccasin Maker) and in Lali’s easy assimilation into British ways in Parker’s novel, Translation of a Savage (New York: Appleton, 1893). Montgomery to G.B. MacMillan, 6 July 1904, George Boyd MacMillan fonds, C-10689, lac. Red Scrapbook, 5; Epperly, Imagining Anne, 102. In scrapbook 4 at upei, Montgomery altered the 1914 Canadian Magazine version to describe Elinor as “an Ontario girl” rather than “a Prince Edward Island girl” and deleted a brief descriptive phrase (“in a rain of finely sifted sunlight,” 278); these changes suggest that she planned a further reissue of “Tannis.” Rubio, Lucy Maud Montgomery, 232. See Quirk, “Labour of Love,” 201–51. My Dear Mr. M, 81. Johnson, Collected Poems, 125–6. Ibid., 164–5. Johnson was the most prominent early Canadian poet of the Muskoka region, as revealed by a search of the Chadwyck-Healey Canadian Poetry database under “Muskoka.” Reimer, “Soliciting Home,” chapter 5 of this volume. Current interpreters of Montgomery’s stories are now attempting to bring them up to date by inserting new characters from marginalized cultural groups. For example, in 2019, the producers of the “Anne with an E” television series announced a plan to add a Mi'kmaw character to be played by a girl from Lennox Island: see https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/ pei-anne-auditions-mi-kmaq-character-1.5010530 (accessed 18 April 2019).

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12 Orgies of Lovemaking L.M. Montgomery’s Feminine Version of the Augustinian Community

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n Anne and Miss Cornelia sit on the front porch of Ingleside enjoy-

ing the charm of a starlit evening and the friendly female conversation so often experienced in the wonderful worlds of Avonlea and Glen St Mary. During the rambling course of the conversation, Miss Cornelia describes Mr Richard Chase, the father of Anne’s new friend, Stella. Miss Cornelia says, “He’s a card … Richard brought Stella up himself. And him an infidel if he’s anything! He says women are only important biologically … whatever that may mean. He’s always shooting off some big talk like that.”1 Through the scornful lips of Miss Cornelia, L.M. Montgomery introduces the reader to one of the most influential (and controversial) ideas of Christian church history – that women are necessary to God’s plan

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only insofar as they make the production of children possible. Several early theologians, such as Tertullian and Ambrose, played with this idea, but most people attribute its fullest expression to Augustine, perhaps the most significant theologian of the patristic period. Augustine envisioned a masculine community in which all aspects of life, from physical labour to intellectual pursuits, are made more pleasant and fulfilling by the exclusion of women. While Augustine recognized that women are needed for procreation, he believed that women were essentially unnecessary for the greater and more esoteric aspects of human community – friendship, work, and the pursuit of God. In the Anne of Green Gables books, L.M. Montgomery creates a feminized version of Augustine’s ideal community. Like Augustine, Montgomery imagines a homosocial community which privileges one sex over the other. Like Augustine, Montgomery suggests that one of the sexes is useful only for the production of children. Like Augustine, Montgomery demonstrates that marriage and sex are purely utilitarian and only good insofar as they make other, greater, goods possible. Unlike Augustine, Montgomery’s community is almost exclusively female, whereas, of course, Augustine’s is almost exclusively male. In the Anne books, Montgomery offers her readers a vision of a self-sustaining female community that both embraces and inverts Augustine’s ideal community.

Augustine’s Vision of a Masculine Community Augustine states his view clearly in his Literal Commentary on Genesis: If it were not the case that the woman was created to be man’s helper specifically for the production of children, then why would she have been created as a “helper” (Gen. 2:18)? Was it so that she might work the land with him? No, because there did not exist any such labor for which he needed a helper, and even if such work had been required, a male would have made a better assistant. One can also posit that the reason for her creation as a helper had to do with the companionship she could provide for the man, if perhaps he got bored with his solitude. Yet for company and conversation, how much more agreeable it is for two male friends 267

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to dwell together than for a man and a woman! … And nobody wants to suggest, does he, that God, if he so willed, could only make a woman from a man’s side, yet that he couldn’t create a man as well? I cannot think of any reason for woman’s being made as man’s helper, if we dismiss the reason of procreation.2 Augustine believed that the production of children was and is so vital to God’s plan for the world that God willingly introduced the creature through which children would be born, even though he knew that it was through this same creature that sin would also be born into the world. In this he agrees with his teacher and mentor, Ambrose, who wrote in his book On Paradise, “So the Lord declared that it was ‘not good for man to be alone,’ because the human race could not have been propagated from the man by himself. God preferred that there might be many people for whom he could work salvation and to whom he might forgive sin, than that there be only one person, Adam, even though he be sinless.”3 Therefore, both Augustine and Ambrose (and other early Church Fathers) taught that sin entered the world through woman, and that the first sin continues to play itself out most graphically in the sexual lust men express toward women. Just as Eve offered up the forbidden fruit to Adam, and he took it from her, making himself and all of humanity guilty, so every woman in every place offers up herself to men, tempting him to act as if she (her body) has a greater authority over him than does God. Every act of sexual lust, even between spouses, is simply a replaying of the first sin. However, Augustine concedes that not all sexual acts are, by nature, sinful. He believes that marriage and the sexual act have extrinsic value and, if they are practised with the desire to obtain that extrinsic value, they are not sinful. He writes in On the Good of Marriage: “Truly we must consider, that God gives us some goods, which are to be sought for their own sake, such as wisdom, health, friendship; but others, which are necessary for the sake of somewhat [else], such as learning, meat, drink, sleep, marriage, sexual intercourse. For of these certain [ones] are necessary for the sake of wisdom, as learning; certain for the sake of health, as meat and drink and sleep; certain for the sake of friendship, as marriage or sexual intercourse; for hence subsists the 268

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propagation of the human kind, wherein friendly fellowship is a great good.”4 Notice that Augustine’s statement that marriage and sexual intercourse are necessary for the sake of friendship is not a reference to the relationship between husband and wife, but rather to the relationships made possible through the propagation of the species. However, Augustine contends that because sexual intercourse has only extrinsic value, it is not a necessary practice for a good human. If a person can obtain the things with intrinsic value (wisdom, health, friendship) without practising those things which have only extrinsic value, all the better. Augustine concludes, “It is good to marry because it is good to beget children, to be a mother of a family; but it is better not to marry, because it is better not to stand in need of this work.”5

Montgomer y’s Vision of a Feminine Community While Montgomery would obviously have been scornful of Augustine’s contention that women are good only for producing children, she embraces his vision of a rich, complex, single-sex community. However, in Montgomery’s world, it is the men who are not needed to help with women’s work, and they are not even very useful or interesting in terms of companionship or conversation. Montgomery goes one step farther than Augustine in exploring the companionship women experience by including several “romantic friendships” between her female characters, which is perhaps predictable of a late-Victorian author, as such relationships were expected and welcomed in Victorian society. As scholar Laura Robinson states, “This emotional intensity, and the often flamboyant descriptions of the affections, both physical and emotional, emerged from a society that generally encouraged this style of female friendships.”6 The women in Montgomery’s books do not act as sexual partners or counterparts for each other – Montgomery includes men in her world to aid with procreation, just as Augustine acknowledges the necessity of women in his – but she does allow women to form romantic bonds that often outweigh the usual bonds between men and women in her books. By separating romance from sex, she makes most of her male leads into flat characters, useful and necessary only in terms of marriage and procreation, while the female characters generally have rich, full 269

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personalities and together build a domestic, homosocial world more satisfying than one wherein male/female bonds create the basis for romantic, or any other, relationships. Like Augustine, Montgomery imagines a world in which every aspect of life is made more pleasant and fulfilling by the exclusion of an entire sex, but she inverts Augustine’s vision to create a world essentially uninhabited by men. The closest and most striking link between Augustine and Montgomery is their shared categorization of sex and marriage as extrinsic goods. Just like Augustine, Montgomery portrays marriage, and by extension sex, as purely utilitarian. But unlike Augustine, she sees two goods with intrinsic value coming from marriage and sex. The first good is the begetting of children. Like Augustine, Montgomery certainly is in favour of the propagation of the species, and she attributes a spiritual significance to the production of children. However, Montgomery adds to Augustine’s utilitarian view of marriage and sex. She sees that marriage and sex are good not only for the production of children, but also for the social status and freedom they bring to women, the primary members of her community.7 Anne’s status and influence in the society is guaranteed when she becomes “Mrs. Doctor dear.” Her wisdom and maturity grow to their full extent when she becomes both a joyful and bereaved mother in one day. Her social and spiritual purpose and significance are sealed as she becomes the mother of many children. However, Montgomery also creates women who have status, maturity, wisdom, and purpose without marriage or sex, and therefore concludes with Augustine that “to whomsoever they are not necessary, if he use them not, he doeth better.”8 In her article, “Bosom Friends: Lesbian Desire in Montgomery’s Anne Books,” Robinson agrees, stating, “Montgomery novels suggest that a woman does not have to be heterosexually active to raise a child.”9 Consider Marilla; when Marilla adopts Anne, she is “a tall, thin woman, with angles and without curves … a woman of narrow experience and rigid conscience.”10 Marilla is a capable woman, but lacks a certain love and compassion, a maternal instinct that a Victorian woman was expected to have. Her development into full womanhood begins when she decides to keep Anne, as her heart “soften[s] at the sight of the child’s pale face with its look of mute 270

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misery.”11 A few chapters later, Marilla experiences another small leap of growth as Anne impulsively squeezes Marilla’s hand, causing “Something warm and pleasant [to] well up in Marilla’s heart at touch of that thin little hand in her own – a throb of the maternity she had missed, perhaps.”12 With Anne’s arrival, Marilla begins to experience both the joys and trials of motherhood that she had been barred from before. She also enters into community life in a way she had not until this point, becoming intimately involved in the lives of Anne’s friends and any neighbours that Anne (initially) rubs the wrong way. Marilla’s progress continues as Anne persuades her to adopt Davy and Dora, and they work together to provide for the twins’ mental and physical well-being. By the time Anne is in college, Marilla is able to show the love she feels, in spite of her natural reserve; as Anne comes in the door one evening, she “[catches] her girl in her arms, and crushe[s] her and her flowers against her heart, kissing the bright hair and sweet face warmly.”13 The narrator also tells us that “Marilla had changed [outwardly] but little in the past nine years … but her expression was very different; the something about the mouth which had hinted at a sense of humor had developed wonderfully; her eyes were gentler and milder, her smile more frequent and tender.”14 It is clear that her adoption of Anne, and the opportunity to work with Anne (and later Mrs Lynde) to adopt Davy and Dora, have changed her and helped her grow into an affectionate, compassionate woman, capable of great love. This same growth into purpose, joy, and influence is also seen in Susan Baker, the housekeeper/second mother at Ingleside. And, while Rilla does eventually marry (past the end of the series), her growth into maturity, influence, and capacity for both joy and sorrow is largely made possible by Jims, her little adopted war-baby. The relationships between the women mentioned above are particularly important, as very few of these women benefit from the extrinsic goods of marriage (children and friendship) with men. Though the series opens with Marilla and Matthew running Green Gables together, the first book ends with Matthew’s death, which is an emotional tragedy for both Marilla and Anne. However, his death allows the blossoming of a female-only community at Green Gables, wherein both women 271

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come into their own. As Emily Cordinali Cormier argues, “Anne and Marilla’s farmstead at the end of Anne of Green Gables offers a meaningful option to the heteropatriarchal rural farmstead that dominated rural life during Montgomery’s time. Anne and Marilla represent two modes of rural femininity that, when put together under one roof, offer an empowering image of the female-managed farm.” She suggests that Anne is a “feminist heroine at the end of the novel for subverting the assumption that women could only have their “own” rural home through marriage. Anne quite literally replaces Matthew as a farming partner for Marilla … With Marilla’s skills as a traditional agrarian woman, and the forward-thinking mindset of Anne, Green Gables becomes a site of feminist pleasure for representing female independence in a framework traditionally dominated by men.”15 Anne and Marilla embark on their work together, well able to run the day-to-day aspects of the household and farm without help from men, though they rent out the fields to Mr Barry. Marilla would not have been able to run Green Gables on her own, either; because of her deteriorating eyesight, it is necessary for her to lean on Anne for support, and Cormier points out that “compared with Marilla, Anne is a passable but not prodigious housekeeper by the time she turns sixteen,” which makes it clear that she still has much to learn from the older woman.16 Though Anne could go to college, she chooses to stay with Marilla and Green Gables, telling Marilla, “I’ll read to you and keep you cheered up. You sha’n’t be dull or lonesome. And we’ll be real cozy and happy here together, you and I.”17 Anne’s devotion to Marilla over and above her own ambitions emphasizes the importance of the female community growing at Green Gables, which allows both women to gain purpose, joy, and influence without the interference of men. Companionship born of common work is one aspect of the feminine community Montgomery is constructing. However, the camaraderie that is built between women who act as partners for each other is radically different from the company between women who are friends. Anne’s first, great experience of this kind is with Diana Barry, her “bosom friend,” with whom she vows eternal love and undying devotion. Marah Gubar describes this pledge as a “lover’s compact,” which is 272

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befitting of the setting she labels an “Edenic garden.” Anne and Diana promise to be friends forever in a solemn ceremony, which Gubar describes as a “kind of mock wedding service, in which Anne functions as both minister and participant.”18 As they join hands over the garden walkway, both Anne and Diana vow to “be faithful to [their] bosom friend … as long as the sun and moon shall endure,”19 a promise befitting romantic lovers. Anne’s extreme love for Diana is contrasted with her loathing for Gilbert, whom she meets in chapter 15. Her encounter with Gilbert is fraught with as much passion as her meeting with Diana, but the passion explodes in quite the opposite way, as she cracks a slate over Gilbert’s head in a temper over his teasing. After being made to sit next to him as a punishment for being late the next day, Anne vows never to forgive Gilbert; she tells Diana that “the iron has entered into [her] soul.”20 The community that Montgomery is building has few places for males, especially those who attempt to enter the community by force. Readers will remember that the reason Gilbert was teasing Anne in the first place was to get her to look at him; in the way of adolescent boys, he was declaring his intentions to woo “that redhaired Shirley girl with the little pointed chin and the big eyes that weren’t like the eyes of any other girl in the Avonlea school.”21 Anne’s opposing vows and passions – to love Diana but hate Gilbert – emphasize the potential for love in the female relationships, and the disappointment of the relationships between males and females. At the end of chapter 15, Anne sobs to Marilla that she “love[s] Diana so,” saying “I cannot ever live without her. But I know very well when we grow up that Diana will get married and go away and leave me … I hate her husband – I just hate him furiously.”22 Anne “hates” both Gilbert and Diana’s future husband, who represent male intruders that threaten the deep relationship she has forged with Diana. Though Anne does ultimately forgive Gilbert, paving the way for their eventual marriage, it is clear that the romantic friendship that Anne and Diana share is more satisfying than any romance would be between Anne and Gilbert, not least because it is a relationship that is mutually agreed upon from the start. As Vappu Kannas points out in her essay in this volume, “‘Nora and I Got 273

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through the Evening’: Gender Roles and Romance in the Diary of L.M. Montgomery and Nora Lefurgey,”23 Montgomery is more interested in intimate relationships between women than in conventional romance. Montgomery’s portrayal of Anne’s romantic friendship with Diana, and her decidedly un-romantic depiction of Anne’s relationship with Gilbert, illustrates just how unnecessary and unwanted a male presence is in the feminine world she is creating. Her female characters find each other’s company completely fulfilling, not just in terms of companionship, but also in romance and sentimentality; when Gilbert attempts to voice these same sentiments, Anne brushes him off or rejects him outright, giving in only when Gilbert proposes for a second time. Anne later has other romantic friendships with women (her college roommates in Anne of the Island and Katherine Brooke in Anne of Windy Poplars), and no romantic bond is stronger or deeper than the one she forms with Leslie in Anne’s House of Dreams. When Anne first sees Leslie, as she and Gilbert drive to their new home a few hours after their wedding, she is struck by her beauty: “it was [her] beauty that made Anne give a little gasp … [the girl] was hatless, but heavy braids of burnished hair, the hue of ripe wheat, were twisted about her head like a coronet; her eyes were blue and star-like; her figure, in its plain, print gown, was magnificent; and her lips were as crimson as the bunch of blood-red poppies she wore at her belt.” When Anne asks Gilbert who the girl is, he says that he “didn’t notice any girl,” having “eyes only for his bride.”24 Although she is but recently married, Anne is the one with the wandering eye. Her attraction to Leslie mere hours after her marriage to Gilbert reinforces Montgomery’s feminine vision for community. Gilbert is very handsome and infinitely loyal, but Anne’s most fulfilling relationships are only possible with other women. Anne and Leslie become “very good comrades” as “each had something to give the other – each felt life the richer for friendly exchange of thought and friendly silence,”25 and Anne confesses to Captain Jim that she “like[s] … and admire[s] her so much – I want to take her right into my heart and creep right into hers.”26 However, because of the tragedies Leslie has experienced, it is not until after the loss of Anne’s first child that she and Leslie can become truly intimate. Once Anne gets strong 2 74

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enough after Joyce’s birth and death, Leslie pours out her heart to Anne in a talk that surpasses that rapturous first meeting with Diana. As Tara Parmiter contends in her essay in this volume, “when they finally talk after Joyce’s death, rather than trying to cover the nakedness of Anne’s bereavement, Leslie exposes her own worst anguishes.”27 Anne has found “someone who can look directly at her pain because she too has been stripped bare.” At the conclusion of their heart-to-heart, Anne says “I am your friend and you are mine, for always … I have had many dear and beloved friends – but there is a something in you, Leslie, that I never found in anyone else and I have more to give you than I had in my careless girlhood. We are both women – and friends forever.”28 This rather effusive romantic pact mirrors the childhood one that Anne and Diana made in Anne of Green Gables and it solidifies Leslie as Anne’s true romantic partner, especially when contrasted with the scene of Anne’s engagement to Gilbert, where Anne is speechless in answer to Gilbert’s question. Anne and Leslie’s friendship is perhaps the fullest vision of the feminine community Montgomery longs for; Anne and Leslie are not only romantic friends after their intimate exchange, but they also provide companionship for each other in their daily work. Anne tells Miss Cornelia a few chapters after her conversation with Leslie, “I don’t know what I’d do without Leslie, especially now when Gilbert is so busy. He’s hardly ever home.” In spite of the melancholy sound of that statement, Anne does not seem overly sad about the fact that she sees her husband for only a “few hours in the wee sma’s,”29 and it seems that Leslie is the perfect companion for Anne; at the beginning of their heartto-heart, Leslie tells Anne “you don’t know how good it is to be sitting here with you again – working – and talking – and being silent together.”30 While Leslie and Anne share a romantic friendship similar to Anne’s and Diana’s, they also share something Anne and Diana did not seem to share: the companionable moments that come out of working together. As Jackie Stallcup argues, “far from simply consuming time and controlling women’s lives, these tasks engage women in significant female interrelations.”31 Anne and Leslie’s friendship enriches both of their lives in a way that their husbands, good or bad, could not. 275

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Because of the bond that Anne and Leslie share, it is Leslie with whom Anne experiences the first days and weeks of her motherhood. Though Gilbert is necessary in bringing the baby into existence, it is not with him Anne shares parenthood. Near the end of book five, the narrator tells us that Anne and Leslie “worship the baby,” and that “Leslie was quite as foolish over him as Anne was. When their work was done and Gilbert was out of the way, they gave themselves over to shameless orgies of lovemaking and ecstasies of adoration.”32 Montgomery’s choice of words highlights the extremely romantic nature of Anne and Leslie’s relationship that has now expanded to include Jem, and, once again, Montgomery suggests that a woman is made into the person she should be through relationship with children. Through Joyce’s death, Leslie enters entirely into Anne’s healing influence, and through Jem’s birth, Anne and Leslie can both partake of the wonderful happiness, purpose, and joy that comes from mothering children. Although Gilbert protests the amount of baby-talk Anne indulges in, he acknowledges the special bond between mothers and children, saying “Oh, you mothers! … God knew what He was about when He made you.”33 Even though Leslie is not Jem’s biological parent, she is intimately involved in mothering this “child of the house of dreams”34 because of her relationship with Anne, and it is through this romantic friendship and her connection to baby Jem that Leslie grows into full womanhood. Under Anne and Jem’s influence, Leslie becomes capable of compassion and happiness, able to love and laugh, and dream again of her own possible future. The myriad examples of companionable and romantic love between women make it clear that Montgomery’s vision is for a self-sustaining female community. This autonomy extends even into religious practices; several of Montgomery’s female characters function as religious leaders. This emerges most clearly in Rainbow Valley through Miss Cornelia and Rosemary West, who act as correctives to Mr Meredith, the local Presbyterian minister. Although Susan Baker is continually amazed and aghast at Miss Cornelia’s willingness to criticize any minister, Miss Cornelia’s religious leadership is not merely through her outspokenness. Rather, Montgomery uses Miss Cornelia’s practical Christianity as an example of what she believes true religion should look like: a strongly 2 76

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feminine Christianity, marked by the ability and willingness to care for those who are most often overlooked, like children and the poor. Miss Cornelia is constantly making clothes for a new baby or giving help to a poor woman in need. In other words, it is a religiousness that is focused more on community-building than doctrine-building. This type of Christianity is in clear contrast with the vague, abstract, heady religiousness of Mr Meredith, who is constantly depicted as someone who loves his children and his community but is so buried in scholasticism that he is clueless to the point of negligence. Not surprisingly, Montgomery connects this “manly” religious leadership with Augustine, not once, but twice. She writes, “And the Rev. John Meredith forgot to go to bed at all because he was absorbed in reading a life of St Augustine. It was gray dawn when he finished it and went upstairs, wrestling with the problems of two thousand years ago. The door of the girls’ room was open and he saw Faith lying asleep, rosy and beautiful. He wondered where Una was … [and] sighed. He felt that Una’s whereabouts ought not to be a mystery to him.”35 Ironically, Una is sleeping with Mary Vance, who is soon to be adopted by Miss Cornelia at Una’s request. While the male minister “wrestles with problems of two thousand years ago,” the women in his own house and neighbourhood wrestle with problems of the present. Montgomery closes the chapter by again emphasizing Mr Meredith’s ineptitude and connecting it to Augustine when she writes, “But Mr Meredith did not notice that [his bed] was unmade. His last thoughts were of St Augustine.”36 Rosemary West becomes the ultimate solution to Mr Meredith’s male religious leadership. She is brought into the family through Una37 and weds practical religion to Mr Meredith’s dreamy scholasticism. Thus, the entire community (both male and female) can now thrive religiously in a way that they could not while Mr Meredith was on his own.

Acceptable Intruders Even though Montgomery says through Diana at the beginning of Anne of Ingleside that “it would be horrible”38 to live in a world without men, the rich and fulfilling feminine communities she creates ask the reader to imagine a world in which marriage is neither necessary nor wanted, 277

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an imagining that Augustine also endorses. Both Montgomery and Augustine know that such a vision will not be widely accepted or desired, but nonetheless they both continue to suggest, imagine, and advocate for just such a community. However, Montgomery cannot seem to create a world entirely without men, and clearly a few men are allowed into the community, but only once they have been properly feminized. Gilbert is the steadiest male influence in the books; he is introduced in Anne of Green Gables and remains a male lead through Rilla of Ingleside. However, in spite of his longevity as a character, he is representative of a category of men who are really only present as the women’s “helpers” when it comes to procreation. Gilbert is repeatedly described in masculine terms; at the beginning of the series, Gilbert is described as “a tall boy, with curly brown hair, roguish hazel eyes and a mouth twisted into a teasing smile,”39 and though Anne declares that he is “handsome,” he never meets Anne’s dark-eyed, inscrutable romantic ideal. After Anne forgives him, he is repeatedly described as her friend or comrade, and the language between them is significantly less romantic than the language between Anne and Diana, at least until the last two pages of Anne of the Island, and even then, as Gubar points out, “Unlike the romantic love shared by Anne and Diana, heterosexual love proves to a large extent unwritable.”40 For most of the series, Gilbert functions as part of the backdrop, too masculine to be allowed fully into Montgomery’s feminine community. As Eve Kornfeld and Susan Jackson claim, “There is no room for traditional masculine qualities in this world of women.”41 There are other men besides Gilbert and the “masculine” men (Fred, Owen, Jem), who figure more significantly within the Anne books, but those who are allowed to enter and live in the feminine community are described in feminine terms. Paul Irving, introduced in Anne of Avonlea, is the first example of this; when Anne meets him, the narrator explains that “he had the most beautiful little face she had ever seen in a child … features of exquisite delicacy and refinement, framed in a halo of chestnut curls. His mouth was delicious, being full without pouting, the crimson lips just softly touching and curving into finely finished little corners that narrowly escaped being dimpled.” He is also said to be “unlike the Avonlea children … unlike other children anywhere” with 278

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“a soul subtly akin to [Anne’s] own.”42 His initial portrayal gives readers a full understanding of his beauty, and his letter to Anne about his rock people leaves no doubt about his imagination and appreciation of romance. Miss Lavender compares him to her “little dream boy,” whom she never lets get much older than twelve, because “he might grow up altogether and then [she’d] lose him.”43 Her remark foreshadows the inevitable for Paul, and he does indeed drop out of the saga as he gets older, though he retains his rights as a kindred spirit through his writing. Paul, however, is only a prototype of the perfect feminine man that would be allowed to inhabit Montgomery’s community, and this man is found in Anne’s own second son, Walter Blythe. In Rainbow Valley the reader learns that he cherishes dreams of becoming a poet and that a “certain Uncle Paul” was his model. Walter, like Paul, is described as beautiful, having “finely modelled features.” He is also a possessor of “his mother’s vivid imagination and passionate love of beauty,”44 which qualify him as entrant to Montgomery’s community of females. Moreover, he retains this special access even into his twenties because of his overwhelming love of beauty, and remains a part of it through his poetry even after his death. In these “feminized men” who gain access to the female community, Montgomery is once again flipping Augustine’s vision. While Augustine’s ideal community is mostly male, it is not exclusively so. He, too, occasionally allows the opposite sex to join, if not as natural equals, then at least as ones who have been made equals through unusual gifts. Just as Montgomery describes Paul and Walter in feminine terms, Augustine’s women are described in masculine terms to justify their inclusion in the community. While they are not physically male, they are, essentially, spiritually male. Monica, Augustine’s mother, is just such a woman. During the weeks prior to her death, Monica travelled with Augustine and his male companions. She was regularly included in their intellectual and religious conversations, and in his Confessions Augustine even records a charismatic experience in which he and his mother together ascend into the heights of heaven on the wings of the intellectual consideration of the beauty of God. In the conversation they spur each other on to greater contemplation of the divine being 279

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and so help each other to a greater experience of the divine presence. Augustine describes Monica’s part in this experience as fully equal to his own. In sum, Augustine says that his companions “were amazed at the courage which Thou hadst given her, a woman.”45 Two other women whom Augustine singles out as worthy of both admiration and emulation by the entire community of God (not just women) are Perpetua and Felicity, Christian martyrs of the early third century. Augustine preached at least three sermons on the anniversary of their deaths, describing them as having “a manly spirit,” and says that God “enabled these women to die faithfully like men.”46 Augustine contends “that it was a greater miracle for women in their weakness to overcome the ancient enemy, [while] the men in their strength engaged in the contest for the sake of perpetual felicity.”47 Notice Augustine’s claim that the men engaged in the contest “in their strength,” while at all times he is careful to ascribe any female strength to miraculous gifts rather than inherent ability. Men are members of this community by virtue of their created (natural) qualities, while women gain these qualities only through rare, supernatural gifting. Augustine states that “According to the inner self they [Perpetua and Felicity] are found to be neither male nor female; so that even as regards the femininity of the body, the sex of the flesh is concealed by the virtue of the mind, and one is reluctant to think about a condition in their members that never showed in their deeds.”48 Just as feminized men are given entrance into Montgomery’s community, so masculinized women are allowed into Augustine’s. It is noteworthy that two of these women (Monica and Perpetua) become “manly” through the seeing of divine visions, calling to mind Walter and his capacity for visions, embodied most fully in his vision of the Pied Piper. But while Montgomery seems to limit the number of men allowed into her female communities, Augustine wonders if perhaps all women would have eventually been included into the male-dominated community if sin had not been introduced. He writes in his Literal Commentary on Genesis, “However, maybe the woman had not yet [at the time of her temptation by the serpent] received this grace that comes with the knowledge of God, but would have acquired it only gradually, under the man’s rule and management.”49 280

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Conclusion Augustine’s vision for a purely masculine community is laid out in his writings, wherein he concludes that relationships between males are more satisfactory for all facets of life, from work to companionship. He does acknowledge that women are useful and necessary for marriage and procreation, but only because marriage and procreation further the human species as a whole, allowing for greater friendships to be created. Centuries later, L.M. Montgomery fashions a similar, but feminized, community in the Anne series;50 in these books, we find that, like Augustine, Montgomery concludes that relationships between females are more satisfactory than those between females and males, and more beneficial to work and companionship. She agrees that men are necessary for procreation, but suggests that, no matter the circumstances of a child’s birth, any woman can find true joy, purpose, and influence through the raising of children, her own or others’. While both Augustine’s and Montgomery’s communities are open to members of the opposite sex, one seeking to join must possess the traits of the community they are entering in order to be accepted. While Augustine muses that perhaps, through male influence, women would be able to join fully in his community, Montgomery chooses to feminize Augustine’s vision for a homosocial community entirely, allowing her female characters to find happiness and purpose, as well as true love – both romantic and companionable – apart from the influence of men, and, in doing so circumvent some of the boundaries drawn for them by a patriarchal society.

No t e s 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Montgomery, ain, 83. As cited in Clark, Women in the Early Church, 289. As cited in ibid., 31–2. Augustine, “On the Good of Marriage,” 403. Ibid., 403. Robinson, “Sex Matters,” 171. One of the best examples of this is Valancy Stirling of The Blue Castle.

281

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8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Augustine, “On the Good of Marriage,” 403. Robinson, “Bosom Friends,” 19. Montgomery, agg, 57. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 123. Montgomery, ai, 158. Ibid., 149. Cormier, “Womanhood in Flux,” 207. Ibid., 208. Montgomery, agg, 327–8. Gubar, “Where Is the Boy?” 55. Montgomery, agg, 133. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 162. Kannas, this volume, chapter 9. Montgomery, ahd, 24. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 103. Parmiter, “Like a Childless Mother,” this volume, 327. Montgomery, ahd, 129. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 123. Stallcup, “She Knew She Wanted to Kiss Him,” 126. Montgomery, ahd, 208. Ibid. Ibid. Montgomery, rv, 66. Ibid., 67. Una is certainly yet another example of female religious leadership, since the practical command to “love your neighbour” is fulfilled when Miss Cornelia adopts Mary and when Rosemary agrees to marry Mr Meredith, both of which happen at Una’s promptings. Montgomery, ain, 6. Montgomery, agg, 153. Gubar, “Where Is the Boy?” 64. Kornfeld and Jackson, “The Female Bildungsroman,” 71. Montgomery, aa, 34. Ibid., 250–1. Montgomery, rv, 17. Augustine, Confessions, 142. 282

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46 47 48 49 50

Augustine, Sermon, 281. Ibid., 282. Ibid., 280. Clark, Women in the Early Church, 40. For an interesting comparison, please see Heather Ladd and Erin Spring’s essay “Feminizing Thomson’s The Seasons: Identity, Gender, and Seasonal Aesthetics in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables,” this volume, chapter 13.

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13 Feminizing Thomson’s The Seasons Identity, Gender, and Seasonal Aesthetics in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables

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n In chapter 5 of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), Maril-

la questions Anne about her previous education. Although Anne has been to school only infrequently (seasonally, only in the spring and fall), she voices her excitement about the verses she has read and memorized. Her list includes The Seasons (1730) a poem cycle by eighteenthcentury Scottish author James Thomson. Comprising “Winter,” “Summer,” “Spring,” “Autumn,” and “A Hymn on The Seasons,” Thomson’s long poem articulates a deeply felt appreciation of the natural world for its own sake, a theme taken up by the Romantics at the beginning of the nineteenth century. His work had international appeal and was

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frequently anthologized and included in schoolbooks; unsurprisingly, young Montgomery knew it well. Thomson’s text was central to Montgomery’s creative development, as she reveals in her essay “How I Began to Write” (1911). In this piece, originally published in the Toronto Globe, Montgomery reflects, “I remember the very first ‘poetry’ I ever wrote. I was nine years old, and I had been reading Thomson’s ‘Seasons,’ of which a little curly-covered, atrociously-printed copy had fallen into my hands. So I composed a poem called ‘Autumn,’ in blank verse, in imitation thereof … ‘Autumn’ had many successors.”1 Attesting to this statement is a slim volume of Montgomery’s poetry edited by John Ferns and Kevin McCabe that begins with a section called The Seasons and the Rural Round. In these eleven poems and elsewhere in her oeuvre of verse, the author obsessively conceives of time and the self, particularly the youthful self, through seasonal change. In her later non-fiction, Montgomery reflects on “the woods” in each of their seasons in four essays published in the Canadian Magazine in May, September, October, and December of 1911. Anne of Green Gables, which can be considered one of the “successors” to Montgomery’s fledgling effort in verse, novelizes the interrelationship between the seasonal landscape and the human subject, both changed by the passing of time. Montgomery feminizes the aesthetic model that Thomson is operating within, in which the individual’s rapport with the seasonal natural world is made explicit. In their chapter in this volume, Christina Hitchcock and Kiera Ball identify a similar process of feminization in the Anne books, investigating Montgomery’s revisionary use of Augustine’s model of an ideal, single-sex community.2 The relationship between Montgomery’s and Thomson’s imaginative worlds is likewise gender-complicated, for identity, particularly subjective female identity, is established in Anne of Green Gables through the heroine’s feeling engagement with seasonal geographies, an engagement that has its source in the “pre-Romantic” verse of James Thomson. Montgomery scholars have attended to the affinities between verse and prose in her novels, notably in the Anne and Emily books. Elizabeth Epperly notes that “Montgomery’s nature descriptions are full of poetry,” making a kind of “prose-poetry” that allows Anne a 285

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“communion with beauty.”3 Likewise, Epperly examines allusions in Anne of Green Gables to works by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Robert Browning and acknowledges the particular “humanness” of Montgomery’s own poetic descriptions.4 Margaret Doody has written about the influence of eighteenth-century writers on Montgomery, briefly noting how Thomson’s The Seasons shaped Emily of New Moon.5 While scholars have reflected on Montgomery’s debt to Britain’s Romantic poets, such as William Wordsworth and John Keats, her treatment of setting, and the links between Anne’s imagination, self-expression, time, and physical surroundings, there are no studies that tease out the connections between Montgomery and Thomson. One explanation for this gap is that the Scotsman’s verses fell out of readers’ favour in the twentieth century, and only in recent decades has scholarly interest in The Seasons returned. Hence, this important eighteenth-century work is often ignored as an intertext, particularly as a transnational intertext. Montgomery’s heroine and Thomson’s poetic persona celebrate the seasons in similar fashion, both taken by the extraordinary beauty and plenitude of the natural world. The material within each part of The Seasons is organized chronologically: in “Spring,” “Autumn,” and “Winter,” the poet follows each season’s course, while “Summer” records from dawn to dusk the impressions of a single summer’s day. The proximity of the individual to the natural world is by turns that of a painter (in the vein of J.M.W. Turner), and a scientist – the empiricist closely attending to the workings of the natural world. Kevis Goodman considers The Seasons as the product of Thomson’s “microscopic eye,” a poetics informed by the Enlightenment optics of Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke.6 In these four sections of Thomson’s descriptive long poem, the poet traces nature in its cyclical variety; much like Anne, Thomson catalogues nature’s bewitching heterogeneity, as well as his own intellectual and emotional responses to the landscape, in a style that is deliberately poetic, steeped in Latinate diction and periphrastic phrasing. Thomson describes hatching birds as breaking “their brittle bondage,” uses “the bleating kind” instead of sheep, and replaces child with “The human blossom.”7 Although the great eighteenth-century writer and critic Samuel Johnson admired Thomson’s “genius” and 286

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originality, he also complained about the poet’s “florid and luxuriant” writing.8 Thomson’s verses indeed teem with sensory detail – much of it temporally specific. Scholars have recognized the “keenness of [Thomson’s] colour-sense”9 and his sensitivity to the shifting stimuli of the landscape in time. The speaker notes the harvest of Autumnal fruit: “the downy peach; the shining plum … the ruddy nectarine, and dark / Beneath his ample leaf the luscious fig.”10 L.M. Montgomery’s 1911 seasonal “woods” essays and Anne of Green Gables show the influence of Thomson’s The Seasons in a close attention to aesthetic changes in the seasonal landscapes. The embodied narrator of Montgomery’s four “woods” essays, which are steeped in poetic discourse, vividly describes her impressions as she experiences the woods at different times of the year. Like Anne, she humanizes the landscape, observing in “The Woods in Summer” that “Trees have as much individuality as human beings who love and learn them.”11 She finds community and companionship in this natural space, likening the trees to “old friends” whom she visits year-round.12 As in Montgomery’s fiction, the essays are sensorially rich, especially visually, the winter trees being “a symphony of greens and grays.”13 In “The Woods in Autumn,” the narrator similarly writes that, “when autumn comes, the maples give up trying to be sober and flame out in all the barbaric splendour and gorgeousness of their real natures.”14 Marilyn Solt considers the influence of place on Anne of Green Gables, arguing that Anne’s ability to connect with and visualize setting is what makes the text seem “fresh and alive to contemporary readers even though the time portrayed is now far in the past.”15 Similarly, Joy Alexander writes about Avonlea as being “governed by space, place, and nature,”16 where Anne finds belonging. Avonlea becomes a “crucial aspect of [Anne’s] psyche.”17 While Anne’s vivid descriptions of the island highlight the seasonal changes that take place, these changes are explicitly aligned with her own physical growth and maturation. This mirrors Elizabeth Epperly’s assertion that Montgomery “genders time” in Magic for Marigold.18 The majority of Montgomery’s chapters begin with an acknowledgment of the specific season that Anne inhabits, the novel covering a period of about five years. Solt has 287

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similarly noted that Montgomery marks the passing of time through seasonal imagery, primarily because Anne is “intensely aware of the natural beauty surrounding her.”19 Anne follows the same aesthetic impulse as Thomson, gravitating toward an ornamental, discursive style. Perpetually recoiling from both the ugly and the quotidian, she is consciously poetic in observing the seasonal beauty around her. Anne’s diction reflects her reverence for nature, which is too special to be rendered in ordinary language. In chapter 5, Anne sees a wild rose, and explains to Marilla that she “read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I’ve never been able to believe it. I don’t believe a rose would be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.”20 Echoing Thomson’s verse, Anne visualizes her physical surroundings in a poetic, highly descriptive, and specifically feminized way. Nature is associated with conventionally female emotions, life experiences, and modes of self-presentation. Anne observes the flowers in the woods behind Green Gables, where “there were myriads of delicate ‘June bells,’ those shyest and sweetest of woodland blooms, and a few pale, aerial starflowers, like the spirits of last year’s blossoms. Gossamers glimmered like threads of silver among the trees and the fir boughs and tassels seemed to utter friendly speech.”21 In the first half of the novel, Anne’s relationship with nature operates as an egalitarian friendship. Vis-à-vis engagements with the natural world that dissolve boundaries between private subjectivity and social experience, such as the example above, Anne integrates herself into the Avonlea community as a social and physical place. Montgomery initially feminizes Nature by affiliating it with the female child Anne’s feelings of safety and companionship in her new home: with her desire and commitment to growing roots in this specific place. In her adolescence, the natural world continues to be feminized, but the changes Anne observes become symbolic of her own maturation and gradual movement toward adulthood. In Montgomery’s worlds, both people and landscapes experience personal development. The narrator of the “woods” essays notes the differences between the spring and summer plant life, imagining that the summer trees “know they have lost the freshness of their first youth.”22 288

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While all four seasons are represented in Anne of Green Gables, Anne pays particular attention to springtime, a period symbolic of regeneration and growth. This season is particularly feminized through Anne’s descriptions of trees and flowers in bloom. Upon arrival, she enthuses that “the island is the bloomiest place,” many scholars remarking on the quality of Anne’s first impressions as well as the nuance of her accrued observations on familiar landmarks.23 Anne “revel[s] in the world of colour around her;”24 her direct observations and those filtered through the novel’s narrator are vividly hued, from the “pinkblossomed” mayflowers and violets, to the “dark red and bronzy green” wild cherry trees, and the birches “as golden as sunshine.”25 Not only, then, is Anne’s discourse aligned with feminine emotions and experiences, but references to flowers and trees “in bloom” symbolize rebirth, ultimately foreshadowing her own emotional restoration and transition from girlhood into adolescence while living in this place. As Epperly suggests, Montgomery “privilege[s] cycles and seasons” over a linear sense of time.26 Both Montgomery and Thomson use colour to animate – and sometimes to gender – their landscapes. In both “Spring” and “Winter,” Thomson extensively paints with the colour white. The green world of “Spring” is whitely verdant, the poet-observer noting “the snow-drop” and the “hyacinths, of purest virgin white”; the summer landscape is characterized by flocks of “snowy white” sheep.27 The winter landscape, a “wild dazzling waste,” is even more forcefully dominated by white.28 After a snowfall, the speaker observes that “The cherished fields / Put on their winter-robe of purest white. / ’Tis brightness all.”29 In Montgomery’s “The Woods in Winter,” the authorial voice similarly describes the first snowfall: “the woods are at peace in their white loveliness.”30 For Thomson, whiteness symbolizes divinity and the moral purity of the pre-lapsarian earth. Likewise, in Anne of Green Gables, the heroine ventures that the white world “looks like something God had just imagined.”31 Epperly, who opines that “colour is significant in all Montgomery’s books,” elaborates that, within her novels, particularly Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), “patterns of colour characterize place, state of mind, relationships, narrative turn, and human possibilities.”32 The 289

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insistent evocation of white in the first of the Anne books suggests the tendency – evident in both Thomson’s poetic persona and Montgomery’s heroine – to idealize, or even idolize, nature. For Montgomery, however, white also represents childhood innocence and specifically feminine bridal virginity. On the initial carriage ride to Green Gables with Matthew, Anne observes that the “blooming wild cherry-trees … all white and lacy” make her think of “a bride all in white with a lovely misty veil.”33 Anne’s discourse on nature is replete with words associated with the female identity as it is socially constructed; through the lens of the heroine’s imagination, the natural world – blooming, fragrant, lacy – is feminine, delicately beautiful, almost never sublimely unapproachable, but sometimes slightly mysterious. Likewise, in Montgomery’s poetry, white is central to several of her verse landscapes, as she writes in “The First Snowfall”: “Then comes the snowfall, as pale Autumn folds / A misty bridal veil about her hair.”34 Anne and the poet-speaker of The Seasons are more than simply careful observers of nature. “The raptured eye” of Thomson’s work goes beyond passive looking, as The Seasons is punctuated with the speaker’s exclamations and other signs of an individual’s bodily responsiveness to the natural world.35 As Robert Inglesfield summarizes, “the solitary poet-philosopher, conversing with ‘Nature,’ achieves an emotional harmony that he conveys through ‘pathetic’ poetry.”36 Less cloistered than her verse predecessor, Montgomery’s protagonist is keen to share her personal and emotional investment in nature. Wishing to directly communicate her gratitude and excitement, the socially-oriented Anne tells Marilla, “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers … Look at these maple branches. Don’t they give you a thrill – several thrills?”37 Likewise, her statement-cum-query “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are white frosts, aren’t you?” is an implicit attempt to create a community of nature-lovers.38 In these familial, even “cozy,” moments of seasonally focused appreciation of the environment, Montgomery diverges from the masculine solipsism of Thomson and his Romantic successors. Yet Montgomery and Thomson converge again in their shared emphasis on the role of the imagination – the faculty of “the 290

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mind’s creative eye” – in connecting people and landscapes.39 At several points in his verse cycle, Thomson creates a “visionary scene” rather than a precise record of what an individual sees and feels.40 Scholar of the eighteenth century Patricia Meyer Spacks clarifies the role of “fancy” in The Seasons, noting that much of the poem “derives from imagination rather than actual perception.”41 Thomson, argues Spacks, values “the capacity of imagination to enlarge the bounds of physical perception.”42 In her diary, Montgomery recognizes her own proclivity to poetic licence. She reflects on that first Thomson-inspired poem: “As for ‘Autumn,’ I can recall only the opening lines: ‘Now Autumn comes, laden with peach and pear: / the sportman’s horn is heard throughout the land …’ True, peaches and pears were not abundant in Prince Edward Island at any season, and I am sure nobody ever heard a ‘sportsman’s horn’ in this Province … But in those glorious days my budding imagination declined to be hampered by facts. Thomson had sportsmen’s horns, and so forth; therefore I must have them, too.”43 Montgomery gives her later heroine, Emily Starr, this same childhood experience with the poetry of James Thomson. Early in Emily of New Moon, which Epperly labels a “literary autobiography,” the heroine writes in a letter to her late father that “there is a little curly black-covered book in Aunt Elizabeth’s bookcase called Thomson’s Seasons and I decided I would write a poem on a season.”44 Enjoying the “pretty words” of this work, Emily, like Montgomery, composes verse on autumn and includes the same fanciful imagery.45 Moreover, as Epperly observes, “the melancholy tread of Thomson” and other early-encountered texts, “worked their lasting magic on Emily the writer and the woman.”46 While not explicitly a poet-heroine like Emily Starr, Anne’s creative engagement with her childhood reading – which also includes Tennyson and Byron – and her environment are paramount to her sense of self, as “romanticized nature and romantic allusions are parts of Anne’s identity, self-discovery, and love of home.”47 Anne views nature and herself through the lens of fancy. Her writerly imaginative capacities shape how she engages with the natural world through naming and renaming – a theme that persists throughout the series. Upon arrival, Marilla asks Anne to tell her “what she knows 291

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about herself,” to which Anne replies: “Oh, what I know about myself isn’t really worth telling. If you’ll only let me tell you what I imagine about myself you’ll think it ever so much more interesting.”48 Marilla’s first question to Anne is, “What is your name?”49 Anne asks that Marilla call her Cordelia, as “it’s such a perfectly elegant name.”50 Throughout the text, this binary of “knowing” (or simply stating) versus “imagining” foregrounds both Anne’s seasonal reflections and her own identity development. She renames places and objects in the natural world, giving them more romantic, luxuriant names and elevating or transposing them from the ordinary into the imaginative. Anne tells Marilla that she is “fond of romantic things,” explaining that she has renamed Barry’s Pond the more elegant “Lake of Shining Waters.” 51 Part of belonging to Green Gables involves Anne becoming familiar with her physical and social surroundings. Renaming allows these places to become her own. In giving names to things, she is giving something of herself to place; she is making her mark. Her emphasis on renaming locations or objects, such as her geranium, Bonny, reinforces the connection between the natural world and Anne’s identification with her surroundings. Her seeking to find her own identity – her own name – and giving names to other people and things, strengthens the bond that she has with Green Gables. After a few short weeks in Avonlea, Josephine Barry asks Anne a similar question: “Who are you?” to which Anne replies, “I’m Anne of Green Gables.”52 The word of changes everything: Anne is able to identify with her name, with her sense of self, now that she is part of place. She is no longer “orphan” Anne but Anne “of.” Although she still feels that the name Anne is unromantic, she says “it’s a million times nicer to be Anne of Green Gables than Anne of nowhere in particular.”53 She is able to “reject” the idea of being called Cordelia once she is comfortable being Anne. Both Thomson’s speaker and Anne personify the natural world with which they interact through their senses and “fancy.” Nonetheless, Thomson’s tendency is toward abstraction and moralization. Montgomery, however, takes personification a step further than her eighteenth-century counterpart and humanizes the natural world, this humanization effected through friendship and storytelling. While both 292

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authors’ focalizers attribute human emotions and agency to inanimate aspects of the natural world, Anne does not gender her environment female to objectify it, but to befriend it; she imbues inanimate things with personal histories, thus fashioning an imagined community for herself even before she uses nature to cement the human bonds tying her to Avonlea. Anne’s relationship to the natural world is feminine insofar as it is both familiar and egalitarian: an idea of same-sex friendship as intimate and non-hierarchical. Montgomery’s heroine befriends the natural world, her affective responses to the landscape changing with the shifting Canadian seasons. Humanizing natural features of Avonlea through the seasons reinforces her own affective links to her home. The trees “talk in their sleep,” while the brook “laughs.”54 Not only does Anne personify nature, but other characters explicitly align Anne with nature. Rachel Lynde tells Marilla that “Ruby Gillis’ looks are real showy. But somehow … when Anne and them are together, although she ain’t half as handsome, she makes them look kind of common and overdone – something like them white June lilies she calls narcissus alongside of the big, red peonies, that’s what.”55 Here, nature’s palette is used to underscore Anne’s individuality. Not only is Anne an observer of the natural world, but she is part of it. In “Spring in the Woods,” the narrator similarly notes that the woods “are so human that to know them we must live with them.”56 Although supremely sensitive to the beauties of nature, Thomson’s and Montgomery’s focalizers cannot always convey this understanding. At the height of the blooming season in Thomson’s poem cycle, “Spring” flowers showcase an array of colours to the human observer who marvels at their “Infinite numbers, delicacies, smells, / With hues on hues expression cannot paint.”57 Sometimes the speaker is rendered speechless by the splendour before him; or, he confesses the limits of his descriptive powers and “meditates on the inability of poetic language to properly render the beauties of nature.”58 Likewise, Anne is “struck dumb” by the beauty of the Avenue upon first sight: “She leaned back in the buggy, her thin hands clasped before her, her face lifted rapturously to the white splendour above. Even when they had passed out and were driving down the long slope to Newbridge 293

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she never moved or spoke.”59 Observing the creator’s hand in the natural world, Thomson concludes his celebration of the seasons with “Hymn on the Seasons,” in which he welcomes “expressive Silence.”60 Almost paradoxically, the long poem ends with this allusion to mute praise, which seems an abnegation of the masculine logos that informs the speaker’s perspective on nature. Thomson’s final movement beyond the articulable is akin to Anne’s rhetorical progress in the first novel of the series, for, as Epperly posits, “having learned the true romance of nature and belonging, Anne is almost ready to give up the artificial speech that before separated her from an uncaring environment.”61 While there are moments when Anne embellishes nature through renaming, there are also instances where the heroine admits that nature cannot be improved upon by words. In a conversation about the “White Way of Delight,” she muses, “Pretty? Oh, pretty doesn’t seem the right word to use. Nor beautiful, either. They don’t go far enough … It’s the first thing I ever saw that couldn’t be improved upon by imagination.”62 Yet when she does improve on reality, on the disappointing stories and names of exquisite things, she does not do so to exercise her power over the insentient, but as an appreciative, even companionable, gesture. Similarly, in “The Woods in Autumn,” the narrator writes that much of her surroundings “cannot be expressed in terms of the dictionary or symbols of earth, but must be seen to be believed or realized.”63 Likewise, in the concluding thoughts of “The Woods in Winter,” the narrator describes a transcendent moment in nature as “inexpressibly marvellous.”64 Montgomery selectively draws on The Seasons and rejects much of the “harder,” less lyrical, attitudes within this eighteenth-century work. Thomson’s poetics of nature are traditionally masculine in their ideologies and methodologies. Literary historian John Barrell discusses Thomson’s conservative vision of the natural world: the Enlightenment poet’s idea of landscape necessitates the organization of details into what Barrell discusses as “a preconceived structure.”65 Thus, The Seasons form something of a “natural historical taxonomy,” to use Heather Keenleyside’s phrase.66 The speaker’s self-consciously masculine responses to the landscape are tied to his search for knowledge, both spiritual and scientific. In Montgomery’s writing, however, local meanings – the 294

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casual, the private – are more important. For example, in “The Woods in Summer” the narrator refers to “the June-Bells, which have another and more scientific name of course,” but never uses this formal term.67 Despite its plenitude, Thomson’s nature is a space ruled by Christian hierarchies. In “Spring” the speaker observes that “Man superior walks / Amid the glad creation.”68 The Great Chain of Being informs the structure of “Spring,” which delineates the effects of the season’s arrival on first, inanimate objects, and second, vegetation, then animals, and finally, humans. Masculine power dynamics underpin Thomson’s Seasons, even as the landscape is figured as female. The imperative tense is used throughout the poetic cycle, for example. In “Spring,” the speaker exhorts, “Lend me your song, ye nightingales.”69 Jennifer Keith places Thomson within a male literary tradition “in which the poet gendered as masculine proves his mimetic powers by feminizing the objects he represents.”70 Nature is variously fecund, showy, vulnerable, and controllable – by Enlightenment empiricism and taxonimization, by human ordering and classically-influenced poetic representation. Montgomery’s natural world is a thing to be observed in great detail, but also with great love, a point Tara K. Parmiter makes as she positions Montgomery within the nature study movement, a trend in educating children popularized in the 1890s that encouraged “deeper sympathy and respect for nonhuman nature.”71 Thomson’s landscapes likewise engender respectful wonder, if not quite sympathy. “Winter,” the most philosophical part of Thomson’s poetic cycle, is concerned with the sublime aspects of nature – aweinspiring vistas and dangerous forces like the sea and the storm. Hostility between humans and the environment in The Seasons erupts most prominently in this section, the first Thomson wrote and published. The speaker notes “the fierce rage of Winter,” earlier labelled “the cruel season.”72 Thomson’s “Winter” figures the sea as a fierce antagonist to the human subject. The winter seascape is not simply an aesthetic exercise in the sublime, but a prompt for reflection on human suffering and mortality. The poet conjures an image of a boat battered by the waves, and the speaker laments that “Ill fares the bark, with 295

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trembling wretches charged.”73 Significantly, the relationship with “Dread Winter,” even with its altered power dynamics, is still hierarchical.74 Thomson’s speaker is humbled by the divine order and the awesome power evidenced by nature’s seasonal extremes. Observing the powerful forces shaping the landscape, he exclaims, “Essential Presence, hail! / To thee I bend the knee.”75 Thomson’s speaker seems to resign any paternalistic control over the natural world, but this relationship is still hierarchical, and hence masculine, whether the human is positioned above or below the natural. While Anne expresses her wonder at the season’s elements, she also seems to both befriend and identify with nature. When she is first told by Marilla that they might not keep her at Green Gables, Anne explains that “if I go out there and get acquainted with all those trees and flowers and the orchard and the brook I’ll not be able to help loving it … everything seems to be calling to me, ‘Anne, Anne, come out to us. Anne, Anne, we want a playmate’ – but it’s better not. There is no use in loving things if you have to be torn from them.”76 Soon, she “was acquainted with every tree and shrub”77 and the birches “waved joyful hands”78 at Anne. She thinks it would “be nice if roses could talk.”79 While Anne perceives the gardens surrounding the Barry house as a “bowery wilderness of flowers,” echoing aspects of the sublime, Montgomery’s vision of the natural world is gentler. 80 Anne’s beloved landscapes are beautiful, largely unthreatening, and even kindly; she positions herself in close proximity to nature, personifying flowers and trees as companions. In contrast to Thomson, Anne focuses on the beauty and pleasure of the frost-laden trees and gardens in wintertime: “Oh, Matthew, isn’t it a wonderful morning? The world looks like something God had just imagined for His own pleasure, doesn’t it? Those trees look as if I could blow them away with a breath – pouf!”81 Rather than the hierarchical positioning found in Thomson, Anne’s reflections (“as if I could blow them away”) position her as equal, a force that both acts and is acted upon. Rather than seeing winter as “the cruel season,” the romantic, feminized view of the seasons adopted by Anne in summer and spring carries through to her descriptions of winter. The “cathedral aisle”82 of 296

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the Avenue in the summer is matched with the “glittering fairy arch”83 of Lover’s Lane in winter. While she calls winter “mysterious,” marking it as somewhat different from the other seasons, she still reflects on it positively. 84 In Anne’s early days at Green Gables, her physical surroundings are presented as safe spaces – the orchard, the pond, Green Gables, her bedroom. These spaces are bordered and can thus be easily nurtured and tamed. It is not surprising, then, that these are the places that are aligned with Anne’s childhood. On the carriage ride from Bright River Station to Avonlea, Anne tells Matthew, “Mrs. Spencer said your place was named Green Gables. And she said there were trees all around it. I was gladder than ever. I just love trees. And there weren’t any at all about the asylum, only a few poor weeny-teeny things out in front with little whitewashed cagey things about them. They just looked like orphans themselves, those trees did. I used to say to them, ‘Oh, you poor little things! If you were out in a great big woods with other trees all around you … you could grow, couldn’t you? But you can’t where you are. I know just exactly how you feel, little trees.’”85 Anne equates her own feelings of dislocation or orphanhood to weak saplings. In order to be strong, and able to grow, rootedness is essential. Anne’s observations also reiterate the importance of community as a key facilitator of healthy growth, an argument reiterated by Susan Drain in relation to Anne’s arrival on the island: “individuality, then, is established not in contrast to a community, but by a commitment to it.”86 Anne understands that it is no use trying to grow without the sustenance of other trees. This comparison highlights Anne’s awareness of what is needed for a nurturing, supportive home and community. As Anne is reflecting on the orphan trees, she and Matthew are passing through the Avenue, with cherry blossoms, in full bloom, on either side. Marilyn Solt has argued that this particular image anticipates Anne’s eventual growth and belonging on the island.87 Once Matthew and Marilla decide to keep Anne, the tree imagery, in particular, shifts, alluding to Anne’s ability to grow and “blossom” in their care. Anne’s recollections of weak, orphan-like trees are soon replaced with those of trees in bloom, such as the ones that grow along the 297

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Avenue. Branches literally tap against Anne’s east-gable window, from a tree “so thick-set with blossoms that hardly a leaf was to be seen.”88 Trees “showered over with blossoms.”89 The conflation of the processes of nature and girlhood is at the centre of Montgomery’s poem “The Gable Window.” The speaker nostalgically reflects, “The airy dreams of child and maiden / Hang round that gable window still / As cling the vines, green and leaf-laden, / About the sill.”90 Before Anne leaves for Queen’s, Marilla tells her, “I was wishing you could have stayed a little girl  …  You’ve grown up now and you’re going away, and you look so tall.”91 In response, Anne reassures Marilla, explaining: “I’m not a bit changed –  not really. I’m only just pruned down and branched out. The real me, back here, is just the same. It won’t make a bit of difference where I go or how much I change outwardly … I shall always be your little Anne, who will love you  …  and Green Gables … every day of her life.”92 “Branched” connotes positive, unimpeded growth, while “pruned” suggests the necessary violence of cultivation. “Pruned” implies that, in order to transition from childhood into young adulthood, Anne has to shed parts of her old self. Though Anne claims to be the same girl at her core, she has needed to be pruned down from her childhood-self in order to move outwards into the world, again aligning tree growth with her shifting identity. Sentiments akin to this pruning are likewise present in The Seasons, which positions both the poet and the farmer as participating in the refinement of the natural. Informed by the Enlightenment optimism of thinkers such as Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, from whom he draws both the belief in “a beneficent cosmic order” and humankind’s moral perfectibility,93 Thomson traces civilization’s progress in “Autumn.” He celebrates the power of “Industry,” which “His faculties unfolded; pointed out / Where lavish Nature the directing hand / Of Art demanded.”94 Other passages in the poem, informed by Virgil’s Georgics (29 bce), depict the agricultural work of controlling “lavish Nature” (“Summer”) from the sower with his “measured step” (“Spring”) and the reaper (“Autumn”), to the shepherd with his “well-guided shears” (“Summer”). In both poem and novel, nature’s decay also symbolically reflects human concerns and spheres of activity. Thomson details how the chill 298

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of Autumn radically alters the landscape into “a desolated prospect”; autumnal winds act upon the flowers of the field, for “shrunk into their beds, the flowery race / Their sunny robes resign.”95 Significantly, this natural desolation is accompanied by the approach of “Philosophic Melancholy,” this personified figure representing one of the various moods and attitudes that, akin to seasonal change, transform the human psyche.96 When Anne returns to Green Gables after being away at college in Anne of the Island, she notices that the Snow Queen is dead, as it is rotten at its core. This is a moment of pathetic fallacy, reflecting her childhood’s demise. This image of the blooming tree outside Anne’s bedroom window reiterates a shift in the way place is presented, but it also signals that Anne herself is transitioning from childhood into adolescence. Nature speaks to Anne differently through these stages of her life. The treescape remains a safe space, but it becomes more wild or untameable, illustrating Anne’s gradual maturation. The house, which provides Anne with stability, with roots, is surrounded with trees in bloom, suggesting that Anne’s transition between childhood and adolescence is gradual; she can have roots and bloom, simultaneously. Increasingly self-reflective, Anne’s awareness of change is apparent when she tells Marilla that she will miss the Snow Queen, which represents her childhood: “‘What has happened to the old Snow Queen, Marilla?’ ‘Oh I knew you would feel bad over that,’ said Marilla. ‘I felt bad myself. That tree was there ever since I was a young girl. It blew down in the big gale we had in March. It was rotten at the core.’ ‘I’ll miss it so,’ grieved Anne … ‘I’ll never look from [the] window again without a sense of loss.’”97 Until now, Anne’s growth has been equated with the deeply-rooted, blooming trees that are found on the island. The demise of the Snow Queen reflects the loss of something central to both Marilla and Anne. When a tree dies in the forest, it decomposes into the soil; its death will result in new growth. Marilla’s use of the word “rotten” in relation to the tree could also be indicative of the end of childhood. Again, we see the tensions of not wanting to grow up, and of Anne mourning her childhood, but simultaneously of acknowledging the need to grow. Rotting can indicate the end of something, the death of a living entity, but can also prefigure growth, namely the new life that is rendered from 299

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the same organic material. Therefore, the death of the tree suggests that Anne’s childhood is over, but also that Green Gables will always be part of her identity, an identity predicated on her experiences of home. Thus, in both the Anne series and Montgomery’s poetry, seasonal change engenders nostalgia, tender – often wistful – sentimentality about the past. The landscape is a palimpsest of human activity, one winter bringing to mind memories of other winters past. Montgomery’s “When Autumn Comes,” a poem about an imagined autumnal homecoming, uses sensory impressions of the season to develop a sense of yearning for the “sweet forgotten ways” of a country upbringing.98 The poem ends with the wish to “dream one dream of boyhood ’neath our father’s roof / once more,” the seasonal change suggesting both passing seasons and passing years and the speaker’s maturation.99 The influence of Thomson’s work as a landscape poet is evident in Anne of Green Gables, which also uses the seasons to mark the passing of time, develop Anne’s character and relationships, and celebrate the beauties of rural Canada. In Montgomery’s novel, as in The Seasons, close observation of the natural world is a spur to poetical enthusiasm and the myriad forms of creative, imaginative activity so key to the subjectivities of both Anne and Thomson’s speaker. Anne’s engagement with the changing landscape of Avonlea, particularly the spots near Green Gables, shows Montgomery drawing on – as well as reacting to and working against – Thomson’s The Seasons. Although both Anne of Green Gables and The Seasons chart the individual’s affective relationship with nature, Anne’s responsiveness to the aesthetics of landscape is gendered as feminine in Montgomery’s novel by being associated with the young protagonist’s movement out of girlhood. The seasonal imagery that Montgomery uses is feminine and feminized, with blooming trees and blossoming flowers symbolizing Anne’s puberty and seasonal changes presenting readers with a visual correlative of the heroine’s mental and physical transformation in the novel. Yet Montgomery does not simply draw on the poetic tools of eighteenth-century nature poetry to demonstrate her heroine’s coming of age. Anne’s sociable world, which unites landscape and human community, lacks the hierarchical bent of Thomson’s The Seasons. Montgomery exchanges Thomson’s 300

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poet-philosopher for a protagonist for whom nature is by turns a mother and a friend, the novelist thus offering a criticism of the traditionally male perspectives on nature.

No t e s 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Montgomery, “How I Began to Write” in Lefebvre, Montgomery Reader, 1:68. Hitchcock and Ball, “Orgies of Lovemaking,” this volume, chapter 12. Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 28–9. Ibid., 28. Doody, “Significance of ‘Classics,’” 81. K. Goodman, Georgic Modernity, 12. Thomson, “Spring,” 672; “Winter,” 261; “Spring,” 1147. Johnson, “Thomson,” 269. James Logie Robertson, “Preface,” vi. Thomson, “Autumn,” 676–9. Montgomery, “The Woods in Summer,” 401. Montgomery, “The Woods in Winter,” 162. Ibid., 164. Montgomery, “The Woods in Autumn,” 574. Solt, “The Uses of Setting,” 198. Alexander, “Anne with Two ‘G’s,” 43. Ibid. See Epperly, “Magic for Marigold: Engendering Questions about What Lasts,” this volume, 333. Solt, “The Uses of Setting,” 179. Montgomery, agg, 89. Ibid., 110. Montgomery, “The Woods in Summer,” 399. Montgomery, agg, 66. Ibid., 163. Ibid., 199–200, 163. Epperly, “Magic for Marigold,” this volume, 336. Thomson, “Spring,” 530, 547; “Summer,” 394. Thomson, “Winter,” 239. Ibid., 232–4. Montgomery, “The Woods in Winter,” 163. Montgomery, agg, 171. Epperly, “Natural Bridge,” 106. 301

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

Montgomery, agg, 65-6. Montgomery, Poetry, 36. Thomson, “Summer,” 1407. Inglesfield, “Thomson and Shaftesbury,” 89. Montgomery, agg, 163. Ibid., 185. Thomson, “Autumn,” 1016. Ibid., 1122. Spacks, “Vision and Meaning,” 217. Ibid. Montgomery, “How I Began to Write” in Lefebvre, Montgomery Reader, 1:68. Montgomery, enm, 98. Ibid., 99. Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 150. Ibid., 37. Montgomery, agg, 88. Ibid., 76. Ibid. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 197. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 74, 82. Ibid., 281. Montgomery, “Spring in the Woods,” 59. Thomson, “Spring,” 553–4. Parker, “James Thomson,” 12. Montgomery, agg, 69. Thomson, “A Hymn,” 118. Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 28. Montgomery, agg, 70. Montgomery, “The Woods in Autumn,” 574. Montgomery, “The Woods in Winter,” 164. Barrell, The Idea of Landscape, 22. Keenleyside, “Personification,” 453. Montgomery, “The Woods in Summer,” 400. Thomson, “Spring,” 170–1. Ibid., 576. Keith, Poetry and the Feminine, 183. Parmiter, “The Spirit of Inquiry,” 146. Thomson, “Winter,” 722, 243. Ibid., 1004. 302

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74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Thomson, “Winter,” 1024. Thomson, “Spring,” 557. Montgomery, agg, 85–6. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 185. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 185. Ibid. Ibid., 68. Drain, “Community,” 19. Solt, “The Uses of Setting,” 180. Montgomery, agg, 81–2. Ibid., 82. Montgomery, Poetry, 82. Montgomery, agg, 304. Ibid., 304. Klein, Shaftesbury, 70. Thomson, “Autumn,” 72, 74–6. Thomson, “Autumn,” 1003, 999–1000. Ibid., 1005. Montgomery, ai, 112. Montgomery, Poetry, 31. Ibid.

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n In a virtual round table titled “Theorizing Queer Temporalities,”

Carolyn Dinshaw states that “we must take seriously temporality’s tremendous social and political force.”1 More explicitly, in Time Binds, Elizabeth Freeman explains that “naked flesh is bound into socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation.”2 She therefore develops “a counter-genealogical practice of archiving culture’s throwaway objects, including the outmoded masculinities and femininities from which usable pasts may be extracted.”3 It is awareness of the force of temporality that has led queer theorists such as Lee Edelman, J. Halberstam, and Heather Love to challenge our assumption that time is natural and linear and to ask us to “look backward” or revalue failure.4 These queer theorists’ perspectives on time can enable those analyzing gender to do so through a fresh lens, that of how a subject is gendered through the experience of time, through existing in a specific era or moment, through inheriting a given tradition, and, moreover, how the construction of identity also constructs a particular understanding of time. Literary scholars Julia McQuillan and Julie Pfeiffer address our conflicted relationship with past representations of gender when they ask, “Why do we enjoy girls’ fiction so much when it often privileges values that can be sexist and offensive? What is it about these engaging, delightful heroines that makes their worlds absorbing to us?” They recognize the push and pull that contemporary women experience when reading Montgomery, noting that “we have the luxury of looking back with a contemporary feminist sensibility”5 that allows both productive analysis of the experiences earlier writers depicted and the pleasure of imaginatively inhabiting another time, a way of being in two times at once.

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The three chapters in this section explore temporal aspects of gendered female experience through recreating a specific time, through the development of identity, and through revising conceptions of time. The section begins with Jane Urquhart’s “Her Reader,” an account of her mother’s childhood experience of reading and of wanting to write. This imaginative personal account focalizes the reading of Montgomery’s works through the experience of one girl reader, showing the importance of that reading in the girl’s understanding of her community and the development of her ambitions and tastes. It also highlights the intergenerational gift that Montgomery provides, as Urquhart’s mother’s desire to write is passed along to her. Urquhart’s piece exemplifies one answer to the questions McQuillan and Pfeiffer ask: in rural Ontario, just after the end of the First World War , stories that focus on personal change and lead to a new way of seeing the familiar must have resonated with that reader. In “Like a Childless Mother: L.M. Montgomery and the Anguish of Mother’s Loss,” Tara K. Parmiter explores how in Anne’s House of Dreams Montgomery writes out her own pain at losing a child by having Anne lose a child, thus postponing Anne’s transformation to motherhood and leaving Anne “in a liminal state of being a mother, yet not a mother.”6 In doing so, she argues, Montgomery exposes the pain and trauma the idealized gender constructs of the period could cause and complicates temporal notions of cause and effect. Elizabeth Rollins Epperly’s “Magic for Marigold: Engendering Questions about What Lasts” relies in part on an understanding of Freeman’s concept of “temporal drag,”7 as Epperly re-evaluates Magic for Marigold, arguing that “Montgomery genders time to engender questions about what persists despite the seeming changes of contemporary times,” and therefore “affirm[s] her own experience of a deeper quality of time.” 8 These writers address Montgomery’s construction of female characters’ identities as inhering in and affecting conceptions of generation, time, and change.

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No t e s 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

Dinshaw, “Theorizing Queer Temporalities,” 178. Freeman, Time Binds, 3. Ibid., xxiii. See Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive; Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History; and Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure. McQuillan and Pfeiffer, “Why Anne Makes Us Dizzy,” 24. Parmiter, “Like a Childless Mother,” 321. Freeman, Time Binds, xxiii. Epperly, “Magic for Marigold,” 333–4.

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14 Her Reader JANE URQUHART

n Early on a Friday afternoon in the long ago twenties of what is now

a former century, a girl of eleven walks up the lane that runs from her Ontario farmhouse to the road. She is heading for the village two miles away. I think it is likely August and therefore hot, but she is wearing a pinafore over a three-quarter-sleeved cotton dress to protect it from being soiled after a day spent mostly out of doors. She is bareheaded – there being no notion at this time that the sun is something to be shunned – and her skin is summer brown. She reaches one hand up now and then to touch her dark, recently bobbed hair, while the other keeps a firm grasp on the handle of her brother’s red wagon. Which brother the wagon belongs to is anyone’s guess; there are already several – all younger than she – so perhaps it is considered communal family property. But one thing is certain in these gender-specific days: the wagon does not belong to her. What she is after in the village does not belong to her either, but more about that later.

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It is important for us to know what she sees as she walks to her destination along the gravel road, because after her summer’s reading it has become important for her to know. Mr Moore, who owns the farm across the road, is plowing the field adjacent to his home, and the girl looks at the details of his flower garden and clapboard house, even one of the sheds out back, the curve of its sagging roof. She knows the names of the two workhorses pulling the plow, just as she knows the names of the horses on her own farm, and of those on all the farms in the district, for agricultural animals are still given names and the quirks of their personalities are much discussed. She also knows the physical characteristics of the field and especially of the creek that runs through it. The creek runs under the road on its way to her father’s property, where it disappears into dim, mysterious cedar woods after crossing a damp pasture. The girl and her brothers have constructed forts and playhouses in the woods and have either pushed each other or waded voluntarily into the creek. Now, as a result of a summer spent reading, these memories seem to have taken on an episodic importance in a way they never have before, and she senses she might find a use for them in the future. She also wants to name the woods in which the small dramas took place, wants to call it something like the Haunted Forest, but knows that a name such as that doesn’t fit the ways in which she and her brothers have passed their time there. To follow the contours of his gently rising land, Mr Moore is plowing east to west, rather than north to south, and he is presented to the girl in profile, almost silhouetted against the hills that dominate Percy Township in Northumberland County, Ontario. The girl has been told that the hills, which gather height and dimension as they approach the nearby village, and then the great lake ten miles father on, were the shores of that lake in a time so long in the past that no one is quite sure whether it was thousands or millions or billions of years ago. But such vast acreages of time seem no more incomprehensible to her than the notion that the place where her own village stands was a wilderness only two hundred years before, not the familiar cluster of buildings that represents all she understands of community. To her, this summer, her small community has become almost mythical. She will never forget her shock of recognition after opening a 310

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brownish-green book with a lovely young woman’s profile on the cover. She had been hesitant to read it until her mother, who had bought the book a decade before when it was first published, assured her that it was about a girl her age. And once the girl in Ontario had followed Anne Shirley home to Green Gables, and had begun to know the people in Avonlea, Prince Edward Island, she realized she could just as easily have been reading about her own world. She had never had an experience like that before. Until then, the books she read were about children and animals in faraway England. The Anne books and the Emily books have electrified her own small life, added meaning and intensity even to the most ordinary of its attributes. The neighbours, the fields, the special chosen places in the landscape, the prankster boys, the politics she hears her father complain about before he goes to the town hall in the village are important to her now in ways they never were before. Soon she is passing her uncle’s farm, so called because he is the one who performs all the physical labour there. In truth, the land and everything on it belongs to the girl’s maternal grandmother, who has always been hard-willed and who, by this time, is beginning to lose her eyesight, which seems to make her tighten her grip on the property. This particular uncle is engaged to be married, and has been for some time, but is unable to set a date for the wedding because he cannot imagine leaving his mother. As the girl passes the farm, a farm not nearly as wooded or well watered as her own, she thinks about the ring her uncle has given to the young woman; white gold with two amethysts set on either side of a small sharp diamond. Jewellery this glamorous and costly is seldom seen, and the ring was much admired by the girl when, a few years before, her uncle opened the small velvet box to show it to his family. She thinks, also, of the “lost diamond,” an ancestral legend in the family of Emily Starr, from Emily of New Moon, and how Emily finds it eventually, as the girl always knew she would. There are legends like this in her own family, tales filled with portents, and separated lovers, and early death. She has always been fascinated by such stories, but now, after spending July with Anne of Green Gables and August with Emily of New Moon, these family tales have gained an added dimension. 3 11

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The west field of her uncle’s farm abuts the graveyard, which lies, like a miniature medieval city, on the very edge of the village. It is a picturesque acre, gently rolling, punctuated here and there with ten or twelve impressive granite pillars, but mostly filled, in an orderly way, with marble headstones on which clasped hands, weeping willows, and occasionally birds in flight are carved. No one in the community is wealthy enough to afford an angel in memory of a loved one. Even if they were, the money would likely have gone toward building the war memorial that stands down the road a little closer to town. It is a modest example of its kind, though on its surface it is possible to find names from almost every family in the vicinity. The girl barely remembers the war, being still quite small when it ended, but now, having begun her introduction to Anne’s daughter in Rilla of Ingleside, she believes that she does remember it, has lived through it. And although no one in her own family was directly affected, she believes she understands with greater clarity the losses it brought about. The war is still much talked about by the master at school and is the subject of many of the poems that she and her classmates are required to memorize and recite in unison. In those poems there are references to the Mother Country of England, whose call was answered by her sons here in the Dominion of Canada. Because of her summer reading, the girl knows more about the emotions connected to this war, about those boys who departed, and about the trance of grief that existed, and exists even now. In the graveyard, over the plots of their pioneer ancestors, the girl has often sworn eternal friendship with other girls of roughly her age, this being considered a very solemn and romantic thing to do. It seems that after all the labour of clearing land, removing stumps and boulders, building log houses and rail fences, and somewhat later brick or frame houses and barns, a general decision had been taken never to move elsewhere, for any one of the girl’s classmates was able to find ancestral graves over which to cement a friendship, if the occasion demanded that they do so. And with those ancestral graves came the ancestral stories of families other than her own, stories that the girl now believes to be charged with meaning, in the same way that the stories she has recently read are resonant and haunting. The landscape surrounding 312

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the graveyard has become more powerful as well. The girl thinks about how the roads, hills, rivers, and sometimes even villages bear the names of the settlers who are buried in this spot. And she knows that Anne or Emily would likely have sworn eternal friendship over graves in their own landscapes near hills and roads named after their own ancestors. The village the girl is now entering is called Castleton, a name relating neither to a settler family nor a castle but connected instead to some lost place in the Mother Country that one or two of the first settlers must have hoped to keep bright in their memories. Now, however, only a century or so later, this humble place is substantial enough that the hamlet that inspired its name is never thought of, and most of the newer Castleton’s inhabitants would be surprised to learn that another Castleton existed anywhere else on the planet. Essentially, with a few straggling exceptions, the village is built around a junction formed by two roads: the one on which the girl’s father’s farm is situated and the one that enters the village from the north and heads toward the great lake. Having walked by the twenty or so houses on the first road, the girl is now approaching the buildings that make up the central core: two general stores, a hardware store, the small, brick town hall, and the frame hotel that also houses a very small branch of the Standard Bank of Canada. Drama, the child now knows, drama of a very significant, almost Shakespearean nature, could be unfolding in the rooms of any one of these structures. Because of her summer reading she has become enlightened to the fact that stories unfolding in the plain brick and clapboard houses of the Dominion of Canada can be just as riveting as those that take place in large, dark country houses set in sad, neglected grounds near glens and moors. What she has come for is housed in the bank. So great is her desire, she has once or twice fantasized about committing an act of robbery but eventually decided that a more conventional method could be used. She leaves her wagon on the wooden sidewalk, walks up the steps, and opens the door. Mr Morton, the bank manager (who is also the teller and the secretary), is standing behind the counter. There are no customers, which pleases the girl because she knows that what she wants 313

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to do will seem foolish to adults and, this being the case, the fewer of these around the better. Mr Morton is relatively new to town, having arrived from Belleville the previous year to take the place of the retiring Mr Dempsey. Several romantic rumours have already begun to circulate about this young, good-looking man, and after her summer reading, these rumours make the girl believe there is gold, of a sort, in simple gossip. But all these possible narratives pale in comparison to what it is that Mr Morton has in his possession. The child stares at the young man until he finally looks up from the column of sums that occupies him. “What is it, Marian?” he asks in a surprisingly respectful manner. He has likely taken into consideration that her father is reeve of the township. Just the previous week, the girl has finished the last page of Emily’s Quest, the third volume in the Emily trilogy by Lucy Maud Montgomery. She is bursting with the idea of climbing the Alpine Path of publishing, first in seed catalogues and then, later, with a big American publisher in Boston or New York. “I want to borrow your typewriter for the weekend,” she says. She knows there is not one other machine of this nature for at least ten miles. Mr. Morton is struck dumb. “You won’t need it till Monday,” the girl continues, “and I promise to take care of it. I won’t let the boys anywhere near it.” “What on earth,” Mr Morton asks with a vaguely condescending smile, “would you be wanting to do with a typewriter?” The girl is surprised. Either he really doesn’t know or he’s pretending not to know. “I am going to write a novel,” she says. Astonishingly, the bank manager in Castleton, Ontario, permitted my mother to take the typewriter back with her to the farm all those years ago. He carried it out of the bank, placed it in the wagon, and after making her promise to have it back first thing on Monday morning he wished her luck with the novel. Although my mother discovered to her great frustration that she knew nothing about typewriters and the bizarre scrambling of the 314

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alphabet in the placement of their keys, and therefore did not complete the first chapter of her novel, she kept the intense love of reading – and of reading Canadian authors – that had been born in her that summer. And decades after she returned the typewriter to Mr Morton at the Standard Bank in Castleton, she passed on those books by Lucy Maud Montgomery, and that love of reading Canadian authors, to me.

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15 Like a Childless Mother L.M. Montgomery and the Anguish of Mother’s Loss

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n On 22 September 1912, three months after the birth of her first son,

Chester, Montgomery returned to her journal to record the “busy doings and wonderful experiences” of her new life as a mother. Besides reporting that she had experienced “no severe pain” in the “birth chamber,” and besides revelling in the “wave of love” that had “engulfed” her in “the exquisite moment of the realization of motherhood,” Montgomery reflects as well on how the joy of being a mother is inherently coupled with fear. As she writes, “How can a mother bear to lose her child! It must be possible, since mothers do bear it and live. But I cannot believe that I could go on living if anything happened to my darling. The mere thought of it sends a thrill of agony to my very soul. The love of motherhood, exquisite as it is, is full of anguish, too.”1 This focus on loss and anguish just at the moment of having gained so much seems eerily prescient: though little Chester survives, Montgomery’s

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next child, a son named Hugh, was stillborn two years later, just at the outbreak of the First World War. What was once a rhetorical question about how a mother could bear such a loss – meant in that moment as an expression of love for the new life “cuddled to [her] breast” – becomes instead what Montgomery calls, on 30 August 1914, a “dream of horror.”2 Suddenly, she does have to learn how to “bear” such a painful loss and “go on living.” One way to bear that loss is through writing about it, and besides sharing her deepest anguish in the private space of her journal, Montgomery draws from this experience in writing her next novel, Anne’s House of Dreams, which was published in the midst of the war, in 1917. As Hilary Emmett argues in “‘Mute Misery’: Speaking the Unspeakable in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Books,” this tactic of attributing her lived experiences to characters in her novels allowed Montgomery to “make[] the private public by giving open expression to socially unacceptable subjects and feelings through the incorporation of a private narrative (the journal) into the publicly circulating narrative of her novel.”3 In other words, while it may have been difficult to speak openly about her own loss, by sharing that loss with Anne, her most beloved literary creation, Montgomery could channel her pain and anger into the more acceptable realm of popular literature. William V. Thompson further argues that this blurring of Montgomery’s private life and public fiction directly results in “the re-visioning of the character of Anne Shirley,” one that features “a level of darkness and anxiety, tension and distress, not present in the earlier Anne books.”4 While Thompson may downplay the darkness of those earlier novels – which, after all, feature multiple orphans, illnesses, deaths, natural disasters, monetary uncertainties, and emotional heartaches – in a palpable way, Anne’s fictional life is rerouted by Montgomery’s personal anguish; both author and character have their houses of dreams razed by the loss of little Hugh Macdonald. As Melanie J. Fishbane has discussed, Montgomery regularly turned to writing “to work out of and through her grief,” using “her characters to question public and private forms of grieving.”5 But while Montgomery borrows heavily from her lived experience in shaping Anne’s transition into motherhood, she does not simply cut and paste her life 317

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into Anne’s. Fishbane emphasizes that fiction is something you “craft,” and that crafting involves choices, especially when the writer borrows from personal life.6 So Montgomery makes a significant change between her experience and Anne’s: while Montgomery lost her second child, Anne lost her first.7 This change in birth order allows at least two very interesting narrative opportunities for Montgomery. First, it allows her to postpone Anne’s transition into motherhood, keeping her heroine waiting yet again to fulfill her dreams and ambitions. Such a delay continues the pattern in Anne’s life famously identified by Marah Gubar as “the pleasures of postponement”; as Gubar notes, Montgomery’s fiction frequently celebrates the benefits of long or broken engagements, for these “lengthy delays make room for passionate relationships between women” and open a space for “the formation of more unconventional loves, relationships, and households.”8 Yet following the changes in Montgomery’s experience – most notably the loss of Hugh and the concurrent stresses of war – the postponement in Anne’s House of Dreams shifts the focus from pleasure to agony. Second, and perhaps more noteworthy given Anne’s prominence as a literary character, this change also allows Montgomery to give voice to the mother’s anguish, helping to complicate our notions of the “ideal mother” of children’s literature. Even though Montgomery may have imagined a more varied readership when she wrote the novel, Anne’s House of Dreams is regularly marketed today to child and teen readers interested in the continued adventures of Anne Shirley; readers, therefore, have a vested interest in seeing Anne as a mother, having witnessed her growth from child to adult. But this long-standing relationship with Anne as a character means that she already differs from the mothers in much of children’s literature: as Lisa Rowe Fraustino and Karen Coats note in Mothers in Children’s and Young Adult Literature, “the discursive mother is often static if not flat, as authors enact a sort of pedagogy or wish for both adult and child readers regarding how an ideal mother should or should not act.”9 By refusing to grant Anne a smooth transition into an idealized state of motherhood, Montgomery addresses the insufficiency of such constructs and exposes the oftensilenced pain these ideal notions attempt to mask. 318

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Lost Mothers and Motherhood Lost Much of the recent scholarship on Montgomery’s mothers focuses on Montgomery’s struggle to reconcile her own relationship to motherhood, whether as a daughter in search of a maternal figure or as a mother herself, struggling to live up to, yet separate herself from, the social expectations for this role. In “L.M. Montgomery and the Anguish of Mother Loss,” the essay that inspired my project, Rita Bode examines Montgomery’s “search for the missing mother,” noting Montgomery’s repeated attempts as a daughter to connect to her own lost mother through her writing.10 Bode reflects on how the loss of the mother permeates Montgomery’s life writing and fiction, “continually attest[ing] to the prominent place that the mother occupies in [Montgomery’s] imagination.”11 This search for the missing mother yields many kinds of “maternal figures,” from darlings like Matthew to demons like Valancy’s mother in The Blue Castle to the dead, beloved ideals haunting the memories of Anne and Emily. I would add that, in Anne’s House of Dreams, this search for the missing mother appears not only as Anne’s search for a mother outside of herself – a daughter-centric quest to reconnect with this lost ideal – but as the search for the mother within herself, the mother she thought she would be upon the birth of her first child. Both Caroline E. Jones and Margaret Steffler explore Montgomery’s own search for the mother within, examining how her life writing about motherhood responds to contemporary expectations of mothers and shapes her depictions of motherhood in her fiction. In “Performing Motherhood: L.M. Montgomery’s Display of Maternal Dissonance,” Steffler focuses on how Montgomery self-consciously portrays herself as a new mother in her journals following the birth of Chester, her first son. For Steffler, these writerly performances reveal a failed attempt to live up to expected ideals, but at the same time “draw[] attention to the gap between the public display of motherhood and the private act of mothering. The difference lies in the easy and gentle love demanded by the public institution and the complexity and fierce passion so deeply entrenched in the private act.”12 Jones similarly notes a tension between Montgomery’s public and private expressions of mothering, tracing how Montgomery’s new insights into her desires and disappointments 319

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as a mother reshape her depiction of mothers and mothering in her later fiction. In “The New Mother at Home: Montgomery’s Literary Explorations of Motherhood,” Jones argues that “becoming a mother” not only uplifted Montgomery’s social standing in an era that equated child-rearing with “wifely and womanly duties,” but also allowed her to “reflect upon motherhood as an institution” from the perspectives of both child and mother.13 This deeper insight did not exactly lead to more realistic portrayals of mothers – as Jones observes, “Although [Montgomery’s] depictions of motherhood shift once she experiences motherhood herself, the relationships between mothers and their children, particularly their daughters, still rarely approach verisimilitude”14 – but it did allow Montgomery to “process her feelings about motherhood” and “reclaim the tragic losses of first her mother, and then her stillborn son, through her art.”15 Building on these previous examinations of Montgomery and motherhood, I argue that Anne’s House of Dreams provides one of Montgomery’s most perceptive portrayals of the interior life of the mother, because rather than seeing the mother through the child’s eyes, we see her through her own hopes and regrets. Through Anne’s loss, Montgomery makes public “the complexity and fierce passion” of the “private act” of mothering and creates one of her most believable mothers, perhaps paradoxically because of the incompleteness of the mother-child dyad. Unlike her profusions of emotion following Chester’s birth, which Steffler characterizes as a “masquerade,” what Montgomery expresses in her journals following Hugh’s death is no performance of grief. By sharing those expressions of anguish with Anne, Montgomery provides her readers a rich portrayal of a mother in search of herself when all exterior and interior expectations of motherhood have been upturned. The death of her first baby disrupts Anne’s evolving sense of her identity: pregnancy is not just about the gestation of a baby but the gestation of the mother as the woman begins to incorporate that new role into her previous sense of self. As Jones notes, Montgomery had from the start of the series depicted Anne as wanting “a family that belongs to her,” so it follows that once married to Gilbert she would desire, as Jones suggests, “in addition to education, career, and avocation … an 320

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opportunity to be the mother and create the family she lost.”16 Throughout the first half of Anne’s House of Dreams, we hear Anne preparing herself for this expansion of her identity, as she repeatedly refers to her “darling hope” for what “the spring would bring to her little house of dreams.” 17 Even though she frames her expectations as “hopes,” we see no indication in all her hand-stitching of baby garments that she anticipates anything other than a joyful arrival. Losing her baby is therefore a double loss, for it is not just the baby’s absence that torments her. Sociologists Wendy Simonds and Barbara Katz Rothman elaborate on this double loss in Centuries of Solace: Expressions of Maternal Grief in Popular Literature. “Pregnancy and infancy losses come at a point of peak involvement in self-as-mother, as the woman involves herself in making the transition to motherhood,” they explain. “Pregnancy and the neonatal period are times of what one might call ‘role engulfment’ for women as mothers: the experience of being a mother is a total one, felt physically, psychologically, socially. In every possible sphere, the woman is experiencing herself in this transition to mother.”18 When Anne and Gilbert’s baby does arrive, therefore, and is named Joyce and then dies by the end of the day, Anne loses her child – her joy – and her new identity as mother in one harsh blow. Because she does not get to experience the life of her first child, or her role in the life of that child, Anne remains in a liminal state of being a mother, yet not a mother, a mother by biology and emotional attachment but not by the social or psychological relationships that make mothering a fully embodied and relational experience. In Motherhood Lost: A Feminist Account of Pregnancy Loss in America, Linda L. Layne discusses how “In many cultures including our own, pregnancy is treated as a rite of passage [for the mother], especially if it is a first pregnancy … [P]regnancy has a liminal status and represents a temporary condition” that will eventually resolve itself with two new identities, a child and a mother. Pregnancy loss, therefore, is often seen as “an uncompleted rite of passage,” leaving the former mother-to-be in yet a different liminal state, but not one that follows the expected script.19 Simonds and Rothman further emphasize the significance of losing a first child, noting how that loss complicates the woman’s 321

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evolving understanding of her identity: “When women lose a first or an only child very early, they lose almost all of their motherhood. The wider social world did not know her as mother, and the part of herself that was defined as mother itself is lost.”20 Simonds and Rothman see in the writing of new mothers who have experienced pregnancy or infant loss “a struggle for recognition of the grieving mother’s motherhood,”21 something we can see as well in Anne. This struggle helps us account for Montgomery’s authorial choice to have Anne lose her first child instead of the second, as Montgomery had. Montgomery herself notes in her journals that she “could not have faced” Hugh’s death without her first son, Chester, but Anne has no such refuge in another living child.22 Instead, losing Joyce creates a parallel to Anne’s early life when she loses her parents. Just as she entered Green Gables orphaned and alone, Anne enters motherhood alone, without the child who would validate her role as mother.

The Mother’s Voice As a mother without a child, Anne is a particularly interesting maternal figure to examine, for her expressions of anguish provide insight into the expectations of motherhood she had developed during her pregnancy. Feminist scholars since the 1970s have examined the historical, social, political, and lived experience of mothers, contributing to the growing field of what is now called motherhood studies. Seeing motherhood as both “experience and institution,” in Adrienne Rich’s words,23 these scholars have sought both to question the gendered expectations of the mother as a social role and to broaden the understandings of mothering as action. Of particular interest to this field is the desire to empower the mother herself to speak: Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy have identified what they call a “daughter-centricity” in much writing about mothers, noting that “maternal perspectives are strangely absent. We most often hear daughters’ voices in both literary and theoretical texts about mothers, mothering, and motherhood.”24 Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O’Reilly similarly note that “a central if not defining aim of motherhood studies has been to articulate and theorize ‘the voice of the mother’: to analyze, in other words, becoming 322

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and being a mother from the perspective and subjectivity of mothers themselves.”25 What makes Anne’s House of Dreams fascinating in the context of motherhood studies, then, is the way it shifts the focus from the child losing the mother – a recurrent theme in children’s literature, especially orphan narratives such as Anne’s – to the mother losing the child. Here the child, usually the centre of the story, is absent, but Anne the mother remains, struggling to reconceptualize herself in the face of this loss and to speak her pain to the community around her. Montgomery accomplishes this shift so convincingly because of the way she translates her own anguish into her character’s anguish, using her fiction to answer her own question in her journal, “How can a mother go on living after losing her darling?” Montgomery’s description of Anne’s loss is strikingly similar to her journal description of her loss of Hugh, suggesting that the famous author intentionally drew a connection between her experience and that of her most famous character. Thompson has suggested that Montgomery’s experiences as a bereft mother shaped her depiction of Anne, whose storyline changes direction notably following the traumas in Montgomery’s own life. Thompson argues in particular that “the older Anne acquires a presence that is unmatched by any of Montgomery’s other characters, and she does this by receiving something of Montgomery herself through [her] journals.”26 In sharing her pain with Anne, that is, Montgomery both enriches her literary character and uses her to confront the readers with the unexpected and uncomfortable interior life of the mother, paralleling the journal passages most likely to shock an audience. But these parallels may not simply indicate art imitating life: in 1919, three years after the publication of Anne’s House of Dreams and five years after Hugh’s death, Montgomery began transcribing her childhood journals with the goal of preserving her life story for posterity. As biographer and journal editor Mary Henley Rubio acknowledges, these early journal entries have likely been “reconstructed,” benefiting from “shaping, pruning, shading, and amplifying” by the author.27 So, just as the journals may have influenced her description of Anne’s anguish, Anne’s anguish may have influenced Montgomery’s transcription of her experience in her journals.28 But 323

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regardless of where the words first appeared, Montgomery and Anne’s parallel narratives can be seen as revealing Montgomery’s “voice of the mother,” speaking out from the pages of both fiction and life writing. For example, Montgomery cries out in her journal about how unfair it is to have lost her child and uses the same passage in Anne’s lament, simply shifting the gender of the baby from boy to girl. In the novel, the passage reads, “‘It doesn’t seem fair,’ said Anne rebelliously. ‘Babies are born and live where they are not wanted – where they will be neglected – where they will have no chance. I would have loved my baby so – and cared for it so tenderly – and tried to give her every chance for good. And yet I wasn’t allowed to keep her.”29 More important than the direct expression of Montgomery’s emotions through Anne’s mouth is the narrator’s input: by describing Anne as speaking “rebelliously,” Montgomery acknowledges that she and Anne were not willing to be silenced in their grief, even if such expressions were not socially acceptable for leading women in their communities. Montgomery was writing against a century-long tradition of consolation literature: poems, short stories, and articles from popular magazines in which “women offered emotional support and religious consolation to other women” by writing about the grief of losing a child.30 In this writing, as Simonds and Rothman attest, “the reactions of mothers to infant death … converge into a vehement outpouring of passion and despair, an outpouring which ultimately becomes transformed into self-restraint and resignation … accomplished through the belief in an afterlife of blissful togetherness.”31 We hear this belief in a heavenly reunion of mother and child in lines like these from an 1888 poem called “A Silent House”: “But now that great Eternity / Doth separate my child from me … / Ah! God! That I may be forgiven, / And meet my little child in Heaven”; or again in this poem from 1897 called “To an Infant”: “So bow we to God’s gracious will, / For he was lent, not given, / And let this cheer our drooping hearts, / Our Charlie is in Heaven”; and yet again in this 1865 poem titled “This Is a Mother’s Grief”: “Yet when the first wild throb is past / Of anguish and despair, / To lift the eye of faith to Heaven, / And think, My child is there.”32 Such writing follows a prescribed formula, moving from despair to the acceptance 324

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of God’s will. An avid magazine reader and contributor of poems to similar magazines, Montgomery would likely have been familiar with such writing and the expectations for maternal grief and resignation they presented to the public.33 While we can certainly question whether the writers truly subscribed to these beliefs or were writing to the demands of the literary market, they still established the accepted cultural scripts for how to respond to pregnancy and infant loss, scripts that Montgomery rebels against through her heroine. We see this rebelliousness again in another parallel passage in which Anne shocks Marilla by suggesting that it was not “God’s will” to take her baby but the devil’s. Unlike the writers of consolation literature, Anne and Montgomery are not satisfied by the thought of the child in heaven; they want their children there with them on Earth. In the novel, Anne exclaims “passionately” – another adjective that Montgomery applies to herself through her heroine – “Why should she be born at all – why should anyone be born at all – if she’s better off dead? I don’t believe it is better for a child to die at birth than to live its life out – and love and be loved – and enjoy and suffer – and do its work – and develop a character that would give it a personality in eternity. And how do you know it was God’s will? Perhaps it was just a thwarting of His purpose by the Power of Evil. We can’t be expected to be resigned to that.”34 This mention of the “Power of Evil” has Marilla truly alarmed, as if Anne were again that little orphan turning her back on God over the question of red hair. But we readers are trained to listen to Anne, not those trying to censor her, and Montgomery uses our alliance with our heroine to her advantage. As Hilary Emmett notes, “In being cut off by well-meaning and morally upstanding characters like Marilla and Miss Cornelia, Anne’s rebellious exclamations can be permitted to remain in the text. A blasphemy that Montgomery, as a minister’s wife, could never have muttered openly is given safe expression by her fictional character. Anne is gently taken to task for it, but our readerly sympathies for her are so engaged by this point that her words remain with us despite Marilla’s attempt at silencing.”35 By giving herself a public voice through Anne, Montgomery also allows herself to critique the scripts for responding to a mother’s 325

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anguish. Montgomery and Anne were both angered and frustrated by how their larger communities responded to their pain: the expected social norm then as now is to express condolences to those who have lost a family member, but what infuriates Montgomery and Anne is how these condolences attempt to silence these mothers’ anger about their losses. As mentioned above, both women are fed platitudes about God’s will and the baby being better off – in the journal, Montgomery describes the “horrible ‘letters of condolence’” (which she puts in scare quotes), as “hurt[ing her] as keenly as an enemy could have done – their blundering attempts to console, their trite threadbare assurances only wounded me. Platitudes can never cover the nakedness of bereavement.”36 The anger and dismissiveness here are palpable: these “blundering” well-wishers have nothing fresh to say that could possibly “console” Montgomery at this moment. In the parallel scene from the novel, Montgomery softens the bite a bit; rather than the blunderers she had to endure, Montgomery gives Anne “kindly callers” who at least “strove to cover the nakedness of bereavement.”37 In both the journal and the novel, Montgomery equates bereavement with “nakedness,” something bodily and perceived by others as shameful, something that others feel compelled to cover, not to protect the one in pain but to shield the eyes of the onlookers. Simonds and Rothman observe a similar uneasiness in responding to bereaved mothers throughout much of the twentieth century, noting that, “If babies died, if pregnancies ended – and that has always happened to some women – it happened in silence. The loss of a baby was a painful, tragic event, made all the more painful and tragic by the silence that surrounded it.”38 As with the blasphemies she was able to broadcast through Anne’s voice, Montgomery must have felt a certain satisfaction in publicly denouncing those letter writers for trying to silence her pain with platitudes and refusing to acknowledge the validity of that naked bereavement. It is in this insistence that “platitudes” cannot cover, and should not cover, the nakedness of bereavement that Montgomery answers her question about how a mother finds a way to go on living: by sharing her story with others who will listen to and understand her loss. In the 326

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two chapters immediately following the birth and death of little Joyce, Anne is approached by two of her dear friends in Four Winds Harbor, each of whom shares their own losses with her. Captain Jim, the keeper of the lighthouse, tells her the story of “lost Margaret,” the sweetheart of his youth, who perished at sea fifty years earlier. “I’ve often wanted to tell you about her,” Captain Jim says, and yet he did not do so until after Anne’s loss.39 It is as if he understands that now is the time to tell this story to Anne: Margaret was his story of loss, something he needed to share with someone who could empathize with his pain. Anne later conveys this narrative to her friend, the writer Owen Ford, who incorporates it into his novel Captain Jim’s Life Book; Montgomery seems to be nodding at her own blurring of private and public here, having Ford craft Margaret’s story as the emotional core of his work of fiction, just as Hugh’s loss and Joyce’s form the emotional core of Anne’s House of Dreams. But we see the nakedness of bereavement most dramatically in how Anne’s loss opens up the possibility for true friendship with Leslie Moore, the beautiful and tragic next-door neighbour who has led a gothically horrific life. Anne has been fascinated with Leslie throughout the novel, but unable to get past her reserve. When they finally talk after Joyce’s death, rather than trying to cover the nakedness of Anne’s bereavement, Leslie exposes her own worst anguishes. She confides in Anne that her younger brother died after being crushed under a wagon wheel, her father hanged himself in the family parlour, her mother coerced her into marrying an abusive womanizer to save the family farm and then died herself, and then that same abusive husband took off to sea, where he received such a traumatic blow to the head that he lost all sense and memory, leaving Leslie to be his caretaker for the past twelve years and into the foreseeable future. She also confides how much she has hated Anne, whose life seemed so blissful in comparison to her own. Most telling, though, is her passionate declaration that the “barriers” between the two women have now been “swept away.” Leslie confesses, “I hope you won’t misunderstand me if I say something else. Anne, I was grieved to the core of my heart when you lost your baby … But your 327

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sorrow has brought us closer together. Your perfect happiness isn’t a barrier any longer. Oh, don’t misunderstand, dearest – I’m not glad that your happiness isn’t perfect any longer – I can say that sincerely; but since it isn’t, there isn’t such a gulf between us.”40 This blunt confession is the opposite of what Anne has been hearing from her “kindly callers,” but precisely what she has needed: someone who can look directly at her pain because she too has been stripped bare. What makes Leslie’s confession so valuable is that she does not make any attempt to soothe or cover up Anne’s nakedness; she instead exposes her own. “You know me now, Anne,” she says, “the worst of me – the barriers are all down.”41 Montgomery has torn down the barriers for her readers as well: as Elizabeth Rollins Epperly puts it in Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, “The healing, the novel shows, comes with the expression.”42 Anne’s House of Dreams reveals how important the question of the mother’s voice is to the discussion of literary motherhood and mothering: by allowing her young mother to speak out in the nakedness of grief and to open herself to the anguishes of others, Montgomery pushes beyond the image of the ideal mother so familiar in child-centric narratives. Indeed, it is poignant that this depiction of a mother’s anguish appears in the pages of what we would now consider children’s literature, for how often do such works focus not only on a child’s death but also on the interior pain of the mother trying to live with the dual loss of her child and the part of herself that was invested in the mother-child bond? As Bode reminds us, Montgomery’s search for the missing mother yields a variety of maternal figures who complicate the ideal mother type, and I would argue that the childless mother, one who has not had the chance to experience the act of mothering the child she carried, is an important figure to acknowledge within that community. By providing a voice for the mother’s anguish, Montgomery reminds us of the power of storytelling in helping the grieving to go on living. Sharing her anguish with her heroine and her readers, Montgomery calls on us to listen to alternative stories of motherhood and mothering, stories that look beyond the ideal to elucidate the lived experience, regardless of the pain that experience may have brought.

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No t e s 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Montgomery, sj 2:101. Ibid., 2:101, 151. Emmett, “Speaking the Unspeakable,” 100. Thompson, “The Shadow,” 113. Fishbane, “My Pen Shall Heal, Not Hurt,” 132, 134. Fishbane, “Crafting Fiction from Fact.” Unlike Montgomery’s son, Anne’s child does live for a day, giving Anne a brief glimpse of motherhood and marking another difference in how Montgomery transformed her lived experience into fiction. Another notable change, as Caroline E. Jones points out, is that Montgomery switches the gender of Anne’s child from a boy to a girl. As Jones puts it, Montgomery “offered homage to the daughter she had hoped for by giving Anne a first-born girl,” a way of providing a veiled-yet-public tribute to her own hopes for a girl prior to Hugh’s stillbirth. See Jones, “The New Mother at Home,” 99. For the purposes of this paper, though, the birth order change is the most important. Gubar, “Where Is the Boy?” 47, 52. Fraustino and Coats, “Introduction: Mothers Wanted,” 3. Bode, “The Anguish of Mother Loss,” 55. Ibid., 61. Steffler, “Performing Motherhood,” 191. Jones, “The New Mother at Home,” 92. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 94. Ibid. Montgomery, ahd, 105. Simonds and Rothman, Centuries of Solace, 25. Layne, Motherhood Lost, 59. Simonds and Rothman, Centuries of Solace, 24. Ibid. Montgomery, sj 2:152. See Rich, Of Woman Born. Daly and Reddy, Narrating Mothers, 1. Podnieks and O’Reilly, “Introduction,” 2–3. Thompson, “The Shadow,” 130. Rubio, Lucy Maud Montgomery, 274. Thank you to Laura Robinson for reminding me of the complex drafting history of the journals. Montgomery, ahd, 119. Simonds and Rothman, Centuries of Solace, 51. 329

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31 Ibid., 57, 64. 32 Poems reprinted in Simonds and Rothman. 33 Simonds and Rothman note that these nineteenth-century writers connected their grief firmly to their status as women: “Women writers acknowledge the belief that motherhood includes suffering in its very definition; fatherhood is not seen as inherently traumatic. When the death of a child occurs, the father’s whole reason for being has not been taken away” (61). Nevertheless, they acknowledge that men “also wrote such poems, though not nearly as prolifically” (61), which does raise the question of why fathers are seemingly excluded from these discussions of child loss. Though not within the scope of this project, it would be interesting to examine how Montgomery’s fathers cope with their losses and whether these losses are notably different from those of the mothers. 34 Montgomery, ahd, 119. 35 Emmett, “Speaking the Unspeakable,” 93. 36 Montgomery, sj 2:153. 37 Montgomery, ahd, 118. 38 Simonds and Rothman, Centuries of Solace, 1. 39 Montgomery, ahd, 121. 40 Ibid., 127. 41 Ibid., 129. 42 Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 89.

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16 Magic for Marigold Engendering Questions about What Lasts

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n Gender is a hot topic today, as it was, differently, in Montgomery’s

day. Assumptions about gender shaped cultural practices, then as now. Despite decades of intense debate and widely read scholarship that uncouples gender from biological sex only, many do not want to consider “gender fluidity” or how non-binary identification1 may affect numerous socially constructed practices. The infamous bathroom laws in the States2 suggest how fiercely people hold onto what they imagine are facts and truth when it comes to biology, intimacy, and privacy, and cannot accept what Judith Butler has famously posed as “the concept of gender as historical and performative.”3 In the mid-to-late 1920s, when Montgomery was writing Magic for Marigold, women’s wartime work had (again) unsettled some long-held beliefs about female and male practices. Increasingly trivialized by some contemporary critics as “old fashioned,” Montgomery may have

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wanted to prove in her fourteenth novel, Magic for Marigold (1929), that she was up-to-date in her treatment of what was called in her times “the sexes,” conflating biology and gender. Irritated, and perhaps also sometimes amused, by some critics’ misinterpretation of her work, in Marigold Montgomery deliberately linked questions about gender practices with questions about “the times” themselves. Her aim, I think, was to question and to affirm what persists and what changes in life and in art, using current times against a larger and longer sense of time. Interestingly, rereading Marigold’s story over a span of years may even offer readers ways to measure their own evolving assumptions about gender, “the times,” and time. I did not have high praise for Magic for Marigold in The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass in 1992. Using a feminist perspective, I found Marigold a disturbing book. At the end of the novel, Marigold risks sacrificing her imaginary friend, Sylvia, so she can win the approval of the boy next door; to my (then) consternation, I thought Montgomery was betraying Marigold with these words: “She liked his scarlet boy-stories better than her rose-pink and moon-blue girl-fancies.”4 I thought the novel’s last chapter, “Her Chrism of Womanhood,” disastrously undercut the freedom and imaginative power the book had explored and seemed to endorse. The very last line of the book, I thought then, sealed Marigold in a glass coffin, where she would stupidly wait for her prince to deign to return: “‘And I’ll always be here for him to come back to,’ she thought.”5 In truth, by 1992, I had already changed my mind about my overall reaction to Magic for Marigold more times than about any other novel, including Anne of Ingleside. I loved Marigold when I first read it in the 1960s, was saddened by it in the 1970s, and by the end of the 1980s was dismayed and then infuriated. What in the book provoked me? Just two years after Sweet-Grass was published, another scholar acknowledged the seeming weakness of the book’s ending, but focused on something fascinating. Elizabeth Waterston’s essay “Marigold and the Magic of Memory” traced in Montgomery’s descriptions of young Marigold’s upbringing contemporary debates about early-childhood learning and schooling – Montgomery’s comic and canny critiques of Froebel, Dewey, Freud, Montessori, Dr Helen MacMurchy, Piaget, Blatz, and the 332

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child-focused books of A.A. Milne and Marjorie MacMurchy.6 Reading the novel as Waterston urged, as Montgomery’s weighing, and sometimes satirizing, of ideas hotly debated in her times, added a dimension to what I had wanted to dismiss as an irritating unevenness throughout the book. In addition, Elizabeth Waterston made me think more appreciatively about an idea she raised – but chose not to pursue – in 1994, or later in 2008 when she sharpened the points in the chapter on Marigold for a chapter in Magic Island. In 1994, she wrote of Magic for Marigold: “Montgomery’s novel reveals more about time, the times, and the creative imagination.”7 Years later – and inspired also by a riveting discussion with Jean Mitchell about the book’s many layers concerning religion and spirituality – I am captivated again by Montgomery’s re-creation not only of her times but of time itself. Montgomery genders time to engender questions about what persists despite the seeming changes of contemporary times. And throughout, she justifies her own way of writing and her own treatment of time and gender. I now think the novel’s last three sentences are Montgomery’s shrewd reading of her times and a wry comment on their seemingly irreconcilable tensions. The two sentences before the problematic concluding one serve as the affirming punchlines for Marigold’s story. These sentences claim equality between the sexes. Montgomery says, “She was no longer a boy’s rival. She stood on her own ground.” But then Montgomery renders twelve-year-old Marigold’s thoughts as the last line of the novel: “‘And I’ll always be here for him to come back to,’ she thought.”8 A vital, sadly comic, distinction is suggested between the narrator’s declaration and Marigold’s naming of it. Marigold may be affirmed in her knowledge of herself, but that seeming bedrock knowledge is immediately compromised by her socially ascribed role as dependent supporter. The last three sentences of Magic for Marigold actually miniaturize the whole book’s alternations of opposing energies and relational tensions. Seeming to go one way, the energies also then pull the opposite way. The lines together suggest the simultaneous cresting of a wave and the backwards pull of its undertow, a powerful one-two movement that queer theory describes as “temporal drag.”9 I suggest Montgomery used a complicating, one-two, backwards and forwards movement in 333

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Marigold to urge readers to question gender relations as they are performed within a particular time, as opposed to how they play out over a longer history of time. For Montgomery, this complex treatment of gendered time is fundamental to her notion of her own writing and what in it has value, no matter what defines “the times.” Montgomery wrote Magic for Marigold to defy those who would fix her in the past only and to affirm her own experience of a deeper quality of time. In July of 1924 Montgomery began working on four short stories with a new kind and age of heroine with “an eye to The Delineator” a smart magazine.10 In September of 1925 she finished them and in October the Delineator purchased them. Sweet, affirming success. In the same 30 October 1925 journal entry happily announcing the purchase, Montgomery described the ground that I suggest is Marigold’s at the novel’s end: “It has been my misfortune to be born a conservative, hater of change, and to live my life in a period when everything has been, or is being turned topsy turvey, from the old religions down … For myself I have my own foundation and I stand firmly on it, unalarmed and unhurt by the crash of creeds and systems.”11 She qualifies these brave words honestly: “But I cannot help being affected adversely by the changes in the world around me.”12 Her spirit would indeed be “affected adversely” and she would want to justify her foundation. The Delineator invited her to write more Marigold stories; by May of 1927 she had written them, and Miss Carroll of the Delineator carried four of them back to Toronto, where the editor purchased three and arranged for their publication in January, February, and March of 1928. Montgomery was delighted to think she was going to appear again in this up-to-date magazine, a needed balm when the sales of her new books were not matching the sales of her older novels.13 Montgomery began writing the novel about Marigold just five days after Miss Carroll’s May 1927 visit. Meanwhile, a new editor swept into the Delineator and, in October of 1927, Miss Carroll wrote to say that he had rejected the purchased stories, declaring they were not “sophisticated enough for The Delineator.”14 Dismay and fury, and a bedevilled resolve. She would prove to that editor and to an increasingly hostile male literary establishment,15 334

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that she was “sophisticated” in lasting ways – creatively, entertainingly, critically aware of her times and of her own sense of timing. After the rejection in October, and the slur on her writing, it took a full year for her to complete the novel, though, as Benjamin Lefebvre discovered, she had published half of the novel as short stories before it appeared as a book.16 The backdrop for the writing of the early and later stories of Marigold is upheaval – Chester going away to school, the Macdonalds’ move to Norval, ongoing harassment about the Pickering lawsuit, embarrassing financial problems, more lawsuits with Page – and writing the book that had begun with what she called a “burst of sunshine”17 tested her grit instead. In completing Marigold, Montgomery was fighting for a way of perceiving and sharing time in fiction (weaving into her stories what she perceived as eternal verities found in fairy tales and poetry and in a shared valuing of cycles18 and layered repetitions), a way she knew was under serious threat19 despite the continuing endorsement of her work in the international popular press.20 In the scene with Marigold and Old Grandmother on the night of Old Grandmother’s death, Montgomery startles the reader into questioning assumptions about what is old, what is young, and what is timeless. The seeming pathos of the situation, a possible time for nostalgia, is abruptly undercut by Old Grandmother’s irreverence. To borrow the image used for “temporal drag” in queer theory, the cresting wave of the story about an impending death has a darkly comic and revealing undertow. “Temporal drag” as I adapt it metaphorically, helps explain the onetwo movement in Montgomery’s treatment of time. Inspired in part by Judith Butler’s use of “drag” and performativity in Gender Trouble, Elizabeth Freeman developed a queer theory of “temporal drag,” suggesting that the past pulls us backwards even as the wave takes us forwards. According to Freeman’s book Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, queer experience of time, in its otherness, is already outside the conventional binary of male historical-linear sequence and female domestic-season cycles, and even outside feminist generational waves, whether progressing or repeatedly challenging. Queer time is characterized by interruption and by a simultaneous pull backwards and forwards, just as the undertow is part of the wave.21 335

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What interrupts, or creates drag, is precisely where time is and where gender may be productively, provocatively performed. Montgomery’s treatment of time may be what modernists objected to most. They privileged fracture and disruption of linear time; she privileged cycles and seasons. But they also did not appreciate a simultaneity in her writing where, I suggest, both sequence and cycle fold into one. In Montgomery’s writing, the dailiness of experience is imbued with a felt sense of shared timelessness that is the opposite of linear time, but also something more. The setting for Old Grandmother’s last talk with Marigold simultaneously suggests timelessness and very distinct times in Old Grandmother’s life. The combination of orchard and garden is a kind of perverse Garden of Eden, where Old Grandmother remembers jealousies and spite, genuine love, and loyal friendship. Seven-year-old Marigold is not quite at one with this garden on this night, but Old Grandmother is. Over the course of Old Grandmother’s reminiscences Marigold becomes aware of other presences, ghosts and thoughts charged with palpable life by Old Grandmother’s stories. In fact, stories eventually make the time all one. Here I imagine Montgomery snapping her fingers not only at those who think she can write only old-fashioned pieces (when Old Grandmother’s acerbity seems decidedly modern) but also at those who do not understand that, underneath the changing fashions, rich human dramas are the same. This writing was meant to unsettle those who underestimated Montgomery’s sharp insights into age and generational differences and similarities. Ninety-nine-year-old Edith Lesley decides to get out of bed one last time, to take a walk through the moonlit garden she has not entered in nine years, so she can visit her past and give advice to her present great-granddaughter. This is a meeting of generations, but not a smooth transition, like one wave following another to shore. Their hours in the garden will fold time in on itself: Old Grandmother will be young Edith, and Marigold will be her contemporary. At the end of the scene, Old Grandmother turns in the moonlight, “waving a kiss to the invisible presences behind her” and “Suddenly the years were bridged”;22 Marigold sees and knows Edith. The performed past is the lived present. Daily life includes many times and timelessness. 336

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Their bridging of time would have seemed impossible to Marigold  –  and perhaps the reader  –  when the episode begins. Old Grandmother is for Marigold one of “The Things That Always Have Been” (note the capitals). Marigold cannot imagine life without Old Grandmother, because if she could die, then “nothing could be depended on.”23 But during and after the orchard visit, Marigold’s sense of time changes. When Old Grandmother does die that night after Marigold goes to bed, Marigold is at first “engulfed” by a “terrible, abysmal loneliness,” “And then she suddenly ceased to believe Old Grandmother was dead. That was not Old Grandmother – that little ivory-white creature in the big flower-banked casket. That was not Edith of the orchard. She was living and laughing still – if not in the orchard then somewhere else.”24 Marigold’s sense of time changes because of her interaction with Old Grandmother. Old Grandmother’s storytelling is both cresting wave and undertow; Old Grandmother knows the relentless pull of time, but she arrests that movement, and also affirms it, by giving Marigold advice especially about gender relations. Old Grandmother’s insights about the past – the drag backwards – make her seem thoroughly modern in her grasp of sexual politics, and a relentless “progress” forward. “Temporal drag” is “the visceral pull of the past on the supposedly revolutionary present.”25 Seemingly anachronistic, Old Grandmother is revolutionary in her frankness with Marigold. She dares to give Marigold advice about men, women, and marriage, advice that even today may inspire as much bitter, knowing laughter as genuine mirth. After declaring what a clan beauty she had been in her youth she says, “No Lesley man ever married an ugly woman. Some of us were fools and some shrews, but we never shirked a woman’s first duty – to please a man’s eyes.”26 She brags about all the little boys and young men who were in love with her, laughing “reminiscently, with all the delight of a girl in her teens.”27 She tells Marigold that her husband fell in love with a cousin and admits that was a “bad time while it lasted” and then advises: “They generally come back if you have sense enough to keep still and wait – as I had, glory be.”28 Is it this bit of advice Marigold will recall at the end of the story – urging her to keep still and wait until Budge returns to her? Old Grandmother says “Be sure you have some sense, Marigold, when it 337

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comes to handling the men.”29 Caustically, she says of her current times: “Never mind the old traditions. Traditions don’t matter when queens have their pictures in magazine advertisements.”30 Old Grandmother provides a kind of drag from the past, what Freeman calls a “productive obstacle to progress, a usefully distorting pull backward, and a necessary pressure on the present tense.”31 While Montgomery may not have endorsed the assumptions and advice of Old Grandmother, the character unsettles readers not expecting to find so much salt and vinegar flavouring clan stories told to a seven-yearold. Old Grandmother is a “productive obstacle” because she challenges notions both of what is past but also of what is always present. Montgomery, through Old Grandmother, makes readers experience the drama of events and stories from the past as a way to see that the details and circumstances of daily life will change with time, but (similar) passions and tensions will always shape people’s lives. Old Grandmother illustrates the power of “drag” sartorially as well. So much about Old Grandmother and how she defines herself has to do with clothing, today’s drag of a different kind, but exactly the same in spirit: Montgomery’s text recognizes clothing as performance – of a self within a particular culture. Old Grandmother chose the orchard room as her bedroom when she got old, and there she was surrounded by a gallery of brides in their wedding clothes. Montgomery suggests that, for Old Grandmother, time is measured in these changing fashions: “the crinolines and flower-lined poke bonnets of the sixties, the bustles and polonaises of the eighties, the balloon sleeves and bell skirts of the nineties, the hobbles and huge hats of the tens.” To Marigold, “They all belonged to that legendary time before she was born, when people wore all kinds of absurd dresses.”32 Marigold’s childish assumption is subtly likened to that of a reader who thinks what is past is irrelevant and absurd and what is present is the only thing of value. Old Grandmother tells Marigold about the only “serious quarrel” she and her husband had in their marriage (since his falling in love with someone else did not, evidently, produce a quarrel): her husband spilled soup on her favourite purple silk dress, a dress he did not like. Old Grandmother shows more energy over the loss of this dress than over the loss of many friends and 338

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family: “I always believed he did it on purpose because he didn’t like the dress. He has been dead up there in South Harmony graveyard for forty years, but if he were here now, I’d slap his face for that dress.”33 She retaliated by declaring she would wear a bright green petticoat to church on Sunday, but no dress, and though she was fully covered by a long coat, her husband never got over the sight of the petticoat peeking defiantly out between the folds of the coat. He got even in turn by keeping her from ever wearing green again, though it was her colour. Of such details is life made and destroyed, Old Grandmother knows, and Montgomery makes sure the reader gets the point. The book suggests that the seemingly dismissible, the seemingly trivial, details of daily domestic life are always the stuff of meaningful drama and performance for both women and men. Old Grandmother’s spite and dark humour, like the undertow of a wave, are counterbalanced by a shimmering crest. In the midst of her glee and sharpness, she suddenly speaks in “a different voice. A gentle, tender voice. ‘I loved Annabel. She was the only one of the Lesley clan I really loved. A sweet woman. The only woman I ever knew who would keep secrets. A woman who would really burn a letter if you asked her to. It was safe to empty your soul out to her. Learn to keep a secret, Marigold. And she was just. Learn to be just, Marigold. The hardest thing in the world is to be just. I never was just. It was so much easier to be generous.’”34 Old Grandmother is a complex character, full of perversities and of wisdom, at one moment loving the poetry of the Bible “when all the morning stars sang together”35 and Ruth’s speech to Naomi, and in the next raging because no daughter-in-law of hers would ever have said to her what Ruth said to Naomi.36 It is entirely believable, and affirming of the book’s overall push and pull of energies, that sensitive little Marigold can identify with and see her great-grandmother as Edith. Old Grandmother understands her own performance as part of a continuous drama of women and men over time. She and Marigold come together in their estimation of the world: “What do you really think about the world?” she asks Marigold. And Marigold “knew exactly what she thought about the world. ‘I think it’s very int’resting.’” “You’ve hit it …  the pageant of human life goes 339

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on. I’ve never tired watching it. I’ve lived nearly a century – and when all’s said and done there’s nothing I’m more thankful for than that I’ve always found the world and the people in it interesting.”37 Despite their differences – and because of them – Old Grandmother and Marigold, for a moment, are one. In their one-ness, Marigold and Old Grandmother appreciate the seeming contradictions and tensions of life: old age may be youthful and childhood wise; moments may seem unique but be infinitely repeatable. Montgomery suggests that seeming differences, like the two aspects of a wave, are parts of a continuous, but meaningfully interrupted, whole. And what makes this whole not only bearable but even thrilling to experience and to observe is found in the individual’s willingness to believe in things that have no easy proof. In Montgomery’s writing, poetry and fairyland are narrative markers for beauty, mystery, and this willingness to believe. Old Grandmother gives Marigold advice about belief and we may hear in it Montgomery admonishing the cynical critics and embittered readers of her day: “If you don’t believe things you’ll never have any fun. The more things you can believe the more interesting life is.”38 The Weed Man echoes her: “What a lot you’re going to miss if you don’t believe in things. Now, I just drive round believing everything and such fun as I have.”39 Marigold is an eager believer in many things. Belief is vital not only to storytelling and pleasure, Montgomery suggests, but to appreciating the relational energy and time of life itself. Marigold’s learning depends on her willingness to believe, to trust the impact of what she feels and intuits, even when cold facts seem to belie her faith. Because she is the youngest of Montgomery’s heroines, ending her story where Anne and Emily begin theirs, readers may experience with her before she is six how images and colours in the natural world reflect what and how she is feeling. Marigold repeatedly communes with what she experiences as the personality of houses and the spirit of the land.40 Among the many passages chronicling Marigold’s daily communion with imaginatively perceived place, the description of the Hidden Land stands out. In fact, I suggest it provides the ground of imagery for the whole story, and it illustrates Marigold’s willingness 340

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to have her faith restored within moments of its being shattered. When Marigold later loses faith in an actual Hidden Land, she still experiences the rapture of the beauty before her, and this is the point of the novel: beauty is real and rapture is accessible for those willing to see and to feel. Marigold imagines there is a magic place just over the hill that is completely unlike her side of the hill. When she finally summons the courage to climb the hill to find the Hidden Land, she is at first horribly disappointed: Nothing before her but fields and farmhouses and barns and groves – just the same as along the road to Harmony. Nothing of the wonderful secret land of her dreams. Marigold turned; she must rush home and find Mother and cry – cry – cry! But she stopped, gazing with a suddenly transfigured face at the sunset over Harmony Harbour. She had never seen the whole harbour at one time before; and the sunset was a rare one even in that island of wonderful sunsets. Marigold plunged her eyes into those lakes of living gold and supernal crimson and heavenly apple-green  –  into those rosecoloured waters – those far-off purple seas – and felt as if she were drowning ecstatically in loveliness. Oh, there was the Hidden Land – there beyond those shining hills – beyond that great headland that cut the radiant sea at the harbour’s mouth – there in that dream city of towers and spires whose gates were of pearl. – It was not lost to her … The horrible disappointment and the sense of bitter loss that was far worse than the disappointment, had all vanished in that moment of sheer ecstasy above the world. She knew.41 In the exquisite gold, crimson, apple-green, rose, and purple of Marigold’s rapture, I find encoded the wordless trance of Anne, the flash of Emily, the wonder of Valancy. Experience of the Hidden Land could signal what has been called “women’s time”  –  time outside linear male-historical time but working symbiotically with it, one gendered part of the binary reinforcing the other.42 It can be regarded as “fractal 3 41

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time,” purposefully stimulated cycles and patterns.43 Montgomery’s use of ecstasy and knowing speaks about possibilities for understanding something beyond binaries and gender performances, something that affirms and attracts a sense of oneness, what Buddhists call consciousness of “two and not two,”44 when two seemingly separate states of mind (or separate beings) become as one through understanding and intuition. That last line, “She knew” links the repeat Montgomery reader to the times and time; that is, Montgomery’s use of the italicized knew may serve as a shorthand reminder of other Montgomery heroines experiencing rapture.45 Marigold is conscious of and sure of her response to the here and now (the times) and also aware of her communion with a timeless presence she perceives as beauty. Marigold’s ecstasy is a lived physical experience of a timeless beauty also figured for Montgomery in poetry and fairyland. Sylvia, a fairyland playmate, is Marigold’s best friend until she is twelve. Time after time, Marigold identifies with the spirit of place far more than she identifies with any human child. For more than half the book – after Old Grandmother is dead and after Grandmother Marian has grudgingly restored to Marigold the symbolic key to the magic orchard door – Marigold’s education seems like a hectic series of misadventures, as though Montgomery’s novel performs the fractured time it critiques. Marigold goes on numerous visits, and readers are introduced to many houses and eccentric adults, with one episode heaped on another. Several of them very entertainingly satirize religious zeal, and many comment on female-male relationships. Three boys are attracted to Marigold, and although each is certain of a boy’s natural superiority over any girl, each loses face in a contest with Marigold. The seemingly disjointed episodes all illustrate Marigold’s growing ability to navigate the complexities of female-male relationships. Time, in this series of negotiations, seems almost relentless in its push forwards and in its pull backwards. Marigold may learn to hold her own with boys, but she must also learn to compromise, to relinquish some of her own wishes, if she wants companionship with a boy. What she gains in self-knowledge and self-confidence may also be undermined by (too much) compromise. 342

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The last chapter of Marigold, “Her Chrism of Womanhood,” is perhaps one of the most challenging chapters to analyze in all of Montgomery’s novels, precisely because, I now think, it so persuasively enacts the push-pull, one-two, backwards-forwards motion of the book’s relational energies, themselves illustrative of the tensions between “the times” and “time.” The very words “Chrism” and “Womanhood” are challenges to reconsider what is immutable and what must change. “Chrism” is literally the oil used in consecrations and figuratively is a ceremony of anointing or sacred initiation. Montgomery’s comic use of similarly high-flown language elsewhere in the book – “bends sinister,” “emprise,” “levinbolt” – supports a humorous reading of Marigold’s misapprehension of what is happening to her. By using chrism and womanhood together to talk about a twelve-year-old girl’s disappointed love for the boy next door, Montgomery may seem to be laughing at Marigold’s self-drama, and she is, but Montgomery is also questioning seriously what Marigold’s rites of passage mean in contemporary times, where women can be doctors and bob their hair and drive cars. Making excellent use of the whole book’s one-two movement, Montgomery signals Marigold’s passionate, youthful desire to consider herself anointed in some ecstatic martyrdom of womanhood, and at the same time suggests Marigold’s real strength may come from withstanding that cultural seduction and standing instead “on her own ground.”46 The fact that Montgomery ends the book with Marigold’s words about “always” being there for Budge to come back to still galls me as a reader. But I now think that, if they do not gall me, I have missed the “productive” undertow, the “temporal drag,” that is part of the cresting wave. Just as I now think that the ending Montgomery created for what I call her literary manifesto, Emily’s Quest, is a deliberate paradox (the ending cannot be happy and be truthful – the ending must be happy to be true to her own code and to Emily’s), so here in her novel that challenges the times and the notion of time itself: Marigold will stand on her own ground; and while that ground will be “affected adversely”47 by the times, it will also be upheld by a bedrock of knowing belief. Just as the Hidden Land as an actual place is a child’s dream, the Hidden Land as metaphor for ecstatic, knowing engagement is immutable. 343

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“Her Chrism of Womanhood” opens with an ominous-but-comic line: “A new magic had fallen over Cloud of Spruce.”48 Throughout the novel Marigold has been the one to make magic or to discover it. So where has this “new” magic fallen from? The word “fallen” suggests a shroud or fog that may also lift. In the ensuing scenes, the narrator directs a layered reading of Marigold’s situation, underscoring that Marigold does not know her friend and boy-next-door, Budge, so well as she imagines. Marigold’s misreading deepens her grief when he seems to go away. When Budge returns, the narrator’s aside is coolly comic. Budge complains about Tad: “And he said I was a coward and that I wouldn’t walk through the graveyard at night.” “Let’s go through it to-night and show him,” said Marigold eagerly. “Not to-night,” said Budge hastily. “There’s a heavy dew. You’d get wet.” Happiness flowed through Marigold like a wave. Budge was thinking of her welfare. At least, so she believed.49 This wonderful dramatic irony distances Marigold’s perspective from the reader’s. Marigold cannot see exactly what is in front of her, but a reader may – and is thus encouraged to bring an informed skepticism to the reading of Marigold’s other words and thoughts, too. So I come back to the line that was so problematic in my assessment of Marigold in the late 1980s: “She liked his scarlet boy-stories better than her rose-pink and moon-blue girl-fancies.”50 Reading this in light of the novel’s general one-two movement, I realize this is not the narrator pointing out something about Budge; it is instead Marigold’s assessment of Budge, an assessment I need to be careful to interpret. If I focus on gender relations, the line suggests a binary battle Marigold has already lost. There is no mistaking the power attributed to the boy here: his are “boy-stories”; hers are “girl-fancies.” He is identified with vivid “scarlet”; she, with pastels. There may be danger in the scarlet – like the secret fire Marigold and Budge share on the beach – but there is 344

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a “delicious horror,” too, even if his stories give her nightmares. Poor Budge, I could argue; he is stuck performing red when he is afraid to go into a graveyard at night. A whole book has been written about the confused cultural significance, in North America, of pink and blue.51 But the more important point for me is that the assessment of Budge’s power is Marigold’s, not the narrator’s, and is suspect in the same way that her misreading of his concern for her is naive. She is smitten, and she magnifies his powers. Like the “new magic” that has “fallen over Cloud of Spruce,” this colour contrast is signalling a change in time – Marigold’s growth, Marigold’s maturing. She has outgrown a child’s time, childhood’s pastels, and in Budge’s “red” she is testing a time of womanhood she has not yet entered. The palette Marigold experiences throughout the novel suggests that her adult colours, her adult time, will be as vivid as those of the Hidden Land, as true and bright as the life of Aunt Marigold. As a childless woman doctor, Aunt Marigold is emblematic of the changing times; as a constant, shaping influence on Marigold’s life, she is the abiding spirit of motherhood, providing what Tara K. Parmiter refers to in this volume as one of Montgomery’s “alternative stories of motherhood and mothering.”52 Up-to-date Aunt Marigold represents timeless truths and rites. If Old Grandmother is the productive undertow of the book, Aunt Marigold is the cresting wave. Old Grandmother loves the poetry of the Bible, but Aunt Marigold lives it. Uncle Klon hears an echo of Proverbs 31:12 when he first looks at her sweet, androgynous face: “She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life”;53 the narrator characterizes her at the end of the book by alluding to Proverbs 20:12: “She had not only the seeing eye but the understanding heart as well.”54 And Aunt Marigold herself, in explaining to Marigold that love means sharing, alludes to John 14:2 “You must not expect to have Budge wholly to yourself, dear, as you had Sylvia. Our earthly house of love has many mansions and many tenants” and “We – women – must always share.”55 This is meant to be a sacred moment, this passing to Marigold from her namesake Aunt Marigold the “chrism of womanhood,” and it is told without irony or humour. Montgomery carefully suggests throughout the novel that intelligent, 345

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insightful, compassionate, loving Aunt Marigold stands on eternally sacred, unassailable ground humanly in the same way that magic, poetry, and beauty belong in stories of any era narratively. Verities abide, despite fashion or form, Montgomery asserts. The novel’s last line (“‘And I’ll always be here for him to come back to,’ she thought”), in my interpretation now, is young Marigold’s mistaken reading of Budge’s ongoing significance for her. Just as Marigold mistook Budge’s fear concerning the graveyard as his concern for her comfort (and the narrator signals this misreading with the comment “At least, so she believed”), so at the end, Marigold misreads “here” as a place defined in relation to Budge rather than as the place where she is fully her own person (and the narrator again helpfully nudges the reader with “she thought”). Budge may indeed come back to Marigold and she may be “here” for him, but not because she is keeping still and pathetically waiting, defining herself in relation to his absence or presence. Marigold will be “here” for Budge not because of Budge, but because steadfastness is a defining part of her authentic (soon-to-be) conscious self. As I read her now, Marigold is poised to realize that she, like Old Grandmother and even Aunt Marigold, will confidently perform herself when she stands – and stays – firmly on her own consciously chosen ground. All Montgomery’s novels are about female power and empowerment within the constraints of kin and culture. All her novels are about relationships between people, between person and place, between person and perception of place or idea, between writing and time. There is nothing simple about Montgomery’s treatment of gender in Magic for Marigold. It is a complex dialogue about what changes and what endures, including the apparent differences between “the sexes” and their apparently changing practices in contemporary culture. Wave and undertow, affirmation and undercutting: there is no clear end for a time or an idea or a book that people continue to read. Modernism celebrated fractured time, wounded time; Montgomery insisted on time’s deep continuities; she endorsed healing. The character of Old Grandmother suggests how time interfolds upon itself because female and male are constructs we perform. Old Grandmother tells Marigold there is a 346

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world of difference between cackling over the foibles of your fellows and genuine laughter. The more closely I reread Montgomery’s Marigold through different lenses, the more distinctly I think I hear L.M. Montgomery’s magic laughter.

No t e s 1 See for example the Globe and Mail Saturday feature article by Sarah Hampton “Their Story: In a Culture Where Men Are Men and Women Are Women, Beck Gilmer-Osborne Identifies as Neither,” 30 January 2016, F2–F4. 2 See for example Hanna, Park, et al., “North Carolina Repeals ‘Bathroom Bill,’” 30 March 2017. 3 Butler, Undoing Gender, 10. 4 Montgomery, mm, 267. 5 Ibid., 274. 6 “Marigold and the Magic of Memory” in Rubio, Harvesting Thistles, 155–66. 7 Ibid., 161. 8 Montgomery, mm, 274. 9 See especially the chapter “Deep Lez: Temporal Drag and the Specters of Feminism” in Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds, 59–93. Freeman quotes Meryl Altman for the epigraph of her chapter on “temporal drag”: “Every wave has its undertow” (59). 10 Montgomery, sj 3:251. Elizabeth Waterston traces the history of the writing of the book in her chapter on Marigold in Magic Island, 151–60. See also the L.M. Montgomery Institute’s KindredSpaces online archive of the RyrieCampbell Collection of original periodicals containing Montgomery pieces: http://kindredspaces.ca/islandora/search/mods_genre_ms%3A%22Short% 5C%20story%22?islandora_solr_search_navigation=1&sort=fgs_label_s% 20asc&f[0]=mods_relatedItem_host_titleInfo_title_ms%3A%22Delineator%22. 11 Montgomery, sj 3:259. 12 Ibid. 13 Even though she discovered this apparent falling off of sales was really because her old books were still selling so well (Montgomery, sj 3:379 and see also Lefebvre, 3:35), and while she did not see so high a profit from the older books as from each new book sale, the number of sales of her books continued to be impressive. 14 Montgomery, sj 3:357. 15 See Mary Rubio’s riveting account in A Gift of Wings (especially 353–7; 459–66) of William Arthur Deacon’s malicious and successfully damaging 347

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16

17 18

19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

treatment of Montgomery’s reputation as a writer from the mid-1920s on. See also Kate Sutherland, “Advocating for Authors and Battling Critics in Toronto: Montgomery and the Canadian Authors Association,” in Bode and Clement, L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys, 223–37. Benjamin Lefebvre says: “In addition to the four stories in The Delineator, Montgomery had published not four more Marigold stories but seven” (Montgomery Reader 3:34). Montgomery, sj 3:259. See Ladd and Spring’s essay in this volume, chapter 13, for an excellent discussion of Montgomery’s conscious feminizing of the cycle of seasons in Anne of Green Gables. Elizabeth Freeman describes how extensively the management of time can control all aspects of life. Chronobiopolitics “extends beyond individual anatomies to encompass the management of entire populations: people whose individual bodies are synchronized not only with one another but also with larger temporal schemae experience belonging itself as natural. In a chronobiological society, the state and other institutions, including representational apparatuses, link properly temporalized bodies to narratives of movement and change” (Time Binds, 4). As Benjamin Lefebvre shows, the general reviews of Marigold were overwhelmingly positive (3:298–306). See “Introduction: Queer and Not Now” in Freeman, Time Binds, 1–19. Montgomery, mm, 75. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 76–7. Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds, e-book front-matter summary, http://read. dukeupress.edu.proxy.library.upei.ca/content/time-binds, accessed 12 April 2016. Montgomery, mm, 60. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 74. Freeman, Time Binds, 64. Montgomery, mm, 62. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 73. Job 38:7. Ruth 1:16, “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither though goest, I will go.” Montgomery, mm, 67. 348

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38 Ibid., 72. 39 Ibid., 151. 40 See Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 211–27, and Epperly, Through Lover’s Lane, 86–102. 41 Montgomery, mm, 34. 42 Elizabeth Freeman says: “Chronobiopolitics harnesses not only sequence but also cycle, the dialectical companion to sequence, for the idea of time as cyclical stabilizes its forward movement, promising renewal rather than rupture. And as Julia Kristeva argues, the gender binary organizes the meaning of this and other times conceived as outside of – but symbiotic with – linear time,” Time Binds, 5. 43 Gregg Braden, in his book Fractal Time, describes “fractal time” in twentytwo mathematically based “Time Codes.” “Time Code 3” reads: “New discoveries show that we can think of time as an essence that follows the same rhythms and cycles that govern everything from particles to galaxies” (199); “Time Code 11” reads: “Nature uses a few simple, self-similar, and repeating patterns  –  fractals  –  to build energy and atoms into the familiar forms of everything from roots, rivers, and trees to rocks, mountains, and us” (200). 44 A recent young-adult novel by Sarah Pennypacker makes wonderful use of this Buddhist concept. Pax, New York: HarperCollins, 2016. See especially 186–7. 45 Interestingly, Ladd and Spring in this volume, chapter 13, identify Anne’s silent rapture with Thomson’s “expressive Silence” in his “A Hymn on the Seasons” (294). 46 Elizabeth Waterston ends her 2008 chapter on Marigold this way: Montgomery “ended with a final smile at Marigold’s acceptance of a new, ridiculously feminine dream” (160). 47 Montgomery, sj 3:259. 48 Montgomery, mm, 264. 49 Ibid., 270. 50 Ibid., 267. 51 Jeanne Maglaty, “When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?” Smithsonian.com 7 April 2011, accessed 28 April 2016; Anna Broadway, “Pink Wasn’t Always Girly: A Short History of a Complex Color,” Atlantic, 12 August 2013, www. theatlantic.com, accessed 28 April 2016. See also, Jo B. Paoletti, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. 52 Parmiter, “Like a Childless Mother,” this volume, 328. 53 Montgomery, mm, 23. 54 Ibid., 273. 55 Ibid. 349

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Pr imar y S our c e s After Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery’s Letters to Ephraim Weber, 1919–1941. Edited by Hildi Froese Tiessen and Paul Gerard Tiessen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The pei Years, 1889–1911. Edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. 2 vols. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2006. The Green Gables Letters from L.M. Montgomery to Ephraim Weber, 1905–1909. Edited by Wilfrid Eggleston. 1960. Ottawa: Borealis Press, 1981. L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years 1911–1929. 3 vols. Edited by Jen Rubio. Oakville, Ontario: Rock’s Mills Press, 2016–17. Montgomery, L.M. After Many Days: Tales of Time Passed. Edited by Rea Wilmshurst. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992. – Against the Odds: Tales of Achievement. Edited by Rea Wilmshurst. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994. – Among the Shadows. Edited by Rea Wilmshurst. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992. – Anne of Avonlea. 1909. Toronto: Seal, 1984. – Anne of Green Gables. 1908. Edited by Cecily Devereux. Peterborough, on: Broadview, 2004. – Anne of Ingleside. 1939. Toronto: Seal, 1983. – Anne of the Island. 1915. Toronto: Seal, 1981. – Anne of Windy Poplars. 1936. Toronto: Seal, 1983. – Anne’s House of Dreams. 1917. Toronto: Seal, 1983. – At the Altar: Matrimonial Tales. Edited by Rea Wilmshurst. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994. – “Author Tells How He Wrote His Story,” In Lefebvre, The L.M. Montgomery Reader, vol. 1, 33–4. – “Aunt Philippa and the Men.” 1915. In At the Altar, 1–16. – The Blue Castle. 1926. Toronto: Seal, 1988. – The Blythes Are Quoted. Edited by Benjamin Lefebvre. Toronto: Viking, 2009. – Emily Climbs. 1924. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1998. – Emily of New Moon. 1925. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1985.

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– Emily’s Quest. 1927. Toronto: Seal, 1998. – [Garrets and Cheerful People]. 1902. In Lefebvre, A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917, 229–32. – The Golden Road. 1913. Toronto: Seal, 1987. – “High School Life in Saskatchewan.” 1894. In Lefebvre, A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917, 93–5. – “How I Began to Write.” Toronto Globe (January 1911). In Lefebvre, The L.M. Montgomery Reader. Vol. 1, 67–72. – “I Have Come Home.” Family Herald and Weekly Star, 15 June 1936, 47. – Jane of Lantern Hill. 1937. Toronto: Seal, 1989. – Letters to G.B. MacMillan. George Boyd MacMillan fonds, Library and Archives Canada, C-10689 (formerly George MacMillan Papers, mg 30, D185). – Magic for Marigold. 1929. Toronto: Seal, 1988. – “My Favorite Bookshelf.” In Lefebvre, The L.M. Montgomery Reader, vol. 1, 154–6. – Pat of Silver Bush. 1933. Toronto: Seal, 1988. – “A Patent Medicine Testimonial.” In Against the Odds. 15–25. – Poetry of L.M. Montgomery. Edited by John Ferns and Kevin McCabe. Markham, on: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1999. – “Prince Edward Island.” In Lefebvre, The L.M. Montgomery Reader, vol. 1, 352–5. – “The Punishment of the Twins.” Blue Book Magazine. February 1909: 814–21. – “The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s.” 1912. Chronicles of Avonlea, 122–39. Toronto: Seal, 1987. – “The Quest of a Story.” Youth, October 1902, 292–6. – Rainbow Valley. 1919. Toronto: Seal, 1988. – Rilla of Ingleside. 1921. Edited by Benjamin Lefebvre and Andrea McKenzie. Toronto: Viking, 2010. – “Spring in the Woods.” Canadian Magazine 37, no. 1 (May 1911): 59–62. Canadiana. www.canadiana.ca. – The Story Girl. 1910. Toronto: Seal, 1987. – A Tangled Web. 1931. Toronto: Seal, 1992. – “Tannis of the Flats,” Canadian Magazine 42 (Jan 1914): 275–82. – “The Twins Pretend.” In The Blythes Are Quoted, 118–43. – “The Twins and a Wedding.” In At the Altar, 115–26. – The Watchman and Other Poems. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1916. – “A Western Eden,” Prince Albert Times and Saskatchewan Review, 17 June 1891, 4. – “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand.” In At the Altar, 197–214. – “The Woods in Autumn.” Canadian Magazine 37, no. 6 (October 1911): 574–7. Canadiana. www.canadiana.ca. – “The Woods in Summer.” Canadian Magazine 37, no. 5 (September 1911): 399– 402. Canadiana. www.canadiana.ca.

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376

CONTRIBUTORS

KIER A BALL is an instructor of writing at Presentation College. Her research

interests focus on gender and theology in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury British literature. WANDA CAMPBELL teaches women’s literature and creative writing at Acadia University. She edited Hidden Rooms: Early Canadian Women Poets and Bronwen Wallace: Essays on Her Work. Her articles have appeared in Journal of Canadian Studies, Canadian Literature, The Canadian Encyclopedia, Canadian Poetry, ecw, Mosaic, scl/élc, and in several of the Reappraisals: Canadian Writers series. She has also published a novel, Hat Girl, and five collections of poetry. CATHERINE CL ARK is an associate professor at Averett University in Virginia, with a dual appointment in French and English; she also serves as the director of Study Abroad. She received her doctorate in comparative literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. LESLE Y D. CLEMENT, co-editor of the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies and past visiting scholar with the L.M. Montgomery Institute (upei), has published on visual literacy, empathy, and death in children’s literature. Recent projects include co-editing, with Rita Bode, L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911–1942, and, with Leyli Jamali, Global Perspectives on Death in Children’s Literature. Her work on Montgomery appears in Studies in Canadian Literature, L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys, and L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature(s). ELIZ A BE TH ROLLINS EPPERLY, professor emerita of English (University of

Prince Edward Island) and fourth upei president and vice-chancellor (1995–98), is the founder of the L.M. Montgomery Institute (lmmi) at upei.

CONTRIBUTORS

She published the first full-length critical study of Montgomery’s novels and four other Montgomery studies. Her most recent publications include a children’s book, Summer in the Land of Anne (illustrated by her sister), and a new edition of Imagining Anne: L.M. Montgomery’s Island Scrapbooks. She is the (contributing) consultant for the 2022 Digital Museums Canada exhibition A National Treasure: L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables Manuscript. CAROLE GERSON, frsc, is a professor emerita in the Department of English

at Simon Fraser University. Co-editor of volume 3 (1918–1980) of History of the Book in Canada/Histoire du livre et de l’imprimé au Canada, she has published extensively on Canada’s literary and cultural history with a focus on women writers. Her book, Canadian Women in Print, 1750–1918 (2010), won the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian criticism. In 2013 she received the Marie Tremaine medal from the Bibliographical Society of Canada. Her most recent book, co-authored with Peggy Lynn Kelly, is Hearing More Voices: English-Canadian Women in Print and on the Air, 1914–1960 (2020). CHRIS TIN A HITCHCOCK is professor of theology at the University of Sioux

Falls and the author of The Significance of Singleness. VAPPU K ANNAS is a Finnish writer and literary scholar. She holds a PhD in

English from the University of Helsinki. Her articles have been published in the journals Avain and The Looking Glass, as well as in the collection of essays Reading Today. Her poems and stories have appeared in several literary journals in Finland and in Canada, and she has published one book of poetry, Morsian (ntamo, 2018) and a novel, Rosa Clay (Kustantamo s&s, 2020). Her most recent novel was published in June 2021. HE ATHER ANN L ADD is formerly associate professor of English at the Universi-

ty of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Currently, she is an English instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia. She has held library fellowships at Yale University’s Lewis Walpole Library, the Chawton House Library (uk), and the Moore Institute at the National University 378

CONTRIBUTORS

of Ireland, Galway. Her primary area of research is eighteenth-century British literature. She has published many articles and chapters, including an exploration of the relationship between fictional children and their animals, which appears in Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures. In 2019, she contributed to the L.M. Montgomery Institute’s Emily of New Moon Read Along. TAR A K. PARMITER received her PhD from New York University, where she teaches in the Expository Writing Program. She has published articles on the imagined landscapes of Anne of Avonlea, nature study in the Anne books, summer vacationing in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and the green gothic of the Twilight saga, and she serves on the editorial board of the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies. E. HOL LY PIK E is associate professor of English at Grenfell Campus,

Memorial University, where she teaches literary history, women writers, and children’s literature. She has published on Montgomery’s works in a number of collections, including L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys and 100 Years of Anne with an ‘e.’ She is on the editorial board of the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies. ASHLE Y N. REESE is a learning and development coordinator at the University of South Florida. She received her PhD in children’s literature from the University of Cambridge. Her current research focuses on gender in turn-of-the-century North American girls’ books. She is the author of The Rise of Girls’ Literature (Cambridge University Press). M AV IS REIMER is dean of graduate studies and professor of English at the

University of Winnipeg. She was the Canada Research Chair in Young People’s Texts and Cultures, lead editor of Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, and president of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature. She is the founding director of the Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures; founding president of the Association for Research in Young People’s Cultures; an editor of five collections of scholarly essays, including Such a Simple Little Tale: Critical Responses 379

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to L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables; and co-author, with Perry Nodelman, of the third edition of The Pleasures of Children’s Literature. L AUR A ROBINSON is the dean of the Faculty of Arts at Acadia University,

where she is also a professor of English literature and women’s and gender studies. Former visiting scholar at the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island, she has published many articles on Montgomery’s work, in addition to articles on Canadian writers Margaret Atwood and Ann-Marie MacDonald, as well as on Americans Louisa May Alcott and Eleanor H. Porter. K A Z UKO S A K UM A teaches English and literature at Sophia University

in Tokyo, Japan, where she completed her ma and PhD programs in literature. She has presented and published extensively on nineteenthand twentieth-century women writers, including L.M. Montgomery. Her primary research interests are war and peace, translation, and gender. She has contributed a chapter on the ‘Pat’ books to the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies’ special edition on L.M. Montgomery and Reading (2021), and a chapter on Anne of Green Gables in Japan to Kindred Spirits: Reflections on our Relationship with Anne of Green Gables (forthcoming). ERIN SPRING received her PhD in children’s literature from the University of Cambridge in 2014. She is currently an assistant professor in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary. Her most recent publications can be found in Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures and Children’s Literature in Education. REBECCA J. THOMPSON is a librarian and coordinator of Instruction and Ref-

erence Services at King’s College, Pennsylvania, and stays close to her roots as an English major through her work as a Montgomery scholar. BONNIE J. TULLOCH is a PhD student and Vanier Scholar (2018–21) in the School of Information at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on children’s and young-adult literature/media. She is the 2018

380

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recipient of the lmmi Elizabeth R. Epperly Award for Outstanding Early Career Paper. J A NE URQUH A R T is the acclaimed author of eight novels, which have

received numerous awards, including Le prix du meilleur livre étranger in France, the Trillium Award, and the Governor General’s Award. Her most recent novel is The Night Stages (2015). Urquhart is also the author of four books of poetry and a number of other works, including a biography, L.M. Montgomery. Urquhart is a chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and an Officer of the Order of Canada, among other awards received, and has been awarded honorary doctorates from, and been writer-in-residence at, several Canadian universities.

381

INDEX

lmm is used as an abbreviation for Lucy Maud Montgomery. Page numbers in italics denote illustrative material. aa. See Anne of Avonlea (aa) Abegweit (pei), 255, 264n32 abortion rights, 2, 14n4 Acadians, 121 advertising children for adoption, 124–31 “The Aftermath” (Walter Blythe, bq), 56–7, 59–60 agg. See Anne of Green Gables (agg) ahd. See Anne’s House of Dreams (ahd) Åhmansson, Gabriella, 7, 69, 79, 82, 204–5, 240, 242 ai. See Anne of the Island (ai) ain. See Anne of Ingleside (ain) Alabone, Edwin, 63n28 Alaimo, Stacy, 76 Alexander, Joy, 287 Ambrose, 267, 268 Anderson, Benedict, 146 angel-in-the-house figure, 69, 71–3, 77, 106, 157, 164 animals, 202–3 Anne Around the World (Ledwell and Mitchell), 7–8 Anne Made Me Gay (musical), 8 Anne of Avonlea (aa), 141, 175, 184–7, 254, 278–9

Anne of Green Gables (agg): about, 2, 3–4, 6, 120, 144, 285; about Green Gables, 95, 271–2; Blythe, Gilbert, 51, 104, 107–8, 111, 204, 273–8; colonization and domesticity, 89–93, 114n21; consumption, 48–51; humour in, 199; patriarchy, 90–1, 93, 104–6, 173; religion, 101–3; “The Round of Life,” 50; “Unattached Women Raising Cain,” 147n16; “An Unfortunate Lily Maid,” 48 Anne of Ingleside (ain), 131, 175, 254 Anne of the Island (ai), 17, 44–54, 63, 184, 193n29, 274 Anne of Windy Poplars (awp), 175, 187–8, 249, 274 Annescapade, 91, 96–8, 101, 103, 105–9 Anne’s House of Dreams (ahd): and motherhood, 320–1, 323, 328; romantic friendships, 274; and strength of female characters, 204. See also “Aunt Philippa and the Men” (ahd); Bryant, Miss Cornelia (ahd, rv) Anne with an E (tv series), 114n23, 117n99 antiwar poetry, 66n75 Ash, Susan, 125 “As It Was in the Beginning” (Johnson), 250, 256, 257 Augustine, 267–9, 277, 279–80, 281 “Aunt Philippa and the Men” (ahd), 195–8, 201–3, 206

INDEX

“Au Revoir” (bq), 58–9 Austen, Jane, 69 “Author Tells How He Wrote His Story” (Boston Journal), 3 awp. See Anne of Windy Poplars (awp) Bachelard, Gaston, 154, 158–60, 162, 168 Baker, Susan (ri), 20 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 174, 195, 196, 198–9 Ball, Kiera: about, 379; chapter by, 266–83; referenced, 13, 190, 230, 285 Barad, Karen, 8, 9–11, 88 Barnardo boys/Thomas Barnardo, 121–2, 131–2, 134–5, 148n32 Barreca, Regina, 200 Barrell, John, 294 Barrie, J.M., 55 Barry, Diana (agg), 48–50, 78, 105, 272–5, 278 Barthes, Roland, 125, 148n32 Baym, Nina, 74 bc. See The Blue Castle (bc) Beckett, Francis, 24–5 Belaney, Archibald (Grey Owl), 255, 264n30 Benjamin, Walter, 234–5 Bentley, D.M.R., 256 Berg, Temma F., 101 Bergson, Henri, 174, 196, 199–200, 203–4, 206 Bettelheim, Bruno, 234–5 binarism, 19, 44, 61, 292. See also gender binarism Blackford, Holly, 147n16 Blackwell, Jeannine, 94, 106, 107, 110, 111, 118n121 Blanchot, Maurice, 44 “The Blood of Our Sons” (Gullace), 21 The Blue Castle (bc): about, 233–5, 238–9, 246n1, 253; Cissy Gay, 46, 384

62n8, 73–4, 84–5n34, 241–2; Epperly on domesticity, 72–3; fairy-tale structure, 236–8; patriarchy, 71–2, 74, 75, 77, 81–2, 235; Reese on, 168; Rubio on, 83, 245; and sexual agency, 240, 247n22. See also Snaith, Barney (bc); Stirling, Valancy (bc) “Blue-Eyed Baby Stock Rises with Little Girls Preferred” (Kelso), 138 Blue Scrapbook (Montgomery), 254–5 Blythe, Anne. See Shirley, Anne (later Blythe) Blythe, Gilbert, 51, 104, 107–8, 111, 204, 273–8 Blythe, Jem (ri), 30, 32, 55, 57–60, 67n82, 276 Blythe, Walter (ri, bq, rv), 20, 22, 28–38, 53–61, 279 The Blythes Are Quoted (bq), 54–9, 254 Bode, Rita, 319, 328 Bodies That Matter (Butler), 9, 176 Bolger, Francis W.P., 7 “Bosom Friends: Lesbian Desire in Montgomery’s Anne Books” (Robinson), 270 bq. See The Blythes Are Quoted (bq) Braden, Gregg, 349n43 Braudy, Leo, 30 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 17, 44, 48, 61 Brouse, Cynthia, 6 Browning, Robert, 286 Bryant, Miss Cornelia (ahd, rv), 198, 202, 204, 206, 276 Buchanan, Roberta, 205 Bunkers, Suzanne, 217–18 Butler, Judith: on gender issues, 179, 331; Gender Trouble, 9, 17, 207, 335; Undoing Gender, 9. See also Bodies That Matter (Butler) Byrne, Katherine, 46, 51

INDEX

ca. See Chronicles of Avonlea (ca) Callahan, Kat, 8 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 125 Campbell, Joseph, 247n11 Campbell, Wanda: about, 379; chapter by, 195–210; referenced, 12, 220, 226 “Canadian Born” (Johnson), 252, 261 Canadian Crusoes (Traill), 93–4 Canadian Magazine, 245, 251–2, 259, 265n53, 285 Carden-Coyne, Ana, 54 castaway versus castoff, 94–6 Cather, Willa, 60, 179 cats and dogs, 202–3 censorship, 56–7 Centuries of Solace (Simonds and Rothman), 321 childhood, natural, 135–7 “Childhood Charms” (Kelso), 139 Child, Nation, Race, and Empire (Swain and Hillel), 144 Children’s Aid Societies, 123, 128, 132, 134, 138–9, 144 Chronicles of Avonlea (ca), 259–60 cj. See Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery (cj) Clark, Catherine: about, 379; chapter by, 233–48; referenced, 13, 75, 207, 229 Cleghorn, Sarah N., 24 Clement, Lesley D.: about, 379; chapter by, 44–67; referenced, 12, 17 clothing: in gendered stereotypes, 177, 182–3, 185, 187, 243, 338; lmm’s yellow garter, 218–20; transformation of orphans by, 132, 135, 137, 139; Woolf on, 5 Coates, Donna, 40n2 Coats, Karen, 318 Cogewea: The Half-Blood (Mourning Dove), 256

Coleman, Daniel, 143 Collins-Gearing, Brooke, 8, 263n8 colonization/colonialism: in Canada, 114n23, 121, 146, 263n8; and children, 92, 114n21; and domesticity, 89–93; and lmm’s writing, 13; and religion, 101–3; and Valancy’s dust pile, 77 “Come, Let Us Go” (Anne Shirley), 59 Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery (cj), 6–7, 23, 40n18 Confessions (Augustine), 279–80 Conservation of Childhood (Kelso), 125 consumption, 45–52, 61, 62n8, 63n24, 84–5n34 Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (Lawlor), 52, 63n28 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 298 Cormier, Emily Cordinali, 272 Courageous Women (Keith and McKinley), 114n31, 250 cross-dressing: clothing and gendered stereotypes, 177, 182–3, 185, 187; female characters as masculinized, 178–9, 185–6; “female female impersonator,” 178; gender binarism, 176–7, 190–2; heteronormativity, 179, 180, 187, 189; heterosexuality, 182, 186–7, 192; humour, 176; “A Patent Medicine Testimonial” (Montgomery), 176; and twins, 175, 182–4, 193n29; “The Twins and a Wedding,” 182–4; “The Way of Transgressors” (AI), 184–5; “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand” (Montgomery), 177–82 Culley, Margo, 214, 216 The Cure of Consumption (Alabone), 63n28 Cusack, Leonard, 62n14 385

INDEX

Cuthbert, Marilla: about, 95–6, 143, 270–2; adoption of Davy and Dora, 175; and Anne Shirley, 97–106, 108–12, 298–9, 325; on orphan boys available for adoption, 120–1, 123, 147n16 Cuthbert, Matthew: on adoption of Anne, 1, 98, 104, 297; death of, 2, 53, 64n44, 112, 271–2; as feminized male character, 77, 319; Rachel Lynde on, 95–6 Daly, Brenda O., 322 Davin, Anna, 138 Dawley, J. Searle, 23 Deacon, William Arthur, 5, 347–8n15 deaths: Anne Shirley on, 59–60; lmm on, 17, 45, 46, 50, 53; masculine images of, 49, 52, 54, 61; of Matthew Cuthbert, 2, 53, 64n44, 112, 271–2; of Old Grandmother (mm), 52–3, 335–40; of Ruby Gillis (ai), 17, 44– 53, 62, 63; of Walter Blythe, 35–8, 45, 53–61, 279 Death So Noble (Vance), 37, 56, 64–5n46 Defoe, Daniel, 89, 93 destabilization of gender: and the consumptive maiden, 45–53, 61; and fairy tales, 240; and kalos Thanatos, 45, 53–61; Rubio on (bc), 245. See also gender Devereux, Cecily, 121 dick/pinkie, 178, 193n13 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 305 dogs and cats. See cats and dogs domesticity: as adventure, 87, 89, 94, 103; and Anne, 90–3, 104–5, 109–10, 113; in bc, 18, 69, 72–7, 81; and colonization, 89–93, 114n21; “Girls in Bonds” (Salah), 87; as less than 386

ideal, 87; lmm on, 104, 167, 205–6; and patriarchy, 87–8; Doody, Margaret, 286 Douglas, Ann, 61n3 Downton Abbey (tv series), 22, 40n12 Drain, Susan, 90, 91, 110, 297 Eaton, Timothy, 128 Edelman, Lee, 305 Edwards, Gail, 93 Edwards, Owen Dudley, 28, 31 Eggleston, Wilfrid, 252 Elaine, in Tennyson, 46, 48–9, 51, 107 Ellis, Samantha, 90 Emerson, 79 Emily of New Moon (enm), 286. See also Emily trilogy; Starr, Douglas (enm); Starr, Emily Byrd (enm) Emily’s Quest (eq): Emily and the parlour, 155; Emily on the Disappointed House, 163; and Indigenous Peoples, 254; Lofty John’s Bush (eq), 155, 168, 170n15, 172n91 Emily trilogy, 152–72; Aunt Ruth’s house, 156–9; the Disappointed House, 162–9; the lookout room, 159–61; the parlour, 154–6 Emmett, Hilary, 317, 324 enm. See Emily of New Moon (enm) Epperly, Elizabeth Rollins: about, 14n21, 379–80; on Anne, 107, 109– 10, 115n38; chapter by, 331–49; on domesticity in bc, 72–3; on Emily, 164, 291; on Ewan Macdonald, 222; The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, 7, 87, 153, 235, 241, 328; on islands in lmm’s works, 98, 115n55; on lmm and nature, 70, 245, 285–6; on lmm’s verbal imagery, 124; on loss of Walter (ri), 20; My Dear Mr. M:

INDEX

Letters to G.B. MacMillan from L.M. Montgomery (with Bolger), 7; Through Lover’s Lane, 153, 159; on time in mm, 287–9; use of colour in lmm’s works, 289–90 eq. See Emily’s Quest (eq) Essays in Fallacy (Macphail), 66n59 ethics of entanglement (Barad), 11 Evans, Suzanne, 22 Faerie Queene (Spenser), 60 Fair, Thomas, 106 “The Fair World of L.M. Montgomery” (Porter), 234 fairy tales, 234–8 femininity: comparison of robinsonades, 94; in an exclusive community, 267, 269–77; “female female impersonator,” 178; femalefemale relationships, 7, 110, 212–13, 224–5, 269; The Female Imagination (Spacks), 154; femaleness as less valued, 2–3; feminism, 3, 6, 7, 9, 21–2; The Feminization of American Culture (Douglas), 61n3; and nature, 69, 285–90, 300–30; pathologies of, 46, 51; Valancy’s acts of rebellion (bc), 241–2; and worms, 186. See also domesticity; women fetal alcohol syndrome, 7 Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Ott), 48 First World War, 53–4, 261–2 Fishbane, Melanie J., 317–18 Fisher, Susan, 43n94 Fitzgerald, Charles Penrose, 23–4, 27 “Flight of the White Feather” (Stevens), 22 Flint and Feather (Johnson), 250, 260 For What? (Varley), 60 Foster, John. See Snaith, Barney (bc)

Foster, Shirley, 71 The Four Feathers (film), 23, 40n19 The Four Feathers (Mason), 22–3, 40n18 Four Lights, 24 Fractal Time (Braden), 349n43 The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass (Epperly), 7, 87, 153, 235, 241, 328 Fraustino, Lisa Rowe, 318 Freeman, Elizabeth, 305, 335, 338, 347n9, 348n19, 349n42 Freud, Sigmund, 44–5 Frohman, Charles, 55–6 From Chivalry to Terrorism (Braudy), 30 Frye, Northrop, 98 Further Chronicles of Avonlea (Page), 259–60 Gammel, Irene, 72–3, 117n99, 120, 191, 211–12, 221–2 The Gates Ajar (Phelps), 64n41 Gay, Cissy (bc), 46, 62n8, 73–4, 84– 5n34, 241–2 gender: attributes of/behaviour by, 175–82, 184–7, 189–90; and clothing, 177, 182–3, 185, 187, 243, 338; feminization of male characters, 30–2, 69, 77–83, 244–6, 277–80, 319; and humour, 176, 196, 202; “L.M. Montgomery and Gender” (L.M. Montgomery Institute), 2; masculinization of female characters, 178–9, 185–6, 201; and nature, 12, 68–86, 198, 285–90, 300–1; and time, 9, 13, 207, 334, 341–2, 346; War and Gender (Goldstein), 20–1; and wars, 19–22, 30, 35, 40n2, 331–2; “Why Anne Makes Us Dizzy” (McQuillan and Pfeiffer), 207. See also Butler, 387

INDEX

Judith; destabilization of gender; femininity; gender binarism; masculinity; queerness/queer theory; sentimentality; women gender binarism: adventure/ domesticity, 91; identification, 176–7, 190–2, 201, 335, 341–2, 349; in lmm’s time, 2, 173, 176; non-binary identification, 15n31, 331; in short fiction, 196–7. See also gender Gerson, Carole: about, 380; chapter by, 249–65; referenced, 11, 13, 151n90 The Gift of Wings (Rubio), 5, 55, 246n1, 347–8n15 Gilbert, Sandra M.: on angels/ monsters, 69, 72, 157, 165; “female female impersonator,” 178; lack of matrilineal heritage, 159; The Madwoman in the Attic (with Gubar), 154; on male sexuality, 79, 163; on no man’s land and unmen, 56 Gillis, Ruby (ai): death of, 17, 44–53, 62, 63; Rachel Lynde on, 50, 52, 293 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 71 “Girls in Bonds” (Salah), 87 The Golden Road (gr), 46, 254 Goldstein, Joshua S., 20–1 Goodman, Kevis, 286 Goodman, Ruth, 219 Goodwin, Sarah Webster, 44, 61 gr. See The Golden Road (gr) Gray, Paige, 157, 167 Green Gables, 95, 271–2 Grey Owl/Archibald Belaney, 255, 264n31 Gubar, Marah: on Anne and Diana’s friendship, 272–3, 278; on the pleasures of postponement, 7, 318; on unwritten heterosexual love, 81; “Where Is the Boy?” 7

388

Gubar, Susan: on angels/monsters, 69, 72, 157, 165; “female female impersonator,” 178; on heterosexual love, 278; The Madwoman in the Attic (with Gilbert), 154; on male sexuality and literary power, 163; matrilineal heritage for authors, 159; pen as metaphorical penis, 79 Gullace, Nicoletta, 21–7 Guthke, Karl, 52 Haig, Douglas, 54 Halberstam, J., 305 Hammill, Faye, 153 Hayes, Kate Simpson, 259 “Heart – Hunger” (Kelso), 139, 140 “Heredity or Example, Which” (Kelso), 135, 149n59 heteronormativity, 179, 187, 189, 212. See also sex/sexuality The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature (Nodelman), 92 Higonnet, Margaret Randolph, 30, 60 Hilder, Monika B., 76, 173 Hillel, Margot, 144 Hitchcock, Christina: about, 380; chapter by, 266–83; referenced, 13, 190 Homer, 54 Homes Wanted for Homeless Children (Kelso), 125, 126, 130 Howey, Ann, 48, 49 “How I Began to Write” (Montgomery), 285 Hoy, Helen, 7 humour: in Anne of Green Gables (agg), 199; to avoid sentimentality, 50–1, 64n40; from gender assumptions/stereotypes, 176, 196, 202; lmm on, 173–4; in lmm’s diary with Lefurgey, 213–14; use by

INDEX

lmm, 191, 207, 220, 226, 343–4; and Valancy Stirling, 248n37. See also laughter Humphreys, David, 63n28 Humphries, Mark, 57 Hypatia Club, 250, 252, 263n6 Idylls of the King (Tennyson), 48 Indigenous Peoples: in Anne with an E (tv series), 114n23; and lmm, 250, 253–4, 263n8; in lmm’s work, 8, 151n90, 265n61; Mi'kmaw Nation, 254–5, 265; Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 146, 262 Inglesfield, Robert, 290 The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery (Gammel), 211 Irving, Paul (aa), 141, 278–9 “Is it Any Wonder That People Are Eager to Adopt Such Bright Little Children as These” (Children’s Aid), 138 “Island Homemaking: Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes and the Robinsonade Tradition” (O’Malley), 89 Jackson, Susan, 2, 278 Jane of Lantern Hill (jlh), 68, 175 Johnson, E. Pauline, 249–65; about, 251, 260–1, 265n59; “Canadian Born,” 252; Flint and Feather, 250, 260; Legends of Vancouver, 260; The Moccasin Maker, 257, 260; “Moonset,” 249–50; “Pauline Johnson: A Reminiscence” (MacKay), 252; “Pauline Johnson and Her Contribution to Literature” (Montgomery), 250, 260; stories by, 250–1, 256–7; “A

Strong Race Opinion: On the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction,” 257 Johnson, Samuel, 286–7 Johnston, Russell, 127–8 Jones, Caroline E., 8, 319–20, 329n7 journals. See Montgomery, L.M.: journals kalos Thanatos, 45, 52, 54–6, 58, 60–1 Kannas, Vappu: about, 380; chapter by, 211–28; referenced, 12, 273–4 Kapur, Shekhar, 40n19 Keenleyside, Heather, 294 Keith, Jennifer, 295 Keith, Marian, 250 Kelso, John Joseph: brochures/articles, 125, 130, 135, 138, 139, 141, 149n59; images, 126, 129, 133, 136, 140, 142, 145; superintendent of children, 122–3, 128, 132, 134–5 Kendall, Tim, 41n40 Kilmeny of the Orchard, 68 Kincaid, James, 139–41 King, Cecily (gr), 46 Kornfeld, Eve, 2, 278 Koven, Seth, 132 Kristeva, Julia, 349n42 Kuhlman, Erika A., 22 Kutzer, M. Daphne, 192 Ladd, Heather: about, 380–1; chapter by, 284–303; referenced, 13, 349n45 laughter: Bakhtin on, 195–6, 198–9; examples in lmm’s works, 173, 293, 337; Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Bergson), 199; and lmm, 12, 201, 203, 214, 225, 347. See also humour Lawlor, Clark, 52, 63n28 Lawson, Kate, 71–2, 153, 241

389

INDEX

Layne, Linda L., 321 Ledger, Heath, 40n19 Ledwell, Jane, 7–8 Leed, Eric, 56, 66n68 Lefebvre, Benjamin: The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 4, 287; on lmm’s use of initials, 3; on mm, 335, 348n16; on ri, 22, 32, 36–7 Lefurgey, Nora: about the diary (written with lmm), 211, 213–15; entries on the same subject, 216, 219; on Ewan Macdonald, 223; friendship with lmm, 174, 224–6; recitations, 255; on romance/ sexuality, 212, 218–21; and the scrapbooks, 215 Legends of Vancouver (Johnson), 260 Lerer, Seth, 47 A Life and Its Mirrors (Åhmansson), 7 Literal Commentary on Genesis (Augustine), 267–8, 280 Litster, Jennifer H., 31, 211–12, 219, 225–6 L.M. Montgomery: The Gift of Wings (Rubio), 5, 55, 246n1, 347–8n15 “L.M. Montgomery and the Anguish of Mother Loss” (Bode), 319 “L.M. Montgomery and Gender” (L.M. Montgomery Institute), 2 L.M. Montgomery Institute, pei, 2, 14n15 The L.M. Montgomery Reader (Lefebvre), 4, 287 “L.M. Montgomery’s Great War” (Robinson), 31 Lofty John’s Bush (eq), 155, 168, 170n15, 172n91 loss: of Anne’s first child, 274, 318, 320–3, 327–8; Centuries of Solace (Simonds and Rothman), 321; in Emily’s life (eq), 163; “L.M. 390

Montgomery and the Anguish of Mother Loss” (Bode), 319; of lmm’s mother, 143, 319–20; of lmm’s second son, 316–18, 320, 322–3; Motherhood Lost (Layne), 321; of a pregnancy/infant, 321–2, 325, 326, 330n33; from war, 20, 35, 54, 56 Love, Heather, 305 Lusitania, 33, 55 Lynde, Rachel (agg): on Anne, 50, 90, 104, 112; and Marilla, 2, 95–6, 120–2; on Ruby, 50, 52, 293 MacDonagh, Michael, 26–7 Macdonald, Chester, 335 Macdonald, Ewan, 205, 212–13, 221–3 Macherey, Pierre, 93, 119–21 MacKay, Isabel Ecclestone, 252 MacLulich, T.D., 110 MacMillan, George B., 7, 173, 250, 259 Macneill, Penzie, 252, 255, 258 Macneill, Tillie, 197 Macphail, Andrew, 57, 66n59 The Madwoman in the Attic (Gilbert and Gubar), 154 magazine stories and short fiction, 87, 175–95, 196–7 Magic for Marigold (mm): imagery in, 340–2; and Indigenous Peoples in, 253–4; Old Grandmother, 52–3, 335–40 Magic Island (Waterston), 153, 244–5 Maher, Susan Naramore, 94 “Marigold and the Magic of Memory” (Waterston), 332–3 Martens, Lorna, 215 masculinity: Augustine, 267–9, 277, 279–80, 281; in bc, 75, 77, 81; From Chivalry to Terrorism (Braudy), 30; constructions of, 12, 181–2, 184; feminization of male characters,

INDEX

69, 77–82; ideologies of perfection, 71; and illness/death, 45, 49, 52, 54, 61; masculinization of female characters, 178–9, 185–6, 201; men in a feminine community, 277–80; phallic references, 79, 180; and robinsonades/adventure, 89–91, 94, 103–4, 106, 110, 114n14; and Thomson, 290, 294–6; and wars, 33, 39. See also gender; patriarchy; wars Mason, A.E.W., 22–3 matriarchy, 1–2, 82–3, 153–5, 159–60, 167–8 “The Maud Squad” (Brouse), 6 Maurier, George du, 46 McClelland, John, 260 McDonald-Rissanen, Mary, 217–18, 225 McGillis, Roderick, 90, 108 McKenzie, Andrea, 22, 33, 37 McKinley, Mabel Burns, 250 McMaster, Juliet, 100, 105 McMaster, Lindsey, 153, 154 McMillan, Rachel, 167 McQuillan, Julia, 207–8, 305 Meredith, Reverend John Knox (ri), 54 Mickenberg, Julia, 144 Mi'kmaw Nation, 254–5, 265, 265n61 Millais, John Everett, 47 Miller, Judith, 153 Mitchell, Jean, 7–8, 333 mm. See Magic for Marigold (mm) The Moccasin Maker (Johnson), 257, 260 Montgomery, L.M. – general: about, 2–5, 117n114, 143, 334, 347n13; on childhood in rv, 135–7; critiques of educators, 332–3; on death, 17, 45, 46, 50, 53; on domesticity, 104, 167, 205–6; and femininity/females, 110, 269–77, 281, 345; and Indigenous Peoples, 8, 151n90, 250, 253–5, 263n8, 264n23,

265n61; letters to MacMillan, 173, 250, 259; letters with Weber, 21, 38, 207, 252, 263n11; and loss, 64n42, 143, 316–18, 319–20, 322–4, 329n7; on marriages, 167, 204–5, 212, 270, 277–8; and mothers, 319–22; and nature, 68–9, 70, 78–9, 224, 245, 285–9; and orphans, 131, 143; on romance, 220, 221, 226; and sexual agency (bc), 240, 247n22; and wars, 38, 43n99, 59, 65n48. See also humour; laughter; Lefurgey, Nora – journals: on being a mother, 316–17, 319–20, 322–4, 326; on the Canadian West, 252; on cats, 203; compared to diary with Nora, 211–15, 221, 226, 233–4; Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery (cj), 6–7, 23, 40n18; and conflict, 8; on her name and gender identity, 4; on humour, 173; items not included, 23, 211–12, 251, 254–5, 260; on marriages, 204, 221; published, 6; self-editing of, 217; on sex, 218, 247n22; on short stories, 195; on Tillie Macneill, 197; on Trilby, 62n10; on voting, 3; on war, 37, 43n99, 59; on writing, 29, 33, 51, 64n40, 334 – others on: “Bosom Friends: Lesbian Desire in Montgomery’s Anne Books” (Robinson), 270; “The Fair World of L.M. Montgomery” (Porter), 234; The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery (Gammel), 211; “L.M. Montgomery and the Anguish of Mother Loss” (Bode), 319; “L.M. Montgomery and Gender” (L.M. Montgomery Institute), 2; The L.M. Montgomery Reader (Lefebvre), 4, 287; “L.M. 391

INDEX

Montgomery’s Great War” (Robinson), 31; My Dear Mr. M: Letters to G.B. MacMillan from L.M. Montgomery (with Bolger), 7; “‘Sex Matters’: L.M. Montgomery, Friendship, and Sexuality” (Robinson), 247n22; “The Victorian Sickroom in L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle and Emily’s Quest” (Lawson), 241. See also Epperly, Elizabeth Rollins; Rubio, Mary Henley – works: Canadian Magazine, 245, 251–2, 259, 265n53, 285; chapters in Courageous Women, 114n31; diary with Lefurgey, 213–14, 215, 217–18, 222–3; “How I Began to Write,” 285; “A Patent Medicine Testimonial,” 176; “Pauline Johnson and Her Contribution to Literature,” 250, 260; “The Punishment of the Twins,” 184; scrapbooks, 214–15, 252, 254–5, 259; The Seasons and the Rural Round (Ferns and McCabe), 285; stories for the Delineator, 334; “The Summons” (AI), 50–1; “Tannis of the Flats,” 250, 252, 256, 258; “The Twins and a Wedding,” 182–4; “The Way of Transgressors” (AI), 184–5, 187; “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand,” 177–82; “The Woods,” 79, 285, 287, 289, 293–5; writings on the West, 252–3, 257–8; “You,” 252. See also The L.M. Montgomery Reader (Lefebvre); Montgomery, L.M.: journals – writing life: affinity for Emerson, 79; and du Maurier’s Trilby, 62n10; and E. Pauline Johnson, 151n90, 250–1, 256–7, 261; letters 392

with MacMillan, 7, 173, 250, 259; letters with Weber, 21, 38, 207, 252, 263n11; and Macphail, 66n59; male characters as feminized, 30–2, 77–8, 81–3, 244–6, 277–80, 319; on writing, 37, 64n40, 195, 246n1, 285, 335. See also Thomson, James “Moonset” (Johnson), 249 motherhood: and loss, 318–22, 328; Motherhood Lost (Layne), 321; Mothers in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Fraustino and Coats), 318; Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs (Evans), 22; “The New Mother at Home” (Jones), 320; voice of, 322–3 Murdoch, Lydia, 134, 135, 141 “‘Mute Misery’: Speaking the Unspeakable in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Books” (Emmett), 317 My Dear Mr. M: Letters to G.B. MacMillan from L.M. Montgomery (Bolger and Epperly), 7 naming/names: Anne renaming her world (agg), 91, 100–1, 291–2; Anne with an “e” (agg), 104, 117n99; Barney Snaith and his names (bc), 82–3; females with male names, 201; lmm as Maude, 212, 214; Valancy Stirling and her names (bc), 82–3, 238; “When I don’t like the name of a place or a person ...” (agg), 91 Narbonne, André, 173 nature: as alternative to religion, 101–2; and Anne Shirley, 96–7, 287–91, 293–4, 296–7, 299–300; and Barney Snaith, 79–83, 242, 248n40; Epperly on lmm and nature, 70, 245, 285–6; as gendered, 12, 69, 79,

INDEX

285–90, 300–1; lmm and Nora in, 224; and lmm’s heroines, 68–9, 78– 9; “Nature’s Queer Performance” (Barad), 11; and Valancy Stirling, 69–72, 76, 78–80, 242; versus humankind, 294–5; versus nurture, 135, 149n59, 198; Walter and, 29; “The Woods” (Montgomery), 79, 285, 287, 289, 293–5. See also Thomson, James “The New Mother at Home” (Jones), 320 “Nice Little Boys for People Who Want Them” (Toronto Daily Star), 127, 129, 130 Nikolajeva, Maria, 114n14 Nodelman, Perry, 92 non-binary and trans people, 15n31, 331 Nussbaum, Felicity, 217 Old Grandmother (mm), 52–3, 335–40 O’Malley, Andrew, 89, 92 Once Upon a Time (Warner), 238 On Paradise (Ambrose), 268 On the Good of Marriage (Augustine), 268–9 Ophelia (Millais), 47 O’Reilly, Andrea, 322–3 Oronhyatekha, Dr/Peter Martin, 255, 264n30 orphans: advertisement of children, 124–31; citizenship, 122, 144, 147n16; cultural function of, 144–6; documenting success, 131–7; examples of imagined orphans in lmm’s works, 141–2; Kelso’s photographs of, 126, 129, 133, 136, 140, 142, 145; public information about, 124, 147n26; soliciting home, 138–43 Ott, Katherine, 48

“‘Outrageously Sexual’ Anne” (Robinson), 8 Owens, Louis, 256 The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature (Mickenberg and Vallone), 144 Page, L.C., 259–60 Parmiter, Tara K.: about, 381; chapter by, 316–31; referenced, 13, 64n42, 275, 295, 306, 345 “A Patent Medicine Testimonial” (Montgomery), 176 Patmore, Coventry, 69 Pat of Silver Bush (psb), 253 patriarchy: in agg, 90–1, 93, 104–6, 173; in bc, 69, 71–2, 74–7, 81–3, 235; and fairy tales, 235; and lmm, 153–4, 197, 205; and religion, 103, 173, 201; Rubio on, 83, 235; in society, 4, 12, 79, 281. See also Emily trilogy “Pauline Johnson: A Reminiscence” (MacKay), 252 “Pauline Johnson and Her Contribution to Literature” (Montgomery), 250, 260 Pearce, Sharyn, 77 Peirce, C.S., 125 pen as a metaphorical penis, 79 Pennypacker, Sarah, 349n44 performativity, theory of (Butler), 9–10 “Performing Motherhood” (Steffler), 319 Perrault, Charles, 235, 247n26 Peter Pan (Barrie), 55–6 Petticoats and White Feathers (Kuhlman), 22 Pfeiffer, Julie, 207–8, 305 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 64n41 photographs of orphans: about, 125–9, 131–5, 139, 141, 148n32; Kelso, 126, 129, 133, 136, 140, 142, 145 393

INDEX

Pike, E. Holly: about, 381; chapters by, 1–15, 175–94; referenced, 72, 81–2, 173, 196–7, 201 pinkie/dick, 178, 193n13 “The Piper” (Walter Blythe, bq), 36, 55–6, 57, 58 Plaissetty, René, 23 Podnieks, Elizabeth, 322–3 Poetics of Reverie (Bachelard), 162 Poetics of Space (Bachelard), 154, 162 Porter, Helen, 234 Power Notes (Epperly), 14n21 Prairie Potpourri (Hayes), 259 Protection of Children (Kelso), 141, 142 Prycer, Melissa, 46, 49, 62n8, 63n24 “The Punishment of Billy” (mm), 193n29 “The Punishment of the Twins” (ai), 184, 193n29 “The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s” (ca), 195–201, 203, 205 queerness/queer theory: Anne Made Me Gay (musical), 8; “Bosom Friends: Lesbian Desire in Montgomery’s Anne Books” (Robinson), 270; Gender Trouble (Butler), 9, 17, 207, 335; “Nature’s Queer Performance” (Barad), 11; “Theorizing Queer Temporalities” (Dinshaw), 305; Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Freeman), 335, 348n19, 349n42; “Your Childhood Pal, Anne of Green Gables, Was Probably Queer” (Callahan), 8. See also femininity; masculinity; sex/sexuality Rainbow Valley (rv): Blythe, Walter (ri, bq, rv), 20, 22, 28–38, 53–61, 279; Bryant, Miss Cornelia (ahd, 394

rv), 198, 202, 204, 206, 276; and children/childhood, 135–7, 141, 254; and twins, 175 Reddy, Maureen T., 322 “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” (Johnson), 250, 256, 257 red hair, 47–9, 100, 104–5, 325 Red Scrapbook (Montgomery), 214–15, 252, 255, 259 Reese, Ashley N.: about, 381–2; chapter by, 68–86; referenced, 12, 18, 168, 248n40 Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag), 19, 31 Reimer, Mavis: about, 381–2; chapter by, 119–51; referenced, 7, 11, 12, 88, 92, 93, 250, 262 religion: and adoption, 130, 134, 139; in agg, 101–3; Augustinian ideas on women, 266–7; narratives behind orphan photographs, 135; Valancy Stirling as if born again (bc), 80 Residential School system, 146 Rich, Adrienne, 322 Rilla of Ingleside (ri): on babies to evoke love, 141; on Mary and her childhood, 137; Rilla on Walter enlisting, 34; “The Sound of a Going,” 55–6. See also wars; white-feather movement Robinson, Laura M.: about, 382; “Bosom Friends: Lesbian Desire in Montgomery’s Anne Books,” 270; chapter by, 1–15; referenced, 8, 31, 69, 107, 196–7, 269; “‘Sex Matters’: L.M. Montgomery, Friendship, and Sexuality,” 247n22 robinsonade genre: about, 89, 113n1; Annescapade, 91, 96–8, 101, 103, 105–9; context of, 93–4, 106, 110–11; female versions versus

INDEX

male versions, 111, 114n14; “Island Homemaking: Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes and the Robinsonade Tradition” (O’Malley), 89. See also domesticity; gender; patriarchy Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 89, 96–7 A Room of One’s Own (Woolf), 4, 154 Rosenthal, Toby, 48 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 47 Rothman, Barbara Katz, 321–2, 324, 326, 330n33 “The Round of Life” (agg), 50 Rubio, Mary Henley: on Anne Shirley, 100–1, 109, 116n92; on bc as critique of patriarchy, 83; on Emily as muse, 168–9; on Further Chronicles of Avonlea, 259–60; on gender destabilization (bc), 245; on lmm as widely read, 38–9, 43n100; on lmm’s journals, 323; on lmm’s writing, 90, 91, 153, 242; L.M. Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, 5, 6, 55, 246n1, 347–8n15; on religion in Avonlea, 102; “Subverting the Trite,” 226, 235 rv. See Rainbow Valley (rv) Sakuma, Kazuko: about, 382; chapter by, 19–43; referenced, 12, 17 Salah, Christiana, 87, 196 Saltman, Judith, 93, 97 Sanchez-Eppler, Karen, 92 Sardella-Ayres, Dawn, 163, 169 Sassoon, Siegfried, 57 scrapbooks (Montgomery), 214–15, 252, 254–5, 259 The Seasons (Thomson). See Thomson, James The Seasons and the Rural Round (Poetry), 285

sentimentality: and adoption, 138–9; and Anne, 107, 274; avoided by humour, 50–1, 64n40; and consumption, 51–3; in lmm’s work, 3–4, 233–4, 300 sex/sexuality: in bc, 73, 240–2, 246; “Bosom Friends: Lesbian Desire in Montgomery’s Anne Books” (Robinson), 270; and consumption, 84–5n34; heteronormativity, 179, 187, 189, 212; heterosexuality, 7, 81–2, 182, 186–7, 192, 230, 278; lmm and Nora on, 218–19, 226; male sexuality and literary power, 163; “‘Outrageously Sexual’ Anne” (Robinson), 8; separation from romantic love, 190–2, 269–70; “‘Sex Matters’: L.M. Montgomery, Friendship, and Sexuality” (Robinson), 247n22; as sinful, 268– 9; and tuberculosis, 63. See also gender; queerness/queer theory Shaw, Bernard, 24 Sheckels, Theodore F., 100 Shirley, Anne (later Blythe): about, 46–7, 48, 50, 99–100, 110–12, 284; as Adam, 100, 101; Anne with an “e” (agg), 104, 117n99; and Diana Barry, 48–50, 78, 105, 272–5, 278; and E. Pauline Johnson (awp), 249; and Gilbert, 51, 104, 107–8, 111, 204, 273–8; on Green Gables as her home, 103; on having red hair, 100, 104, 105; and Leslie, 274–6, 327–8; and Marilla, 97–8, 102, 110–12, 271–2; as a mother, 318–22; and nature, 96, 287–90, 293–4, 296–7, 300; “‘Outrageously Sexual’ Anne” (Robinson), 8; and patriarchy, 90–1, 93, 104–6; renaming her world (agg), 91, 100–1, 291–2; “The Round 395

INDEX

of Life,” 50; and trees, 98–9, 108, 297–300; on Walter’s death, 59–60; “When I don’t like the name of a place or a person ...” (agg), 91; “You don’t want me because I’m not a boy,” 1; “Your Childhood Pal, Anne of Green Gables, Was Probably Queer” (Callahan), 8. See also Lynde, Rachel (agg) short fiction and magazine stories, 87, 175–92, 196–7 Siddal, Elizabeth, 47, 62n12 “A Silent House” (in Simonds and Rothman), 324 Simonds, Wendy, 321–2, 324, 326, 330n33 Simons, Judy, 71 Singley, Carol, 134 Smith, Michelle J., 106, 114n32 Snaith, Barney (bc), 68–86; and domesticity, 72–7; as in a fairy tale, 236–46; as feminized, 69, 77–82; as John Foster, 69–72, 245; and names, 82–3 Solt, Marilyn, 287–8, 297 “Some of Ontario’s Children” (Globe), 144, 145 Sontag, Susan, 19, 31, 45–6, 62n8 “The Sound of a Going” (ri), 55 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 154, 157–8, 160, 164, 166, 291 Spenser, Edmund, 60 Spring, Erin: about, 382; chapter by, 284–303; referenced, 13, 349n45 “Spring Song” (Walter Blythe, bq), 59 Stallcup, Jackie E., 74, 77, 205, 275 Starr, Douglas (enm), 46, 49–50, 63n24 Starr, Emily Byrd (enm): and Aunt Elizabeth, 154–6, 158, 161, 169n13; comparison to Anne, 49–50; The Moral of the Rose, 161, 165; as owner 396

of Lofty John’s Bush, 168, 172n91; relationship to space, 152; A Seller of Dreams, 160–1; The Woman Who Spanked the King, 158 Steffler, Margaret, 319 Stevens, Kimberly Elisa, 22 Stirling, Valancy (bc): and domesticity/angel in the house, 18, 72–7; as in a fairy tale, 236–46; and humour, 248n37; and John Foster/ nature, 69–72; and names, 82–3, 238; and patriarchy, 69, 71–2, 74–7, 81–3; relationship with Barney, 77–82, 229, 248n40. See also The Blue Castle (bc) Stone, Martin, 57 Storm and Dissonance (Mitchell), 8 The Story Girl (sg), 68, 254 “The Storyteller” (Benjamin), 234 “street Arabs,” 121 Strong-Boag, Veronica, 124 “A Strong Race Opinion: On the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction” (Johnson), 257 “Subverting the Trite” (Rubio), 226, 235 Such a Simple Little Tale (Reimer), 7 suffrage, 2–3, 9 “The Summons” (ai), 50–4 Sutherland, Kate, 5 Swain, Shurlee, 144 A Tangled Web (tw), 234, 254 “Tannis of the Flats” (Montgomery), 250, 252, 256, 258–60 Tatar, Maria, 235 temporal drag, 306, 333, 335, 337, 338, 343, 347n9 Tennyson, Lord (Albert Tennyson), 48–9, 261, 286 Terry, J.E. Harold, 23

INDEX

“Textual/Sexual Space in The Blue Castle” (Åhmansson), 240 “Theorizing Queer Temporalities” (Dinshaw), 305 A Theory of Literary Production (Macherey), 119 They Used to Call Me Snow White … but I Drifted (Barreca), 200 Thompson, Rebecca J., 12, 88, 152–72 Thompson, William V., 317, 323 Thomson, James: compared with lmm’s work, 292–4, 296, 298–300, 349n45; and imagination, 290–1; importance to lmm, 284–5, 291; language style/detail in, 286–7; and masculinity in The Seasons, 294–6; mirroring of in agg, 288; use of colour, 289–90 Three Guineas (Woolf), 19 Through Lover’s Lane (Epperly), 153, 159 time: Fractal Time (Braden), 349n43; gender constituted in, 9, 13, 207, 334, 341–2, 346; lmm’s treatment of, 333–6, 343, 346; queer theorists’ perspectives on, 305, 335–6; temporal drag, 306, 333, 335, 337, 338, 343, 347n9; through seasonal change, 285, 286, 287–8, 289, 300; Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Freeman), 335, 348n19, 349n42 Traill, Catharine Parr, 89, 93–4, 114n31–2 trans and non-binary people, 15n31, 331 Trilby (Maurier), 46, 62n10 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 146, 262 tuberculosis, 46, 62n14 Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Byrne), 46

Tulloch, Bonnie J.: about, 382–3; chapter by, 89–118; referenced, 12, 87–8, 157 tw. See A Tangled Web (tw) twins: Anne’s experiences of, 175; crossdressing of, 185–6; gendered behaviours, 176; and heteronormativity, 187–9; and humour, 191; “A Patent Medicine Testimonial,” 176; “The Punishment of the Twins” (ai), 184, 193n29; “The Twins and a Wedding,” 182–4; “The Twins Pretend,” 189; “The Way of Transgressors” (ai), 184–7; “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand,” 177–82, 188–9 “Unattached Women Raising Cain” (agg), 147n16 Undoing Gender (Butler), 9 “An Unfortunate Lily Maid” (agg), 48 unheimlich, 108 Urquhart, Jane, and mother: about, 383; chapter by, 309–15; referenced, 13, 306 The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Bettelheim), 234–5 Vallone, Lynne, 144 Vance, Jonathan, 37, 56, 64–5n46 Varley, Fred, 60 “The Victorian Sickroom in L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle and Emily’s Quest” (Lawson), 241 A Vindication of the Rights of Women (Wollstonecraft), 9 vote, right to, 2–3, 9 Warner, Marina, 235, 238 wars: antiwar poetry, 66n75; as book topic versus books about women, 5; 397

INDEX

From Chivalry to Terrorism (Braudy), 30; Death So Noble (Vance), 37, 56, 64–5n46; First World War, 38–9, 43n94, 52–4, 261– 2; and gendered roles, 19–22, 30, 35, 40n2, 331–2; images versus reality, 56–7; kalos Thanatos, 45, 52, 54–6, 58, 60–1; and lmm, 35, 37–9, 43n99, 59; “L.M. Montgomery’s Great War” (Robinson), 31; mythologization of, 66n75; recruitment, 27–9, 37, 54–7, 65n48, 261–2; silver war badge, 41n34; Walter Blythe (ri, bq, rv), 28–38, 53, 54, 57; War and Gender (Goldstein), 20–1. See also white-feather movement Waterhouse, John William, 48–9 Waterston, Elizabeth: on Anne, 90, 116n67; attributes by gender, 184; on Deacon and lmm, 5; on Emily and Teddy, 166; Magic Island, 153, 244–5, 347n10, 349n46; “Marigold and the Magic of Memory,” 332–3; on Montgomery studies, 6; on twins, 175 “The Way of Transgressors” (ai), 184–5, 187 Weatherall, Ann, 17 Weber, Ephraim, 21, 38, 207, 252, 263n11 Webster, Sarah, 17 Weiss-Town, Janet, 90, 91 Wesseling, Elisabeth, 92 Wharton, Edith, 60 “When Jack and Jill Took a Hand” (Montgomery), 177–82, 188–9 “Where Is the Boy?” (Gubar), 7 white-feather movement, 19–43; about, 12, 21–2, 27, 28–9; books and films

398

about, 21–4, 40n19; experiences of, 24–6; inclusion in ri, 27–8, 35; lmm knowledge of, 23; press about, 40n25, 41n46; silver war badge, 41n34; White Feather Brigade/ Order of the White Feather, 24 “Why Anne Makes Us Dizzy” (McQuillan and Pfeiffer), 207 Wiggins, Genevieve, 199, 205 Wilmshurst, Rea, 253 Wolf, Virginia L., 98 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 9 women: as beautiful consumptives, 46–7, 50, 62n10; grief connected to, 330n33; as man-haters, 196, 199; as only necessary for procreation, 266–7; roles in war, 19–20, 40n2; term usage, 9, 15n31; as written versus writing subjects, 217. See also femininity; gender “The Woods” (Montgomery), 79, 285, 287, 289, 293–5 Woolf, Virginia, 4–5, 19, 24, 154–6, 158 world wars. See wars Worrall, Lechmere, 23 Wrede, Thelma, 88 Yeast, Denyse, 197 “Yellow Wallpaper” (Gilman), 71 “You” (Montgomery), 252 “Your Childhood Pal, Anne of Green Gables, Was Probably Queer” (Callahan), 8 Zelizer, Viviana A., 138–9 Zipes, Jack, 235 Zweig, Paul, 99, 105–6, 112