In her journal entry of 21 October 1921, L.M. Montgomery recalls a traumatic childhood incident in which her grandmother forced her to pray to God for forgiveness for being “a bad girl,” a task she remembers completing “sorely against my will, and with a soul filled with humiliation, impotent anger, and a queer sense of degradation as if something in me was outraged.”1 Elizabeth Waterston, noting Montgomery’s contextualizing of the journal entry as occurring “just after she finished writing the ninth chapter of Emily,”2 connects such childhood memories with the creation of the character of Emily, who, like Montgomery, experiences anger and shame as a result of humiliation imposed by older relatives and oppressive religion. The result of this particular incident in Montgomery’s life was “a lasting sense of disgust with and hatred for prayer and religion,” a rather curious admission to be made by a minister’s wife in early twentieth-century rural Ontario. While conceding that it was not “real prayer – real religion” that she “loathed,” but her grandmother’s version, which consisted of “pattering formulas and going blindly through certain meaningless ceremonies,” the retrospective journal writer is still easily moved to extreme feelings of loathing for a religious style that requires constant resistance and is so obviously part of her present as well as her past. She believes that she retained the humiliation and loathing of the forced childhood prayer, which “manifest[ed] itself in a feeling . . . that ‘religion’ and all connected with it was something which – like sex – one had to have but was ashamed of for all that.” She explains that in her “subconscious mind” this childhood incident, traumatic at the time but also deeply disturbing in retrospect, was primarily responsible for her “irrational detestation of ‘being a Christian.’”3
Montgomery assumed that she was “like most people in being a helpless victim to impressions made in early years” but thought that she was perhaps “more helpless than some owing to the exceeding sharpness and depth of the impressions made on a somewhat unusually sensitive nature.” Her “helplessness” was supported, however, by the way in which she nurtured the retention and intensification of such impressions through revisiting, rethinking, and rewriting them. In the 21 October 1921 entry, for example, she talks about how she dislikes “the name ‘Jesus’ itself” because she remembers it being “howled forth” by “unctuous evangelists and revivalists”; she also comments on her lifelong aversion to the term “Christian,” which came from being asked, “Little girl, isn’t it nice to be a Christian?” by “old Secord,” a grotesque Bible pedlar.4 These girlhood experiences, which occurred before Montgomery kept a diary or journal, are recorded for the first time in retrospect from the distance of adulthood and Leaskdale, years and miles removed from the original events and feelings. Once written in the journal, such experiences are often copied word for word, over and over, in letters to various correspondents, impressing themselves on the mind and memory as if they had been recorded, fact and emotion, at the time of the event itself. In chapter 8 of this volume, Emily Woster points out how the process of rewriting confronts a former voice, thereby encouraging the emergence of a new pattern of identity.5 Indeed, such remembering and rewriting is as much about the present as the past. According to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, “Acts of remembering take place at particular sites and in particular circumstances,” with “the life narrator depend[ing] on access to memory to narrate the past in such a way as to situate that experiential history within the present”; the result is that “we inevitably organize or form fragments of memory into complex constructions that become the changing stories of our lives.”6 Montgomery, for example, in a letter to Ephraim Weber on 15 October 1922, recounts this same incident of forced prayer and aversion to the name of Jesus and being called a Christian, transcribing the words directly from her journal of the previous year but claiming that the incident was triggered by a squabble she had just settled between Chester and Stuart,7 whereas in the journal account, it is apparently a catechism question asked by Stuart that triggers the memory. The event is deliberately contextualized and framed differently, drawing attention to the artificial construction of the recounting without undermining the power of the memory itself, which remains constant. This practice draws attention to Montgomery’s need to write out and write over key religious experiences. What is interesting is that Weber receives exactly the same account as the one recorded in the journal – the personal correspondence does not differ from the journal entry written with the intention of eventual publication.
Another form of rewriting was also taking place in the early 1920s. Mary Rubio outlines the process and years in Leaskdale when Montgomery, now in her forties, was “copying her childhood diaries into the formal journal ledgers,” creating a new character, “Maudie,” in the process.8 Maudie, as Rubio demonstrates, is a more persecuted and marginalized child than was the fairly content and privileged young Maud. This complete journal of the PEI years, as recopied by Montgomery “sometime between 1918 and 1922,” is now available in two volumes as The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889–1900 (2012) and 1901–1911 (2013), “uncut,” in “the format she herself devised.”9 These years of recopying the PEI journals serve as the period studied in this chapter, which considers both what is being copied and what is being lived. Rubio points out that Montgomery’s “brooding up” and writing of Emily of New Moon took place during this time when “she was once again reconfiguring her childhood in her journals.”10
This was also a time when Montgomery was anxious about the effects of religion on her own children. Concerned about the impact of Christianity, and specifically small-town Ontario Presbyterianism, on the growth of the child, she was, in October 1921, remembering her own childhood brushes with religion as faced by “Maudie,” creating those of the fictional Emily, and worrying about the effects of religious education on six-year-old Stuart and nine-year-old Chester. The journal entry of 21 October begins with the reference to completing the ninth chapter of Emily and ends with an anecdote relating how Montgomery went against the Leaskdale Sunday school teachers, “crude, ignorant old women,” and the “Leaskdale grundyites” by providing Stuart with a different and better answer to the catechism question of “Why did God make all things?” Rather than simply repeating what she considered the egotistical answer of “for his own glory,” Montgomery supplied “a very much higher conception of God’s creation” with her answer that “God made all things for the love and pleasure of creating them – of doing good work – of bringing beauty into existence.”11
Woster notes that Montgomery’s initial Ontario journal entry, in its retrospective stance, marks the first “major shift in her journaling process.”12 Even before she moved to retrospective entries, Montgomery noted that “in writing all this down I have seemed to live it over again.”13 Retrospective writing would have increased this sensation, but it is in the recopying and rewriting of her already composed life that such reliving becomes most intense: “I find that when I am copying those old journals I feel as if I had gone back into the past and were living over again the events and emotions of which I write. It is very delightful and a little sad.” In her writing and rewriting, Montgomery creates Maud, a journal persona, in order to maintain, when desired or needed, an important distance between herself as journal writer and herself as depicted on the journal page. The presence of a persona, for example, allows her to respond to the space between her current self in the sterile present and her former self in the sensuous past, which calls up feelings of difference and loss: “I have made myself wretchedly homesick by writing all this and visualizing the memories evoked. It has been so real to me that it has filled me with a bitter longing to be in those spots once more – to taste the inimitable flavor of the wild fruit, to lie amid the sun-warm grasses, to hear the robins whistling, to tiptoe through the lanes of greenery and fragrance in the summer mornings of those faraway years. When I wrench myself away from their idyllic memories to the bitter, carking reality of life at present I sicken at the contrast.”14 The narrative, although speaking of acute pain, is constructed with an appreciation for the artistic balance and contrast achieved in the startling gap between the plentiful past and the destitute present.
It seems that the revisiting of her childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood through the recopying of the PEI diaries facilitated in Montgomery a reliving of both what was recorded and not recorded in those pages, including earlier childhood moments preceding the years covered by the diary and intense impressions not included in the original account. These moments and depths appear in various forms in the current Leaskdale journal as her writing triggers memories. Despite the immediacy and power of the actual childhood events and narratives, these accounts are obviously written out of the life of Mrs Ewan Macdonald, the minister’s wife in Leaskdale, as much as they are written out of the Cavendish childhood and adolescence of Maudie. It is the startling intersection of these two lives that results in the extreme passion of the 21 October 1921 journal entry and other entries during this period. The intersections facilitate the transference and blurring of emotions between child and adult, nowhere more apparent than in the strong responses to Christianity and the Presbyterian Church. Sidonie Smith proposes that for the autobiographer “the doubling of the ‘self’ into a narrating ‘I’ and a narrated ‘I’ and, further, the fracturing of the narrated ‘I’ into multiple speaking postures” results in “several, sometimes competing stories about or versions of herself as her subjectivity is displaced by one or more multiple textual representations.”15 Montgomery’s fractured representations during this time include Maudie, the child; Maud, bereft cousin and friend of Frede; L.M. Montgomery, celebrity author and creator of Emily; and Mrs Ewan Macdonald, mother of two sons and minister’s wife to her husband and his congregations. A common thread connecting these disparate identities is the complex impact of religion as both supportive and destructive in past and present narratives, which are retrieved and constructed as continuous and complementary rather than competitive.
The importance of the creation of the character of Emily at this time, even beyond Montgomery’s admission of its autobiographical tendencies,16 is found in the theory of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who argue that “life is enactment, art the outward manifestation of the scenes performed on an inner stage, and thus an author and her characters are one: they are, as we have said, one ‘supposed person,’ or rather a series of such persons.”17 Montgomery’s concentration as an adult on the child identities of Maudie, Emily, Chester, and Stuart is similar in some ways to Gilbert and Gubar’s account of Emily Dickinson “consciously enacting the part of a child – both by deliberately prolonging her own childhood and by inventing a new, alternative childhood for herself.” Gilbert and Gubar’s interpretation of Dickinson’s poem “She rose to His Requirement” provides a relevant commentary on Montgomery’s conflicting identities, particularly those of girl and wife: “The irony of the woman/wife’s situation as it is described here is that in ‘rising’ to the rigorous ‘Requirement’ of a husband she has . . . been cast out of the holy, Wordsworthian sea of imagination where she had dwelt as a girl.” The husband/master’s diminishment of creative works as “Playthings”18 displays an attitude not far removed from Montgomery’s assessment of Ewan’s view of her fiction.19
There is then an intertextuality present in the fall of 1921, and more generally in the years 1918 to 1922, that involves the writing of the current journal in Leaskdale, the recopying of the diaries of the PEI years, and the composition of the first Emily novel – all written out of the Leaskdale manse, the official home of the local Presbyterian minister, with its complicated obligations to the congregation of St Paul’s Presbyterian Church and the rural Ontario communities of Leaskdale and Zephyr. Within that manse, Ewan suffered from what was called at that time “religious melancholia,” revealed to Montgomery when she pushed him for an explanation: “He said he was possessed by a horrible dread that he was eternally lost – that there was no hope for him in the next life. This dread haunted him night and day and he could not banish it.”20 I argue that the “physical repulsion to Ewan,”21 as experienced and expressed by the journal persona Maud in response to this “malady,” is a complex culmination of Montgomery’s own contradictory and long-standing loyalty and aversion to institutionalized Christianity and Presbyterianism – which is as much about Montgomery as it is about Ewan. The complex feelings, highly controlled and not yet articulated in the girlhood entries of the PEI diaries being recopied into the journal format, are carefully formulated in the fiction but take full form and weight in the Leaskdale journal. The extreme diction used to describe Ewan’s mental illness and Maud’s reaction to it is the same diction used to describe retrospective childhood “feelings” about a detestable religion that was neither holy nor healthy. Such diction is not generally used in the early journals but is applied to these childhood experiences and feelings in retrospect. Montgomery’s disgust for Ewan’s condition encompasses a more general disgust for Christianity, which she was not free to acknowledge to herself or others as a child in Cavendish or as Mrs Ewan Macdonald of the Leaskdale manse. In chapter 13 of this volume, Lesley Clement describes the separate life that Montgomery carved out for herself in Toronto during the Leaskdale years,22 and it was perhaps only in the city that she experienced relief from these recurring feelings of disgust and repression.
On one level, Montgomery is viewing the devastating effect on her husband of a particular brand of Scottish Presbyterianism, which depends on a belief in the doctrine of Predestination, thus corroborating her sense of religion’s oppressive impact at its most extreme. In his short study of Montgomery’s religious thought, Gavin White explains that Ewan would have heard “Predestination actually taught in the sermons of his youth, as had many of the settlers in Prince Edward Island,” whereas Montgomery, on the north shore of the island, “was certainly made aware of Predestination, but probably was not taught it; in fact, she probably heard sermons rejecting it.”23 Ewan would not have been taught Predestination when he attended Glasgow’s theology school, but Rubio outlines the pervasive persistence of the belief well after its exclusion from official doctrine.24 Montgomery was convinced that Ewan did not believe in Predestination in a rational way but was a victim of its power when he fell ill and was unable to think rationally. This explanation is similar to her own belief that her detestation of being a Christian was a result of her subconscious rather than conscious mind. Montgomery’s observations of Ewan’s attacks of “religious melancholia,” however, make it difficult to determine if a rational belief in Predestination caused the illness or if an irrational belief in the doctrine emerged as a symptom of the illness. Montgomery provides the diagnosis that makes the most sense to her and with which she can live most easily – the one that removes responsibility, choice, and will from Ewan.
Despite her intellectual attempts to explain and understand Ewan’s condition, Montgomery actually partakes of the repugnance and self-loathing felt by Ewan – or that she attributes to him. Repelled by certain brands of religion since early childhood, she is intimately familiar with feelings of loathing directed toward the institution of religion but does not apply the loathing to herself until 1919 when she is weighed down by her cousin Frede’s death and Ewan’s illness.25 Ewan calls forth Montgomery’s disgust for what religion has done to him, but he also becomes a catalyst for her sense of what it has done to her to a lesser degree and what it could potentially do to her sons, considering the pervasive presence of the Presbyterian Church in their lives. Disturbingly, Ewan embodies for her all that is perversely dark and destructive in the institution of Christianity and more specifically in Presbyterian theology and doctrine. She concentrates her abhorrence on Ewan as both a representative and victim of the type of religion practised by her grandmother and imposed on her in childhood. Its shadow continues to haunt her as she uses her Leaskdale journal for the familiar process of “writing it out,” “it” in this case being the shame for having religion, comparable in Montgomery’s opinion to the shame for having sex.26 Smith argues that “the autobiographer acknowledges, sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly, an uneasiness with her own body and with the sexual desire associated with it.”27 Montgomery is more explicit than implicit but is consciously working within what Irene Gammel identifies as a “remarkable awareness of both the risks and the empowerment involved in disclosing intimate subject matter.”28
The fiction written by Montgomery during this period wrestles with the complexities of professing Christianity and Presbyterianism. Rainbow Valley (1919), in its exploration of the life of a minister, a manse family, and a judgmental community, serves as a preparatory text for Emily of New Moon (1923), which explores internal beliefs, including alternate forms of faith and spirituality. In Magic Island, Waterston describes Rainbow Valley as a novel concerned with “the institutions” as opposed to “theological beliefs” of religion and observes that it reflects the “tensions” of the “old-time Presbyterian community in which Montgomery grew up” and “her tussle with her own beliefs in the years when she was growing, perforce, into the role of minister’s wife.”29 In her contribution to this volume, Waterston outlines the ways in which Montgomery’s concerns about Ewan, Chester, and Stuart are transferred from the writing arena of the Leaskdale manse to the fictional manse of John Meredith.30 Rainbow Valley, through its depiction of Meredith, deals with the many challenges faced by Ewan as a distracted minister in a small town and even touches on his adversary – Predestination. Treating beliefs in Predestination and damnation humorously through Harrison Miller, who “growls at everybody because he thinks he is fore-ordained to eternal punishment,”31 and through the lightness of children’s attempts to grasp heavy and irrelevant concepts, this novel touches on the darkness that is beginning to envelop Montgomery’s life by exposing Predestination to views that render it powerless and turning the narrative’s attention to other matters. Concentrating on topics less harsh than those of Predestination and damnation – the problems of a minister who does not connect with his congregation, a manse in disarray, and a community ever ready to find fault – Montgomery has selected areas over which she has some control in her own life. For example, she is able to compensate for Ewan’s distance from those he serves, keep the manse in order by attacking it with regular cleaning campaigns, and defend her family and home from the watchful eye of Leaskdale. She is the minister’s wife who is missing in the Meredith manse and thus writes herself into importance and service through demonstrating the negative impact of the absence in the fictional home and family. She heals and fixes the Merediths in a way that she could never heal and fix the Macdonalds. She cannot permanently cover for Ewan or completely protect her children from the invasive gazes and judgments that penetrate the walls of the Leaskdale manse. Neither can she protect the community of Leaskdale from the war, but as Mary Beth Cavert’s chapter demonstrates, she can publicly honour and mourn Leaskdale’s losses through the literary dedication.32
The PEI diaries she recopies in Leaskdale are filled with entries devoted to religion, but it is a much more socially enjoyable religion than that being lived by Montgomery in Ontario. Many of the references to religion, Christianity, and Presbyterianism in The Complete Journals focus on drives to and from church services and prayer meetings. Often the young Maud provides more detail about the drive than the service: “In the evening went over to the Baptist church at New Glasgow. It was a delicious evening for driving and I enjoyed that part of it quite well.” When describing services, she often refers to views out the window, such as the one afforded by the family pew, which “look[ed] out over the slope of the long western hill and the blue pond down to the curving rim of the sandhills and the sweep of the blue gulf,” or she refers to views of the congregation: “As usual I tucked myself away in the corner of Aunt Mary’s pew where I could take a sly squint every now and then at Mary and Ida out of the tail of my eye.” Services seem to provide more entertainment than worship, such as that provided unknowingly by “poor Mrs Albert Laird who came sailing down the aisle and plumped herself down in front of us with a sewing needle and a yard of white thread hanging from the crown of her bonnet down over her back. Every time she twitched her head – and she is noted for her twitches – the needle would fly.”33 The actual church is more of a theatre than a sanctuary.
Very aware of the different denominations of Christianity and sharply judgmental of the quality of sermons, Maud keeps track of her attendance at various churches, particularly when she covers a variety of brands in a single day. In Bideford on 5 August 1894, for example, she records that she attended the Methodist Church in the morning and the “Presbyterian service in Tyne Valley in the afternoon,” where she “heard Rev. William MacLeod preach – or rather jump and rant and howl.” She then “drove up to Lot 11 in the evening and heard him again.” One month later, on 2 September, Maud writes that “we went to the English church in the morning and after dinner drove to the Presbyterian church at Lot 14.” Such double-denomination Sundays become a motif in the journal, reaching a climax in Belmont on 22 March 1897: “Yesterday I experimented with three denominations. In the morning I went up to the Baptist church to hear Mr Robinson of S’Side. Then I went down with Mr Simpson and after dinner we all piled into a pung and drove up to Central to hear Mr Sutherland of Zion church preach. After tea we wound up our religious orgy by going to the Methodist church.” The use of the term “orgy,” like the earlier comparison of religion to sex, accentuates the forbidden indulgence in activity not sanctioned or approved. It seems to be both the amount of religion and the unorthodox mixture of denominations that render the day’s activities orgiastic in Maud’s view. In 1893, after having attended in Charlottetown a morning Anglican service at St Paul’s and an evening “Roman Catholic in all but name” service at St Peter’s, Maud declares her loyalty to the Presbyterian Church, proclaiming “I felt devoutly thankful that I was a Presbyterian. If I went to that church a year I’d have nervous prostration – that is, if they always go through all the kididoes they went through to-night.”34 It is a loyalty arrived at through a negative elimination of alternatives and only achieved after experiencing strong feelings that the “Catholic church was the only right one” and repeated “fear[s] that the Baptists, and they only, were right.”35
The potential darkness of the belief in Calvinist Predestination is treated quite lightly in the PEI journals. In an 1891 entry written in Prince Albert, Laura Pritchard, John Mustard, and Maud discuss Predestination, with Mustard arguing for it, Maud arguing against it, and Laura left in the middle. Maud comfortably and confidently concludes that “a million Mustards could never make me believe that God ordains any of his creatures to eternal torture for ‘his own good will and pleasure.’”36 Nineteen years later, in 1910, Montgomery writes a long paragraph in her journal in which she emphatically declares that the doctrines of the shorter catechism, which during her childhood taught “things that are no longer believed – and never should have been believed” – specifically “the doctrines of ‘election’ and ‘predestination’” – “slipped over our minds like pebbles over ice, making little impressions.”37 Her entry of 7 October 1897, however, suggests otherwise. She writes of herself as a child “terribly frightened of hell,” who regularly “fell under conviction of sin.” The ease with which she claims to have dismissed the impact of such teachings in these early years, when they “drop[ped] away like an outgrown husk,”38 questionable even at the time, becomes even more difficult once she moves from Prince Edward Island to Ontario, into her marriage with Ewan and into the Leaskdale community where the impressions of those pebbles reveal themselves as having made deeper and more permanent marks than previously acknowledged.
The dark undercurrent pertaining to religion in the PEI journals emerges not in the dreaded doctrine of Predestination but in non-Presbyterian theology and practices, with baptism by immersion, evangelism, and revival meetings receiving the sharpest criticism. Revival meetings are tolerated because, for Maud, “anything is welcome to vary the deadly monotony of life here [in Belmont].” Even her distrust of evangelical speakers and the pressure to “come out” are overcome to a certain extent by her conscientious decision to avoid having a negative impact on the faith of her friend, Mary Campbell. Maud signs the prayer card when it comes around so that Mary will feel free to do so without being intimidated by Maud’s potential judgment and “sarcastic tongue.” This action prompts Maud to admit that “there are some things I find it very hard to believe.” Drawn emotionally to demonstrative displays of religious faith, she finds herself intellectually and spiritually wary: “The farewell service was held tonight in the Big Brick and 2700 people were present. The meeting was certainly very thrilling. But feeling and belief are such very different things – at least, after we begin really to think.”39
The most serious criticism is reserved for baptism by immersion, but it is not so much the practice itself as the way in which it is presented that irks the young Maud. Mr Baker in Belmont “came out with a narrow, bigoted preachment on immersion,” reports Maud, who had been playing the organ for his meetings and felt insulted that he would preach on immersion in her presence. When he acknowledged her Presbyterian presence with a “deprecating smile” and the comment that “of course I suppose you are all Baptists here. If you are not, you ought to be,” she “gave no answering smile” but “looked as dour as my Scottish-Presbyterian great-grandfather himself could have done.” With respect to the prospect of marrying Edwin Simpson and having to undergo “re-baptism by immersion,” Maud uses the strong diction that reappears years later in the Leaskdale journal: “But to marry a Baptist minister would necessarily involve my re-baptism by immersion – a thing utterly repugnant to my feelings and traditions.”40 The yoking of feelings and traditions is telling here; the “repugnancy” is Maud’s “feeling” transferred to the “tradition.” For a Presbyterian, baptism by immersion may have been irrelevant and indefensible but not necessarily repugnant; this is a word and emotion that Maud claims and owns as the years progress, using it to describe both present and past experiences.
In the PEI journals, Maud presents her inclination and desire to substitute nature for religion as unorthodox and revolutionary. Calling herself “a coward” who “must drift on with the current of conventionality,” she nevertheless writes out her yearning to spend Sundays in the forest “alone with nature and my own soul” but speculates rather dramatically that the “local spinsters would die of horror,” crediting herself with more attention and importance than she would probably receive. In a more subdued framing of institutional religion by nature, she describes a “delicious” drive home from prayer-meeting “through the woods, so dark and rustling and mysterious” and refers to a ramble before the meeting “through the fields, starry with clover and buttercups, climbing old mossy fences, brushing through spruce copses, and startling blue-birds from their nests” without providing any information at all about the prayer-meeting itself. The emphasis on drives and rambles rather than on actual religious events, already noted earlier in this chapter, becomes a motif in the PEI journals to the point that an expected and familiar pattern is set: spiritual needs are met on the way to and from the formal services and meetings that are designed to serve such needs, but fail to deliver. This innocuous replacement of institutional religion with the worship of God as a creator is not as unorthodox or shocking as Montgomery makes it out to be. Her early reading of Emerson exposed her to Transcendentalism,41 which she easily incorporated into her beliefs and which was not unknown in the Prince Edward Island of her childhood, having been “brought to the Maritime Provinces by settlers from New England.”42 Drawing attention to this rather tame (even at the time) religious transgression distracts both Montgomery and the journal reader from the shadow of much stronger and darker emotions that do threaten her religious faith and already exist in a muted form in the Cavendish years. These shadows emerge and expand in her religious struggles in Leaskdale as she performs her demanding roles as minister’s wife, famous writer, and concerned mother.
Montgomery continued to explore other belief systems beyond Transcendentalism, including versions of spiritualism, theosophy, universalism, and the occult in attempts to find a faith more suited to her temperament than Presbyterianism. As Sylvia DuVernet accurately points out in Minding the Spirit: Theosophical Thoughts Concerning L.M. Montgomery, Montgomery’s letters to her pen pals George MacMillan and Ephraim Weber contain extensive discussions of a “theosophical thinker.”43 The extent to which the well-read and informed Montgomery was aware of and searching among current trends of alternative religions is apparent in her journal entry of 29 March 1919 in which she reveals her desire to be convinced by Dr Albert Durrant Watson’s The Twentieth Plane: A Psychic Revelation (1918), “the book which has made such a sensation in Toronto,” and her subsequent disappointment in its “absolute poppycock.”44
Rubio explains that in her fiction Montgomery “took emotions she knew and attributed them to a spectrum of imaginary characters,” while “in her journals, she appears to have reversed the process, taking her emotions and attaching them – sometimes arbitrarily – to suitable real-life characters.” Rubio’s comment is made in reference to the description of the affair with Herman Leard of which Montgomery writes so passionately and which Rubio speculates could be partially due to displacement, her marriage with Ewan being extremely troubled “in 1920, when she recopied the Herman story into her entry of October 7, 1897.”45 While Ewan may be temporarily displaced by Herman Leard of the recopied journal, his continued presence remains necessary for other uses, namely as a receptacle for Montgomery’s own fears and repugnance of sexuality and of certain Christian and Presbyterian dogmas. What Ewan has become – a religious melancholic – she could also be. The extreme reaction and language she uses are understandable as a defence against her own inclination to spiritual darkness, not dissimilar to Ewan’s, which becomes more difficult for her to ward off with each passing year in Leaskdale.
Montgomery is surprisingly well versed in the symptoms of religious melancholia. Upon her realization of the nature of Ewan’s disease, she responds through the journal persona of Maud with intense emotion and extreme diction, claiming that “unutterable horror seemed literally to engulf me,” that he had “every symptom given in the encyclopedia on that type of insanity,” and that “it was one of the things I had always had the most deeply rooted horror of.” Her persona’s insistence that the belief that “you were doomed to hell fire for all eternity” was a “hideous old mediaeval superstition which Ewan normally believed in no more than I did”46 does not seem entirely convincing. Rubio, for example, believes that Predestination was “firmly lodged in Ewan’s mind” and “provided him with the explanatory concept to understand precisely why he felt so miserable and depressed.” She also points out that Ewan felt he had committed the “unpardonable sin” by doubting that he was one of the “Elect,” thereby doubting God’s power. In Rubio’s words, “Ewan was caught up in circular reasoning within a complicated theology,”47 a much more accurate assessment than Maud’s rather simplistic explanation that he was not at all affected by thoughts of Predestination when he was in his “right mind.” White points out that eventually Montgomery does resort to the doctrine of Predestination, despite her stated abhorrence. The most startling examples quoted by White occur in 1925 when Montgomery says, “It will all be according to predestination” and “Well, well, I really believe that everything is foreordained.”48 Although these could be dismissed as isolated and vulnerable moments, Montgomery’s predisposition to such thoughts provides a plausible explanation for her violent reactions to Ewan’s episodes, apparent in her persona’s uncontrolled emotions at the time of their occurrence and reflected in the extreme diction used in the journal accounts. Her response to Ewan’s depression forms it into a creature of her own making.
An example of excessive emotion and diction occurs in an entry on 31 August 1919. After finding Ewan “in his arm chair gazing gloomily before him” and making him “confess that he is again haunted by conviction of eternal damnation,” Maud cries “wretchedly” in her room, saying that this “unnatural” “thing” fills her with “horror and repulsion” and turns her “against Ewan for the time, as if he were possessed by or transformed into a demoniacal creature of evil – something I must get away from as I would rush from a snake.”49 Montgomery’s comparison of religion with sex in the passage describing her grandmother’s forced prayer also seems relevant here in the reference to the snake. The repulsion felt towards religion strongly suggests sexual repulsion even as it evokes desire and temptation. Interestingly, a visit from Captain Edwin Smith in 1922 inspires Montgomery’s comment that “Captain Smith is one of the few people I have met with whom I can discuss with absolute frankness, any and every subject, even the delicate ones of sex.”50 Edwin Smith, like Herman Leard, seems to provide an intimacy that is lacking in her relationship with Ewan.51
Just as Montgomery identifies a single event – the prayer forced by her grandmother – as the cause of her aversion to being a Christian, so she isolates and blames a specific sermon on hell, preached to Ewan as a child, as being “responsible for his delusion.” In both cases, she approaches the problem by assigning responsibility to an external and oppressive force working through a specific, identifiable agent in order to impose suffering. During a period of reprieve when Ewan feels better, she makes the telling comment – “I feel as if I had been lifted out of hell”52 – when it is more literally Ewan, in his temporary release from delusions of damnation, who should feel the effects of being lifted out of hell. Despite the distance that Montgomery establishes and maintains between herself and Ewan, there are similarities that suggest a closer alignment than she perhaps sees or admits. For example, when feeling that she will “be involved in lawsuits all my life – it is all dark and it will never be dawn,” she says that she tries “to reason it away, but reason has no effect on it, any more than on Ewan’s attacks of melancholy.”53
Montgomery also makes comparisons between her sons and herself, but consciously, deliberately, and specifically with “Maudie” of the PEI journals, who in turn shares much with the fictional character of the novel she was creating at this time. She orchestrates and encourages these intersections involving Maudie, Chester and Stuart, and Emily. In her Leaskdale journal, she openly seeks similarities with her sons and draws comparisons between her own childhood and theirs. The attention is often on Christianity and Presbyterianism, as seen in the content of three “odd little things” spoken by Chester in November 1919. Similar to comments made by Montgomery’s fictional characters, Chester’s odd speeches have a serious element. In this case, he says he “kneeled down on the ground and asked God to make it warmer but when I got out of the gate it was just as cold as ever”; he explains that he could now eat celery because “God put the power into me”; and he tells Stuart that “a man and a woman go to a minister and he preaches a sermon to them and then they’re married.” Recording Chester’s comments, Montgomery turns the attention to herself, wondering if she “made many queer speeches when [she] was a tot.”54 The question provides the segue into a recounting of two such examples from her childhood, vivid and detailed because they were actually recorded and remembered. The question is also about all those moments that were not recorded or remembered and are thus lost.
Despite her desire for parallels, Montgomery cannot prevent herself from being drawn to contrasts and sees in the childhood of her sons a measurement of all she has lost. On 6 March 1922, she writes that Stuart enthusiastically tells her that “this is a happy life! I hope it will last always.” She says “the contrast between my mood and his struck me rather bitterly,” and she concedes that “neither he nor anyone else can wholly escape unhappiness in life.” She writes that she tries “at least to give him a happy childhood” but then asks, “Is it any use trying to accomplish anything in this world! Are we not only puppets in the hands of destiny?”55 Perhaps the outmoded doctrine of Predestination has had more of an impact on Montgomery, a committed if unorthodox Presbyterian, than she imagines or is willing to see.
Her recopying of the PEI diaries, along with her copying of other old journals, accentuates contrasts between the old and the new; the happiness of the two years after Chester’s birth, for example, contrasts with the misery following the war, the deaths of Frede and baby Hugh, and the onset of Ewan’s “malady.” Montgomery takes that contrast between past and present and applies it to a more compact past and present: “As I wrote over that old journal I realized how unlike his old self [Ewan] is, even in the days when his trouble grows lighter. It is only in contrast with his dark days that he seems well.”56 The same could be said of Montgomery herself in her final years at Riverside Drive in Toronto. As she speaks of Ewan, she offers insight into herself, or perhaps premonitions. Her belief in Predestination is treated lightly in 1930 when she concedes that “one must just fall back on predestination,” which at times “is a most comforting doctrine” and in 1933 when she calmly recognizes that “there are no ‘ifs’ in predestination – in which I have come to believe absolutely. We walk our appointed ways.”57 These statements are light only in contrast to later ones, such as the 1935 comment that “I seem to live with fear” and the final entry of 1937: “This has been a fitting close to a year of hell.”58 The fear and hell recall the sensations of damnation derived from a belief in Predestination that were prominent in Ewan from 1918 to 1922. These sensations continued to affect Montgomery directly and indirectly into the 1930s.
In her journal entry of 13 December 1920, Montgomery provides yet another contrast – between her religious feelings as a child and her spirituality as a woman in her forties, claiming, “In childhood I had very deep religious instincts but I do not seem to possess them now. I am not in the least spiritual – that is, in the ordinary meaning of that word.”59 The word “instincts” suggests innate feelings, while the “ordinary meaning” of the word “spiritual” is left to the reader to ponder. It is curious that she switches from “religious” to “spiritual,” as “religious” suggests institutionalized Christianity, whereas “spiritual” has more of an air of transcendentalism to it. This account denying a spiritual temperament in general, written in Leaskdale, differs significantly from an earlier journal entry written in Cavendish in 1897. In that earlier entry, Montgomery explains that she is not “‘religiously inclined,’ as the phrase goes, but I have always possessed a deep curiosity about ‘things spiritual and eternal.’ I want to find out – to know.”60 The later reluctance and uncertainty about identifying as “spiritual” suggest a confusion comparable to Ewan’s attraction and repulsion to a belief in damnation. There is a flirting with and withdrawal from what in both cases is perceived as dangerous but also powerfully attractive.
The Montgomery who waits for Frede to visit her from the dead and who sees the divine in nature certainly seems to be “spiritual” – more spiritually open than religiously observant. And in Emily of New Moon, being written when the 1920 statement denying spirituality was made, Montgomery explores the spiritual, in the sense of “of or relating to the human spirit or soul,”61 as she has never explored it before. Emily’s “flash” is the lifting of the soul and spirit beyond the material world. Kathleen Miller argues that Emily’s journey “culminates in a spirituality that reinterprets traditional Christianity and values the power and energy found in feminized landscape, women’s imagination, and female artistry.” Miller also argues that “Montgomery succeeds in allowing Emily to abandon the patriarchal Christian religion, although she herself could not.”62 Although the patriarchy was objectionable to Montgomery, the church itself was not; in the end, she could not dismiss it, primarily because it stood as a type of home, making abandonment unthinkable, even in Leaskdale where it was the source of so much misery.
The autobiographical elements invested in the character of Emily were those of Maudie, the persona of the PEI journals, but were also those of L.M. Montgomery of Leaskdale, who was recopying and rewriting the Maudie of former years while creating Emily. Simultaneously, by necessity, the autobiographical elements were also those of Mrs Ewan Macdonald, the minister’s wife. Montgomery’s loyalty to the Presbyterian Church when the issue of Church Union was being bitterly fought from 1923 to 1925 is reminiscent of Maud’s childhood preference for the comfort and familiarity of Presbyterianism above other denominations. The adult Montgomery resents the “feeling of ‘homelessness’” that the forced union brings with it: “I feel that I have no longer a church. My Presbyterian Church has gone – I owe and feel neither love nor allegiance to its hybrid, nameless successor without atmosphere, tradition or personality.” In the summer of 1924, she writes that the “feeling in Ontario is very intense. No matter what happens our Presbyterian church can never be what it was. We have to choose between staying in a broken, crippled church – which would be my choice were I free to choose – or going into a hybrid nameless ‘United Church.’”63
Montgomery was never fully at home in Ontario, and the Presbyterian Church, even trailing its abhorrent doctrines of the elect and Predestination, spoke strongly of home – the home of Prince Edward Island, of Cavendish, of the Macneill and Montgomery families, and even of the ancestral home of Scotland. In chapter 9, Natalie Forest writes of how the view from Ontario, specifically from the Leaskdale manse, rendered the Cavendish home more uncanny and gothic with each return visit.64 Montgomery’s feeling of homelessness was as much about a lost time, approach, and emotion as a lost place, the gothic taking over as she carried back the uncanny of her Leaskdale life and landscape to her original home. In July 1899, she was forced to mourn actual changes and modernization when she writes of her sadness over the tearing down of the old church in Cavendish: “But the old church is gone now, with all its memories and associations. They will put up a modern one which will be merely a combination of wood and plaster and will not be mellowed and hallowed by the memories that permeated and beautified that unbeautiful old church. Churches, like all else, have to be ripened and seasoned before the most perfect beauty becomes theirs.”65
Montgomery is repelled by what the Presbyterian Church and its doctrine brought to her and her family in Leaskdale. Never one to leave behind the past, memories, or tradition lightly or easily, however, she balanced this abhorrence by contrasting it with the stability and history of the institution and its provision of a home away from home. Her disgust for what she saw in Ewan was a fear of the emergence of what she felt within herself. Rather than an adversary, Ewan was a terrifying mirror, capable of inspiring loathing because of what he reflected. Even this fear and repugnance, however, is balanced by a loyalty to Christianity and the Presbyterian Church as one of many “creeds and religions, dead and alive” that Montgomery is “always poking and probing into” to find “what vital spark of immortal truth might be buried among all the verbiage of theologies and systems.”66 A master of contrasts and balances, Montgomery both denied and embraced the Christianity and Presbyterianism of her childhood, which followed her so closely, so passionately, and so painfully to her home in Leaskdale, Ontario, providing the deepest suffering but also providing complex memories of her PEI home that were written out over and over again in a life that depended on the creation of paradoxical connections and contrasts. In her ongoing search for home, Montgomery of Leaskdale, like Emily of New Moon, was compelled to “write it out.”67