When L.M. Montgomery moved to Leaskdale as the Mrs Rev. Ewan Macdonald, she encountered a series of new challenges and roles she would be required to fulfil. Although she was a new wife and a new manse mistress, she already had experience in keeping house and assuming leadership roles within the church, but this was her first opportunity to create her own home. Montgomery delighted in putting the manse to rights and creating her own spaces for living, entertaining, and writing. In Ontario she had, she hoped, the opportunity to make a home according to her own needs and tastes, free from the scrutiny of family, friends, and overly familiar neighbours. She also had the task of setting up a suitable home for the minister, blending propriety, elegance, and hominess. Montgomery devotes almost eight pages of her published, edited journal to the making of her home, including eight photographs.1 No one from Cavendish or Park Corner came to help her settle in, but these sporadic entries, recorded in a notebook even when she was not keeping up with her journal, reflect a time of comradeship and intimacy with her husband unprecedented in her discussions of Ewan to date.
These early Leaskdale entries reflect a sense of isolation from the people of her new community; in the first entry, as she brings her journal up to date, Montgomery reflects, “there is no one here whom I could admit into my inner circle. To all I try to be courteous, tactful and considerate, and most of them I like superficially. But the gates of my soul are barred against them. They do not have the key.”2 Thus, the physical landscape of Montgomery’s life became increasingly important – creating a congenial and cosy home, finding lovely spaces for walking and thinking – and her work would have to function as her support system until she could build friendships.
The majority of Montgomery’s time in Leaskdale, however, centred on her role as mother. Making a home for her husband and establishing a manse household undoubtedly gave her great pleasure, but in producing sons, she was able to meet the more fundamental expectations of her world: it allowed her to enter the privileged sisterhood of mothers and to fulfil her wifely and womanly duties, important concerns both personally and socially. Significantly for her writing, becoming a mother also gave her the opportunity to reflect upon the institution of motherhood from a panoply of perspectives: to consider her own mother (and surrogate mother and stepmother) as mother and to experience – and construct – the memory of her mother in an entirely new way, and also to reflect upon – and construct – herself as mother in varying phases of her own and her sons’ lives. Sara Ruddick suggests that “three interests . . . govern maternal practice” – “preservation, growth, and acceptability of the child” – and Montgomery’s mothering practices reflect each of these at different points in her sons’ lives. As she mothers her sons, so too does she construct her own identity as mother, alternately succumbing to “the temptations of fearfulness and excessive control” characteristic of the preservation interest of mothers of infants and young children, embracing change as “innovation takes precedence over permanence” as her sons develop agency and independence, and struggling with the inherent contradictions between her own desires for her sons, society’s expectations for them, and their own choices. Notably, Montgomery struggles with all three interests at varying points in her life as mother, and each of these interests manifests in her fiction as well.3
In her fiction, Montgomery returns repeatedly to motifs and subtexts of motherhood, but her depictions of mothers in their various incarnations and relationships, are, like her depictions of fathers, vague, shadowy, and idealized. Rita Bode suggests that “the absent mother, essentially unknowable, keeps reasserting herself and forms the source of a lingering tension for Montgomery,”4 an idea borne out by the fact that mothers, when present in her novels, tend to inhabit the extremes of either perfection or cruelty. Since her mother, Clara Woolner Macneill, died when her daughter was only twenty-one months old, Montgomery had little memory and no experience of a relationship with her own mother.5 Her maternal surrogate relationships, with her mother’s mother, Lucy Woolner Macneill, who raised her, and her stepmother, Mary Ann McRae, whom she met at the age of fifteen when she spent a year with her father in Saskatchewan, were notable failures at intimacy and trust. Perhaps because most of Montgomery’s novels are deliberately child-centric, or perhaps because of a failure (or excess) of imagination, she never produced a realistic, loving, firm mother-child relationship in her work. Although her depictions of motherhood shift once she experiences motherhood herself, the relationships between mothers and their children, particularly their daughters, still rarely approach verisimilitude.
Montgomery gave birth to her first son, Chester, in 1912, when she was thirty-seven years old and had already published four novels and a great many short stories. As she grew into motherhood, as her support systems shifted, and as her relationships with her sons evolved and changed, Montgomery’s intimate understandings of motherhood quietly emerged in her novels, offering subversive interpretations of the mother figure. With her boys maturing and beginning to differentiate in what she perceived were unacceptable ways, Montgomery effaced, idealized, and infantilized her fictional mothers. I explore below these complex engagements with literary motherhood over the course of her actual motherhood, focusing on two of the early Anne novels, Anne of the Island (1915) and Anne’s House of Dreams (1917); The Blue Castle (1926); the two Pat novels, Pat of Silver Bush (1933) and Mistress Pat (1935); and Jane of Lantern Hill (1937).
In the Anne novels, I focus not so much on mother-child relationships as on mother-mothered relationships: the relationship of Anne to her own mother and Anne’s understanding of her new role as mother. Both of Anne’s intensive contemplations of motherhood, which inform the narrative mother, occur at significant moments in Montgomery’s own life as mother. Her conflicting experiences of motherhood especially inform Anne of the Island and Anne’s House of Dreams, which explore motherhood from a duality of perspectives. The former centres on a daughter coming to know her own mother for the first time, written by a woman relatively young in her own experience of motherhood; it is a nostalgic speculation from a daughter missing her mother in a way she had not been able to articulate earlier. Yet that novel is also shadowed by the author’s dreaded loss of a child. Anne’s House of Dreams, in contrast, explores the joys and tragedies of new motherhood: the birth and same-day death of a first child and the later, healthy, birth of a second child. Each of these writing exercises allowed Montgomery to process her feelings about motherhood, to develop her own lens for reading her life, and to reclaim the tragic losses of first her mother, and then her stillborn son, through her art.
Cecily Devereux suggests that Anne’s ambition, despite Queen’s and Redmond, where she earned her BA, and despite teaching and writing, has always “tended” toward the domestic, and that, for her, “the highest ‘womanly’ ambition is realized in motherhood.”6 In Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery indeed establishes Anne’s need, above all, to belong to someone;7 it makes sense that, as a grown woman, Anne would ultimately want – in addition to education, career, and avocation – a family that belongs to her, an opportunity to be the mother and create the family she lost. Montgomery lost her chance at a loving, nurturing family with her mother’s death and her father’s subsequent move from Prince Edward Island. In fact, we see in Montgomery’s actual life an attempt when she was only fifteen to recreate a loving family with her father and stepmother. In her 22 April 1890 entry, she confides, “Do you know, journal mine, I may take a trip out west to see father this summer . . . I feel so excited about it . . . to see darling father again!” On 8 August, the eve of her departure, she anticipates her relationship with her father’s second wife: “Shall I like [Prince Albert]? And my stepmother? I do not know. She seems nice from her letters and I mean to love her if I can, just as if she were really my mother.”8
Unfortunately, three days into her stay in Prince Albert, Montgomery records an antipathy in her stepmother resulting, she believes, from a jealousy of her father’s affection: “It is lovely to be with father again . . . His eyes just shine with love when he looks at me. I never saw anyone look at me with such eyes before. But, to speak plainly I am afraid I am not going to like his wife. I came here prepared to love her warmly and look upon her as a real mother, but I fear it will prove impossible.”9 In this second mention of her desire for a “real mother,” Montgomery, even as a fairly mature teenager, demonstrates a desire for family intimacy. In her work, children of widowed parents betray a touching faith that their parents will do well in their selection of replacement parents; her own disappointment in her father’s choice resonates in this trope. Paul Irving, for instance, expresses confidence that his father has chosen “a nice little second mother” for him – not, notably, a “step”-mother.10
When her own motherhood becomes a real possibility, Montgomery notes in her journal: “Early in November I began to suspect that what I had intensely longed for was to be mine and now I know it. I am to be a mother. I cannot realize it. It seems to me so incredible – so wonderful – so utterly impossible as happening to me! But I am glad – so glad. It has always seemed to me that a childless marriage is a tragedy – especially in a marriage such as mine.” Her journal through the winter and spring of 1912 records the happy preparation and anticipation expected of an eager new mother, but as she enters her last weeks of pregnancy, her tone becomes more anxious. She meditates on the existential aspects of birth, life, and death, weighing the equally terrifying possibilities that she might die and leave her own child motherless or that her child might die, prompting her to reflect, “If I were to live but lose my baby I think the disappointment would almost kill me,” a tragic anticipation of a loss that awaits her.11 Chester’s birth in July 1912 opened an idyllic period in Montgomery’s life. She was a new mother, basking in the glory of her son and enjoying the company of her cousin and dear friend, Frede, who shared her delight in “baby Punch.” In fact, Montgomery’s journal entries for at least five months after Chester’s birth are filled with rhapsodic descriptions of the baby and the fun she and Frede have doting on him. In many ways, his birth cements her position as manse mistress within the Leaskdale and Zephyr communities and makes the transition from the Island to Ontario more manageable: she is no longer Maud Montgomery, orphan or spinster; she is Mrs Rev. Macdonald, mother.
Her first journal entry after Chester’s birth is a paean to motherhood and mother love. Its intense, occasionally religious language prompts Margaret Steffler to suggest that Montgomery’s “exaggerated and passionate performance [of motherhood] calls into question the narrow and tame emotions allocated by society to the institutionalized and public role of motherhood as sweet and nurturing.”12 This journal entry is full of passages like “Love – such love! I never dreamed there could be such love. It seems blent and twined with the inmost fibres of my being – as if it could not be wrenched away without wrenching soul and body apart also and the love of motherhood, exquisite as it is, is full of anguish, too. I see and realize deeps of pain I never realized before. Motherhood is a revelation from God.”13 Steffler reads such entries as an “inflated and exaggerated maternal performance.” Perhaps, as Steffler suggests, this “performance” is “an indictment of the public and patriarchal institution” of motherhood;14 perhaps it reflects the deep relief of a woman who had wondered whether she would ever be a mother, fearing that her marriage would remain empty not just of passion or deep romantic love but also of the gift of children. Or perhaps it is the reflection of a woman for whom writing and words are more natural than motherhood – in consecrating the experience of motherhood with the act of writing, she marries her two great gifts.
5.1 Mother and child: Chester and Montgomery
In her 10 October 1912 journal entry, Montgomery reflects upon Aunt Mary Lawson’s death, wishing her aunt had been able to see Chester, and then muses on other friends and family members who will never know him. Most prominent in the list is her own mother: “In certain lights my baby’s eyes and brows are strangely like my mother’s . . . My mother! How near I feel to her now in my own motherhood. I know how she must have loved me. I know what her agony must have been in the long weeks of her illness when she was facing the bitter knowledge that she must leave me. My dear, beautiful young mother whose sun went down while it was yet day!”15 The fullness of that kinship stayed with Montgomery; we see that over a year later, in Anne of the Island, she offers Anne that painful pleasure of motherhood borrowed from the mother herself, Bertha Shirley, whose experience of motherhood, like Clara Macneill Montgomery’s, was fleeting. As she began writing her third Anne novel, Montgomery little realized how the lines between bereft daughter and bereft mother would blur and dissolve. Embarking upon the story of Anne’s coming of age, Montgomery could not have anticipated the ways in which her own life and loss would inform – and perhaps delay – Anne’s coming into womanhood.
Montgomery began blocking out “Anne of Redmond” on 1 September 1913 and realized that she was pregnant for the second time in November 1913. This time she hoped for a daughter. She began the actual writing of “Anne of Redmond” in April 1914 and lost baby Hugh in August. On 20 November of that year, she writes, “I finished ‘Anne of Redmond’ to-day. And I am very glad. Never did I write a book under greater stress. All last winter and spring I was physically wretched and all this fall I have been wracked with worry over the war and tortured with grief over the loss of my baby.”16 In Anne of the Island, in which Anne is neither married nor a mother, Montgomery successfully incorporates both the joy of Chester’s birth and the anguish of losing Hugh through Anne as daughter. Anne herself is still a girl, unready to receive or return Gilbert’s romantic love; after rejecting his proposal of marriage, she instead seeks the love of her parents at the place of her birth. When Anne returns to the little yellow house where she was born, her idyllic image of it is fulfilled to the letter – with the exception of the honeysuckle over the windows – allowing Anne to live a bit longer as a girl, while showing her the incipient joys of womanhood. In this scene of homecoming, Montgomery allows Anne to inhabit the sacred space where she was born, not simply as herself, a daughter, but also as her own mother: “Here her mother had dreamed the exquisite, happy dreams of anticipated motherhood; here that red sunrise light had fallen over them both in the sacred hour of birth; here her mother had died.”17 The sweetness of birth is mingled with the grief of death, just as it was in Montgomery’s own heart.
Devereux maintains that “the foundation for the construction of Anne’s ‘house of dreams’ is quietly but unmistakably established in the first three novels . . . even Anne of Green Gables . . . serves . . . to entrench her story within the maternalism that comes to dominate the series.”18 While Devereux references not the novel but the concept of the house of dreams, she acknowledges that within that house resides what many of Montgomery’s initial – and subsequent – readers required for “happily ever after.” The House of Dreams novel provides Anne with the husband that readers expected and, perhaps more significantly, the home that eleven-year-old Anne Shirley so deeply craved. The addition of children to that perfect home seemed, at least to my adolescent self, an afterthought. As an adult, however, I read quite clearly the abundant foreshadowing of Anne’s own motherhood: Anne’s “thrill” at Diana’s cuddling of small Anne Cordelia, Montgomery’s pointed references to Miss Cornelia’s preparation for unwanted “eighth babies,” and Anne’s own unarticulated “poignantly-sweet dreams.”19 Yet, as William Thompson notes in the next chapter, the loss of Montgomery’s stillborn second son deeply informs the story of Anne’s motherhood experience.20 Before she could write Anne as mother, even as bereaved mother (and Montgomery knew she could not simply leave Anne with the loss of baby Joy), she needed to process Hugh’s death in her writing and to work through her grief. With Stuart’s birth in October 1915, having given voice to her grief in her art, she was able to take up her life with new hope. She even offered homage to the daughter she had hoped for by giving Anne a first-born girl.
When Montgomery records Stuart’s birth in her 23 October 1915 journal entry, she references the contrast between the “gay time” after Chester’s birth and the “horrible time last year after dear little Hugh’s coming – and going,” adding, “for the first time the ache has gone out of my heart. And yet this baby does not, as someone said, ‘fill little Hugh’s place.’ None can ever do that. He will always have his own place . . . Wee Stuart is doubly precious for his life was purchased by ‘little Hugh’s’ death. But he has his own place; he does not fill that where a little cold waxen form is shrined.” Montgomery began writing Anne’s House of Dreams in June 1916, almost two years after Hugh’s death. She records “getting the material for it in shape all winter and spring,” starting within months of Stuart’s birth. The manuscript was finished on 5 October 1916, just shy of Stuart’s first birthday. Of Anne’s House of Dreams she says, “I never wrote a book in so short a time and amid so much strain of mind and body. Yet I rather enjoyed writing it and I think it isn’t too bad a piece of work.”21 In finally writing Anne as “mother,” Montgomery embodies Ruddick’s interest of “preservation” without the hazard of “excessive control”22 and simultaneously allows herself freedom from her own pervasive grief over Hugh’s death.
In contrast to the images of motherhood Montgomery created in the Anne books, the primary mother in The Blue Castle is simply absurd: mean, petty, and tyrannical. Montgomery first mentions the novel in a 10 April 1924 journal entry, but it is not referenced again until seven months later, on 27 November, when she says she is “finding much pleasure” in it.23 At this point in her life, her primary source of stress appears to be Ewan’s psychological problems; her boys continue to be a source of confidence, even as Chester approaches the cusp of adolescence. Because motherhood is still a comfort, and because she has settled into her Leaskdale life, able to see kindly the humour in the wide variety of motherly experiences around her, Montgomery can use an overdrawn mother as a source of comedy and an initially repressive mother-daughter relationship as a source of liberation for her protagonist.
Valancy Stirling is Montgomery’s only protagonist whom readers never see as child or girl – she is a young woman, waking on the morning of her twenty-ninth birthday, when her story opens. Her relationship with her mother is outwardly respectful but inwardly contentious. Valancy requires a situation in which she believes she has nothing left to lose before she can confront and defy her mother, thus finding agency and empowerment – or so we hope. She is a spinster with nary a beau in sight. She is cowed not just by her mother but by a host of uncles, aunts, and cousins. She has allowed herself to become the butt of their jokes, subjected herself to their unkind remarks, and settled herself into the role of the family’s old maid. It is not until Valancy (mistakenly) believes she is dying that she finds the strength of mind to resist her family and challenge the limits they have set for her. Valancy decides, “I’ve been trying to please other people all my life and failed . . . After this I shall please myself. I shall never pretend anything again . . . What a luxury it will be to tell the truth!”24
While Valancy has never felt “mothered” – her mother is critical and unloving, concerned more that her daughter (like all of Montgomery’s heroines) does not meet her expectations or conform to the norms of her community – she does not seem to miss that aspect of her life. Rather, she seeks, like Anne Shirley, the role of mother and caretaker. And, as she does in the Anne series, Montgomery interweaves and overlaps the various “mother” roles. Valancy’s surrogate child is Cecilia Gay, a childhood friend, and daughter of the town drunk and reprobate. Cissy herself was a mother for a brief shining year: she bore a child out of wedlock and chose not to marry the baby’s father, thus estranging herself from the “proper” elements of her society. The child died after a year of life, a typical punishment for the sinning mother of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels, visited on the innocent child. So, as Laura Robinson discusses in the previous chapter, nothing is left for the wilfully unmarried Cissy, “shunned by the community of Deerwood,”25 but to die, which she does, slowly and painfully, of consumption. Valancy empowers herself and develops a sense of subjectivity by choosing to nurse Cissy in the last months of her life. She learns the truth of Cissy’s story in those last few months, that the child’s father had offered to marry her but Cissy refused: “I couldn’t [marry him] when he didn’t love me anymore. Somehow . . . it seemed a worse thing to do than – the other.”26 Cissy has long understood and lived by the truth that Valancy has just learned: that personal integrity has more value and worth than meeting the expectations of her society.
Montgomery’s relative equanimity during this period of her life allowed her to critique the smallness and pettiness of Valancy’s world, and the more mature intended audience for this novel allowed her to step beyond the expectations of societal norms to do that. Valancy admits to herself that she does not love her imminently respectable mother: “What’s worse, I don’t even like her.” In contrast, Cissy’s year of forbidden motherhood is a precious memory: “My baby was so sweet . . . When he died, oh, Valancy, I thought I must die too – I didn’t see how anyone could endure such anguish and live.”27 Valancy understands the mother-love Cissy feels for her lost son and offers Cissy the motherly understanding and love that both girls have lacked throughout their lives. As Robinson points out, “Valancy’s life changes because of other single women,” especially Cissy.28 The socially outcast young women nourish each other in ways that conventional families – and mothers – cannot. Each embodies an ability to mother regardless of society’s expectations, thus avoiding Ruddick’s concern that in shaping a child acceptable to the mother’s “social group,” the mother inevitably “betrays [her] own interest in the growth of [her] children.”29 Of course, this feminist model is ultimately subverted by the deaths first of Cissy’s son and then of Cissy herself. The desperation that allows Valancy to disregard societal norms and please herself frees her to follow her heart, to look for her “blue castle” rather than just imagining and longing for it impotently. That freedom leads her into traditional romantic love (in the previous chapter, Robinson effectively asserts the inevitability of such an outcome), but the stronger discovery may be Valancy’s own inner mother, willing and able to love, nurture, and accept herself unconditionally.
The Macdonalds have been living in Norval for five years when Montgomery begins Pat of Silver Bush in late 1931. Here she has been enjoying more fulfilling personal relationships than she initially found in Leaskdale. She seems, largely, to take pleasure in Chester and Stuart. As Chester finishes at St Andrew’s, a boarding school in Aurora eighty kilometres from Norval, she worries over his grades and choice of university program but appreciates his company when they are together. She describes a day when Chester, then aged nineteen, shows her the film he took with the family’s movie camera: “It is just capital. I was so amused and tickled that for a time I forgot all my woes.” Stuart, at age sixteen, is still at home, although he will be at St Andrew’s the next year, and is doing well in both academics and gymnastics and offering no cause for expressing anxiety in her journal.30 Montgomery’s main worries seem financial, primarily as a result of the worldwide economic depression. She is also in the midst of a perplexing and generally frustrating relationship with Isabel Anderson, which has been explored elsewhere by Laura Robinson and Mary Beth Cavert.31
As Montgomery begins to write in earnest, she wonders how she can continue when she is “worried and nervous and insomniac,” citing in particular her anxieties about finding time to write and about the “world and market news,” which “continues bad.” The fourth volume of the Selected Journals offers few mentions of the writing process of Pat of Silver Bush, and what references there are focus on the stress of writing and lack of time to devote to the novel. However, in the final days of writing the Pat book, Montgomery makes a trip to the Island, enjoying a “whole month of happiness – what a treasure!” She spends time at Park Corner, the basis for Silver Bush, which no doubt inspired her as she finished this “simple story of a child’s unfolding.” Upon its publication in 1933, Montgomery writes, “Somehow, I love Pat as I have not loved any book since New Moon.”32 Her ultimate success with the novel reflects a relatively uncomplicated sense of her own motherhood. Her sons experience the rebellions and difficulties expected of teenage boys, but, undoubtedly, Montgomery reconciles those difficulties with her awareness of her sons’ “unfolding” into young men.
In contrast, Mistress Pat, published only two years later, demonstrates Montgomery’s increased and intensified maternal anxiety as Chester and Stuart, both out of the house, more actively resist her attempts to manage their lives. They are more able to explore their own impulses, likes, dislikes, and desires, seeing girls outside of their mother’s supervision and pursuing extracurricular interests of which their parents were undoubtedly unaware. The earlier novel, the tale of the child’s development, relies very little on Pat’s need for or relationship with her mother. It is a very interior novel, focalized through Pat and her primary relationship, her home, Silver Bush. Unlike Green Gables or New Moon before it, Silver Bush obsessively dominates Pat’s emotional attachments; Mary Gardiner, Pat’s mother, plays a secondary role in the narrative. However, unlike Anne before Green Gables and Emily after her father’s death, Pat is mothered, regardless of her mother’s health or physical presence. She has Judy Plum, the family’s faithful retainer, to tell her stories, comfort her grief, and offer her “liddle bites” to assuage discontent. In contrast to Montgomery herself, who regresses to Ruddick’s interest of preservation and becomes fearful and obsessed with the control she has lost, the mother figure in the Pat books is idealized through both absence and presence. Of course, as Pat becomes a young woman and assumes the role of “the Chatelaine” of Silver Bush,33 the role of her mother, ostensibly the mistress of Silver Bush, must be addressed.
Mary Gardiner is one of Montgomery’s idealized mothers: she is absent from the daily life of Silver Bush, mostly because her ill health keeps her removed from the busy and active world of Judy’s kitchen. As she becomes stronger, toward the end of the second Pat novel, she travels, absenting herself from the home completely. However, Mrs Gardiner offers an emotional presence for Pat; for example, although she is silent until after the rift between Rae and Pat is healed, she knows that Rae feels Pat has stolen her lover.34 Readers see Mrs Gardiner on special occasions, in which she is generally quiet and good humoured, but have no sense of her except as a feature necessary to keep Silver Bush as unchanged as possible. Judy Plum is, similarly, the idealized surrogate mother: loving, indulgent, and affectionate. Both of Pat’s “mothers” accept and love her unconditionally. They fret over her choices of men (as Montgomery did over her sons’ choices of women), and they worry that no man will ever be able to supplant Silver Bush in Pat’s affections. It is easy to see Montgomery as daughter in Pat, especially with her intense love of place and nature. In both Pat books, Montgomery rewrites her own youth with the maternal support she lacked as she idealizes Pat’s relationships with her mother figures. But we must also read these relationships through the lens of Montgomery as mother, and thus reflective of her sense of maternal inadequacy: she offers Pat the unconditional acceptance and freedom of autonomy that she, as mother, could not give her sons. No real woman could hope to live up to the bar of motherhood set by either Mary Gardiner or Judy Plum: in idealizing these mother figures in the Silver Bush books, Montgomery effectively, if unconsciously, exempts herself from even attempting to meet those standards.
When Montgomery is beginning to think about “Pat II,” Chester brings home a bride, Luella Reid, who is already pregnant with the Macdonalds’ first grandchild. Both Montgomery and Ewan Macdonald have difficulty accepting this turn of events, particularly because of Ewan’s position as the community’s Presbyterian minister but also because this scenario is one that Montgomery, at least, had long dreaded given Chester’s early sexual precocity. Through the beginning of 1934, her journal entries reflect her struggle to reframe her own dreams about and desires for Chester’s marriage and family.35 The second mention of “Pat II,” on 31 March 1934, is the first in a long series of entries expressing difficulty in focusing on her work. Initially she attributes this difficulty to her own ill health, aggravated by her anxiety and disappointment over Chester’s behaviour. But in May 1934, Ewan relapses into melancholia,36 and her entries on “Pat II” from that point on are bleak, the few positive mentions of work expressing surprise at her ability to focus or the quality of the work. For instance, on 21 May 1934, she records, “I wrote the ‘Christmas’ chapter of Pat II today and lost myself for a few blessed hours in ‘Silver Bush’”; on 30 July 1934, “I read over what I have got written of Pat II today and find it better than I expected. It has been so hard to get it written.” However, as she moves through the sequel, Ewan’s precarious health, the lost loyalty of the Norval congregation, and one of Stuart’s girlfriends all claim her attention and generate more anxiety and distress. Entries about the book’s progress are more typically the following: on 12 June 1934, after a bad day with Ewan, she reports, “I tried to write some of Pat II but found it almost impossible,” or, on 17 July 1934, “I worked at Pat II this evening but felt very bad. What a dreary, makeshift sort of life this is!” However, as she nears the book’s end, she allows herself some praise. On 28 November 1934, she notes, “Wrote a Pat chapter – ‘Judy’s’ death – and did it rather well,” and two days later (on her sixtieth birthday), she finishes: “I got the last chapter of Pat II done. Such a relief! I thought so many times this fall I should never get it done. I never wrote a book in such agony of mind before.” Finishing the book was indeed a relief: three days later she mentions that she has revised all day after “a lovely natural sleep of nine hours – nothing like it since last April.” The typescript is complete and ready for the publisher in January 1935.37
Montgomery made a remarkably similar observation about her state of mind in 1914 after the birth and death of baby Hugh; the similar circumstances, twenty-one years later, of a mother living with the consequences of a son’s perceived failure and a wife facing her husband’s mental illness and imminent job loss, result in a book with a very different tone and outlook than Pat of Silver Bush. Mistress Pat is a novel of loss: Pat’s loss of Judy to death, of Mary to her own past, and most significantly, of Silver Bush, first to May Binnie and then, perhaps more mercifully, to fire. Jingle’s arrival and rescue of Pat are negligible and have only six pages in which to redeem six unhappy years. The book may end “happily,” but it is not a happy book.
Both Mary Rubio’s and Elizabeth Waterston’s 2008 biographical works on Montgomery – The Gift of Wings and Magic Island, respectively – reveal a woman only glimpsed in her body of fiction: a woman often seized by depression, insecurity, anger, and resentment, entirely human qualities but qualities we tend not to associate with Montgomery’s optimistic and hopeful heroines. Yet, in much of Montgomery’s later work, and particularly in Jane of Lantern Hill, human nature is revealed as flawed, tainted by bitterness and resentment. Mothers, particularly, come across very poorly: weak, ineffectual, or just plain mean. There are redemptive characters – Jane herself is one – but Montgomery’s anger and pain are neither hidden nor masked in this novel, nor are they presented as extremes or anomalies; they simply are. We might speculate, as Lesley Clement does later in this volume, that while Montgomery’s public “personae must be consistently self-effacing and optimistic,” her journals “reveal . . . a deteriorating strength to fight on in an increasingly alien world.”38 In other words, Montgomery had not the mental or emotional resources with which to soften the bitterness of her first draft, as her life had become almost untenable. Similarly, in the next chapter, Thompson notes the juxtaposition of Montgomery’s “private and public” spheres in her journals as she struggles with the loss of baby Hugh and the simultaneous and grim war news.39 By the time she writes Jane, she cannot confine these juxtapositions to her journal; they seep inexorably into her fiction. Jane Stuart, like Anne before her, plays the role of mother but without any external role model. Montgomery constructs Jane, again like Anne, as an innately maternal figure, someone who does not need to learn how to mother; she simply knows. Jane seeks out others who, like herself, have no functional, nurturing mothers and offers herself as surrogate.
According to her journal, Montgomery worked on Jane from May 1936 to February 1937, a period during which she worried obsessively about the state of Chester’s marriage (which she had only reluctantly accepted as a fait accompli), Stuart’s actions and romantic entanglements, the death of her beloved cat, Lucky, and an unexplained event on 29 January 1937 of which she says only, “On that day all happiness departed from my life forever.”40 In Mrs Kennedy, Montgomery recognizes the tensions at work in her own mothering style, as she too closely involved herself in her sons’ lives. Hence, the strained three-generational relationship and the bitterness and resentment, present primarily in the daughter-mother-grandmother triad of Jane and her mother, Robin Stuart, and Robin’s mother, Victoria Kennedy, become central in the new novel.
Deborah Luepnitz suggests that, “in Lacan’s view, the most important thing a mother can do is to be not in a state of ‘primary maternal preoccupation’ with her infant, but instead a subject in her own right, who does not look to the child to complete her. Who or what else she desires – husband, lover, or work – is not as important as the fact of her desiring something beyond the child.”41 This idea is echoed by Andrea O’Reilly in her work on empowered mothering. She suggests that “empowered mothers do not always put their children’s needs before their own nor do they only look to motherhood to define and realize their identity. Rather, their selfhood is fulfilled and expressed in various ways: work, activism, friendships, relationships, hobbies, and motherhood.”42 Montgomery was a prototypical empowered mother, refusing to relinquish her entire self to her sons, although the last novel published in her lifetime demonstrates not just the motherly failures of both mother-characters in the book but also her own inability to move beyond the need to make her elder son “an adult acceptable to the next generation.”43 In Jane of Lantern Hill, both mothers, in different ways, violate the Lacanian precept and O’Reilly’s criteria for empowered mothers. Mrs Kennedy lives almost entirely through her daughter. When Robin married against her wishes, Mrs Kennedy, rather than cut off her daughter financially or, less dramatically but more radically, support her decision, simply sets out to bring her back home. She manipulates Robin, planting seeds of doubt and distrust in the marriage, which, nurtured by Robin’s own insecurity in her status and skills as Andrew’s wife, eventually bears fruit, driving Robin back to her mother’s house and her role as perfect and obedient daughter. Deceit seals the estrangement when Mrs Kennedy destroys Andrew Stuart’s letter asking his wife to come back. Robin, with her full social calendar, cannot dote on Jane to the extent that either of them would like, but, notably, she relies on Jane’s weakness to find her only moments of strength; Montgomery’s narrator notes that “the only times [Robin] ever dared to contradict grandmother were in defence of Jane.”44
Robin’s relationship with Jane is much sweeter and more tender than her own with Mrs Kennedy. She focuses on Jane what little intimate attention that she can: endearments like “heart’s delight” and “darling”; small and private moments of praise, sometimes in the face of her own mother’s disapproval; and kisses at bedtime or before Robin goes out for the evening. Much of Jane and Robin’s time together is covert, mornings in Robin’s suite over her breakfast, with Jane’s maternal nature manifesting in a longing to do things for her mother and already recognizing the impulse to protect her. Montgomery offers one such morning: “Jane slipped down the hall to mother’s room . . . She was not supposed to do this. It was understood at 60 Gay that mother must not be disturbed in the mornings. But mother, for a wonder, had not been out the night before, and Jane knew she would be awake . . . They had a lovely time, laughing and talking beautiful nonsense, very quietly, so as not to be overheard. Not that either of them ever put this into words; but both knew.” They are conspirators in preserving this time together, for it occurs so infrequently, and Mrs Kennedy’s jealousy would prevent even these few moments if she knew they were happening. Jane wishes “it could be like this every morning,” but she has learned to hold her tongue, for “she would not hurt mother for the world.”45
Jane is made in the pattern of Valancy: a poorly mothered girl who is herself an innate nurturer. She mothers her orphan friend, Jody, and the stray cat she wants to keep. She wants to learn cooking and cleaning, the skills of making a home, despite the unsuitability of this pastime according to Grandmother Kennedy. After an idyllic trip to Prince Edward Island, where her father allows her to home-make to her heart’s content, she emotionally mothers Robin, becoming shrewd in analyzing and interpreting her grandmother’s and mother’s relationships with each other.46 Jane recognizes the fear that drives Grandmother Kennedy, coming to see that she desperately fears losing her daughter. Modern readers can see the parallel between Montgomery and her maternal villain: the author similarly feared the loss of her sons to people or occupations that she deemed unworthy of them and their talents. Rubio suggests that “Jane’s grandmother bears uncanny similarities to the woman Maud could sometimes be: a mother who meddled in her children’s romantic affairs, who tried to break up relationships she considered unsuitable, and who had fierce ambitions for her offspring.”47 Montgomery gives Jane strength beyond Robin’s scope, strength that rivals and redeems the negative power of Grandmother Kennedy. In her penultimate paragraph, Montgomery sets Jane in direct opposition to her grandmother. Jane reflects, “Grandmother, stalking about 60 Gay, like a bitter old queen, her eyes bright with venom . . . could never make trouble for them again. There would be no more misunderstanding. She, Jane, understood [both her parents] and could interpret them to each other.”48 Jane becomes the ultimate and final mother in her own story.
Montgomery’s own experiences of motherhood were complex; she was at once daughter of absent, surrogate, and step- mothers, present mother of sons, bereaved mother, and disappointed mother. In her work, she was able to uneasily align these roles, first and most positively in Anne Shirley and later, more caustically, in the characters and stories of Valancy, Pat, and Jane. Her high expectations for her own experience of motherhood, and for the sons she raised as she had not been raised, set her up for intense disappointment when those sons chose their own paths for their lives. The idyllic and idealistic portrait of motherhood so potently portrayed in the earliest Anne novels is comedically reconstituted in The Blue Castle and poignantly but confusingly reshaped in the Pat novels. But those portrayals of mothers who mean well inexorably give way to the lost, angry, and bitter depictions of motherhood in Jane of Lantern Hill.
Montgomery’s time in Ontario was marked by remarkable highs and lows, as Waterston suggests in chapter 1, a veritable rainbow valley of experience. She came as a bride to Leaskdale, and there learned to be a pastor’s wife and became a mother; while there, she lost a child and several dear friends and lived painfully through the First World War. In Norval, she experienced the joy of new and renewed friendships, even as she struggled to let her boys become men and make their own (devastating, for her) choices. At Journey’s End in Toronto, she wrote her final books and reflected on a life that she believed had failed. Perfectionism hobbled her own self-perception and compromised her relationships with her husband and her sons. Yet in her novels, she offers her protagonists a wide sense of family and empowers them with the ability to both find their own mother figures and shape themselves as mothers.