On 31 January 1920, in Leaskdale, Ontario, L.M. Montgomery writes in her journal that she is having a “damnable day.” With “bitter cold – 20 below zero weather – and a sharp east wind blowing; a grey wintery world; chilly house,” Montgomery suffers from a headache that “prevent[s] her from indulging in [her] usual solace of imaginary adventures.” Incapable of evoking her usual “power” that allows her to “escape from ‘intolerable reality,’” she decides to work out philosophical questions in fictional conversations with such fore-writers as John Ruskin and Charlotte Brontë. “Taste . . . is the only morality,” Montgomery’s Ruskin declares. “The first and last and closest trial question to any living creature is ‘What do you like?’ Tell me what you like . . . and I’ll tell you what you are.”
Following her list of likes, which are predominantly domestic in nature, Montgomery challenges her imaginary Ruskin to “tell me what I am.” Her words here are enigmatic. Statements such as “I like to be kissed by the right kind of a man” suggest a challenge to the principles that a restrictive domestic environment imposes, but others, such as “I like housecleaning – I do!” carry an unapologetic tone for enjoying her domestic role. Her musings align her with the domestic romance genre with which she has been associated, most prominently, through the series of Anne novels, but her ironic tone and the “numbing greyness and monotonous discomfort” that instigate her philosophical search suggest her sense of a gothic presence in her real rural Leaskdale environment.1 Her need to find herself and her aesthetic interest in nature are indicative of her being influenced by Romanticism, but the “discomfort” that pushes her to examine her individuality tilts her Romantic notions towards what Timothy Findley would later call “Southern Ontario Gothic.”2
“Gothic” is a transient literary term that habitually attaches itself to other genres – Romanticism, Victorianism, horror, erotica, science fiction – as its qualities evolve into what is contemporarily considered “disturbing.” In Gothic, Fred Botting explains that in the nineteenth century, the “clichéd” eighteenth-century gothic conventions of “castles, villains and ghosts . . . continued more as signs of internal states and concepts than of external threats . . . [and] became part of an internalised world of guilt, anxiety, despair, a world of individual transgression interrogating the uncertain bounds of imaginative freedom and human knowledge.”3 Montgomery utilizes elements of both the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic in several of her works, adjusting their inclusion according to her aesthetic intents. When she moved to Leaskdale in 1911, her style was identified with romantic, pastoral environments. Elizabeth Epperly addresses the difficulty in discussing “romance” and Montgomery, seeing her style as a combination of both the popular “romantic” and the literary eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “Romantic,” what she refers to as Montgomery’s “romanticized realism.”4 In “(Re)Producing Canadian Literature,” Holly Pike maintains that “in the 1920s debate over the relative merits of modernist and realist-idealist fiction . . . Montgomery comes down firmly against modernism, and sets out her canons of poetry and fiction in the Emily books,” including her choice of Romantic poets. Pike further notes that Montgomery rejected the realism being produced by her contemporaries (citing her 1928 journal entry on latrines and Morley Callaghan) because she had her own brand of what she considered realism.5 Epperly, Pike, and others (such as Lorna Drew, Faye Hammill, Kate Lawson, and Kathleen Ann Miller)6 all explore the gothic Victorian romance rhetoric of the patriarchal home, adventurous heroines, and anti-heroes in Montgomery’s writings. The content of Emily of New Moon and the contemporary journal entries suggest, however, that Montgomery’s domestic role at Leaskdale encouraged a psychologically based, gothic strain in her romantic/Romantic style of realism – a gothic strain that developed independently of Romantic or Victorian traditions.
Montgomery also argues for the “real” in Emily of New Moon (1923), a novel that she defines in the preparatory stages as “a psychological study of one human being’s life . . . [a] ‘real’ novel.”7 Benjamin Lefebvre identifies Montgomery’s change towards this “real” as her “late style,” a style that Margaret Doody characterizes as her dark side.8 Montgomery’s change in style is often attributed to the world wars, legal battles, and her cousin Frede’s death. These multiple events doubtless affected her work significantly, as other chapters in this collection examine, but my focus is on the effects that Montgomery’s domestic and rural environment in Leaskdale had on her writing. In the previous chapter, Emily Woster suggests that Montgomery’s reading habits and process of rerecording her journals while in Ontario also affected her style; she argues, “The nature of this reading-writing relationship then exposes the text-based layers of Montgomery’s identity and self-construction.”9 This action of rewriting her journals is a form of revisiting her past styles and constructions of herself.
Montgomery chronicled her journeys back and forth from Ontario to Prince Edward Island in her journals, and each time her style and perspective began to acquire a new brand of gothic – Ontario gothic – in which the explorations of feelings align with Freud’s uncanny. In her paper on the uncanny in Montgomery’s Emily trilogy, Kate Lawson connects Freud’s uncanny concepts of the familiar and the unfamiliar with Montgomery’s and Emily’s unsettling feelings incurred through encounters with home spaces and the supernatural. Freud posits that “the uncanny that we find in fiction – in creative writing . . . is above all much richer than what we know from experience.”10 Extending Lawson’s line of examination, I argue that Montgomery transcribes experiences identifiable as uncanny into her journals, and subsequently into her fiction, but unlike Freud’s theory on fiction, her real life, as she presents it in her journals, is as “rich” in the uncanny as her fiction.
Pre-Montgomery, autobiographically based Canadian works, such as Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, are echoed in Montgomery’s journals through the gothic elements of harsh wildernesses and climates and of psychological survival in an unknown land. Her journal descriptions of her life in Leaskdale reflect the Canadian gothic theme of a stranger struggling in a strange land; however, the threats to Montgomery’s sense of self – Ewan Macdonald’s mental illness, the Zephyr people, her exhaustive efforts to fit in as the minister’s wife – are on a rural and domestic level. She writes out her gothic conditions in a literary style that is a precursor to what Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte identify in Unsettled Remains as “a more recent strain of gothic literature in Canada [that] has been less preoccupied with an overtly externalized and alien sense of gothic otherness that is ‘out there’ and more concerned with an interiorized psychological experience of gothic ‘uncanniness’ and illegitimacy.”11 Montgomery’s move to Ontario triggers uncanny sensations and gothic sensibilities that at first attach to her Romantic and Victorian inspired “romantic realism” but ultimately instigate a shift towards a modern gothic style of realism, forming a significant link in the tradition of Southern Ontario Gothic that would later appear in the often autobiographical works of writers such as Alice Munro.12
The first to draw comparisons between Montgomery and Emily was Montgomery herself. She acknowledges in her journal that “New Moon is in some respects but not all my own old home and ‘Emily’s’ inner life was my own, though outwardly most of the events and incidents were fictitious.”13 Faye Hammill suggests that “Montgomery’s romantic idealism is . . . amplified by an element of protest against the restrictive social order which has forced both her and Emily to take solace in fantasy.”14 Emily’s struggle is not just that of the girl/woman writer in search of herself/home, nor is she a mirror for Montgomery. Rather, Emily and her story present an example of the changes in Montgomery’s writing style brought on by her newly defined domestic role as wife and mother and her displacement from PEI to Ontario. There are also four short stories – “The Red Room” (1898), “The Old Chest at Wyther Grange” (1903), “The Garden of Spices” (1918), and “The Tryst of the White Lady” (1922) – that contain characters, plots, or settings that identify the texts as inspiration for the Emily series. Montgomery drew from her life experiences in the creation of Emily, but she also mined her previously written stories and refashioned them in order to “fit” with the new gothic style of the Emily series. In “Brian O’Connal and Emily Byrd Starr: The Inheritors of Wordsworth’s ‘Gentle Breeze,’” Margaret Steffler draws striking comparisons between Montgomery’s Emily books and Wordsworth’s The Prelude, concluding, “The most obvious and pure inheritor of a Wordsworthian temperament in Canadian children’s literature is L.M. Montgomery’s Emily Byrd Starr.”15
Both Montgomery’s and Emily’s nature descriptions and quest for the sense of self/artist, or bildungsroman/künstlerroman, are Romantic, but their efforts to reconcile their roles as both women and artists provoke psychological states of darkness that lean towards the gothic. Meena Alexander explains, “Where the Romantic poets had sought out the clarities of visionary knowledge, women writers, their lives dominated by the bonds of family and the cultural constraints of femininity, altered that knowledge, forcing it to come to terms with the substantial claims of a woman’s view of the world”; “the inner-outer dichotomy the Romantic poets played with presupposed a centralising self that could not be easily translated into the world of women.”16 Before her marriage and her move to Leaskdale, Montgomery struggled to balance her public success from Anne of Green Gables with her domestic position as a woman. In her journals, she equates her success with being bound in “chains . . . doubling [her] worries and mortifications.” In Cavendish, she was confined to her domestic responsibility as caretaker to her grandmother, and that relationship was psychologically disturbing. “I am well off and tolerably famous,” Montgomery writes, “but the conditions of my life are not even physically comfortable and I am beset with difficulties on every side – and all, or mainly, because I must live in subjection to a woman who, always inclined to be domineering and narrow-minded, has had those qualities intensified by age.” In the Romantic fashion, she is depressed by her grandmother’s “suppression of all individuality.”17 Her grandmother also repressed the Romantic ideal that “viewed a human being as endowed with limitless aspiration toward an infinite good envisioned by the faculty of imagination.”18 Montgomery’s state of physical and psychological confinement in the PEI homestead journals reveals the impact of her grandmother’s Victorian principles and the beginning of the shift away from the pastoral, domestic romance of Montgomery’s Romantic ideals into the gothic realm of the uncanny.19
In the home space she shared with her grandmother, Montgomery experienced an overwhelming and confusing collision of both the familiar and the unfamiliar. Her domestic roles of woman, granddaughter, and caretaker were familiar but so was her role of artist and her interest in public fame. At the same time, all these various roles were unfamiliar to her, as she felt oppressed within her domestic ones, and her grandmother’s lack of acceptance created unease with her public ones. Montgomery’s sense of self, then, became a confusing locus for both the familiar and the unfamiliar that affected her artistic inclinations. For example, six months before the above-quoted passage on her grandmother, she wrote about her familiar and unfamiliar reaction to her rediscovery in “an old trunk” of a “crazy quilt” she had created when she was in her teens. The crazy quilt trend involved collecting scraps, often from relatives’ clothing. In finding the quilt, Montgomery “felt many a tug at [her] heart,” as the quilt had become the materialization of a “compact of old memories.” However, the language of her nostalgic response also identifies with the repression of domesticity: “To my present taste it is inexpressively hideous. I find it hard to believe it possible that I could ever have thought it beautiful . . . I expended more ‘gray matter’ devising ingenious and complicated ‘stitches’ than I ever put into anything else.”20 What was once a craze in her pastoral environment she now begins to view as patches of domestic stories and labour from the new aesthetic perspective that she is adopting. In chapter 6, William Thompson presents a similar discussion of Montgomery’s journals through Judy Nolte Lensink’s theory that female diarists “design” literary patterns “similar to a quilt’s.”21 Alexander also draws attention to the quilt imagery in Dorothy Wordsworth’s 1803 travelogue, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, describing cottage land as a “collection of patchwork, made of pieces as they might have chanced to have been cut by the mantua-maker, only just smoothed to fit each other.” Alexander reads Wordsworth’s description as a metaphor of the female domestic position: the “image of a patchwork garment, cut of bits and pieces and stitched together as time and resources permit, reflects the realities of a woman’s life commonly defined by the hold of the domestic.” Alexander further positions the patchwork pattern as “stand[ing] in contrast to the seamless creation which so often seems to emerge in authorial self-presentation, the claim that the writer’s life emerges through his works. Literary labour in such a transaction is rewarded by publication and the overt status it accords the writer, with the private and hidden portion of life transposed through the work into the realm of the public and visible.”22
Montgomery’s patches are a series of dichotomies – familiar and unfamiliar, private and public, domestic and professional, fictional and nonfictional, beautiful and sublime, light and dark – and the metaphor is carried into her autobiographical fiction when Emily exclaims to her relatives, “You make me feel as if I was made up of scraps and patches!”23 Montgomery’s journals record the tension created by these patches as she “writes out” her frustrations in the same way that Emily writes the letters addressed to her father – both signifiers of an artist’s journey, or künstlerroman. Similarly, Alice Munro’s Del Jordan from Lives of Girls and Woman, another künstlerroman, is humiliated for her ability to memorize poetry (also a plight of Emily’s) and her inability to sew, making stitches “any six-year-old would be ashamed of.”24 In her analysis of Munro’s works, Coral Ann Howells observes that “while Munro manages to contain the familiar and the unfamiliar within the same story structure, the realistic text is threatened by glimpses of a darker fantastic subtext which cannot be easily accommodated within the narrative.”25 The journals, letters, and fiction of Montgomery and Emily act as “darker fantastical subtexts,” often confusing reality with the fantastic. When her grandmother dies and Montgomery is displaced from their home in PEI, her locus of repression is altered, but not removed, and the gothic presence of her journals is enriched. As Del comments in Lives of Girls and Women, “In the beginning, in the very beginning of everything, there was that house.”26
After Montgomery leaves PEI for her honeymoon and eventually moves to Leaskdale, her record of each return visit to the Island resembles a study in the uncanny. The loss of her grandmother, followed by her displacement from her family home, has encouraged the disconnected feelings of the familiar and unfamiliar in regards to family and place that already existed through the absence of her parents. On her honeymoon, she visits the home of her ancestors in her desperate search for familial connection. When she discovers the Woolner home of her maternal ancestors in September 1911, she “cannot describe” her “feelings – nor account for them.” She “had expected to feel an interest in the place” but “had the strangest sensation of coming home.” With her first return to PEI after moving to Ontario in July 1913, Montgomery brings with her the gothic rhetoric and diction she is further developing in Leaskdale. She contrasts the “good” “tang of the salt air” with “Ontario’s languid air,” a very Munrovian description of the stale rural gothic – of the small town, such as Munro’s Hanratty or Jubilee, where the disturbing lies in the ordinary and the characters are either afraid to leave, or eager to leave, or both. At Park Corner, it hurts Montgomery to see objects from “the old home”; she finds it “painful” to see them “divorced from the old surroundings of which they seemed a part.”
The longer Montgomery was away from PEI, the more “painful” were her returns, and the more gothic were her descriptions. When she returns to Leaskdale from the 1913 visit, she records in her journal the uncanny experience she had on the Island: “Voices were calling me that could not be resisted – voices of the past, fraught with all the past’s enchantment. They summoned me imperiously and I obeyed the summons. I slipped out into the darkness of the summer evening and went to find the lost years.” The summons led her to her childhood home: “In the fading gray light I could see the old gray house hooded in shadows . . . never have I felt keener pangs – never did my heart ache more bitterly with longing and sense of loss . . . it was all there – only those cruel shadows hid it.” Montgomery realizes that with each visit to the old homestead, both her experience of the uncanny and her blurring of fantasy and reality more and more border on the dangerous. As she writes on another visit to her old home in July 1918, “It was too full of ghosts – lonely hungry ghosts. They would have pulled me in among them and kept me. I would have disappeared from the realm of mortals and nobody would ever know what had become of me . . . These pilgrimages to shadow land are eerie things with an uncanny sweetness. I will make no more of them.”
Instead, Montgomery negotiates with her feelings by blurring fantasy and reality in her fiction (and arguably her journals). During this same visit to PEI, she is devastated that the “old school woods had been cut down” and mourns for the “thousand little pitiful ghosts [that] were robbed of their habitations and haunts by the felling of those trees.” Her language here is gothic in her horrific description of the cut woods as a physical deformity, “an abomination of desolation of stumps,” and her wish to “spit” “Garfield Stewart – the author of the outrage – on a bayonet without pity and without remorse.”27 Instead of spitting Garfield, Montgomery uses her fiction to write/right her devastation when, in chapter 19 of Emily of New Moon, Emily is able to halt Lofty John’s plan to cut down the grove north of New Moon. While Montgomery allows the uncanny sense of loss to bleed into her fiction, in Emily of New Moon she is able to control the outcome.
Montgomery also writes her gothic sensation of the uncanny’s supernatural into the Emily series; as Lawson points out, “Emily’s supernatural vision in each of the three novels relates to a house or homelike space that resonates strongly with her imaginative sense of the familiar.” She also suggests that Emily shares Montgomery’s “costs associated with being a romantic visionary” and that “in her uncanny experiences Emily comes into contact with a dark world beyond ordinary reality where she is ‘possessed’ by influences and events that she cannot control.”28 Montgomery’s time in Leaskdale altered her creative lens, as she viewed her old home in PEI from a new perspective. The pastoral, gothic romance becomes psychologically and domestically gothic. This transformation reflects the shift in perspective that Munro’s characters often experience as they are forced to view the familiar from a different angle. In Survival, Margaret Atwood suggests that Munro’s Del “transfers her imaginative allegiance from the stylized world of gothic grotesques she has dreamed up as an adolescent to the small-town ‘here’ she despised when she was actually living in it.”29 Del goes into her local downtown for a grocery trip with her visiting, flashy American Uncle Bill. His presence makes the familiar unfamiliar, and suddenly “Jubilee seemed not unique and permanent as I had thought but almost makeshift, and shabby; it would barely do.”30 With each subsequent visit, Montgomery’s Cavendish becomes less likely to host Anne Shirley’s Green Gables and more suited for Jane Eyre’s Thornfield Hall.
Similarly, in Emily of New Moon, Emily’s uncanny home environments range from the pastoral of the Maywood house in the hollow where she lives with her dying father to the Victorian gothic of New Moon and the gothic romance of Wyther Grange. The Maywood home “was situated in a grassy little dale, looking as if it had never been built like other houses but had grown up there like a big, brown mushroom,” and in her pastoral Eden, Emily is “kin to tribes of elfland,” names her trees “Adam-and-Eve,” and walks with the “Wind Woman.” Cousin Jimmy suggests that there are fairies at New Moon,31 but the house itself is ruled by stern Aunt Elizabeth who rejects modernity and hangs on to the Victorian rules of household domesticity. It is at Wyther Grange that a more modern gothic emerges in Montgomery’s writing, as she begins to write the psychological sublime of Leaskdale into Emily’s story. When Emily enters Wyther Grange, she feels “like one of the heroines in Gothic romance, wandering at midnight through a subterranean dungeon, with some unholy guide,”32 and is terrified on her first night by noises in the walls. She is told that the noises are swallows in the chimney and is quickly cured of her fear. Eventually Emily is pushed psychologically into a dark and disturbing place but not by ghosts in the wall. She is forced into maturity through the acknowledgment of her sexuality by Old Kelly, her aunts, and Dean Priest, and her aunts’ ruthless gossip of shamed and broken lives.
In her afterword for the New Canadian Library edition of Emily of New Moon, Munro describes Emily’s Wyther Grange aunts as “dangerous old women” with “a hint of something sadistic, of cruel play . . . as there is something threatening about their permissive atmosphere . . . the cold freedom, even the material luxury, that surrounds Emily in that house.”33 Irene Gammel also discusses Emily’s stay at Wyther Grange as more than a gothic romance interlude. In “The Eros of Childhood and Early Adolescent Girl Series,” Gammel argues, “Critics pre-occupied with the intertextual allusions to gothic romance and the resulting panicky frisson of Emily’s imaginary wandering through subterranean dungeon spaces have been remarkably blind to the fact that behind the seemingly irrational fears lies the material reality of menstrual and premenstrual symptoms.”34
The Leaskdale manse is a hub of similar internalizations of the gothic notions of ‘sensibility’ found at Wyther Grange, and like Emily’s reaction to her aunts, Montgomery finds the behaviour of some of the small-town Ontarians distasteful. Her journals record various ailments of the mind and body during these years. The recurring bouts of hypochondria, depression, and even hysterics that fester in Leaskdale appear too sensational to be real, but both husband and wife privately suffer them. At Leaskdale, Montgomery works hard to avoid Ewan’s becoming the centre of small-town gossip, hiding his self-absorbed nature and manic depression from the public – a secret that becomes unbearable. Her aesthetic sense finds the small-town environment and the people distasteful, particularly the “Zephyrites.” She writes that she “loathe[s]” Zephyr and hates the Zephyrites, finding many of them “ignorant” and “not attractive in any way.” She finds their religious zeal unappealing and even names the day of her visits to Zephyr “black Thursday.”35 In chapter 3, Steffler traces the influences of Montgomery’s childhood experiences with religion and concludes, “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.”36 Montgomery also concentrates her “abhorrence” on the Zephyrites, and her uncanny relationship with religion parallels her uncanny relationship to place. Although she is a stranger in a strange land, Montgomery’s life and writing begin to adopt the Southern Ontario Gothic elements of social commentary, mental illness, and small-town Presbyterianism that will later define the writings of Ontario natives such as Munro.
Montgomery’s younger PEI self was subject to gothic romance prose in her PEI journals, especially in her account of her love affair with Herman Leard. Later, as a married woman, she reflects on that romantic encounter: “My own love for Herman Leard, though so incomplete, is a memory beside which all the rest of life seems gray and dowdy.”37 Her language acknowledges a sadness for the transition of the gothic in her life from romance to disturbing and mundane domesticity. Steffler’s chapter also suggests that “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.”38 The effort of keeping Ewan’s depression private and handling his public responsibilities affected Montgomery deeply and altered her perspective on life. When he finally confessed his deepest fears to her, the scene, characterized through horror, religion, and psychological internalization, is pure gothic: “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. Never shall I forget my despair when I discovered this. I had always known it as one of his symptoms – the symptom – of religious melancholia. Unutterable horror seemed to engulf me.”39 Ewan’s mind and mood so affected the words and tone of Montgomery’s writings that the origin of the text of the journal often became blurred, making it difficult to distinguish what on the pages of the journals belongs to Ewan and what belongs to Montgomery. Like the creator and the creature of gothic literature, she becomes “engulfed” by the horror of Ewan’s situation, and thus her text and its perception are often inseparable from him. Although there are various interpretations of the ending of the Emily series, Mary Rubio’s suggestion that “Emily’s creativity will sink into grey domesticity within”40 reflects Montgomery’s fear of the state of her own marriage and domestic position, a fear shared by several of Munro’s characters, especially Rose from Who Do You Think You Are. Montgomery’s record of her marriage to Ewan is less in line with the pastoral romance of Gilbert and Anne and more akin to the subject and style of Munro, whose novels and short stories regularly explore domestic relationships plagued by mental illness and social ruin – both dark fears of Montgomery’s and identifiers of Southern Ontario Gothic. With statements such as “I was never in love with Ewan – never have been in love with him. But I was – have been – and am, very fond of him,”41 the journal entries record the real or dark side of marriage in a way that most gothic romances do not.
Montgomery’s journals are not necessarily an exercise book from which works such as Emily of New Moon emerge, but they do provide a collection of insights into the psychological creation of her private gothic reality that is, in turn, written into her fiction. Munro’s explanation for the source of her own autobiographical fiction is similar. Learning “very early to disguise everything,” she translates her private interpretation of her environment into her fiction, proposing that “perhaps the escape into stories was necessary.” She struggles with the concept that her reality is more gothic or unreal than what she can translate into fiction, explaining in a separate interview that “the part of the country [she] comes from is absolutely Gothic. You can’t get it all down.”42 In “Subverting the Trite,” Rubio paraphrases interviews with Munro, who comments on the real in Emily of New Moon, that “in many ways there’s great psychological truth in it.” Rubio also selects a passage that supports a Southern Ontario connection between the two writers: “When asked if there are features of Montgomery’s fictional world that connected Montgomery’s world with rural Ontario, [Munro] replies: ‘Oh, very much so. In the family structure, I think . . . A connection with the sort of people she was dealing with, the old aunts and the grandmothers, the female power figures . . . a sense of injustice and strangeness in family life and of mystery in people that was familiar to me.’”43 Freud would argue that Munro cannot transfer the uncanny of her life into “literature without substantial modification, because the realm of the imagination depends for its validity on its contents being exempt from the reality test.”44 However, the autobiographical nature of both Munro’s and Montgomery’s writings often elicits the subjecting of their work to reality testing, changing the approach to their genres. As Woster suggests in the previous chapter, Montgomery’s journal identity “is informed as much by literature and text as it is by her own past.”45 The character of Dean Priest combines Ewan Macdonald, Herman Leard, Mr Rochester, Heathcliff, and the male Romantic poets, while the old homestead, the Leaskdale manse, Emily’s Maywood home, New Moon, and Wyther Grange reflect Montgomery’s spatial recognition of the uncanny. As with Munro, the “absolutely Gothic” reality is present in Montgomery’s journals, and she weaves these gothic elements from her journal into her fictional stories.
In her journal, Montgomery refers to her uncanny sensations as “psychological experiences,” often premonitions recognized in retrospect or in moments of extreme duress. Such entries sensationalize the “languid” quality of the rural gothic that is her reality. Following the death of Frede, her cousin and dearest friend, Montgomery recalls a recent dream that she believes foretold Frede’s death, although she did not make the connection at the time. In the dream, her house is stripped of its belongings and decorations; in a sense, it is stripped of her domestic contribution and construction of her home space. Montgomery recalls commenting to herself in her dream, “Everything has gone and now I have to set to work to furnish my house all over again.” When she makes the uncanny connection between her dream and Frede’s death, her reflection reveals a dark gothic link between her subconscious and her environment: “But now I know that it meant Frede’s death. And has it not come true? Is it not my house of life left unto me desolate – is it not the inmost shrine of my heart narrowed down? Does not everything seem gone from me? Am I not left to furnish my soul’s habitation afresh – if I can?”46
Although Montgomery’s journals serve as an outlet for her struggles, her fiction is an extension of, and a comment on, her life writing. If the act of reading allows her “to (re)live and write in a space of near constant homesickness and longing,” as Woster suggests in the previous chapter,47 then her fiction writing allows her to navigate through the space of homesickness and longing. Following a quarrel over their “Tansy Patch” playhouse, Emily returns to the patch to see Ilse “gaily” recreating the space she has previously destroyed. Ilse’s candid manner “rather posed Emily after her tragic night, wherein she had buried her second friendship and wept over its grave. She was not prepared for so speedy a resurrection.”48 It is possible to conceive of Ilse as Frede, playfully mocking from the grave Montgomery’s many journal entries that mourn her death. In crossing the lines between life and death, fiction and nonfiction, Montgomery subconsciously consoles herself through the resurrection of Frede in Ilse’s recreation of a domestic uncanny space that all four females can share. The “psychological experience” of writing Frede into her fiction is Montgomery’s way of making sense of the devastating loss and, like Munro, of uniquely modifying reality into fiction and moving past traditional gothic romance conventions.
Montgomery’s journals share material with all her fictional writings, and her fictional writings share material with each other. Similarities exist between the short stories previously mentioned and Emily of New Moon. The stories precede Emily, but in comparison to the novel, the stories contain variations that indicate Montgomery’s experimentation with new versions of the gothic. In her introduction to a compilation of Montgomery’s “darker” stories titled Among the Shadows, Rea Wilmshurst comments that Montgomery eventually “lightened her approach to the genre and, while not mocking it, certainly took it less seriously.” She “took” the romance portion of the gothic “less seriously,” but it could be said that she began to take the gothic more seriously, as her approach to the gothic became less sensational and more psychologically disturbing. The Brontëan-titled “The Red Room,” an example of what Wilmshurst describes as Montgomery’s “early attempt at a ‘Gothic’ thriller,”49 has settings, characters, and plot elements similar to those in Emily of New Moon, such as old spaces, secrets, forbidden rooms, and a girl for a heroine; however, in “The Red Room” – a potboiler heavily influenced by Jane Eyre and The Mysteries of Udolpho – the gothic elements are sensationalized and romanticized. The young heroine, Beatrice, recounts from memory an experience of stormy nights, old mansions, an exotic woman, dark men, and a murder of passion, with even a reference to “Bluebeard’s chamber.”50 Beatrice’s ordeal contrasts Emily’s experience of rural farms, domestic women, weak men, and questionable spaces; unlike Beatrice’s experiences, Emily’s are more internally than externally threatening, and Emily eventually conquers her psychological threats. “The Old Chest at Wyther Grange” has a jilted lover, old maids, and secret spaces, and like Emily, the young heroine is inquisitive about old family secrets. Recalling Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in its title, the story also shares the names Wyther Grange and Starr with the Emily novels but again its style of a sensationalized tragic romance lacks the novels’ psychological development and exploration.
Montgomery wrote two more stories in Leaskdale, “The Garden of Spices” and “The Tryst of the White Lady,” with aspects that will find their way into the Emily series. The two stories are in Montgomery’s usual style that includes elements of the pastoral/domestic romance, the Victorian gothic, the gothic romance, and even Romanticism. The modifications she makes to the elements, mostly centred on the psychological state of the characters, are samples of her experimentation with a new style. Like Emily, the young Jims of “The Garden of Spices” escapes through the window of the room in which he has been locked by his strict aunt and finds solace in the garden of his badly scarred neighbour, Miss Avery. Miss Avery’s face had been burned in an accident with a lamp, and ashamed of her scarring, she has cut her ties with Jims’s uncle. The story, encompassing the pastoral, domestic, romantic, gothic, and Victorian conventions of setting, entrapment, escape, physical deformity, secrets, misunderstandings, and love, ends in happiness with Jims’s inadvertently reconnecting Miss Avery with his uncle and the two becoming his new parents. In her self-imposed isolation, Miss Avery has created a safe, pastoral/domestic environment of which Jims becomes a part and where he is physically free and guilt free. Her scarring adds to the romance of the tale, and the psychological impact is easily smoothed over with love. Montgomery repurposes elements of this story for the Emily series with the story of Teddy and his mother, Mrs Kent. Mrs Kent is insanely jealous and possessive of her son; however, the psychological impact of her scarring (also by a lamp) is much deeper than Miss Avery’s, and her story lacks a romantic tone and outcome. As a psychologically disturbed character, Mrs Kent traps Teddy in a domestically gothic environment that he is never consciously free to escape – a parallel relationship to both that of Montgomery and her grandmother and later to Montgomery and Ewan. In another contrast between the psychological makeup of Miss Avery and Mrs Kent, the former purchases a dog for Jims and saves his pet turkey from slaughter, while the latter is jealous of Teddy’s pets and is even suspected of killing one.
Finally, the evolution of Montgomery’s style and the reality of her gothic life are written out through the physical and psychological disabilities of Roger “Jarback” Temple in “The Tryst of the White Lady” – a story that, when she completed it in 1921, Montgomery called “a fanciful little thing”51 – and through Dean Priest and Cousin Jimmy of the Emily series. Roger, a Romantic hero prototype for Dean “Jarback” Priest, believes that “most people . . . were ugly – though not so ugly as he was – and ugliness made him sick with repulsion”; this repulsion is countered by an obsession with beauty. To further characterize Roger as a Romantic hero, he carries a volume of Wordsworth in his pocket, longs to “escape into the world of dreams where he habitually live[s] and where he [finds] the loveliness he had not found nor could hope to find in his real world,” and is in love with an apparition of a beautiful, ethereal woman. He eventually falls in love with a young deaf woman and experiences his world of dreams in reality; however, he overhears his aunt suggest that the two are properly matched for their disabilities, and her “horrible practicalities . . . filled him with disgust – they dragged his love in the dust of sordid things.”52 Although Roger and his love reunite for a happy ending, he shares Montgomery’s aesthetic interest in beauty and her fear of the sublime and ugliness of reality above her fear of the supernatural. Dean, then, is a psychologically darker and more complex version of Roger. As Emily’s physically deformed, intellectually brooding, worldly, and not entirely honest older love interest, Dean is a Byronic hero in his cynicism, jealousy, and passion. Comparisons have been made between Emily and Jane Eyre and between Dean and Rochester, such as those by Epperly in The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass.53 Montgomery’s descriptions of Ewan’s moods and jealousy of her success align him with Dean, but unlike herself, she offers Emily an alternative (although much debated if “better”) to the domesticated gothic in Teddy. Through the character of Emily’s Cousin Jimmy, Montgomery also addresses her fears that the people of Leaskdale will notice Ewan’s mental illness and lead her family to social ruin. Jimmy’s prospects as an independent, intelligent man are ruined after he falls down a well, as the “Blair Water people thought Jimmy a failure and a mental weakling.”54 The small-town misunderstanding and consequent social mistreatment of mental disability is a frequent Southern Ontario Gothic trope, such as with Munro’s Mary Agnes and Bobby Sheriff in Lives of Girls and Women. Ironically, Jimmy, Mary Agnes, and Bobby have the ability to see details and layers beyond the real, inadvertently teaching the “writers,” Emily and Del, to view reality through new lenses.
Montgomery not only “delight[s] and exult[s]” in her ability to exist in both her fictional and non-fictional worlds but also “save[s] [her] nerves by a double life,”55 a precarious mental state examined in greater detail in chapters 7 and 13 by Melanie Fishbane and Lesley Clement, respectively. Montgomery’s realism is affected by a lens that may often appear exaggerated or sentimental but is real to her, aligning her with “the great poets of English Romanticism” who by “highlighting the change wrought by the seeing self, the eye/I . . . established a distinctive mode of capturing the real.”56 She retains elements of the romance in the various forms discussed in her fiction, but with her domestic existence in Leaskdale, the gothic “real” is increasingly developed. In Lives of Girls and Women, Munro’s Del decides to write a gothic fiction novel based on her hometown. She struggles with what elements to retain from reality in her fictional account of her rural gothic environment and invents the tale of a photographer whose pictures of people “turned out to be unusual, even frightening.” Reflecting on her choices, Del realizes that “the main thing was that it seemed true to me, not real but true, as if I had discovered, not made up, such people and such a story, as if that town was lying close behind the one I walked through every day.”57 This is the exact perspective that Montgomery’s journals offer to readers. Montgomery “discovered” the stories of her fiction in her “real” life, and in her journals, it becomes difficult to determine in which “town” she is walking. Montgomery identifies, both consciously and unconsciously, the elements of the gothic she has acquired through her aesthetic lens and psychological experiences and writes these elements into her fiction.58 At the end of Emily of New Moon, Mr Carpenter comments that Emily’s writings are “too much like a faint echo of Wordsworth” and that her “titles are as out of date as the candles at New Moon.” When he accidentally happens upon the descriptions of himself and the other inhabitants of Blair Water in Emily’s Jimmy-book, descriptions that do not seek to flatter but to describe, he sees “himself as in a glass and the artistry of it pleased him so that he cared for nothing else.”59 Mr Carpenter stumbles upon both Emily’s and Montgomery’s talent to capture what is interesting in the real, and his comments act as Montgomery’s self-acknowledgment of her new creative direction towards the yet-to- be established Southern Ontario Gothic.