SEVEN

Pagan Love and Sacred Promises: Anne and Diana

The two llttle girt, walked with their arms about each other. At the brook they parted with many promised to spend the next afternoon together.

—Anne Shirley accompanied by Diana Barry on her
way home from Barry’s farm¹

As spring turned into summer in 1905, the Macneill rose bushes budded and then bloomed as they never had before. In the twi-A light of the evening, sitting in her upstairs den at her little window overlooking the fields, Maud wrote chapter twelve, “A Solemn Vow and Promise,” drawing from a deep and personal well. In it, Anne Shirley, hungry for a “bosom friend,” has come to the Barry home to meet Diana and finds her on the sofa reading a book. Anne compels Diana to put down her book and step outdoors into the world of action, demanding: “Will you swear to be my friend for ever and ever?” Diana titters, “You’re a queer girl, Anne,” but she complies with her new girlfriend’s wishes.²

Like an epicurean philosopher, Maud evokes a world of discriminate pleasure. The oath swearing takes place in a bower of wildflowers, as if Eros and his mother Aphrodite had set the stage. The summer garden wilderness unfolds its sensuality as a backdrop for the couple’s joining. Crimson peonies, white narcissi, purple Adam and Eve, pink and blue and white columbines arouse the mind’s eye. Musk flowers, sweet clover, sweet roses, fragrant sprays, and mint pleasure the nose. Humming bees and purring wind titillate the ears. Maud’s love of the flower catalogue provided the seeds for this orchard, while the rhythmic poetry of her prose provided the rain and the sun that made it blossom into perfection.

In fact, the old orchard’s unrestrained sensuous beauty was also fuelled by Maud’s nostalgic memory. To “go and stay all night” with Penzie was bliss when they were children. She vividly remembered spending the nights with her chum in that “little old house under the huge willows, with the most delightful, unworldly old garden behind it, ablow with roses and musk.” These same old willows and the same old orchard and musk scent now made their appearance in Anne of Green Gables as the site in which Anne and Diana’s friendship is blessed. The sunshine message of the original religious magazine story is turned on its head in this unrestrained reveling of pagan joy “What chums Penzie and I were in those long ago days! And what fun we did have!” she had exclaimed in her journal in April 1902, after dreaming of Penzie and the old garden, and admitting that, sadly, their friendship had fallen apart.³ In her fiction, Maud could repair the broken friendship.

Red-haired Anne and black-haired Diana are physical and temperamental complements. Thin and finicky Anne feeds on romance and ethereal dreams and intoxicating words. Plump and earthy Diana Barry loves food and drink. Mistakenly gulping down several tumblers of wine in one episode, Diana embodies aspects of Maud, who fondly remembered the late-night Park Corner chicken bones and hams, the caramels and chocolates. Maud took obvious pleasure in joining the felicitous twosome under happy stars. A firm believer in astrology and graphology, in dreams and premonitions, she presumably drew the girls’ birth months from the June 1905 issue of Modern Women (which also contained Maud’s own story “By the Grace of Sarah Maud”). “February—Humane and affectionate as wife and tender as mother; March—A chatterbox, fickle, stormy and given to quarrels.” In chapter twelve, the two bosom friends’ temperaments are intriguingly matched to these “astrological” birth months in the magazine column “What Month Were You Born.” As Anne Shirley informs Marilla, “Diana’s birthday is in February and mine is in March. Don’t you think that is a very strange coincidence?”⁴

The loyal pair represents a dream friendship without quarrels, disappointments, or betrayals. Theirs is an ideal friendship that belongs to the realm of fantasy. Sharing an idyllic love, the couple differs from the sisterly community that surrounds Jo March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), a work twenty-two-year-old Maud had purchased, read, and annotated in 1896. “Their friendship never falters,” writes scholar Temma F. Berg about Anne and Diana, “the two girls remain true to one another even while kept apart.”⁵ They seem welded to each other, like two opposite sides of the same personality.

Recognizing the pair’s romantic closeness, fans, journalists, and scholars have debated the nature of the relationship with great passion.⁶ Is it the embodiment of the perfect friendship? Is it a platonic love between girls and women? Is there evidence of lesbian (read: physical) desire? The latter suggestion created a media quake in Canada. “‘Outrageously sexual’ Anne Was a Lesbian, Scholar Insists,” read the headline in the Ottawa Citizen on May 25, 2000, after an academic had combed the Anne books for evidence of “lesbian desire.” Asked in a Globe and Mail interview if Maud had lesbian tendencies in later life, her biographer Mary Rubio answered with a categorical “absolutely not.”⁷ It was an echo of Maud’s own assertion “I am not a Lesbian” in a February 1932 journal entry.⁸ The fifty-seven-year old author felt she had to defend herself in her journal when she was being courted passionately by thirty-six-year-old teacher Isabel Anderson, who had accused her of being incapable of love. And yet Maud’s genius in fiction consisted precisely in evoking a world and era in which such complexities and clear-cut categories did not exist.

The Playhouse in Idlewild

Immersed in her writing and the beauty of summer, Maud’s fast pen raced across the pages as she poured out her vivid imaginings. Soon, it was time to send Anne and Diana to school after summer vacation. We can sense the ease and speed with which she wrote the novel. On a “crisp September morning” the girls enjoy their romantic walk to school in chapter fifteen.⁹ Maud was in her element. The girls and their love belonged to the pagan geography she herself reveled in. Each day the two girls walked through Lover’s Lane, through Mr. Barry’s back field, and past Willowmere—beyond which came Violet Vale and the Birch Path, named so by Diana. Maud admitted that this landmark was drawn from a photograph she said she found in Outing Magazine. This photograph, originally found in The Booklovers Magazine in October 1904, was taken by D. Davidson in 1901, and was part of a series of images poetically titled Twin Sentinels of the Trail, The Path Through the Birches, As the Trail Nears the Summit, A Dim Forest Aisle.¹⁰ It was the inspiration for the “narrow, twisting path, winding down over a long hill straight through Mr. Bell’s woods,”¹¹ the evocative path traveled by Anne and Diana each day on their way to school. Maud had become excellent at describing scenes she had seen in photographs. In fact, as she told her friend Ephraim, East and West often sent her pictures and told her to create a story to match the illustration.¹² While she did not enjoy being thus constrained, she had become an expert at whipping up a story based on a visual image.

Anne and Diana set up their “playhouse” in a spot Anne names Idlewild. As the name suggests, they are seeking to set themselves off from the larger society of rural Avonlea, which values neither the “idle” nor the “wild.” As if to contain their pleasure within the boundaries of childhood innocence, Anne and Diana are forced to give up Idlewild before they turn thirteen, that is, prior to puberty. When Mr. Bell cuts down the trees, Diana declares that they are too old for the game anyway. Maud imposed boundaries, signaling that crushes, sensuous as they are, are meant to be read platonically. The year 1905 was when Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer were banned from the children’s section of the Brooklyn Public Library for setting bad examples of behavior, and Maud’s limits are clear. And yet Maud left possibilities open particularly for the adult literary reader who was invited to decode rich literary and mythological allusions.

According to Maud’s journal account, the Idlewild scene was modeled on episodes with Maud’s little playmates the Nelson boys, the two orphans who boarded with the Macneills when Maud was aged seven to ten. “Every summer we devoted our playtime to our ‘house’ and gardened and swung and picnicked and had no end of fun,” Maud recalled in her unpublished journal entry of 1892, reviving her memory of their little playhouse in the spruce wood, north of the front orchard.

In the purple dusk of a fragrant summer evening we would go out into the front orchard, and, lying at ease in the delightful tangle of musk and caraway and ‘dandies’ we would pull the yellow stars to make the ‘curls’ and ‘chairs’ that were so plump and brave while fresh and so withered and unsightly when they dried.¹³

In describing this nostalgic childhood scene, Maud also recalled an old green boat named Daisy Dean, turned upside down. On and under this boat she played housekeeping with Well, a game that involved a fascinating class and gender bend: “Well was my ‘mistress’ and I was his ‘servant’”; this meant that Maud “did all the work” while “he looked on, gave orders.” One day Maud, craving some little compliment in compensation for her labor, asked Well to pretend they had a visitor, to whom he was to say, in a line supplied by Maud herself, “I have such a good servant.” Well, quick on the intake, agreed to the imaginary visitor, but revised Maud’s script, to say, “I have such a bad servant. She can’t do anything right and she won’t obey my orders.” Maud recalled in her journal that “I had a fortunate sense of humor, even then, so I sat down, with my hands full of ‘chickenweeds’ and laughed until I cried,”¹⁴

Pagan Diana

In Roman mythology, Diana was the huntress who was at home in the woods. Maud would have been familiar with the Diana verses by Canadian poet Gertrude Bartlett, who published in the same magazines as Maud. Her 1902 “A Pagan’s Prayer” in Ainslee’s fetes “Dian’s beauty” poetically:

Lithe-limbed dryades my will is
To encounter, where the lines
Of tall, yellow, woodland lilies
Burn like torches’neath the pines.

In the forest is a portal
I would find and wander through
To the hidden source immortal
Of the joy the pagan knew.¹⁵

Diana belongs to the world of the woodlands and woodland nymphs, the world of fauns and placid streams and scented orchards—the world of Anne of Green Gables. Linked to the moon, Diana was also the goddess of fertility and childbirth. In both mythology and the era’s popular culture, Diana’s name was associated with paganism, and we recall that Matthew finds the name “dreadful heathenish.”¹⁶ Literary readers would also have associated the name with the unconventional female figures of Romantic female friendship, such as Diana of the Crossways (1885) by British author George Meredith. In Godey’s Lady’s Book, Maud would have read about Margaret Oliphant’s 1892 novel Diana. “Diana is a charming woman and the author has sprung a rare surprise upon us by not letting her marry.”¹⁷ Neither does the title character ever form an attachment with a man in Florence Converse’s 1897 American novel Diana Victrix, a novel focusing on female friendship.

A Part of One Another

Fredericka Elmanstine Campbell was Maud’s closest confidante while she was writing Anne, yet there is suspiciously little about her in the journal entries of that time. Called by the androgynous name Frede, Maud’s friend was the youngest of her beloved Aunt Annie’s children, the Campbell cousins Clara, Stella, George, and Fredericka. Their house in the little village of Park Corner, opposite her Grandfather Montgomery’s house, was a place that resounded with laughter. In her 1933 novel Pat of Silver Bush, Maud immortalized the Campbell home, using it as a model for her character Pat’s beloved home. Since then the Campbell house has been known under the name Silver Bush, and the Campbell descendants operate the Anne of Green Gables Museum. Behind the house is the pond that Maud later claimed was the Lake of Shining Waters.

In many ways, Frede remains a mystery. Only after Frede’s death in January 1919 did Maud provide a detailed and idealized portrait. Colored by the pain of loss, the lengthy journal entry is a chronology of their companionship, which, according to Maud’s account, began in earnest in August 1902 when Maud overnighted at the Campbell’s home. “I recall the night distinctly,” Maud wrote in 1919:

It was a hot night. For some forgotten reason we all three occupied Stella’s room. Stell herself slept on the floor. Frede and I were in the bed. We began to talk confidentially each finding that we could confide in the other. Stell was furious because our chatter kept her from sleeping, so we buried our heads under the blankets that sweltering night and whispered to each other all our troubles—I. the woman of 28, Frede the girl of 19. We discovered that our souls were the same age!¹⁸

From that hour on, the two women were, as Maud paraphrases years later, “part of one another.”¹⁹

As if she meant to weld Frede to the bosom friendship of Anne and Diana, Maud’s retrospective journal portrait of her cousin mirrors the figure of Anne Shirley physically, spiritually, and emotionally. Like Anne, Frede was vivid, dramatic, and intense. Like Anne, she was also homely, freckled, and sallow, and her “enemies called her ugly” because there was “too much spirit and character in her face.” Maud gave Anne Frede’s gray-green eyes and quality to dilate into black orbs. In the right light, Frede’s mocking eyes looked fascinating and attractive to Maud. Like Anne, Frede was lonely, odd, and queer; in Frede’s own words, she was “the cat that walks by herself.”²⁰ An excellent letter writer with a knack for recalling memories Maud cherished, Frede recalled in a 1917 letter drinking Grandmother Macneill’s currant wine,²¹ and we are reminded of Diana’s enjoyment of Marilla’s currant wine in the famous raspberry cordial episode in chapter sixteen. Maud’s relationships with her girlfriends had a freedom that she would not have shared with the men in the same measure; dealings with the opposite sex were much more curtailed, especially when living with Grandmother Macneill.

Intelligent and witty Frede finished Prince of Wales College at age fourteen with a first-class teaching license. Regrettably, girls were given just enough education “to ‘earn their own living,’” writes Maud in her 1919 journal entry, paraphrasing Marilla’s more positive words for Anne (“I believe in a girl being fitted to earn her own living whether she ever has to do or not”²²). In the fall of 1904, Frede took the school in Stanley, ten kilometers from Cavendish. Perhaps because Frede was a relative, and perhaps because she put up a smiling front where Nora may have been more critical, Frede was accepted as a regular visitor by the crabby Grandmother Macneill and later by Ewan Macdonald. In fact, Maud liked to involve a girlfriend in her relationships with men, often feeling perfectly at ease with a man only when one of her girlfriends was present. Frede was Maud’s confidante with a privileged window into Maud’s private life. Frede was a rare emotional and intellectual match—they were true kindred spirits, belonging to “the race that knows Joseph,” a concept Frede had coined to describe their special bond and to suggest that they were different from commonplace people; they had affinities with the biblical Joseph, an exiled figure famous for his special gifts including his coat of many colors and his ability to interpret dreams. Just as Anne is the dominating character in her friendship with Diana, so Frede had always looked up to her older cousin with admiration. Yet it was only many years later, when she thought Frede was dying in 1915, that Maud first acknowledged her as “my more than sister, the woman who was nearest and dearest to me in the world!”²³

A Boston Marriage

At age thirty, when Maud was writing Anne, she was at a crossroads in her life. The good people of Cavendish expected her to marry. “The court of last resort” was what the women’s magazines she read called marriage at her age. In May, The Ladies’ Home Journal had featured a table showing the “percentage of chances a woman has to marry at different ages.” The statistics were dismal: 20—25 years, 52 chances; 25—30 years, 18 chances; 30—35 years, 15½ chances; 35—40 years, 3¾ chances.²⁴ Yet Maud also yearned for freedom. In a story she had recently published in New York’s The Delineator magazine, she had explored the “Boston marriage,” two women living together as a couple. Truth be told, she was conflicted and confused as far as her personal life was concerned. And this confusion was a secret she most definitely did not share with Ewan Macdonald.

In February 1904, just a year before she began work on Anne of Green Gables, Maud published in The Delineator a short story entitled “The Promise of Lucy Ellen.” Although the story was reprinted in Catherine McLay’s collection of rediscovered short stories by L. M. Montgomery, The Doctor’s Sweetheart and Other Stories in 1979, its remarkable content has never been considered in relation to Anne of Green Gables or Maud’s own life. In this story, Maud described “a Boston marriage,” two women cohabiting as a couple. Wearing bonnets like two married women, sharing breakfast and dinner at the table, Cecily and Lucy Ellen Foster, two cousins, share a gabled, old-fashioned house (“hers and Lucy Ellen’s”²⁵) in a place called Oriental. Together, the pair have made a “sacred” vow to each other:

It was Lucy Ellen that had first proposed their mutual promise, but Cecily had grasped at it eagerly. The two women, verging on decisive old maidenhood, solemnly promised each other that they would never marry, and would always live together. From that time Cecily’s mind had been at ease. In her eyes a promise was a sacred thing.²⁶

The story opens on a scene of domestic happiness, as Cecily and Lucy Ellen have cohabited for a considerable although unspecified length of time. Yet what follows is the sad story of the breakdown of the women’s bond when former suitor Cromwell Biron returns with a belated marriage proposal. Shocked by their impending divorce, Cecily tries to hold Lucy Ellen to her vow: “‘But he sha’n’t get her,’ Cecily whispered into her hymnbook … . ‘She promised.’”²⁷ The promise is like a sacred contract, an indissoluble marriage bond. Anger, pain, and resentment mount. “This was her reward for all the love she had lavished on Lucy Ellen.” Eventually she releases Lucy Ellen from the vow. “I hope he’ll be good to her,” she says.²⁸ The heterosexual marriage supersedes the Boston marriage, yet the new couple is depicted in unflattering terms. Lucy Ellen is simpering, nervous, and trembling. Cromwell Biron is weak, bald, and fat. In contrast, Cecily is saved by her sense of humor. Still, it was perhaps prescient that Maud wrote the Boston marriage as a divorce story. Was she exploring her own future?

In Anne of Green Gables, these deep-seated fears provide the material for comic relief, as Anne expresses her rage against Diana’s imagined future husband: “I hate her husband—I just hate him furiously,” cries Anne, while a bemused Marilla listens. “I’ve been imagining it all out—the wedding and everything—Diana dressed in snowy garments, with a veil, and looking as beautiful and regal as a queen; and me the bridesmaid, with a lovely dress, too, and puffed sleeves, but with a breaking heart hid beneath my smiling face.”²⁹ Poking fun at the girl’s fear of losing her girlfriend, Maud also introduces the possibility of a Boston marriage. “Diana and I are thinking seriously of promising each other that we will never marry but be nice old maids and live together for ever,” says Anne, yet Diana hesitates to commit herself to this plan.³⁰ Maud, who at the time she wrote her novel was considering what future she wanted for herself, played with these literary associations by creating, in contrast to the more free-thinking Anne, a Diana character who assumes without question that she will become a wife and mother. It is puckish and pagan Anne who has absorbed all of the Dianic qualities.

By this point, the girls’ bond has twice survived the test of cruel separation: first when Anne refused to go to school, after her altercation with Gilbert, and second, when Mrs. Barry insisted that the two must part after Diana became drunk after having tea with Anne. The dramatic farewells allow further reiterations of eternal love drawn from girls’ keepsake albums. The former episode was modeled on Maud’s own life, when her grandfather took her out of school in 1888 for several months after a disagreement with the teacher, Miss Izzie Robinson. Thirteen-year-old Maud would never forget the monotony and loneliness and separation from Mollie.³¹

Veiled by the comedy is Maud’s own separation anxiety and panic and her lifelong desire to bind her female friends to her by means of contracts, vows, and promises. When Penzie married Will Bulman and moved to New Glasgow in July 1898, she did not say a word about her marriage to Maud, who recorded the “shabby treatment” in her journal, noting, “I suppose she has dropped out of my life forever.”³² That Penzie should feel unable even to mention her upcoming marriage speaks volumes. Similarly, when Frede suddenly married in 1917, Maud was “dumfoundered, flabbergasted, knocked out and rendered speechless,”³³ even though, in practical terms, their relationship was essentially unchanged. Frede’s husband, Cameron MacFarlane, was a soldier and Frede continued to live alone. Maud and Frede, too, had made a promise—a “compact” as Maud calls it—that when either of them died, the deceased woman’s spirit would “come back” to appear to the survivor. The ritual was a variant of the Liebestod (death-in-love) that, in romantic literature, unites heterosexual lovers, such as Romeo and Juliet, in death. Years later, in January 1919, when Frede was dying of the Spanish flu in a Montreal hospital, Maud, hysterical with grief, reminded her of their mutual promise: “Frede,” Maud said earnestly, “you won’t forget your promise to come and see me, will you?” “No,” Frede answered.³⁴ Frede’s death unleashed a stormy and excessive grieving that would last until the end of Maud’s own life and that leads us to conclude that Frede was the central love of her life. Even before her death, Maud had cast her in a remarkably physical and sensuous description. Her cheeks were flushed, she writes about her favorite memory, her eyes brilliant, a pendant glistening on her breast, and earrings caressing her cheeks.³⁵ In her grief she fantasized about having a child from Frede which she would have loved to bring up. “I shall always feel as if I belonged ‘back there’—back there with Frede and laughter and years of peace.”³⁶

While involved in her slow and unhurried courtship dance with Ewan, her look into her own future of possible marriage and motherhood also fueled her nostalgia. In Anne of Green Gables, she was able to explore the bosom friendship with unrestrained enthusiasm and passion. The writing of this passion ironically followed right on the heels of her afternoon visits and flirts with Ewan Macdonald. Through clever wit and irony, Maud had a gift of bringing her readers tantalizingly close to unspoken feelings of sensuality and sexuality, while ingeniously portraying these feelings as universal and innocent.