Good Enemies and Old Love Letters
She flashed one indignant glance at Gilbert from eyes whose angry sparkle was swiftly quenched in equally angry tears.
“You mean, hateful boy!” she exclaimed passionately. “How dare you!”
And then—Thwack! Anne had brought her slate down on Gilbert’s head and cracked it—slate, not head—clear across.
—Anne’s first encounter with Gilbert Blythe1
Reading Anne of Green Gables, we are struck by the explosiveness of emotions as Anne lobs hostile insults against school heartthrob Gilbert Blythe or local authority Mrs. Lynde. Turning from bosom friends and kindred spirits, we now consider the enemies in Anne’s life, which include not only annoying boyfriends but also authority figures and an entire family clan (such as the much-maligned Pye family). Anticipating popular twentieth-century developmental theories (such as Jean Piaget’s), Maud believed that rivalries, jealousies, and conflicts were not necessarily negative but could expedite cognitive development in children.2 Maud’s 1902 poem “To My Enemy” sums up her philosophy regarding the positive power of a good enemy:
Thine anger struck from me a flame
That purged all dull content away.
Our mortal strife to me hath been
Unflagging spur from day to day.3 In February 1938, bitter about her son Chester, whose self-indulgence and lack of responsibility were a great source of distress, she recited this poem at a tea and injected so much “venom” that the audience was taken aback. By that time, her feelings toward the girl who had inspired the poem were long gone, but the venom in the poem has remained as if it had been bottled in a vial. Readers of Anne will remember hateful Josie Pye.
Maud was profoundly influenced by her Scottish culture’s rich tradition of verbal sparring, debating, and orating; she also had an ear and gift for elocution, which was popular during the Victorian era. But it was the tangled web of clan bonds, also an important part of growing up in a proud Scottish-Presbyterian family, that provided a rich source for life-long tensions and feud, as did several old, unresolved love affairs. The good enemy, as Maud proposed, is often a kindred spirit in disguise. And for Anne, that “good enemy” is Gilbert Blythe.
There was one family that Maud loved to hate. “By the way have you Simpsons in Alloa? Cavendish is full of them,” Maud told her friend George B. MacMillan in 1905, adding that her great-great grandmother was a Scottish-born Simpson.4 Known for their pride and vainglory, the Simpsons, along with the equally vainglorious Macneills and Clarks, were among those who founded Cavendish in 1790. They were the educated and outspoken authority figures of the little hamlets of Cavendish and Belmont. They were also related to the Macneills through intermarriage. (In fact, there was a great deal of intermarriage in Cavendish, which was perhaps the reason Maud’s grandfather Macneill was dead set against first cousins marrying each other.) Despite (or perhaps because of) these intense clan bonds, Maud loved to poke fun at her relatives in her journals, with frequent jibes at what she called “Simpsonism” or “Simpsony.” She was no doubt echoing the jabs she had heard around the Macneill kitchen
table as she grew up, for Grandfather and Grandmother Macneill had always had a distinct dislike of the Simpsons.5
But what was the other side of the story? “The Simpsons were community people and they were always at the forefront. They were the pillars of the community, they were the pillars of the church, and if the roads needed to be broken for the mail person in the winter, they would be out doing it.”6 Descendants are still farming the Simpson land, and the homestead where Maud boarded when she was a school teacher in 1897 is still standing. “I’m glad Maud Montgomery is not alive today because I would wring her neck for the things she said about my father and his family,” said ninety-three-year-old Ruth Johnson, offended by Maud’s uncharitable journal comments about the Simpson family, including her disparaging remarks about Johnson’s own father, who was living in the house when Maud was a boarder.7 The old wounds are still sore, and family pride still rules as it did more than a century ago.
As Maud recounts in her journal, the schism between Macneills and Simpsons had opened with a children’s prank. The Cavendish youth had been playacting “the resurrection of Lazarus,” with Ernest Macneill in the role of Lazarus. The performers dug a shallow grave, buried the dead Lazarus under clay sand, and performed the resurrection miracle. The entire performance was witnessed by a group of wide-eyed school children. When they took the story home to their parents, simmering family animosity exploded into outrage over the desecration of sacred subjects. The Simpsons accused the Macneills of desecrating religious subject matter and founded a church of their own, the Baptist Church. This was when the old Baptist Church was built in the beautiful maple grove close to the Cavendish Hall.8 The family acrimonies were now entrenched in a religious divide separating the Presbyterian Macneills and Baptist Simpsons.
Close to the Baptist Church was the Cavendish Hall, which would figure prominently as the Avonlea Hall in the novel. The whitewashed building with a raised platform and library shelves to one side came alive during the winter months when the Literary Society convened for discussions, debates, and musical entertainment. Perhaps because of the family enmity, her grandparents were at first opposed to Maud’s visiting the Baptist Church and the Hall, but the Literary, as it was dubbed, would
play an important role in Maud’s development as a writer. When the Cavendish Hall was razed early in 1960, the Literary Society minute book was recovered and a typescript was prepared by the Prince Edward Island Public Archives in Charlottetown. Yielding fascinating insight into the political, social, and cultural concerns of Maud’s era, it also illuminates the local power play and animosities. As we sift through the minutiae of the minute book, from the February 1886 founding of the Literary Society to its 1924 ending, important pieces in the puzzle of Anne of Green Gables are revealed.9 Discussion topics of the annual winter program varied from Walter Scott to Lord Tennyson, from Confederation to Prohibition, from dairying to pork packing. Opinions were duly noted in the minute book along with some exquisite howlers, such as a recitation of Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” recorded as “Crossing the Barley.”10 Here the young fry of Cavendish practiced public speaking and musical performance before an audience.
During the time Maud was writing Anne of Green Gables, the President of the Literary was Arthur Simpson. The conservative town elder with a distinct dislike for strong women had been a dominant presence over the years, and the minute book is peppered with his incendiary opinions. “Arthur Simpson considered the paper good and George Elliott [sic] bad.”11 This entry of March 27, 1890, followed Miss C. J. Clark’s presentation on the daring female British writer Mary Ann Evans, aka George Eliot, who had taken a lover and given herself the male pseudonym. It was heavy stuff for some of the elders. “Arthur Simpson … thought there was little to admire in the Character of Elizabeth,” we read for February 5, 1891, about the red-haired Queen Elizabeth I whom Maud admired.12 In fact, her personal library in the University of Guelph Archives contains the full set of James Anthony Froude’s five-volume Reign of Elizabeth. It must have irked Maud, too, that Arthur Simpson misspelled her name as “Maude” when he was the minute taker.13 In fact, it was Arthur “Pa” Simpson whom Maud detested “with an undiluted hatred.” In turn, she said, he hated her and her music recitals.14
Another formidable presence at the Literary was the Honorable George W Simpson, a farmer and, from 1903, a Liberal member of the Legislative Council. In the photo Maud glued into her scrapbook, a drooping moustache dominates George’s slim face. His eyes are piercing.
Judging from the comments in the minute book, he spoke with flair and panache. In 1906, at age 48, he died of blood poisoning, leaving a cavernous gap in the Literary as “our ablest debater.”15 It was George W Simpson who presided at the Literary when Maud came out on Friday, November 22, 1889, just days before her fifteenth birthday. It was her first public recitation on the platform of the old Cavendish Hall—a personal milestone that she never forgot.
The Hall was full. For weeks, standing in front of the mirror of her den, she had practiced “The Child Martyr,” May Anderson’s poem of sacrifice and pathos. Mollie went first, then Nate Lockhart. Finally George Simpson called up “Miss Maud Montgomery.” Trembling, she stepped onto the platform and felt herself drowning in the sea of faces. Looking up at her paralyzed figure were Arthur Simpson, George Simpson, the other town elders, her teacher Hattie Gordon, her treasured school friends, and her odious foes. Maud collected her wits and began to recite.16 In chapter thirty-three, “The Hotel Concert,” Maud replayed in fiction her overwhelming attack of stage fright. Anne’s knees tremble, her heart flutters, and she feels as if she is going to faint; that is, until she sees in the audience her archenemy Gilbert. “She drew a long breath and flung her head up proudly, courage and determination tingling over her like an electric shock. She would not fail before Gilbert Blythe—he should never be able to laugh at her, never, never!”17
When the choir concluded the evening of Maud’s first recital by singing “God Be With You Till We Meet Again,” she was hooked. The platform would always hold a special magic for her, and she returned year after year to recite poetry by Tennyson, Scott, and Longfellow. Though she had no professional training, Maud had a natural talent for elocution. For women of her generation, it was an important form of cultural entertainment and public expression. In November 1890, Canadian elocutionist and Boston College instructor Agnes Knox had performed in Prince Albert to great acclaim. Maud admired the performer who looked like a
queen swathed in a black velvet dress; she, too, would make a cameo as Mrs. Evans, when Anne Shirley recites at the American concert. In August 1900, Pauline Johnson stopped in Charlottetown during her Maritime tour. By the early twentieth century, however, elocution was also coming under attack and was considered increasingly old-fashioned. Its critics charged it to be overly dramatic, encouraging conventionalized and exaggerated emotions, rather than natural expressions. Anne of Green Gables was a nostalgic return to Maud’s thrilling performances of the past when she had first won public acclaim. Maud savored the “puffs” she received in the local papers in Cavendish and Prince Albert. With glee she glued the newspaper raves into her scrapbook. “Miss Montgomery deserves special mention. She was encored again and again.”18 Since her first recital, she had also read critical papers on literary subjects, and none other than George W. Simpson had praised her on February 3, 1899: “Miss Montgomery then took the platform and in an excellently written critical paper took up most of the present day novelists of front rank giving a brief anyalis [analysis] of some of their work in a concise and forcible manner.”19 In fact, George W’s generous praise of Maud’s work each time he recorded the minutes forces us to qualify Maud’s sweeping criticism of the Simpsons as self-involved. Maud’s hunger for public praise is evident, and that hunger would be mirrored in her red-haired heroine. These accolades flooded her with warmth and pride; they also whetted her appetite for more.
Despite her elocutionary talent and George W’s praise, Maud felt inadequate in comparison to the brilliant Simpson men. They were outstanding debaters, clever at verbal sparring, and eager to engage on any subject. The Literary was the epicenter for debate, just as the Avonlea Hall is the meeting place for the Debating Club in Anne of Green Gables. Maud, however, was fearful of adversarial situations. After attending the Literary Society in French River, Maud recorded “another big fight” in an unpublished May 1892 journal entry: “It was simply disgraceful the way they went on and I never was so sick of anything in my life.”20 She does not say what the topic was. A wordsmith with her pen, she was by no means a dazzling conversationalist and remained mute during debates. Quiet and introspective, her wit sparkled only in a group of kindred spirits. Whenever she had anything delicate or uncomfortable to communicate
she would rely on a go-between—even later in life and even with people she considered close friends.
During the happy summer of 1905, Maud was not only delighting in roses and rambles, but also quickly reaching chapter fifteen, “A Tempest in the School Teapot,” with its first meeting and clash between Anne and Gilbert. Maud had adopted the character of Gilbert from her earlier February story “Aunt Susanna’s Birthday Celebration,” where she had first introduced Gilbert Martin and Anne Douglas as a “fine-looking couple.” They did have their shortcomings, as the narrator Aunt Susanna explains: “Anne’s nose was a mite too long, and Gil had a crooked mouth. Besides, they was both pretty proud and sperrited and high-strung.”21 The “crooked mouth” was imported from Maud’s kindred spirit Will Pritchard of Prince Albert fame. It was a lovable but distinctive flaw. Perhaps it was too distinctive—too much of a reminder of Will.
With a few strokes of the pen, Maud repackaged and refashioned Gilbert Martin. She softened his angles, neutralized his features, and feathered the edges as the photographer airbrushes a picture. And voilà! A happier and less prickly boy was born in Gilbert Blythe. “He was a tall boy, with curly brown hair, roguish hazel eyes, and a mouth twisted into a teasing smile.”22 After quarreling with Anne, bright and nice-mannered Gilbert Martin had gone out west to Manitoba. In Anne of Green Gables, Maud brings him back to the Island from the prairies, for fourteen-year-old Gilbert Blythe is catching up in school after a three-year stint in Alberta where he accompanied his sick father on his convalescence. The makeover complete, Maud spells out the name of the village Romeo on the school porch wall along with Julia Bell’s. “He’s aw’fly handsome, Anne,” Diana moons. “And he teases the girls something terrible. He just torments our lives out.”23
With her cast of characters crowding into the whitewashed Avonlea school, Maud relived the atmosphere in the old one-room school behind the dusky fir woods near the brook. This was the old world of Nellie and
Clemmie, Mollie and Pollie, Snip and Snap, Alma Macneill, Penzie Macneill, Alena Macneill, and so many others. She remembered the hieroglyphics and initials of generations of students carved in the old brown benches. Teaching was a rich arena for satire. Teachers’ salaries were unfortunately a pittance, attracting teenage women and men who were not always the most competent or accomplished educators. The women would marry and the men would move on to become doctors or ministers, more lucrative professions. At least three of Maud’s suitors, Prince Albert teacher Mr. Mustard, the model for the incompetent Mr. Phillips in Anne of Green Gables, Belmont teacher Ed Simpson, and Ewan Macdonald followed this path. The school lent itself easily to social satire, even though Prince Edward Island was also one of the first communities to introduce free education in the British Dominion, doing so in 1852. The bench where Maud so often sat daydreaming and looking out of the window is the bench where Anne Shirley sits on her first day at school, her eyes fixed on the Lake of Shining Waters.
The stage was set for one of the novel’s most popular scenes. Trying to capture Anne’s attention, Gilbert Blythe picks up the end of her braid and whispers, “Carrots! Carrots!” Anne fans the world over know in a flash what will happen next and probably know some of the wording by heart. Millions of readers have delighted in the explosive scene, when Anne leaps from her seat and brings down the slate, “Thwack!” cracking it on Gilbert’s head, much to the horrified delight of the Avonlea school. Diana gasps. The teacher Mr. Phillips stalks down the aisle to assign unequal punishment. The explosive act described in the epigraph fuels the plotline for the rest of the novel. What caused the blazing emotions behind the drama? There was a simple honesty and spontaneity about this act. There was great pleasure and release in this blunt, rude, unforgettable breaking of Victorian etiquette and decorum. What could inspire such a passionate outburst in thin-lipped and retiring Maud writing in her spinsterish den in the twilight of the day? It is a particularly rich episode in which a number of adventures and influences came together in one powerful scene. They all had to do with Maud’s own unique set of conflicts with boys.
The most obvious influence for the scene takes us to February 1893, when eighteen-year-old Maud was back in the Cavendish school to prepare for her teacher’s college entrance examination, as Anne would in the
novel. “Cavendish Carrots,” the boy she had nicknamed for his flaming red hair had made her scream in class by poking and startling her. Embarrassed, she took revenge by writing the ditty “The Boy With the Auburn Hair.” It sparked a feud that continued for months, as she reports in her journal. Yet much suggests that Gilbert was also an amalgam of many characters, including several foes who were worthy of her steel and stirred up complex feelings of both friendship and hostility. Maud engaged their memories just around the time she would have written the scene.
An unpublished journal entry reveals that in the evening of Sunday, August 6, around the time she would probably have prepared to write the Anne and Gilbert “Tempest in the Teapot” episode, Maud had pulled out an old packet of letters from her trunk. They were from her first boyfriend, Nate Lockhart Spurr (the same boy she had called “that detestable pig” in her letter to Penzie). “I wonder what Nate is doing tonight?” she asked in the unpublished journal entry.24 She untied the red ribbon that held together the letters and began reading, delving into the old Cavendish school days.
Witty, brainy Nate Lockhart was thin and pale with a freckled face and expressive eyes. He was unlike any other boy in the Cavendish school. The half-orphan, whose father had drowned at sea during a storm, had arrived from Nova Scotia in 1885, the year that brought electricity and the telephone to Prince Edward Island. He was a breath of fresh air for Maud. Equipped with a poet uncle, Arthur John Lockhart (better known in Nova Scotia as Pastor Felix), Nate had impeccable pedigree. To this kindred spirit Maud first confessed her most secret desire to become a writer. At the same time, a rivalry developed between the two that anticipated the Gilbert and Anne rivalry. At school, Nate vied with Maud to be the head of the class. He bested Maud in the Prince Edward Island essay competition in May 1890,25 and although Maud was Nate’s senior by two months, the minute book indicates his forceful presence in the august Cavendish Literary Society almost two years before Maud made her first appearance.
26 Behind the bland entries of the minute book, it is startling to learn that the future Saskatchewan crown prosecutor in fact outshone the future author of Anne in literary matters. This must have irked the ambitious girl who had devoted her life to writing and whose determination was unswerving. She did admit, in her journal, that Nate often “vexed” her.
Encroaching on her literary turf, this competitive male was the model for Anne’s rivalry with Gilbert, the “foeman worthy of [Anne’s] steel.”27 The rivalry propels Anne to scholastic excellence far beyond the Avonlea school. Maud may have gotten even with Nate by teasing “his life half out,”28 but the fierceness of Anne’s competitiveness with Gilbert, which stretches over two thirds of the novel, may also suggest the author’s underlying and unspoken resentment. Only in fiction could she give full vent to her feelings. Was the new boy from away perhaps given preference in the Literary because he was a boy?29
She thrilled over their romantic moonlight walks, and their talks, talks, talks. Nate was the first boyfriend to propose to her, when she was just fifteen. In his love letter, he wrote on February 18, 1890, two days after his fifteenth birthday, “Of all my feminine friends the one whom I most admire—no, I’m growing reckless—the one whom I love … is L. M. Montgomery, the girl I shook hands with, the girl after my own heart.”30 The letter was written in red ink.
Yet, as Maud writes in her journal, when the friendship became physical—just around the time following this love declaration—the romance sadly collapsed. She loved the kindred spirit but his kisses left her strangely cold. She desired a brother more than a lover, a pattern that would repeat itself with other suitors. She simply could not stand the feeling of somebody taking possession of her, moving into her space, her body, shifting things around. There never was a clear resolution, however. Had she been able to communicate with frankness and sensitivity, she might have saved her friendship. But frankness was never Maud’s style. Elusiveness was. The awkward affair fizzled out after she went to Prince Albert and he went to study law at Acadia College (today Acadia University) in Nova Scotia. The affair remained unresolved and there was resentment on both sides. His graduation photo captures a cerebral yet lovable schoolboy with curly hair, striking eyes, and a serious look. Nate became a lawyer, married a Nova Scotia woman (which Maud duly
recorded in her scrapbook and journal), and settled in Estevan, Saskatchewan, where he later became a crown prosecutor.31
Rereading Nate’s letters that night of August 6, Maud thrilled once more over “his boyish compliments.” She had no interest in seeing “the Nate of today,” however. In fact, the old memories had given her a heartache, having stirred up “sleeping dogs.”32 Yet the memories of unresolved love and resentment helped fuel the powerful mixture of hostility and attraction in Anne of Green Gables. In fiction, she was also able to transform the experience for Anne. While her relationship with Nate had ended, she had managed to keep the embers of another love-hate affair smoldering, as revealed in journal entries for the crucial Anne years, 1903 to 1908.
The man who had aroused Maud’s deepest and most complex emotions was Edwin (Ed) Simpson. Handsome and brilliant, he plays a prominent role in her journal, never failing to arouse instant agitation and antagonism. Maud first flirted with Ed in 1892, at age seventeen, when she visited in Park Corner. Five years later, in August 1896, when she had no teaching offers from any of the local schools, Ed, who was moving on to another school, called to tell Maud that she would be offered his position in Belmont. Presumably he had put in a good word for her. Maud would transform the event in her novel by having Gilbert give up the Avonlea school for Anne. In June 1897 she became secretly engaged to Ed when he was a student of theology, the details of which are well known through her lengthy journal account.
Unlike the photo in her published journal, the unpublished later portrait that hangs in the Baptist Church at Belmont speaks volumes about Simpson’s refreshing unconventionality. Like a Wildean bachelor, the Reverend Ed Simpson lounges on a chair with book in hand, a lock of hair brushing his forehead, the faintest hint of a smirk playing around his mouth. He looks cheerful, confident, artistic, and sophisticated. Maud thought that Ed, with his thick curly hair and fine eyes, had absorbed the
good looks of the family. She dismissed his brothers Fulton, Alf, and Burton as unattractive (thereby incurring the wrath of Fulton’s daughter). Yet Ed also struck her as “awfully conceited—and worse still, Simpsony.”33 Clever and intellectual, he talked incessantly about himself, she said, forcing her to be the audience. Two strong egos clashed, and Maud was, no doubt, intimidated by his strong personality. But there was also an unconventionality in Ed that must have fascinated her.
Ed’s grandnephew Arnold Barrett at Belmont remembers Ed’s yearly visits, for he would stay at their home. “I was only a kid when Edwin would come home from Wisconsin,” Arnold remembers. “I would have a cap on and he would say, ‘Here’s the boy with the cap that won’t come off!’ and nearly tear the hair off my head, holding the cap and my hair and pulling me off the seat.” The prankish behavior is reminiscent of Gilbert Blythe, who teases Anne about her red braids and pins Ruby Gillis’s yellow braid to her chair. “Edwin was a tease,” admits Ed’s niece Ruth Johnson, and it appears he never outgrew his love of pranks. A bit of a showman, Ed was also competitive, even later in life. He would check his watch in Belmont, then drive his car as fast as he could to Summerside and check his watch again upon arrival. “It’s the funny things you remember,” says Arnold, who hastens to add that Edwin was a great preacher.34 Ed visited once a year, usually in the fall, and would preach in the church.
Gilbert was, in part, a combination of Nate and Ed. The same physical repulsion Maud had felt with Nate had sabotaged her engagement with Ed. She recoiled from his kisses with what she melodramatically called an “icy horror.”35 What is remarkable, however, is that like a Spartan soldier, she fought for nine long months to overcome her emotional and sexual aversion. When she finally broke her engagement with Ed, she avoided explaining her reason. Like her romance with Nate, the relationship with Ed remained unresolved, filling Maud with the same lifelong feelings of shame, confusion, anger, and, ultimately, regret.
Something of Maud’s unresolved feelings of love and hate for both Nate and Ed lived inside the story of Anne and Gilbert. But she molded the character of Gilbert to make it possible for Anne to achieve her fairy-tale ending. Maud’s retouching and airbrushing technique rendered Gilbert curiously neutral and non-threatening—very much unlike the real-life models. In this fairy-tale novel, he is the very idea of a perfect
lover. As Canadian author Alice Munro has put it bluntly, “Her Gilberts and Teddys are curly-haired magazine cut-outs, useless except for obligatory marriages and pasted-on happiness.”36 In literary terms, the Avonlea beau is a “flat” character, the foil to the “rounded”, more complex, and lively, though flawed, character of Anne. But the combination of vivid emotion and airbrushed silhouette, of bad-boy prankster and patiently waiting chivalric hero, appealed to a wide range of readers who could project their romantic desires on this paragon of masculinity. As a romantic figure, Gilbert is popular.
Maud was careful to avoid forays into sexuality. It was a zone in which she felt uncomfortable. Even in the 1936 sequel Anne of Windy Poplars, when Anne writes love letters to Gilbert Blythe, the love talk is cut out by an imaginary editor (making the suppression of sexuality all the more overt). As a result of this clear delineation of boundaries, the action remains focused on Anne and her independent life, even when she becomes friends with, and then engaged to, Gilbert. Gilbert’s appearance creates a romantic tension but never detracts from the heroine.
Maud’s comfort, and the spark for her creativity, was the female arena. The world of Anne of Green Gables is matriarchal, presided over by Mrs. Rachel Lynde, Marilla Cuthbert, Mrs. Barry, Aunt Josephine Barry, Miss Muriel Stacy, and Mrs. Allan. In contrast, the male characters tend either to be overshadowed, in their personal lives, by the females (Matthew Cuthbert, Mr. Thomas Lynde, Rev. Mr. Allan), or to be embarrassed by their flawed professional lives (Mr. Phillips, Old Mr. Bentley).37 Gilbert is assigned a clearly defined space; Anne is allowed to carve out her own individual space and identity. “She made brave sounds, this independent, semi-feminist Maud,” as her biographer Mollie Gillen has written.38 Her insistence on independence, for both Anne and herself, was loud and clear, even as she tried to uphold the traditional Victorian ideals of the woman’s place in the home as wife and mother.