‘You jest have to stumble on it – you’re walking along on the sand-hills, never thinking of sweet-grass – and all at once the air is full of sweetness – and there’s the grass under your feet. I favour the smell of sweet-grass … I don’t like these boughten scents – but a whiff of sweet-grass belongs anywhere a lady does.’ (Captain Jim, Anne’s House of Dreams 138)
L.M. Montgomery’s writing changes people’s lives. To those accustomed to thinking of her as a writer for children, who presumably forget her when they grow up, or as a complacent and dismissible scribbler of romances, to hear that Montgomery’s writing profoundly affects the way people think about themselves will sound absurd. But it is true: thousands of readers identify with and are inspired by Montgomery’s characters, descriptions, and romanticized realism. Why?
Montgomery crosses cultural and generational lines in her phenomenal, continuing popularity. Polish soldiers in the Second World War were issued copies of Anne of the Island to take to the front with them (Wachowicz 10); a post-war Japan turned to Anne of Green Gables for lessons in cheerfulness and optimism (Katsura 57–60; Epperly, ‘Greetings’ 5). Recently a musical based on The Blue Castle has been a smash hit in Poland (Wachowicz 7–35), and thousands of Japanese tourists come to Prince Edward Island to see for themselves the land of Green Gables, and then at home import Anne memorabilia and attend large professional exhibitions of Montgomery materials. Montgomery’s twenty novels and volumes of short stories and poems are appearing in new, handsome, illustrated editions. Montgomery’s journals have gained a solid readership. Several of the novels have been translated into half a dozen languages, and a recent series of Canadian television movies has made Anne a household word all over again in North America. Sophisticated writers such as Alice Munro (Afterword 357–61) and Jane Urquhart (Afterword 330–4) talk about the important influence of Montgomery on their understanding of themselves as females and as writers. I know personally numbers of people who have read and loved Montgomery and have subsequently left other provinces or countries behind to move permanently to Prince Edward Island. What makes Montgomery’s stories so powerful and her characters and landscapes so beloved?
When Montgomery first started writing short stories, she had her eye on the market. She probably read stories in the Family Herald and Weekly Star, as Nellie McClung did (Roper 279), and she read stories in magazines imported from the States, among them the popular Godey’s Lady’s Book (Montgomery, Alpine 48). From the standards and patterns set by periodicals such as these Montgomery fashioned her early pieces in the 1890s.
Her own literary taste had been formed by her reading of nineteenth-century fiction and poetry – whatever volumes she could borrow from the Cavendish Literary Society or from friends and relatives. She had studied literature at Prince of Wales College while she took a teacher’s licence (1893–4) and at Dalhousie University where she was a student for one year (1895–6). She read, among others, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, Trollope, George Eliot, and – her beloved for years – Bulwer Lytton; among the poets she relished Keats, Shelley, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and both Brownings. From the best literature of the nineteenth century – and some introduction to Shakespeare as well as to Milton – Montgomery drew her ideas about narration, description, dialogue, dialect, and moral rectitude. But she shaped her stories to sell to the periodicals she knew or heard about, and she carefully crafted her own pieces to conform to the formula a particular journal favoured.
From reading early examples of Montgomery’s stories, we see how thoroughly she imitated the patterns of the day – dramatic reversals of fortune, suddenly discovered long-lost relatives, sentimental love scenes, and purple patches of description. But if the pieces are formulaic, they are also often very clever, suggesting the gift behind the conformity, the artistic powers barely tapped by the marketable tale.1 A sharp eye for detail and a keenly developed sense of humour and irony show even in some of the most stylized pieces. Montgomery, in short, was successful early in her career for many of the same reasons that she remained popular in her own lifetime and beyond – she wrote what people wanted to read. She adapted material to the form or formula that would sell.
When Montgomery’s grandfather died in 1898, the twenty-four-year-old Maud gave up teaching and returned to Cavendish so that she could take care of her aging grandmother. There she read or reread whatever she could find – perhaps a classic, invaluable to a writer of girls’ stories, such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, or a startlingly unconventional work such as Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm. The Cavendish lending library kept a thin stock of new books, and she read Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (published in 1903)2 and Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden (published in 1898, but read by Montgomery in 1905), which may have inspired Montgomery’s use of the phrase ‘kindred spirit.’3 Within a few years of returning to Cavendish and after a brief stint in Halifax on a newspaper, her arduous apprenticeship paid off, and she began to earn a fairly comfortable living by her pen. Poetry never made much money, but she enjoyed writing it and thought she touched ‘a far higher note in my verse than in prose’ (Letters 3). She decided to expand an idea for a serial into a novel, and in 1905 she began what was to become Anne of Green Gables. It was rejected by five publishing houses, and then, when she had almost given up on it completely, she took it out of the hatbox where she had stored it and sent it off to the L.C. Page Company in Boston. The rest is a publishing success story. The Page Company not only wanted it, but wanted her to prepare a sequel right away. Anne of Green Gables was published in July 1908, and by October of that year the book had gone through five printings. The success continued, and Montgomery became world famous, receiving fan mail from prime ministers and great writers, from young and old, and from as far away as Tibet and Australia. Montgomery had obviously gone beyond the formula of her early, smart little stories; she had touched what T.D. MacLulich calls a ‘universal nerve’ (‘Portraits’ 459) and what her bibliographers call ‘the deepest places in the heart of childhood’ (Russell, Russell, and Wilmshurst xix). She continued to touch that nerve in almost all her writing.
Montgomery’s detractors like to say that she stumbled onto a lucky formula in Anne of Green Gables (MacLulich, ‘Portraits’ 459) and continued to exploit it in all her subsequent fiction. And there is some truth in this, but only some. There is something of formula in all her novels, since she was writing within the safe and fairly predictable boundaries of children’s stories or domestic romance. But just as there was a glimmer of irony and wit in many of those very early magazine pieces that she wrote to order, so in even the most predictable of scenes in her novels we find the twist of irony or humour that transforms the expected into the surprising. And, more importantly, what Montgomery often did exploit was archetype rather than mere formula – the fundamental themes of life rather than just superficial social interchanges. As Elizabeth Waterston explains in her landmark essay on Montgomery in The Clear Spirit, Montgomery’s fiction deals with the deepest anxieties about growing up (198–220). And, Mary Rubio would add, growing up includes confronting the power relations implicit not only in Avonlea community life but in the relations of the sexes themselves (‘Canada’s’ 2).
Much of Montgomery’s lasting appeal, Mary Rubio explains, has to do with the way Montgomery played with the expectations of her audience. She invited her female readers in particular to enjoy in the stories assaults against their own confinement, under the guise of ironic and humorous deflations of authority. The same confinement and oppression that women readers may feel in the culture surrounding them is also felt by other downtrodden groups and cultures – and they, too, read Montgomery and feel the thrill of getting the better of authority in sly, witty, safe ways. Mary Rubio outlines eight ‘strategies’ Montgomery used for including social criticism in apparently innocuous stories: (1) choosing the women’s genres of domestic romance and children’s fiction, (2) writing happy endings for her stories but undercutting those happy endings all along the way with shifts in the tone or form of the writing, (3) undercutting her own subversive elements by using humour, (4) making subversive comments through characters of ‘no-importance’ so that no one takes responsibility for such comments in the fiction, (5) using feelings and thoughts rather than tight plots or straight chronologies, (6) using the narrator to intrude with comments on a heroine’s refusal to conform to convention or expectation, (7) presenting patriarchs as women, thus making behaviour and attitudes that would have been acceptable in a man seem grotesque, (8) using literary allusions and references to reinforce subversive messages for those who know the original literary works (‘Canada’s’ 3–7). Rubio ends her interesting assessment with these words: ‘In summary, L.M. Montgomery’s little romances are more complicated than appear on the surface. We can see that she, like many other female writers of her day, played the literary game with superb finesse, remaining within the confines of genteel female respectability, while incorporating serious social criticism into her novels’ (‘Canada’s‘ 8).
Montgomery had learned in the early years of her apprenticeship to write for the market; she wanted to sell what she wrote and to become a successful ‘worker,’ as she put it, since she did not regard herself as a genius who could ignore money for the sake of art. But Montgomery also learned in those early days to inject something of herself into the writing – to infuse her sense of fun or her own perspective into some of the surprises of dialogue or event. And thus when she did write her first novel, she was already adept at writing within boundaries and yet liberating her own poetic and humorous bents. The impulses behind her descriptions and her irony keep her novels popular even yet.
Montgomery’s books are primarily about female characters. Her heroines range in age from young to old. Eleven of her novels are focused on child or young adolescent heroines, and nine are focused on older adolescent or adult heroines. Each of the heroines4 learns to value herself in relation to the surrounding community and culture; each heroine learns to love and create a home for herself. In discovering or appreciating or creating ‘home,’ the heroines are creating or strengthening interconnections between themselves and the value or beauties of the spiritual or material culture around them. In other words, Montgomery’s heroines act out what Carol Gilligan describes (In a Different Voice) as the essentially female valuation of interconnectedness and interrelatedness, as opposed to the male valuation of competition and separation. Anne Shirley wants everyone to love her, and she celebrates the joyous beauty of the natural world; even though she is less obviously sociable, Emily Byrd Starr prizes her connections with the traditions of the women of her clan and cultivates her gifts for recreating the beauty she sees.
For each of Montgomery’s heroines a recognition of her own distinctive voice is a crucial step to self-awareness; talking back is sometimes a measure of self-confidence or self-worth; love of place is a way of celebrating the centred, whole personality. For Montgomery’s heroines ‘home’ includes an awareness of the centred self; ‘home’ is an attitude as well as a place. Through ingenious – and perhaps often necessarily unconscious – subversions of the various systems and codes around them, Montgomery’s heroines learn to hold their own in a culture that will give them a very limited framework in which to live respectably and comfortably. Not a single one of Montgomery’s heroines loses respectability. Even Valancy’s real break with ‘the Stirlings of Deerwood’ in The Blue Castle is made only after she gets married; her nursing of the consumptive outcast, Cissy Gay, was a cracking of rather than a clear breaking from code, since selfless acts of mercy were still acceptable for the unmarried female. Valancy’s early defiance of the rules of proper daughterly conduct includes saying what she thinks at a clan gathering and viciously pruning a rose-bush. In the world scheme these peccadilloes are minor indeed, but Montgomery and the reader know that within the context of Valancy’s restricted and beleaguered life, these outbreaks are flamboyant.
What can we learn by looking closely at Montgomery’s writing? We can learn what confinement to genre means in terms of the compromises she had to make with character or narrative development. We can also appreciate how Montgomery used and reused certain subjects and themes to suggest intricacies of personality or ironic implications of a scene. We can see how far Montgomery was willing to stretch the boundaries of romance and children’s fiction. In looking carefully at her heroines and their literary context, we can understand something more about our own expectations for female characters and their possibilities for growth, change, and independence.5 We must read carefully if we are to discern what assumptions underlie the humour and the pathos, the indignation and the joy. We will find that Montgomery’s writing is filled with apparently unexamined prejudices – if her writing is in any way a just reflection of her own thinking, she was sometimes racist, classist, ageist, weight-prejudiced, and chauvinistic. It will be impossible for many readers of the 1990s to see the concluding lines of either Magic for Marigold or A Tangled Web, for example, without dismay or shock at the values they suggest. Montgomery’s stories often support not only the white, English-speaking status quo but also stereotypes about men and women and the supposed battle of the sexes.
Nevertheless, despite the chosen limitations of her genre and the perhaps unconscious prejudices of her background and/or times, Montgomery has a great deal to offer the careful reader. Her idealized, late-Romantic, occasionally transcendentalist nature descriptions, for example, are wonderfully attractive and versatile. Montgomery makes considerable use of what Annis Pratt calls the ‘green-world archetype,’ a ‘special world of nature’ that is a continuing source of joy, beauty, and power for the female hero (16). The most pervasive and conspicuous preoccupation is with romance, partly defined by her chosen genres and involved constantly in her own depictions of human foibles and interactions as well as in her descriptions. In every book she wrote, the main characters grapple consciously or unconsciously with their conception of the romantic. The best-drawn heroines struggle openly to define romance and the romantic, and in so doing challenge readers to assess their own assumptions and prescriptions. Montgomery knew what she was doing when she made the child Anne Shirley wrestle with Tennyson’s code of chivalry in Avonlea and years later made Anne’s son Walter set out for the First World War, convincing himself that he must be Tennyson’s Galahad. Romance involves the heroine’s most intimate thoughts about herself as well as the most stringent cultural expectations for her. In Montgomery’s career-long preoccupation with romance and chivalry we find every culture’s debate over its highest ideals and its most practical distribution of labour.
Montgomery’s heroines’ estimations of and responses to romance – in love stories, in the idealizing of nature, in acts of courage – invite our most careful self-analyses and honesty. What do we make of the fact that Montgomery’s novels invert some forms of romance only to reinstate and reinforce them ultimately? Are the freedom and possibilities suggested in the inversion what attract readers or is the restoration of expectations what attracts readers? Or is it that readers, even in the 1990s, want the flouting of authority and the established rules to be subliminal – indirect – so that they can enjoy it without having to think about its implications for their own lives? Do readers of Montgomery’s fiction delude themselves about the cultural forces in their own lives and, in fact, perpetuate their own confinement and oppression? In her book on romance fiction, Janice Radway says: ‘By reading the romance as if it were a realistic novel about an individual’s unique life … the reader can ignore the fact that each story prescribes the same fate for its heroine and can therefore unconsciously reassure herself that her adoption of the conventional role, like the heroine’s, was the product of chance and choice, not of social coercion’ (17). Is Radway’s argument inappropriate for Montgomery’s novels, since Radway is talking about formula romance fiction such as Harlequin romances? Are Montgomery’s domestic romances really different from Harlequins, themselves phenomenally popular?
Let me offer here a word about romance and the way I have used the term and the concept in this book. The writer who tries to define rigidly either romance or romantic will come to grief quickly (Fowler 37–53)- The terms have reasonably precise boundaries when we speak of the Romantic movement or medieval romance literary conventions, but blur when we begin to talk colloquially, as Montgomery’s characters do, about ‘how romantic’ some thing or person is. Confusion could set in when we refer to formula romance (of the kind that John Cawelti, Kay J. Mussell, Janice Radway, or Bonnie Kreps talk about) and at the same time compare it with romantic fairy-tale endings and/or Tennysonian chivalry, itself a Victorian-Romantic remaking of medieval romance. Montgomery’s own thinking, and that of her characters, is influenced by nineteenth-century concepts of romance and valour, themselves much influenced by the Romantics and of course by Sir Walter Scott, and also by the Romantic and then the Victorian-Romantic revaluing of medieval romance; Montgomery’s nature descriptions are strongly influenced by the Romantic poets and by late-Victorian romanticism. And Montgomery’s ideas about love and male-female love relations are heavily marked by nineteenth-century conventional and radical literary thinking. Jane Eyre, a formative text for Montgomery, is both traditionally romantic in supporting passionate love relationships between men and women and radical in challenging in the love story customary barriers of class, age, and gender. I have tried to avoid confusion in my use of the words romance and romantic by using them in their popular – and not strictly literary – senses. At the same time, I try to suggest the rich history behind our popularizing of the terms and concepts.
With Montgomery’s heroines we see several forms of romance at work simultaneously and continuously.6 As children, the heroines romanticize the natural world – trailing Wordsworthian clouds of glory, they thrill to the beauty and splendour in the hills and fields and woods and shore and sky. They thrill to tales of chivalry. As they grow older, they continue to enjoy nature, which continues to be described in rhapsodic language, and they face the romance of a love relationship, with all the juggling of self and roles that this kind of romance suggests. They are called on to perform acts of courage and honour. Meanwhile, the heroines are often reading and rereading Victorian-Romantic poems or stories and/or current magazine formula romances and are shaping themselves and their conceptions of roles and love in response to this romantic reading.7 Ultimately, each heroine defines herself through a highly idealized perception of natural beauty, which is given to us in Montgomery’s romantic descriptions, and through some reconciliation between what the heroine sees as her talents and her concept of home.
Each heroine pursues romance – whether through love of nature or home or person or code – all her life. Romance is, in Montgomery’s wonderfully evocative writing, seen as an individual and collective preoccupation. Yet persistent as this search for beauty or love or honour may be, Montgomery would have us believe that for healthy girls and women, romance is merely woven into a larger pattern of everyday human interactions. Genuine romance, she suggests, will not be permanently realized, but will waft in and out of a heroine’s life, as overpowering and elusive as the fragrance of the sweet-grass Captain Jim brings to Anne for her handkerchiefs (AHD 138).8 In pursuit of one kind of romance, the heroines are frequently surprised by another, sweeter kind. Montgomery’s stories and characters and descriptions suggest that mature romance is wholesome and beautiful. This endorsement of, and perhaps vagueness about, romance is one of the fundamental assumptions I would like to explore in Montgomery’s work.
In the following chapters I talk about Montgomery’s books as literary creations that present believable heroines who make difficult choices and seek to answer complex questions and who find life full of beauty and surprise. Montgomery makes uneven use of her talents for humour, irony, description, dialogue, and scene in the novels, and I explore in the following chapters her use of symbol, repetition, literary echo, changes in voice and perspective, shifts in genre and form, narrative asides, sentimentality, realism and idealism, and time. I concentrate on the heroines, and on their struggles wth self and celebrations of home, and connect these with the overt and covert assumptions about romance. In exploring the romanticized interconnections between self and home, I believe we will come close to the essence of Montgomery’s appeal.
This book is divided into three parts, giving the greatest amount of attention and space to the Anne books, which are Montgomery’s best-known works. Though I talk about all eight Anne novels, I concentrate on the original six. In the first three Anne books Montgomery establishes Anne’s voice through nature description and comic episode and relies on a number of types of romance to suggest Anne’s power. By the time Anne gets to college, the reader is accustomed to assuming Anne’s perspective without having to hear much of Anne’s voice. The next three books, which act as a second trilogy, respond to the Great War, and encode in Anne’s idyllic honeymoon and early married life Montgomery’s hopes for her own culture – of which Anne is now emblematic. Heroism and romance take on wholly new meanings in the context of war, and Montgomery’s indirect and then direct treatment of the war show how far the heroines of a culture reflect its values (Edwards 4). The two late Anne books, treated together in a short chapter, suggest Montgomery’s difficulties in thinking her way back into a romanticized realism she had been changing over the years.
Part II, dealing with the Emily trilogy, offers Montgomery’s most detailed study of the female artist and the constraints upon her. Montgomery uses emotionally charged works – Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh – to suggest parallels for the struggles and forces in Emily’s life and to rationalize Emily’s responses to romance. Emily’s knowledge of literature and her experiments with various kinds of writing provide rich intertextual material. Montgomery suggests that the writer’s life can be read as the way she reads herself writing and reading herself. With Emily we are most aware of the techniques of autobiography and biography.
In Part III, I examine the two Pat books and Jane of Lantern Hill together, arguing that a passion for place that goes sadly awry in the Pat books, and makes Pat obsessed with her physical home, is balanced by Jane Stuart’s healthy self-discoveries and celebrations. Then, in a brief overview of each of the six remaining Montgomery novels, I examine how each heroine responds to various kinds of romance and speculate on some of the cultural expectations Montgomery may have been addressing.
It is a complicated business nowadays to write about ‘the reader’ and ‘we,’ but I have persisted in doing so for several reasons: (1) as a Montgomery fan for more than thirty years, I have talked with many other readers, and I have tried to represent their responses along with my own in ‘the reader’ and ‘we’; (2) as a reader trained in criticism of the nineteenth-century novel (Montgomery’s own reading background), I also believe in an imaginary and idealized reader as a convention of narration, in the same way as I believe in the role of the narrator; (3) I believe that, as Jonathan Culler suggests in discussing Stanley Fish, ‘the reader’ comes up with interpretations that may explain or account for emotions no specific reader may have had (67) – but I also like the possibility for an indefinitely expanding text and readership; (4) Rachel Brownstein suggests that many of us read about heroines because we want to become the heroine (xix), and my ‘reader’ is at times a member of this band of adventurers; (5) ultimately I use ‘the reader’ and ‘we’ because I like to think that many of ‘us’ may truly share perspective or values or questions – alongside our radical differences in interpretations – in assessing a woman writer’s assessment of women.
Montgomery has commanded a large audience since the publication of Anne of Green Gables in 1908. These hundreds of thousands of readers love Montgomery’s writing for the way she makes them think about themselves and their connections with the world around them. And now a new readership is speaking up. One edited collection of essays about Montgomery’s writing appeared in 1976 (Sorfleet). With the publication of the letters and journals, more and more people – including academic critics, traditionally the most disdainful of all Montgomery’s readers (Epperly, ‘Changing’ 177–85) – are giving serious attention to her writing. A recent doctoral thesis in Sweden examines feminist elements of Montgomery’s fiction.9 These new readers, together with the traditional Montgomery fans, are comparing the gripping self-dramatizations of her private life with her determinedly positive fiction. And those who did not already know Montgomery are beginning to suspect that the supposedly simple romances are indeed encoded with multiple messages and miscuings, and that the apparent concessions to convention usually involve shrewd reassessments of the familiar. Although Montgomery’s heroines are far from free from cultural biases, restraints, and expectations, many of them do learn to analyse themselves and do question some of the conceptions that shape them. As we explore Montgomery’s ways of presenting her heroines and themes, perhaps we will gain insight into what she chose to say and what she chose to leave unsaid for a reading public she credited with being analytical, but only up to a point. ‘What point?’ we ask.
I have written this book for Montgomery enthusiasts as well as for those who, whether they know her writing or not, are curious about how a perennially popular female novelist challenges a diverse, growing readership. If we read the heroines carefully, and try to understand Montgomery’s various intensities and types of romance, we may be startled to find how often we are – in limitations and in freedom – the heroines of her novels.