In 1913, four years after the publication of Anne of Avonlea, the L.C. Page Company persuaded L.M. Montgomery to write a third Anne novel. In the meantime she had expanded a short story, ‘Una of the Garden,’ into Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910), written her own personal favourite of all her novels, The Story Girl (1911), and its sequel, The Golden Road (1913), and had refashioned some already-published short stories so that they sometimes included Anne Shirley and Avonlea families and published them under the title Chronicles of Avonlea (1912). But it was a full-length story of Anne that fans clamoured for, and Montgomery finally succumbed to pressure and conjured up the third Anne book – a task for which, she complained to her journal, she felt wholly unequal (Journals 2: 133).
Between the publication of the second Anne book in 1909 and the publication of Anne of the Island (1915), Montgomery’s life went through dramatic changes that were bound to affect her private and public philosophies: she married Presbyterian minister Ewan Macdonald in 1911 and moved away from Prince Edward Island to Ontario; she gave birth to one healthy boy (1912) and suffered through the stillbirth of another (1914); war broke out in Europe, and the young men in her parish were enlisting. During the months of composing Anne of the Island (Anne of Redmond she called it), the peaceful life of a Green Gables home became, indeed, a thing of fiction.
Montgomery was loath to write the book, and complained that her forte was humour and that youth’s love stories should be sacred from humour.1 This attitude coupled with the bleak conditions of the time in which she wrote may have encouraged Montgomery to turn back to some of the original impulses and comic patterns of Anne of Green Gables for inspiration. Or perhaps the heavily sentimental and formulaic story of Kilmeny and the frolic-filled writing of (most of) the other three intervening books enabled Montgomery to recover imaginative balance in her sixth book. For Anne of the Island is filled with humour and yet contains the love story of Gilbert and Anne. Gone is the moralizing narrator of the overtaxed Anne of Avonlea; instead we find in Anne of the Island a story that relies on comedy but finds its strength in symbol and symmetry. Anne matures.
Anne’s voice in this novel seldom lapses into the dreamy sentimentality of Anne of Avonlea; instead, this Anne shows herself sometimes sarcastic, sometimes ironic, sometimes outraged, embarrassed, or downright angry. She can stoop to sparring with Mrs Harmon Andrews; she can write sentimental trash; she can mistake infatuation for love; she can get depressed and feel alienated from home and spiritual kinship. Even if the genre Montgomery chose (domestic romance) and the audience for which she wrote predetermined that the novel would be preoccupied with marriage and fully exploring the right man rather than finding the individual self, Anne Shirley is frequently here a believable and fairly independent person.
To fault the story for its lack of alternatives for the female is certainly a reasonable reading of the 1915 novel in the 1990s, but such a critical rereading must also look at the ways Montgomery uses humour to stretch the sentiment of formula into a comic evaluation of the cultural inevitability of marriage. Unlike the far less flexible Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island suggests that while marriage may be inevitable for somebody like Anne, her happiness is by no means inevitable, and her choice of mate is dependent on her knowledge of self. The novel echoes with the alarm of danger-only-averted-by-a-hair’s-breadth. The minor illustrative stories remind us that wrong choices for wrong reasons are constant temptations: Phil could have stayed in Bolingbroke, as her mother wanted, to choose Alec or Alonzo – but instead she comes to college and thus finds Jonas Blake; Janet Sweet could have despaired of the silent John Douglas and turned him away; Amelia Crowe could have been tempted by the mansion of William Obadiah Seaman to give up the honest and poor Thomas Skinner. Anne Shirley is herself courted by the dark, melancholy hero of her early dreams and realizes only at the brink of accepting his proposal that he is humourless and boring. As in Anne of Green Gables, in Anne of the Island romance must accommodate reality, and that reality demands careful scrutiny of the self.
Anne of the Island supposedly begins one week after Miss Lavendar’s wedding at the end of Anne of Avonlea. But the Anne of this new book is a lifetime beyond the earlier miss in her understanding of fun and human nature. And Diana, too, is not the dumpy dumbbell of the earlier book, who couldn’t seem to understand anything on the famous Golden Picnic. Here Diana and Anne laugh at the smug Charlie Sloane, and Diana even takes poetic flight-just as we are sure the childhood best friend of Anne would be capable of doing: ‘“What a beautiful sunset,” said Diana. “Look, Anne, it’s just like a land in itself, isn’t it? That long, low bank of purple cloud is the shore, and the clear sky further on is like a golden sea”’ (106). Anne is not always day-dreaming and is even given to human self-protection. Of the ubiquitous Charlie: ‘“I am very glad that all the Sloanes get seasick as soon as they go on water,” thought Anne mercilessly’ (25); of Christine Stuart: ‘“She looks just as I’ve always wanted to look,” thought Anne miserably. “Rose-leaf complexion – starry violet eyes – raven hair – yes, she has them all. It’s a wonder her name isn’t Cordelia Fitzgerald into the bargain! But I don’t believe her figure is as good as mine, and her nose certainly isn’t”’ (226). This Anne says thought-provoking things. For example, when Paul’s grandmother remarks that Anne and Paul ‘talk as much foolishness as ever,’ Anne baffles her by replying: ‘Oh, no, we don’t … We are getting very, very wise, and it is such a pity. We-are never half so interesting when we have learned that language is given us to enable us to conceal our thoughts.’ The sympathetic narrator reinforces Anne’s sagacity by pretending to excuse Mrs Irving’s ignorance: ‘She [Mrs Irving] had never heard of Tallyrand [sic] and did not understand epigrams’ (205). This Anne is not merely a starry-eyed believer in fairy tales; she is alive and learning.
The Anne of this book is well read and quick witted and has friends who can appreciate what she says and how she says it. She quotes, mostly playfully but sometimes seriously, from the Bible, Shakespeare, William Cowper, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Poe, Dickens, Browning, Lewis Carroll, William Cullen Bryant, Charles Hadden Spurgeon, and Daniel O’Connell, among others (Wilmshurst 22–6). When Stella quotes from Byron’s Don Juan to ease the tension of burying the chloroformed Rusty, Anne immediately caps and counters – as Montgomery herself was fond of doing (Epperly ‘Greetings’) – when showing that Rusty is still alive: ‘“We’ve got the grave ready. ‘What, silent still and silent all?’” [Stella] quoted teasingly. ‘“Oh, no, the voices of the dead / Sound like the distant torrent’s fall’” promptly counter-quoted Anne, pointing solemnly to the box’ (162). Priscilla, too, has some witticisms and is responsible for a comic use of Whittier’s sentimental poem ‘Maud Muller.’ When Roy Gardner’s mother and two sisters have left after their surprise visit to Anne, Priscilla lifts the luckless cushion where she had hurriedly hidden a chocolate cake, now a flattened mess, and quotes, ‘Of all sad words of tongue or pen / The saddest are it might have been’ (287). And Priscilla’s quotation is not only funny but also ironic – perhaps the rich Gardners’ visit to the poor Anne may have inspired Priscilla’s comic reference to the poem, whose wealthy unmarried lawyer forever must lament that he did not marry the beautiful and poor peasant girl, Maud Muller. In any case, to use Whittier spontaneously to bewail the loss of the cake is in keeping with the book’s literary fun.
The cleverest of Anne’s friends – the only one to scold Anne over Gilbert and Roy and to give Gilbert hope that Anne has changed her mind – is Philippa Gordon, who quotes from or adapts from as full a range of literary sources as do Anne and the narrator.2 One of her clever puns will give an idea of her quick-wittedness. She plays with Othello’s respectful words of address to the Venetian elders. Othello calls them ‘Most potent, grave and reverend signiors’ (I.ii.76) and Phil solemnly borrows the address to characterize the final-year students at Redmond: ‘Potent, wise, and reverend Seniors’ (289).
Anne’s voice is believably imaginative and playful, and she is surrounded by friends who are studying as hard as she is and who are also well-read and witty. To amplify and echo the young women’s literary dialogues and repartee and also to suggest the quality of Anne’s education and friendships, the narrator uses the Bible, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Thackeray, Poe, Thomas Campbell, and Tennyson, among others. Their learning and their fun make the young women special, but Anne is always the most special of all. Her biggest lessons must come not from books or college but from facing herself. One way or another, everything in the book is related to Anne and to her recognition of the importance of knowing herself so that she can understand what romance really involves.
Everything in the book seems geared to a consideration of marriage or partnership or the possibilities of partnership. In writing this third Anne novel Montgomery carefully preserves the internal chronology of her series by referring here in 1915 to stories she published in Chronicles of Avonlea in 1912. Appropriately, the stories she chooses to mention from the short story collection are about courtship and the difficulties of making accommodations for partnership. In Anne of the Island Mrs Lynde refers (55) to the MacPhersons who have bought her farm (‘Aunt Olivia’s Beau’ in Chronicles of Avonlea); Anne and Marilla discuss (73) and the narrator mentions (205) the apparently interminable courtship of Ludovic Speed and Theodora Dix (‘The Hurrying of Ludovic’); Anne tells Gilbert (320) she is going to a Penhallow wedding (‘The Winning of Lucinda’). In ‘Aunt Olivia’s Beau’ a single woman’s ingrained neatness and primness make her rebel against the hearty, blustering masculinity of Malcolm MacPherson. Aunt Olivia learns at the last minute that she will have to give up some of her primness if she is going to have a husband, and she realizes that loving Malcolm MacPherson is more important than a swept rug or tidy antimacassars. In “The Hurrying of Ludovic’ Ludovic Speed is hurried up by Anne’s introducing a rival for him; Lodovic has to face up to the possibility of losing through his own complacency the woman he loves. In ‘The Winning of Lucinda’ a small accident gives two stubborn people an excuse to speak and patch up the fifteen years’ silent feud that prevented their marriage. In each piece mistakes and misunderstandings could all too easily have spoiled people’s chances for married happiness – these episodes turn out well, but only because some desperate resolution or freakish accident turns near-disaster into triumph. The possibility of missed opportunity or misunderstanding also makes the novel suspenseful and instructive. The reminders of others’ difficulties emphasize Anne’s necessity for soul-searching and recognition so that she can make the ‘right’ choice.
Most of the stories in this novel also deal with or end with marriage. Lavendar and Steven Irving return with Paul to the stone house from which they were married; Diana marries Fred; Jane marries a Winnipeg millionaire; Phil marries Jonas Blake; Mrs Skinner tells her courtship story; Janet Sweet marries John Douglas; widowers make ‘sheep’s eyes’ at Aunt Jamesina; Anne receives six proposals. Even nine-year-old Davy shows the preoccupation of the culture, as well as the carefully instilled attitudes to gender and roles. We remember that it was a six-year-old Davy in Anne of Avonlea who revelled in male privilege. Here Davy sends Anne his composition ‘The kind of a wife Id like to Have’:
She must have good manners and get my meals on time and do what I tell her and always be very polite to me. She must be fifteen years old. She must be good to the poor and keep her house tidy and be good tempered and go to church reglarly. She must be very handsome and have curly hair. If I get a wife that is just what I like 111 be an awful good husband to her. I think a woman ought to be awful good to her husband. Some poor women havent any husbands. (170)
In the confused and confusing context of fairy tale in Anne of Avonlea, the intended response to Davy’s learned assumptions is ambiguous at best, but here in Anne of the Island, Davy’s summation of male/female roles in marriage is evidently intended to be (no matter how irritating we may find it) an adorably naïve, comical over-simplification of the truth. And yet, ‘Some poor women havent any husbands’ is definitely the prevailing attitude of the world within the book, the Spofford women and Marilla notwithstanding.
At any rate, the presence of the essay reinforces the focus of the book as a whole on marriage and romance and expectations for men and women. When Anne visits Phil in Bolingbroke and discovers the tiny little yellow house where she was born twenty years before, she recovers her parents through a small bundle of their love letters the owner had discovered in a closet. Even in recovering her own parents, Anne is faced with their courtship and early wedded struggles and happiness. There simply seems to be little worth finding out about that does not include the all-important issue of mating appropriately. We note that neither Stella nor Priscilla seems to have a steady beau – and they are forever shadow figures, witty voices that echo Anne’s and Phil’s apparently larger wit and experience of life. Even on the brink of death Ruby Gillis regrets she has to die now when she has at long last found ‘Mr. Right.’
But if Montgomery’s focus is relentless, it is not humourless. We find here the same quality of comedy and comic reversal of romance we experienced in Anne of Green Gables, and we can laugh at and with Anne’s misunderstanding of romance. Montgomery enjoys a comic romp with literary romance and the ambitions of a budding writer. She will treat the subject of authorship seriously when she writes the story of Emily Byrd Starr, but here Anne’s winsome notions of popular fiction provide a comic commentary on writing and, simultaneously, on misplaced sentimentality. Montgomery uses what happens to Anne’s beloved story as emblematic of what should happen to Anne’s ideas of romance.
The creating of a character who writes stories is a wonderful, often comic literary device Montgomery had herself enjoyed in such books as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (with Jo March). The young author-in-the-novel inevitably exposes her own immaturity and sentimentality in the kind of story she creates. And so it is with Anne. She of course chooses idealized names and language – Averil Lester and Perceval Dalrymple. (No wonder Diana wants to name the hired boy of the story Raymond Fitzosborne, though Anne does say finally, ‘I’m afraid that is too aristocratic a name for a chore boy, Diana’ 116.) Mr Harrison’s ruthlessly matter-of-fact criticisms sound like the later Mr Carpenter of Emily of New Moon, and could certainly be criticisms levelled at Montgomery’s own early short stories (and even some of the lush descriptions in The Golden Road): ‘“Cut out all those flowery passages” he said unfeelingly … “I’ve left out all the descriptions but the sunset,” she said at last. “I simply couldn’t let it go. It was the best of them all.” “It hasn’t anything to do with the story,” said Mr. Harrison’ (119). Montgomery has fun with the trials of the young, misguided author who must face the expectations of a prosaic audience. She uses the blunt, ungrammatical Harrison to ridicule Anne’s evident penchant for purple prose: ‘But your folks ain’t like real folks anywhere. They talk too much and use too high-flown language. There’s one place where that Dalrymple chap talks even on for two pages, and never lets the girl get a word in edgewise. If he’d done that in real life she’d have pitched him’ (120). Anne’s spoken and unspoken responses to Mr. Harrison show just exactly how little of life’s passion and suffering she has yet endured as an adult. She is still enchanted by the fairy-tale world Montgomery has coddled her in in Anne of Avonlea, but the good-humoured, truthful narrator of Anne of the Island exposes Anne’s idealism for what it is. Anne replies to Mr Harrison’s criticism: “‘I don’t believe it,” said Anne flatly. In her secret soul she thought that the beautiful, poetical things said to Averil would win any girl’s heart completely. Besides, it was gruesome to hear of Averil, the stately, queen-like Averil, “pitching” any one. Averil “declined her suitors’” (120). When Anne refuses five proposals herself, she finds out with a vengeance how inadequate this lofty detachment is to describe the incredulity or embarrassment or anger or pain she experiences.
But Anne does not have to wait for larger experience to cure her of the high-flown style of ‘Averil’s Atonement.’ After the story has been rejected several times and Anne has given up on it, Diana secretly edits it slightly for a baking powder contest and Anne wins the prize. Her ‘queen-like Averil’ and the peerless Perceval are now used to promote Rollings Reliable baking powder, and the story is printed in coloured leaflets and distributed to each customer of the local general store. Without realizing it, Anne has hit the formula style of the magazine romance, and this is why her story – even altered – is such a success. Montgomery is careful to make us see that Anne is shamed by the baking-powder prize into giving up a style that she has not yet learned through personal experience to be wholly inadequate to depict truth” and the richness of life. She moans to Gilbert: ‘I feel as if I were disgraced forever. What do you think a mother would feel like if she found her child tattooed over with a baking powder advertisement?’ (153). Even before Anne finishes college and suffers fully for her recognition of her love for Gilbert, she knows how false ‘Averil’s Atonement’ is to real-life experience. The Anne who agonizes over the editing of her story is still very much the little girl clinging to the slimy pilings while Elaine’s funeral barge sinks beneath her. We are invited to laugh at her innocent (but not harmless) support 6f the wrong kind of romance.
Interestingly, while Anne is imagining herself in love with Roy Gardner, she comes to terms with her own true writing voice. Going through hilariously melodramatic old Story Club pieces, she finds the fanciful sketch she wrote while caught in the roof of the Cobb duckhouse (a mishap chronicled in that excellent chapter in Anne of Avonlea entitled ‘An Adventure on the Tory Road’). Anne now recognizes the value of the little spirit-dialogue, rewrites it, and sends it off. It is accepted for publication in Youth’s Friend and we know that Anne’s imagination and her literary voice are finally mature. It is a shame that in subsequent books Anne’s writing never goes beyond sketches and pieces for children, as though she is later thoroughly and unhealthily transfixed in the domestic world she has here chosen as a healthful alternative to sentimental excess.
In keeping with the book’s preoccupation with marriage, Anne’s most bracing lessons in disillusionment come through five of her proposals. Just as Jane Andrews and Anne are drifting off to sleep one stormy night, Jane proposes on behalf of her brother Billy. When a startled Anne refuses and says she hopes Billy won’t ‘feel very badly over it,’ Jane coolly replies: ‘Oh, he won’t break his heart. Billy has too much good sense for that. He likes Nettie Blewett pretty well, too, and mother would rather he married her than any one’ (80–1). After Jane leaves the next day Anne cries over this first disillusionment, and we hear in the summary of her self-consolation about the future the misguided romanticism that will inspire ‘Averil’s Atonement’ and the later affair with Royal Gardner: ‘and the “some one” was to be very handsome and dark-eyed and distinguished-looking and eloquent, whether he were Prince Charming to be enraptured with “yes,” or one to whom a regretful, beautifully worded, but hopeless refusal must be given’ (82). This Anne still cherishes the knights and chivalry and poetry that inspired the child Anne in Green Gables days. As with the early story, here, too, we can laugh at Anne’s false romanticism while sympathizing with her surprise and anguish.
Charlie Sloane’s proposal, right on the heels of Jane’s for Billy, makes Anne angry. They quarrel, and Charlie ‘flung himself out of the house with a very red face’ while Anne ‘threw herself on her bed, in tears of humiliation and rage … Oh, this was degradation, indeed – worse even than being the rival of Nettie Blewett!’ (85). The third comic proposal comes from the lank-haired, raggedy hired man, Sam Tolliver, whose favourite word is ‘yep’ and who offers himself with nonchalant simplicity: ‘Wall, I’ve been thinking some of gitting a place of my own … But ef I rents it I’ll want a woman … Will yeh hev me?’ (266) By this time in the narrative ‘Anne’s illusions concerning proposals had suffered so much of late years that there were few of them left. So she could laugh wholeheartedly over this one, not feeling any secret sting’ (267). Anne learns to steel herself to the evidently universal preoccupation with finding a mate.
Billy’s and Charlie’s and Sam’s proposals are the comic relief for the serious problems Gilbert and Roy Gardner represent. At the end of Anne of Green Gables Anne accepts friendship with Gilbert, and there is a deliberate foreshadowing of romance in the description of their new relationship. Then in Anne of Avonlea Anne stays militantly unconscious of Gilbert’s appeal until the very last pages of that narrative. The skilful story-teller, like Scheherazade, was spinning out the story, but she was also postponing an inevitability she dreaded. Montgomery confided to her journal that in writing this third Anne book she knew she would have to give in to the pressure to get Anne and Gilbert engaged, but ‘I am not good at depicting sentiment – I can’t do it well. Yet there must be sentiment in this book. I must at least engage Anne for I’ll never be given any rest until I do’ (Journals 2: 133). True to the pattern of the first two books, Anne does not realize her love for Gilbert until the very last pages of this third novel. Before Anne can accept Gilbert, she must confront her own concept of romance and learn to recognize and value her true feelings. She must endure Gilbert’s first proposal to her, and then she must be able to withstand Prince Charming, Royal Gardner.
Montgomery deliberately sets the stage for Gilbert’s heartfelt, no-nonsense proposal to Anne. The chapter carries the simple title ‘Gilbert Speaks,’ and it begins with Phil calling it a ‘dull, prosy day’ (184). Anne’s reply to Phil is characteristically idealized, showing Anne to be uninitiated in genuine heartache: ‘It has been a prosy day for us … but to some people it has been a wonderful day. Some one has been rapturously happy in it. Perhaps a great deed has been done somewhere to-day – or a great poem written – or a great man born. And some heart has been broken, Phil’ (184). When Phil complains that Anne has spoiled her pretty thought by tacking on heart-break, Anne rebukes her with words she will, in a very few moments, be tasting bitterly herself: ‘Do you think you’ll be able to shirk unpleasant things all your life, Phil’ (184). Dreamy and self-contained, Anne goes out for a walk and is found by Gilbert. His proposal is direct and sincere: ‘Will you promise me that some day you’ll be my wife?’ (188), and her own answer is also eloquently simple: ‘No, I can’t’ (188). Anne and Gilbert both suffer; no romantic flights can ease either of them: ‘Gilbert’s face was white to the lips. And his eyes – but Anne shuddered and looked away. There was nothing romantic about this. Must proposals be either grotesque or – horrible? Could she ever forget Gilbert’s face?’ (188–9). The stark intensity of feeling is more potent than anything Anne has yet experienced.
Afterwards, Anne faces Phil’s condemnation: ‘You don’t know love when you see it. You’ve tricked something out with your imagination that you think love, and you expect the real thing to look like that’ (190). It is interesting that Montgomery chooses to have Phil rather than the narrator or Anne herself interpret Anne’s dilemma. Within the story, Anne’s self-delusions are apparent to a good friend who herself makes discoveries about romance and self-delusion. But since Anne cannot yet recognize her mistake, her initial reaction to rejecting Gilbert is a belief in her own unfitness for the kind of love her friends approve. Faced with this disapproval and her own unhappiness, Anne does the human thing – she searches for the kind of love she believes in, hoping a discovery of the Real Thing will justify having given Gilbert pain. Anne accepts the cultural inevitability of marriage without a murmur, especially now that she evidently feels she must justify refusal of one man by acceptance of another. Thus, Montgomery’s novel reinforces its own focus.
One hundred pages later Anne prepares herself for a flat world. She has been going out with Royal Gardner for two years and everyone expects her to accept him. She herself expects it, since he is her dreamy, dark ideal, the Byronic-looking hero of her long-ago visions with Diana. Most appropriately, the proposal chapter is entitled ‘False Dawn.’ Anne tells herself she must be thrilled to be with Roy, since he is all that her imagination has ever conjured as the romantic lover – but she is bored by him and life seems insipid: ‘She was deeply in love with Roy. True, it was not just what she had imagined love to be. But was anything in life, Anne asked herself wearily, like one’s imagination of it? It was the old diamond disillusion of childhood repeated – the same disappointment she had felt when she had first seen the chill sparkle instead of the purple splendour she had anticipated’ (298). Roy proposes to her in the park pavilion, where they had first met when Anne’s umbrella had turned inside out. His choice is perfect, his speech is ‘as beautifully worded as if he had copied it … out of a Deportment of Courtship and Marriage’ (299). Montgomery prepares the stage for Anne’s refusal – the reader has seen what is coming, has been prepared for it by all the events and markers of the past hundred pages (if not by pure faith in the inevitability of the match between Anne and Gilbert). But for Anne the realization comes as a ‘blinding flash,’ and she is suddenly ‘reeling back from a precipice’ (300). As with the rejection of Gilbert, here, too, beautiful speeches and melting gestures have no place – the dialogue is realistically terse and strained. Roy leaves her swiftly, and again Anne encounters Phil who (again) scolds her for refusing a man everyone has expected her to accept. But the refusals are not identical; Anne has learned something from this experience, though she has not yet realized precisely what it is.
Montgomery uses a symbolic fog and its undercurrent of joy to suggest Anne’s immediate confusion and eventual clarity: ‘When Roy had gone she sat for a long time in the pavilion, watching a white mist creeping subtly and remorselessly landward up the harbour. It was her hour of humiliation and self-contempt and shame. Their waves went over her. And yet, underneath it all, was a queer sense of recovered freedom’ (301). The fog works well here because we have seen it before – in fact Montgomery uses fog to describe Anne’s dejection in a world without Gilbert in it. On the afternoon Anne meets Royal Gardner, she has gone to the park to clear her soul of fog: ‘Anne roamed through the pineland alleys in the park and, as she said, let that great sweeping wind blow the fogs out of her soul. Anne was not wont to be troubled with soul fog. But, somehow, since her return to Redmond for this third year, life had not mirrored her spirit back to her with its old, perfect, sparkling clearness’ (215). On the very next page Anne meets Roy. Roy is ushered in by fog and leaves with fog – and Montgomery shows us that though he may have kept the fog at bay briefly, he is not the one to dispel it.
It is no accident that Montgomery uses a storm to fill the hours of Anne’s agonized vigil when she at last realizes she loves Gilbert and fears he is dying. At the end of the book, when morning comes and the air is clear again, Anne finds that Gilbert is alive and she knows they will love each other. Before Anne receives the joyous words from Pacifique about Gilbert’s ‘turn,’ the narrator has already alerted the reader to the coming light and joy: ‘The storm raged all night, but when the dawn came it was spent. Anne saw a fairy fringe of light on the skirts of darkness. Soon the eastern hill-tops had a fire-shot ruby rim. The clouds rolled themselves away into great, soft, white masses on the horizon; the sky gleamed blue and silvery. A hush fell over the world’ (317). From the old Green Gables days we know the significance of sunrises and sunsets, and the images of fog and storm have prepared us here to recognize nature’s reflection of the right order of things. Anne’s and Gilbert’s union, the whole story suggests, is part of life’s elemental harmony. Prince Charming was a trick of the old imagination gone wrong – a will o’ the wisp from the Haunted Wood – and the very sun itself rejoices in the restoration of balance between love and dream.
Fog, storm, and sunrise are but a few of the emblems Montgomery uses in the story to mark an important parallel, reversal, or repetition. In fact, when we look closely we find that the whole book is designed to use such emblems to turn the reader back to the past, to suggest a parallel reading of situations that differ in circumstance but not in emotion and impulse. We find several of these small markers toward the end of the book. When Anne casts aside Roy’s graduation violets in favour of Gilbert’s lilies of the valley, we are reminded of all the childhood and adolescent dreams Anne and Gilbert have shared – how they have shared ambitions and visions in school and community. The public celebration of a dream realized belongs, thus, to the past and Gilbert’s lilies, not to Roy’s violets (292). Gilbert gives Anne a tiny enamelled heart necklace in the Christmas of their final year, a year and a half after she has refused him. The enamelled heart is a comic replica of the candy heart Gilbert slipped under Anne’s arm the day she was punished in Avonlea school by having to sit next to him. In childhood she had ‘ground … to powder beneath her heel’ (AGG 122) Gilbert’s peace offering. In adulthood she wrenches the chain and heart from her neck when Phil tells her Gilbert’s engagement to Christine Stuart is to be announced as soon as Convocation is over (294).
Back in Avonlea there are even more poignant reminders of the past and of painful change. After leaving Kingsport for good, Anne returns to Green Gables only to find that the beloved old cherry tree, the Snow Queen, has blown down. The death of the tree marks the death of Anne’s childhood dreams and life – the tree was one of the first things she named on arrival at Green Gables as a child, and into its branches she had gazed as she had dreamed and thought and planned the brightest of futures for herself. Now she grieves: ‘The porch gable doesn’t seem the same room without it. I’ll never look from its window again without a sense of loss. And oh, I never came home to Green Gables before that Diana wasn’t here to welcome me’ (306). The old Snow Queen (herself cool, inaccessible?) belongs to another life – now Anne finds Diana having a baby, Jane marrying, Marilla getting old, the twins growing up, everything maturing and ripening except her apparently futile life.
Anne, out of the mainstream, possesses a BA and loneliness; all her friends are marrying and birthing. The loud, clear message about the necessity for and desirability of marriage is artfully reinforced with yet another heavily suggestive passage. Anne is already feeling that she belongs only in ‘past years and had no business in the present at all’ (310) when she goes to see Diana’s new baby. While Anne is there, Mrs Allan (mother of several herself now since the old days when she first came to Avonlea as the new minister’s bride) tells a story about her only recollection of her mother. What a poignant way for Montgomery to reflect (replicate?) the cultural pressure on Anne to get on with what is apparently meant to be the real work and only blessing of life – to be married and to be a mother. Radiant with new motherhood Diana says she cannot wait to hear her baby call her ‘mother’; Mrs Allan chimes in with her sweet recollection of her mother’s protective love (shortly before the mother died); and there is Anne, unmarried, an orphan, childless. She is outside the norm, already feeling that she has turned aside the best life has to offer. Montgomery plays up Anne’s loneliness and isolation until they seem almost unbearable. Anne’s only sensible choice, Montgomery’s novel suggests, is to embrace her destiny, realize her love for Gilbert, and get married.
At the end of the chapter describing Diana’s baby, Mrs Allan’s story, and Anne’s dejection, we find this rich description: ‘Anne felt lonelier than ever as she walked home, going by way of the Birch Path and Willowmere. She had not walked that way for many moons. It was a darkly-purple bloomy night. The air was heavy with blossom fragrance – almost too heavy. The cloyed senses recoiled from it as from an overfull cup. The birches of the path had grown from the fairy saplings of old to big trees. Everything had changed’ (312–13). The burden of her own ripeness, the ‘overfull cup,’ oppresses Anne, and we see that just as ‘the fairy saplings’ have become commonplace old trees so her tender dreams must give way to uncompromising realities. Such a description is perfectly suited to the mood of dejection and to the pattern of growth and maturity and change the whole book exploits. And here is where Montgomery shows herself the artist and works her material away from closure and fixity. Had Montgomery stopped with the ‘overfull cup’ and the older trees, we could feel that the patterns of the book were completed and the messages suitably if relentlessly expressed, but we would not feel that Anne herself had any freedom or choice or resilience or power. But Anne Shirley continues to live in the 1990s because she does not quite conform to reader expectation, to cultural stereotype, or to accepted convention. She does, overall, fit in and conform, but there is always that subtle twist to the good stories that shows Anne gently, discretely interpreting and responding to expectations and roles in an individual way. This saving something is found in the next words of this same description. Anne does not submit to the oppression of the ‘overfull cup’; instead, she characteristically renounces romance and then is consoled by the very romance of renouncing romance: ‘Anne felt that she would be glad when the summer was over and she was away at work again. Perhaps life would not seem so empty then. “I’ve tried the world – it wears no more / The colouring of romance it wore,” sighed Anne – and was straightway much comforted by the romance in the idea of the world being denuded of romance!’ (313) This sighing over lost romance belongs to the childhood Anne and is, here, an ironically triumphant expression of her ability to turn the most oppressive cultural expectations into trials for her own (self-romanticized) melancholy individuality. This older Anne – so well educated, so apparently mature – is still, inside, the little indomitable soul who was much consoled by the romantic leave-taking of Diana, when Mrs Barry had forbidden them to play together. In other words, Montgomery’s narrator assures us, Anne is not broken by her sorrows (as a romance heroine might be), but is still able to fictionalize her own suffering. Montgomery gets to have it both ways – Anne is herself, but we know that she will not have to subside into battered loneliness. Anne ‘wins’ because she does not relinquish her romantic, poetic, imaginative spirit, even though she must surrender false romance to embrace romance of another kind.
In fact, what we find here is that Montgomery has completed or repeated with the mature Anne, and in this novel, the patterns she began in Anne of Green Gables (but made no good use of in Anne of Avonlea). This story offers symmetry; its very narrative shape suggests fulfilment and completion. The language, images, and themes of the first chapter of the book are echoed and completed in the last chapter of the book. And while the cluster of markers or emblems at the end of the novel remind us of all former Avonlea life and the developments of Anne’s and Gilbert’s story, so the progress of events within the story repeats in miniature and sometimes comic form the larger lessons of the narrative. Montgomery uses irony and comedy to echo the implications of the attraction between Gilbert and Anne.
Notice, for example, the narrative pattern between the first refusal of Gilbert and the refusal of Royal Gardner. Immediately after giving up Gilbert, Anne discovers her parents and hears from a woman who knew them that her father was ‘homely but awful nice. I mind hearing folks say when they was married that there never was two people more in love with each other – ’ (194). The reader understands that Anne’s father was no romantic ideal and that he and Anne’s mother shared the most wonderful love and joy. Gilbert’s offer to Anne is actually transcribed in her own past (even though Gilbert himself is handsome, he is not the dark hero of Anne’s dreams). In the next two chapters Anne returns to Green Gables only to find things subtly different there – the child Davy has already picked out a wife, he says, and when Paul Irving visits, he can no longer find his beloved rock people. Clearly childhood is passing. And sweet, insightful Miss Lavendar / Mrs Irving puts her finger on the issue when she questions Anne about Gilbert and then says: ‘you were made and meant for each other, Anne … You needn’t toss that young head of yours. It’s a fact’ (206). There is more here than just Miss Lavendar’s recognition of their suitedness; her own story – a twenty-five-year misunderstanding and separation from the man she loved – is token that mistakes have a way of turning lives unhappily awry, dividing those who would be best together.
In the next three chapters we see Montgomery’s deft use of repetition and irony. The three titles themselves – ‘Enter Jonas,’ ‘Enter Prince Charming,’ ‘Enter Christine,’ – suggest how she is reinforcing parallels to make a point. Phil’s Jonas is the antithesis of her own ideal – she had always insisted she must marry a handsome rich man, and Jonas is ugly and poor. Phil’s rapture is, of course, further reinforcement for the lesson that the apparently commonplace can mask the splendidly romantic. In keeping with the book’s twist of convention that turns out to be conformity to convention, Phil’s renunciation of riches and glamour and idleness for a life of poverty and cheerful usefulness is really the height of romance, after all. Then in the next chapter when Prince Charming comes, we see Anne stunned by Roy’s dark good looks and mysterious air: ‘dark, melancholy, inscrutable eyes – melting, musical, sympathetic voice – yes, the very hero of her dreams stood before her in the flesh. He could not have more closely resembled her ideal if he had been made to order’ (218). The words ‘made to order’ give him away, of course. As subsequent events suggest, Roy is all trappings and no substance – a tailor-made, manufactured hero who, Anne later finds out, is even a little shop-worn, having twice before broken his heart and mended it. Gilbert is the genuine article. And then when Christine arrives and Anne suffers jealousy, we know exactly what Anne’s interest in Roy is worth. In the three chapters together, we find the admirable model (Phil and Jonas), the hollow ideal, and then the instrument that punctures the hollow ideal.
Equally effective and thought-provoking is the comic sequence of events a short time later. Diana’s wedding (where Gilbert and Anne as best man and bridesmaid make people exclaim over what a handsome couple they make) is immediately followed by one of the delights of the book, a five-page Dickensian miniature giving the story of ‘Mrs Skinner’s Romance.’3 Twelve times in the five pages Mrs Skinner punctuates her narrative with ‘Jog along, black mare’ even when she is stopping the horse. This two-hundred pound, red-faced elderly woman in a tight, ten-year-old black cashmere dress proceeds to tell Anne all about her ‘romance’ with Thomas, to whom she has been married only a month. For the poor Thomas she declined the wealthy William Obadiah Seaman, since ‘he didn’t love me.’ She repeats to Anne the dialogue she had with herself: ‘you can marry your rich man if you like but you won’t be happy. Folks can’t get along together in this world without a little bit of love. You’d just better tie up to Thomas, for he loves you and you love him and nothing else ain’t going to do you’ (247). Even if Anne is not ready to make the connections between the Skinner romance and her own need for self-knowledge, the reader is – and the comic interlude offers yet another variation on that same theme, that love can come in the most unexpected guises and romance is merely an imaginative colouring for what the heart wants and accepts as worthy. After this comic brush with Mrs Skinner, Anne’s failure in intervening to hasten John Douglas’s courtship of Janet Sweet is not so surprising. There is obviously much about life and love that Anne does not know and will have to learn.
Anne of the Island has symmetry in itself, but it also makes the first three Anne novels work together to complete a picture of Anne’s struggle with romanticism. Montgomery’s insistent echoing of the past in Anne of the Island as a whole assures us of Anne’s sameness while we are seeing her changes and need for change. Notice how opening and closing chapters of the novel fully complement each other and also fulfil patterns from Anne of Green Gables and the last pages of Anne of Avonlea. The motto that opens the book is from Tennyson – appropriately, from ‘The Day Dream’; the title of the last chapter, ‘Love Takes Up the Glass of Time,’ is from Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall,’ a line spoken by the man in recalling the days when he and Amy first declared their love for each other.4 The first chapter opens with a description of an autumn afternoon, where the fields are bare and ‘scarfed with golden rod’ (1); the book ends with a September afternoon ramble in the woods and fields where the hills are ‘scarfed with the shadows of autumnal clouds’ (323). In the first chapter Anne and Gilbert stand on the bridge ‘just at the spot where Anne had climbed from her sinking dory on the day Elaine floated down to Camelot’ (6), the place where Anne’s false idea of romance made her scorn the friendship Gilbert offered. At the end of the book, Anne and Gilbert walk back to Hester Gray’s garden, that site of real romance in Anne of Avonlea, where a loving man and woman chose to live away from the trammel of the world. In the first chapter Anne revels in the love of place and home when Gilbert praises Kingsport: ‘“I wonder if it will be – can be – any more beautiful than this,” murmured Anne, looking around her with the loving, enraptured eyes of those to whom “home” must always be the loveliest spot in the world, no matter what fairer lands may lie under alien stars’ (6). At the book’s end, Gilbert gives Anne a picture of his ideal home: ‘I dream of a home with a hearth-fire in it, a cat and dog, the footsteps of friends, – and you!’ (324).
In the 1990s we probably will not applaud the way Montgomery proscribes Anne’s choices – or rather how Montgomery reflects her culture’s popular proscription of women’s choices – in making it seem that Anne must marry or be a failure. And yet, many of us may enjoy Anne’s story because we discount the cultural pressures on Anne and pursue romantic fictions of our own, imagining Anne will be able to retain individuality and power within marriage and home. Others of us may question not only the inevitability but also the desirability of conventional romance – for Anne or ourselves – since it involves so many limitations and role expectations. However we choose to reinterpret romance, we can see that for Anne – for Montgomery – the rejection of chivalric romance or magazine-formula type romance and their stultifying proscriptions is indeed a triumph. Anne chooses, among others, two forms of romance to replace the chivalric ideal: (i) the romantic ideal of the freedom, power, and importance of the individual, (2) the belief in magical surprises within the everyday world. And, interestingly, the more we – in the 1990s – come to understand how our own cultures inhibit women’s abilities to see ourselves clearly (Smith), the more warmly we can praise Montgomery’s heroines and Montgomery’s irony and humour and belief in beauty. We can relish with Anne and Montgomery the liberating dreams that rules may be bent and lives may just slip the groove and burst into splendour.
At the end of Anne of the Island, Anne no longer prefers Camelot to Avonlea, nor will she choose the romance of a broken heart over the comforts of companionship, shared values, and home. She has passed through her Book of Revelations, as Montgomery calls it, and she is affirmed in what she knew and purged of what she perversely imagined. The book insists on marriage, but it also insists on the crucial importance of self-knowledge. Montgomery’s first three novels together show that happiness and maturity demand facing up to self-delusion as well as to different versions of romance. The switch from Camelot to Hester Gray’s garden suggests that beauty is within reach for all of us if we determine to recognize/create it here, in ourselves, with our knowledge.