Written from June to October of 1916, right in the bleak middle of the First World War, Anne’s House of Dreams (1917) is a passionate celebration of home and love. Potentially the most sentimental of all the Anne books, since it presents the long-awaited marriage of Anne and Gilbert, Montgomery’s fourth Anne novel is instead a tightly woven, wise story. This is not a novel about wedded bliss, but is instead about friendships, particularly Anne’s with Leslie Moore. Facing grief and pain, each woman learns from the other something about the healing, active powers of love. Without referring to it, Montgomery is writing against the ravages of war – she conjures an ‘enchanted coast’ (175) where like-minded women and men reverence the beauty of the world and the drama of its rhythms and traditions. Change and evil threaten, even here, but home and trust can be built and rebuilt. Anne’s House of Dreams is the most consciously poetic of Montgomery’s novels, and the most unselfconsciously philosophic.
This novel is full of poetry. The numerous descriptive passages, more even than in Anne of Green Gables, create atmosphere, reflect personality, and suggest the romantic, often symbolic, dimensions of Four Winds harmony. Montgomery had published a collection of poetry entitled The Watchman and Other Poems in 1916, while she was working on Anne’s House of Dreams, and the imagery and rhythms of the poems reappear in the novel. Injudiciously edited, the collection shows the songs of woods and field and hill and sea to poor advantage,1 but in the novel Montgomery’s favourite images and colours work well to show beauty through the loving eye (Epperly, ‘Reworking’ 40–6).
Montgomery chooses the sea as the subject of most of the poetic passages of Anne’s House of Dreams. Abiding, yet ever-changeful, at times serene and at times savage, the sea suggests the quality of Four Winds life. The apparent power, beauty, mystery, melancholy, caprice, and joy of the harbour and gulf reflect as well as affect the moods and personalities of the novel’s main characters. The sea is the novel’s metaphor for tumultuous life, and the lighthouse beacon (tended by a male Hestia) is the promise of order and love and truth. While the sea is central to the atmosphere and the characters, it is, true to Montgomery’s own experience, a landlubber’s ocean – we gaze at it and walk along it, but we seldom venture onto it. Yet even though it is often at a distance, its power is pervasive.
Janice Kulyk Keefer notes that the sea of Canadian Maritime fiction is fairly tame, almost as cultivated as a field (15). In the first three Anne books the sea is often merely a strip of blue on the horizon, but in Anne’s House of Dreams it is essential to life and scene. The old Avonlea version of the sea is offered on the opening page of this novel, where from the garret of Green Gables is ‘glimpsed a distant, white-capped, blue sea’ (1). The narrator remarks on Anne’s new experience at Four Winds: ‘There was a certain tang of romance and adventure in the atmosphere of their new home which Anne had never found in Avonlea. There, although she had lived in sight of the sea, it had not entered intimately into her life. In Four Winds it surrounded her and called to her constantly’ (52–3). Moments after meeting Leslie Moore, Anne confides: ‘The sea at Four Winds is to me what Lover’s Lane was at home’ (82). Every important character in the book is in some way involved with the rhythms or the beauties of the sea, but Anne’s and Leslie’s and Captain Jim’s lives are most intimately implicated in the poetic passages.
As in Anne of Green Gables, we identify many of the descriptive passages in Anne’s House of Dreams with Anne. This close identification explains why this novel can be filled with other people and their stories and yet make us feel that we are exploring Anne’s thinking. The twenty-five-year-old Anne is the artistic fulfilment of the twelve-year-old beauty-loving Anne of the early Green Gables days. Perhaps Anne’s recovered poetic dimension was what encouraged Montgomery herself to believe in 1917 that Anne’s House of Dreams was the best book she had written thus far, including Anne of Green Gables and her own favourite, The Story Girl, written in 1911 (Journals 2: 222). Montgomery had not only recaptured something of the early flavour of Anne of Green Gables, but had seasoned it. At any rate, Anne’s first view of her home is of the Four Winds Harbour. This description is typical of the novel’s preoccupation with colour, precious stones and metals, and dreamy language. Elsewhere we also find sapphire, emerald, ruby, pearl, diamond, amber, gold, maize, crimson, scarlet, and the beloved purple. The fact that Montgomery had deliberately reworked this passage from one in a short story2 suggests just how carefully she was setting the tone for the book’s treatment of sea and home:
Her new home could not yet be seen; but before her lay Four Winds Harbour like a great, shining mirror of rose and silver. Far down, she saw its entrance between the bar of sand-dunes on one side and a steep, high, grim, red-sandstone cliff on the other. Beyond the bar the sea, calm and austere, dreamed in the afterlight. The little fishing village, nestled in the cove where the sand-dunes met the harbour shore, looked like a great opal in the haze. The sky over them was like a jewelled cup from which the dusk was pouring; the air was crisp with the compelling tang of the sea, and the whole landscape was infused with the subtleties of a sea evening. (29)
The riches of a ‘rose and silver’ mirror, the ‘great opal,’ the ‘jewelled cup’ work together with the homey ‘dreamed,’ ‘nestled,’ and ‘infused,’ and the bracing ‘crisp’ and ‘tang’ to suggest the welcoming beauty and changeful-ness of Anne’s new spirit-home by the sea. Even her new little ‘house of dreams’ is part of the shore, resembling ‘a big, creamy seashell stranded on the harbour shore’ (32). Everywhere Anne looks she is greeted with the sea and shore and their multiple meanings.
At times the novel seems a kind of hymn to the shore, as though Montgomery, the homesick exile from Prince Edward Island, recaptures all her remembered and beloved past in rhapsodies about the sea. After her marriage in 1911 and subsequent move to Ontario, Montgomery made two vacation visits to P.E.I. before she wrote Anne’s House of Dreams, one in 1913, and one in 1915. A letter to MacMillan about the 1913 visit sums up her rapture with the sea: ‘I shall never forget my first glimpse of the sea again … I was not prepared for the flood of emotion which swept over me when I saw it. I was stirred to the very deeps of my being – tears filled my eyes – I trembled! For a moment it seemed passionately to me that I could never leave it again’ (Letters 68). Perhaps the sea became for Montgomery the essence of P.E.I. life itself, as she thought about her island and compared it with what she was much later to call ‘smug opulent Ontario’ (Letters 115). Montgomery could look to her own letters and journals for descriptions of the ocean’s power – and separateness – which she celebrates in the fourth Anne novel. The narrator of Anne’s story takes flight: ‘The woods are never solitary – they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unshareable sorrow, which shuts it up into itself for all eternity. We can never pierce its infinite mystery – we may only wander, awed and spell-bound, on the outer fringe of it … The woods are human, but the sea is of the company of the archangels’ (69–70). Since the sea is not predictable and cannot be tamed, human focus on it and identification with it involve power and mystery, too. Anne may turn to the shore as a replacement for Lover’s Lane, but We never forget that she cannot be as intimate with the sea as with the woods. Something will always escape her – prod her to strange, sometimes even unwelcome fantasies.
For the most part in this novel, the sea is beautiful. Anne enjoys its ‘sheeny shadows’ and the ‘curtain of violet gloom over the sand-dunes’ (70); we enjoy the changing of the seasons by observing the change in lights and water. In spring, the beacon again ‘begemmed the twilights’ because the harbour is free of ice; the sea itself ‘laughed and flashed and preened and allured, like a beautiful, coquettish woman’ (137). Everywhere in the descriptions we find Montgomery’s especial love – colour.
The sea and colour are essential to our appreciation of the novel’s most complex character – Leslie Moore. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston have suggested that Leslie is the shadowed side of Montgomery’s own mind (Afterword 282). Perhaps Anne and Leslie together are one personality, one psyche split into the ethereal and the passionate, the pink and the crimson. Certainly they operate as perfect complements; neither is complete without the softening or enriching of the other. Leslie’s confessions to Anne and distrustful, even hostile responses to Anne’s overtures sound very much like the self-distrust and self-loathing we all face when we examine minutely our own thoughts and prejudices. And Leslie’s bitter experiences make her the life counterpart of Anne’s as well – next to Leslie’s, Anne’s past sounds charmed, easy. Anne has never been made to suffer so hideously as Leslie has suffered.
Very like the innocent young going to war in Montgomery’s own time, and like a survivor of abuse, Leslie is the victim of others’ negligence, pain, or selfishness: at twelve she sees her younger brother crushed under the wheels of a tractor; at fourteen she discovers her father hanging from the parlour lamphook; at sixteen she marries a drunken, lascivious young man so that he will not foreclose the mortgage on her mother’s farm (and her mother has urged her to make this self-sacrifice); at seventeen she becomes the caretaker of the look-alike cousin she believes to be her now imbecilic husband, who had gone to sea when he tired of Leslie and had (she thought) lost his memory and capacities in a drunken brawl. For years Leslie takes care of this supposed Dick Moore and is only released from imprisonment when an operation restores the man’s memory. And here she meets Anne, newly, happily married to a man who seems in many ways to be her equal. Anne is immediately attracted to Leslie’s sullen beauty, and the struggle between the bitter and the sweet begins. Perhaps the suggestion is that if Leslie can recover, the ravaged world, too, can recover. But it takes a special kind of love to restore life fully to Leslie, a love Montgomery would not have dreamed, in a domestic romance of 1917, of entrusting to another woman. Anne is only the initiator here – she is not herself the answer, and so her friendship with Leslie is not the final restorative. In keeping with the book’s support of mating and pairing and conventional romantic love as parts of the homing instinct, the restored Leslie (or the reintegrated Montgomery?) must find an Other (male) in order to be fulfilled.
Whether we choose to see Leslie as counterpart to Anne or Montgomery or a separate individual or all of these, we can appreciate how Montgomery uses colour and the sea to make Leslie an intricate, passionate expression of Four Winds life. Romantic setting and colouring reflect romantic intensity.
Anne’s first glimpse of Leslie establishes the colour pattern for the novel – Leslie’s cold beauty is offset by red, the emblem of her restrained passion: ‘her figure, in its plain print gown, was magnificent; and her lips were as crimson as the bunch of blood-red poppies she wore at her belt’ (31). Anne does not know who the woman is, but shortly after, when she notices the gray house close to their own, whose ‘windows peered, like shy, seeking eyes, into the dusk’ (34), Anne is suddenly reminded of the mysterious beauty. Montgomery is using what was to be one of her favourite devices – having a house express the personality of its owner; we know that the beauty must live in the gray house, and we suspect that her coolness masks a shyness and eagerness Anne will touch. When Anne and Gilbert make their first visit to Captain Jim’s lighthouse, the association between red and Leslie is reinforced in a lengthy description of sunset colour and its reflection on the windows of Leslie’s house:
The day had begun sombrely in gray cloud and mist, but it had ended in a pomp of scarlet and gold. Over the western hills beyond the harbour were amber deeps and crystalline shallows, with the fire of sunset below. The north was a mackerel sky of little, fiery golden clouds. The red light flamed on the white sails of a vessel gliding down the channel, bound to a southern port in a land of palms. Beyond her, it smote upon and incarnadined the shining, white, grassless faces of the sand-dunes. To the right, it fell on the old house among the willows up the brook, and gave it for a fleeting space casements more splendid than those of an old cathedral. They glowed out of its quiet and grayness like the throbbing, blood-red thoughts of a vivid soul imprisoned in a dull husk of environment. (67–8)
The exotic association of a ‘land of palms,’ the use of the dramatic word ‘incarnadined,’ which may bring to mind Lady Macbeth’s famous lines,3 the association of the romantic word ‘casement’ with the lines from Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (‘Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn’ 69–70) that Anne has already quoted (AHD 33), the comparison of the farmhouse windows with those of a cathedral – all these devices operate together with the fire imagery and the heightened colours – scarlet, gold, amber, red – to make us concentrate on the power of the ‘soul imprisoned in a dull husk of environment.’ The repetition of the reds and this second use of the house to suggest Leslie’s passion prepare us to accept and be intrigued by the mysterious woman, who is so unlike, yet drawn to, the often ethereal Anne.
When Anne does finally meet Leslie, on the shore, she is struck by her ‘splendid hair … bound about her head with a crimson ribbon’ and by her ‘fine curves’ encircled by ‘a vivid girdle of red silk’ (80). When a shaft of sunlight breaks through the clouds and falls on Leslie’s hair, ‘For a moment she seemed the spirit of the sea personified – all its mystery, all its passion, all its elusive charm’ (80–1). Here Montgomery brings together unmistakably the associations of red and sea we continue to explore with Leslie in a number of ways. Much later in the novel, when Anne takes Owen Ford to meet Leslie, who rents him a room for the summer, Montgomery again uses the red and the sea together to suggest the powerful impression Leslie makes on Owen. This time Leslie wears a cheap cream-coloured dress, but around her waist is a ‘girdle of crimson.’ The narrator explains: ‘Leslie was never without her touch of crimson. She had told Anne that she never felt satisfied without a gleam of red somewhere about her, if it were only a flower. To Anne, it always seemed to symbolise Leslie’s glowing, pent-up personality, denied all expression save in that flaming glint’ (177). The use of ‘pent-up personality’ here deliberately evokes the ‘imprisoned soul’ of the earlier description, and we are thus led to share in the analysis of Leslie and to understand her depth.
Owen does not know what we know and what Anne knows, but he sees Leslie’s ‘ivory-tinted’ arms and her hair shining ‘like a flame’ against a ‘purple sky, flowering with stars over the harbour’ (177) and he is staggered into saying to Anne: ‘I – I never saw anything like her … I wasn’t prepared – I didn’t expect – good heavens, one doesn’t expect a goddess for a landlady! Why, if she were clothed in a gown of sea-purple, with a rope of amethysts in her hair, she would be a veritable sea-queen’ (177). Owen’s appreciation of Leslie’s beauty is one thing, but his transmutation of the purple sky and stars into ‘a rope of amethysts’ and his instinctive recognition of her goddess power and kinship with the sea recommend him as the appropriately sensitive romantic partner Leslie has never yet known. Thus it is that Montgomery uses colour and symbol in this novel to enrich our understanding of spiritual affinity and love of beauty.
Heartsick, much later, and confessing to Anne his love for Leslie, Owen believes he is saying farewell forever to Four Winds. Notice how Montgomery uses colour and image here to remind us of Leslie’s potentially beneficent presence, promising through the description what the story cannot yet reveal: ‘Silence and twilight fell over the garden. Far away the sea was lapping gently and monotonously on the bar. The wind of evening in the poplars sounded like some sad, weird, old rune – some broken dream of old memories. A slender shapely young aspen rose up before them against the fine maize and emerald and paling rose of the western sky, which brought out every leaf and twig in a dark, tremulous, elfin loveliness’ (196). The young aspen, with its background of ‘paling rose’ suggests Leslie herself; as background sound, the sorrow of the wind is not so constant as the sea. We know love will be possible for the paired spirits, who seem to belong together as do the very colours and sounds of nature.
And when Owen comes back to a free Leslie, he declares his love for her in a chapter entitled ‘Red Roses.’ She explains her preference to Owen: ‘I love the red roses … Anne likes the pink ones best, and Gilbert likes the white. But I want the crimson ones. They satisfy some craving in me as no other flower does’ (273). Montgomery uses the symbol of romantic passion to mark Leslie’s search and release; with Owen Ford, the full weight of the novel’s colours and scenes suggest, Leslie will explore the riches of her intensity. Purple and crimson, pink and white, like seeks like.
Montgomery uses the sea and sea fog to suggest bonds between Anne and Leslie. We associate Leslie with mysterious mist as well as with the tumult of the ocean and the energy of the colour red. The first time Leslie visits Anne and Gilbert, she comes when ‘moonlit mists were hanging over the harbour and curling like silver ribbons along the seaward glens’ (100). Two important scenes in the story of Anne’s and Leslie’s relationship use sea fog to suggest the blurred borders between fantasy and reality; between the psyches of the very different women; between hopelessness and faith. A few pages after Montgomery uses the sea mist to usher Leslie into the Blythe household, we find Anne alone in her house of dreams, almost afraid of an unearthly ‘shrouding fog’ (104) and its chilling fantasies. The ghostly quiet makes her think she can hear ‘the footsteps of unseen guests’ (105), and she decides to visit Leslie and leave her little house to its own vigil. Anne steals through the uncanny fog and slips unheard into Leslie’s house, but there she finds Leslie ‘weeping horribly – with low, fierce, choking sobs, as if some agony in her soul were trying to tear itself out’ (106). Anne slips away unseen, instinctively realizing that Leslie would never forgive her witnessing such abandoned grief. Montgomery’s use of the eerie fog is a truly masterly touch – it is as though the sea itself is in torment and veils its mourning; it is as though Anne is drawn to the centre of the chilling mist because she is somehow bound to Leslie’s powerful emotions. But Anne has not yet experienced an adult grief that privileges her to claim kinship with Leslie’s pain, and so she must leave Leslie without comforting her.
Anne is initiated into adult grief with the death of her day-old baby girl. Drawing on her own agonized experience of the death of her second child (Journals 2: 151–4), Montgomery writes with poignant economy and depicts the gladness and then the bitterness of the birth and death of little Joyce. Fog is the herald of death. Anne is at first oblivious to the condition of the ‘wee, white lady’ (149), but ‘Then, as subtly, and coldly, and remorselessly as a sea-fog stealing landward, fear crept into her heart’ (148) and she realizes that Joyce is not going to live. The use of the sea fog here reminds us of Leslie’s own bitterness and pain, and we know that Anne has now endured one of the rites of passage that will rend the fog between her and Leslie.
And when another crisis comes to Leslie – her love for Owen Ford and her belief that she has shamed herself by loving him, since she is not free – we find another eerie fog. But this time, in keeping with the shift from isolation to kinship, Anne experiences the fog as a thing of charming fantasies, benign supernatural forces. In this enchanted mist Anne stumbles upon Leslie, who is walking restlessly on the shore to fight off her agony over Owen Ford’s departure. Unlike the earlier eerie fog, which showed Leslie weeping and in company with chill and death, this fog suggests fairy-tale magic, unexpected reshapings. And the reader thus experiences through suggestion and association and direct reading the change in Leslie’s soul. Anne is now the more knowledgeable of the two, having heard Owen’s confession, and Leslie greets her as a spiritual comforter. Having passed through her own ‘shrouding fog,’ Anne can perceive and help to transform Leslie’s morbid delusions into endurable sorrow.
When, earlier, we followed Anne through the ghostly fog and saw her barred from Leslie’s confidence, Montgomery encouraged us to feel with Anne the chill of inadequacy – the recognition of pain and sorrow beyond our power to relieve or heal. Leslie must be left alone. After her own immersion in the fog Anne can discern new shapes in its shadows, and we recognize that in the spiritual integration of the two women – in the equal friendship they can now experience – Montgomery is showing us the strength of the mature, loving woman. Through faith and love they can endure grief and can share in the joys of life that are also a part of the Four Winds harmony and change.
When Anne arrives on the shore this time the scene is set for magic: ‘It was warm for September, and the late afternoon had been very foggy; but a full moon had in part lessened the fog and transformed the harbour and the gulf and the surrounding shores into a strange, fantastic, unreal world of pale silver mist, through which everything loomed phantom-like’ (198–9). The shapes Anne sees and the sounds she hears are bewitching, and we know something unusual is going to happen. She sees a real schooner as a ‘spectral ship’; seagulls’ cries are now the ‘cries of the souls of doomed seamen’; foam from the waves is really ‘elfin things stealing up from the sea-caves’; sand dunes are ‘sleeping giants’; altogether ‘It was delightful – romantic – mysterious to be roaming here alone on this enchanted shore’ (199). What a perfect setting for Leslie’s confession: romantic, mysterious, magical, perhaps a little dangerous. Leslie’s pain in not something to be amused by, and Montgomery makes sure that we understand that though the outcome (as suggested) may eventually be positive, for the time being Leslie is in agony. Her language of confession is characteristically physical. She feels as though life has ‘struck me a terrible blow.’ ‘When I turned back into the house this morning after he had gone the solitude struck me like a blow in the face’ (201). To the sympathetic Anne, Leslie confides: ‘Oh, when I think that I will never see him again I feel as if a great brutal hand had twisted itself among my heartstrings, and was wrenching them’ (201–2). And, somewhat like the old Leslie, she wishes to cover herself with the fog and be invisible: ‘Oh, I wish this mist would never lift – I wish I could just stay in it forever, hidden away from every living being’ (202–3). The difference between this vigil in the fog and her earlier tearful one is that Leslie now has a friend who can understand, who shares her sorrows and her values and can take her back to safer ground while the fog lasts. When Leslie and Owen are finally together as free woman and man, we know that there will be other soul fogs, but they, too, will be of this latter kind, containing strange shapes only faith and love can make plain.
Without Leslie Moore, Anne on her own in this novel would be pale indeed. As I have said, Anne seems very much alive partly because of the power of the nature descriptions and partly because of the strength of the characters around her. Twinned with Leslie for much of the novel, Anne seems as necessary to Four Winds as the lovely lights and gentle ripples of the sea. At their very first meeting Leslie identifies herself with the thunder and riot of the sea: ‘I don’t like the sea so well when it’s calm and quiet. I like the struggle – and the crash – and the noise’ (82). Anne, on the other hand, characteristically enjoys the quieter beauties of the shore; true to her domestic bias in this home-celebrating novel, Anne delights in the sea she gazes on from her sewing room: ‘The effects of light and shadow all along these shores are wonderful … My little sewing room looks out on the harbour, and I sit at its window and feast my eyes. The colours and shadows are never the same two minutes together’ (84). Montgomery is careful to make both the passion and the gentle love essential to a balanced Four Winds life – just as she carefully alternates tragedy (or perhaps melodrama) with comedy in the construction of the story itself.
Towards the end of the novel Montgomery reinforces the harmony between Anne’s and Leslie’s differences in a number of ways. They are now both Madonnas (247) in spirit as they share Anne’s little Jem; even their laughter harmonizes: ‘Anne’s laughter was silver and Leslie’s golden, and the combination of the two was as satisfactory as a perfect chord in music’ (260). Captain Jim’s farewell to the house of dreams involves a ritual blessing of these two women. Captain Jim has known all the brides and women of the little house and now reveres the home spirit he feels with Leslie and Anne guarding the hearth fire and the traditions he has honoured all his long life. Captain Jim’s speech encapsulates the message of the novel – the praise to home and love that Montgomery depicts throughout. Read as her massage to a war-torn world, and delivered as it is by one of her favourite character creations,4 a rugged, golden-hearted figure right out of the best in Dickens’s tradition of ragged heroes, Captain Jim’s speech and blessing suggest the reason for Montgomery’s twinning of Leslie and Anne:
‘I see happiness for all of you – all of you – for Leslie and Mr. Ford – and the Doctor here and Mistress Blythe – and Little Jem – and children that ain’t born yet but will be. Happiness for you all – though, mind you, I reckon, you’ll have your troubles and worries and sorrows, too. They’re bound to come – and no house, whether it’s a palace or a little house of dreams, can bar ’em out. But they won’t get the better of you if you face ’em together with love and trust. You can weather any storm with them two for compass and pilot.’
The old man rose suddenly and placed one hand on Leslie’s head and one on Anne’s.
‘Two good, sweet women,’ he said. ’True and faithful and to be depended on. Your husbands will have honour in the gates because of you – your children will rise up and call you blessed in the years to come.’ (274)
This sentimental scene works in the context of the novel because Captain Jim is such a dear old man, even if he does seem a little overdrawn at times. And the scene works because Anne and Leslie are clearly the heirs apparent to the tradition of home love that Captain Jim’s own story epitomizes. As he passes on to them his accumulated wisdom and love, Anne and Leslie become the mothers of the human race who fulfil the words of ‘The Song of the Pilgrims’ from Rupert Brooke’s poem that Montgomery used as a motto for this novel: ‘Our kin / Have built them temples, and therein / Pray to the gods we know; and dwell / In little houses lovable.’ Anne and Leslie are clearly emblematic of continuing traditions of love and home; they are one bright promise in a world whose changes can seem destructive.
In fact, Montgomery uses Captain Jim throughout the novel as a kind of living emblem of chivalry and kindness and truth. His love of the sea and his love of Lost Margaret, who disappeared on the sea, make him seem the incarnation of devotion and vigilance. Naturally he is the keeper of the light: as the ‘beacon cuts swathes of light … in a circle over the fields and the harbour, the sandbar and the gulf’ (68) it is a constant reminder of hope and home. Since we identify the lighthouse with Captain Jim, we find that, even after he dies, the lighthouse continues to be a reminder of his beneficence. On the very last page of the novel, as Anne and Gilbert say goodbye to their house of dreams, ‘The lighthouse star was gleaming northward’ (291). Throughout the novel light plays an important part, and Montgomery ties the images together with the lighthouse (and, by both metaphor and metonymy, with Captain Jim); she uses the light itself, the lighthouse ‘star,’ stars, and firelight to suggest the various symbolic interpretations of illumination in darkness.
The lighthouse beacon is one of the charms Gilbert describes to Anne when he tells her about their new home (13); firelight greets the bride and bridegroom when they cross the threshold of their new home (32); when Anne meets Captain Jim, their souls commune as two lighthouses – ‘Kindred spirit flashed recognition to kindred spirit’ (34); even in the comfort of her bed Anne has time in the stormy November evenings to think of the ‘great, faithful light, whirling through the darkness unafraid’ (110); when Anne rapturously identifies their homelight, Gilbert calls it ‘our beacon’ (113); Owen Ford is enraptured with Four Winds even before he sees Leslie when he hears voices across ‘a starlit sea’ as ‘The big light flashed and beaconed’ (176); love illumines Leslie as a ‘rosy lamp might shine through a flawless vase of alabaster’ (190); Gilbert knows Captain Jim is dead when he spots the ‘baleful star’ of the lighthouse beacon burning after the sun has risen (281). Perhaps one of the most peculiar uses of language in the book is found in the passage describing Leslie’s vigil the night she realizes Owen Ford loves her and has come to ask her to marry him. Montgomery uses rhyme to punctuate the image of Leslie and the light: ‘But she watched the great revolving light bestarring the short hours of the summer night, and her eyes grew soft and bright and young once more. Nor, when Owen Ford came next day, to ask her to go with him to the shore, did she say him nay’ (emphasis added 266). The first sentence sounds poetic; the second, like comic doggerel. Perhaps Montgomery was – even rhythmically – juxtaposing serious and comic. At any rate, we know that throughout the novel sea and symbol, character and rhythm reinforce the lessons about love and home and trust.
Everything in this novel is made to harmonize; all things, it is suggested, change in unexpected and (if we are patient and faithful) often delightful ways. In the middle of the book we experience such a harmonizing of images and attitude. New Year’s Eve day has been ‘one of those bright, cold dazzling winter days, which bombard us with their brilliancy, and command our admiration but never our love. The sky was sharp and blue; the snow diamonds sparkled insistently; the stark trees were bare and shameless, with a kind of brazen beauty; the hills shot assaulting lances of crystal’ (123). But at the end of the day, ‘a certain pensiveness fell over her beauty which dimmed yet intensified it; sharp angles, glittering points, melted away into curves and enticing gleams. The white harbour put on soft grays and pinks; the far-away hills turned amethyst’ (123–4). The landscape here is a metaphor for life in general and Leslie in particular. Under the warming influence of Anne’s friendship, she softens and becomes suffused with colour, not just marked by one red glint. Immediately after the description of the dusk, we find that, along with the lighthouse beacon, the sky is lit by the ‘brilliant star of evening,’ ‘Venus, glorious and golden’ (124). It is Leslie who recounts the myth about the shadow of Venus: that if you see it, within a year ‘life’s most wonderful gift will come to you’ (124). It is Venus, of course, who triumphs in the love of Owen and Leslie, and Anne reminds Leslie of the shadow of Venus when Owen returns to woo her. On this New Year’s Eve vigil, Anne watches Leslie transformed from cool restraint to a whirling Viking woman with ‘crimson cheek and glowing eye and grace of motion’ (127). Within the lighthouse itself, Captain Jim’s valiant hearth fire warms acquaintance into friendship; loving friendship begins Venus’s work. Montgomery brings shore, lighthouse, colour, and star together to suggest how all things illumine and modify each other if love (or the loving eye) is present.
Montgomery’s poetic book is also wise. It is interesting that no single character in the novel is infallible or without a touch of forgivable perversity. Leslie is sullen in her unhappiness and is also incapable of seeing faults in her own family; Miss Cornelia is merciless in her faulting of men for all the ills in and out of Four Winds, and most particularly here she believes that Gilbert should not meddle with (the supposed) Dick Moore’s old head injuries; Anne also opposes Gilbert’s interference with Dick Moore (and thus both Anne and Miss Cornelia would have been condemning Leslie to an unbroken career of miserable servitude); Gilbert is too quick and smug early in the story in judging the unhappiness with her husband of a woman he does not know. He remarks to Anne about Leslie: ‘A fine woman would have made the best of it. Mrs Moore has evidently let it make her bitter and resentful’ (87). And even lovable old Captain Jim misjudges women. Much as he admires them, he believes them incapable of serious thinking or work. The fact that his story is created and told by a woman makes his own comment the more interesting: ‘Captain Jim thought women were delightful creatures, who ought to have the vote, and everything else they wanted, bless their hearts; but he did not believe they could write … “A writing woman never knows when to stop; that’s the trouble. The p’int of good writing is to know when to stop”’ (184). Even chivalry (especially chivalry?) has its blind spots.
The fact that no one is always right seems a deliberate part of Montgomery’s philosophy in the novel. Just as Four Winds is an idealized version of the world – a place where all things harmonize, where even ugliness and violence are admitted, though they do not triumph – so it is also a miniature of the world Montgomery knew, and in it all people have lessons to learn or gaps in their understanding that others may discern but that they themselves may be incapable of discerning.
Unlike the pedantic narrator in Anne of Avonlea, the narrator in Anne’s House of Dreams shares insights with an equal. From first to last the book assumes in the reader a sympathetic interest in what motivates people to thwart themselves or others and what makes people capable of giving and loving. The interactions of the characters of course explore these conflicting tendencies fully, but the narrator makes separate commentary occasionally (in addition to speaking through the numerous descriptions). For example, notice this brilliant little sketch used to suggest the persistent gloom of a Mrs Jasper Bell: ‘She belonged to the type which always has a stringy black feather in its hat and straggling locks of hair on its neck’ (12). In a more serious vein, when Leslie faces the decision about an operation on Dick Moore that may restore his faculties, she withdraws from everyone, and the narrator wisely observes: ‘When one great passion seizes possession of the soul all other feelings are crowded aside’ (228).
For the most part in the novel we experience the kindly knowledge of human nature through the created exchanges between characters – the characters come to realizations or the narrator presents a scene so that we come to the realization though the character cannot. Anne’s agony over the death of her baby is wrenching to read, but we see that in saying all the bitter things death has made her feel, Anne is on the way to recovery. Montgomery had learned to confide in her journal the kinds of things that here are expressed by the narrator and then shared openly – after great effort – by the characters. The healing, the novel shows, comes with the expression. The narrator describes Anne’s slow recovery: ‘Anne’s convalescence was long, and made bitter for her by many things. The bloom and sunshine of the Four Winds world grated harshly on her; and yet, when the rain fell heavily, she pictured it beating so mercilessly down on that little grave across the harbour; and when the wind blew around the eaves she heard sad voices in it she had never heard before’ (150). This suffering and depression are exactly what Montgomery experienced over the death of her own baby. But when Anne expresses her bitterness to Marilla we know that she will begin to recover. This bitterness, too, is what grieved Montgomery and what as a minister’s wife, she (probably) could confide only to her journal: ‘Why should she be born at all – why should any one be born at all – if she’s better off dead? I don’t believe it is better for a child to die at birth than to live its life out – and love and be loved – and enjoy and suffer – and do its work – and develop a character that would give it a personality in eternity. And how do you know it was God’s will? Perhaps it was just a thwarting of His purpose by the Power of Evil. We can’t be expected to be resigned to that (AHD 151; Journals 2: 153). Marilla is shocked; but, having said the worst of what she thinks, having literally expressed the venom from herself, Anne regains the will to live. Again, when we remember that this novel was written in wartime and think of the despair facing the people and nations who had to struggle daily to feed the will to live, we realize the context in which Montgomery offers Anne’s grief (though the novel itself is set some twenty years before the war). In the Four Winds idealized miniature of the world, grief and suffering are expressed, not repressed, and healing is allowed time.
Exposing evil is what cures Leslie of her morbid, sullen anger. Anne hears Leslie’s story from Miss Cornelia, but Leslie herself can speak of her brother’s death, her father’s suicide, her hideous marriage, and her resentment of Anne’s happiness only after Anne has lost little Joyce. And when Leslie is able to speak of the old pain and the recent ones, we see in action the purging and healing Anne herself has undergone. Leslie says, ‘Talking it all out seems to have done away with it, somehow. It’s very strange – and I thought it so real and bitter. It’s like opening the door of a dark room to show some hideous creature you’ve believed to be there – and when the light streams in your monster turns out to have been just a shadow, vanishing when the light comes. It will never come between us again’ (162). In the thousands of books that have been published since 1917 about the facing and dispelling of fears is there anything plainer than this?
At the end of the chapter ‘Barriers Swept Away,’ Anne and Leslie make a spiritual pact – one that foreshadows the ritual blessing Captain Jim will confer near the end of the book. Here the two mature women make a vow that is the self-reflective complement of the romantic oath Anne and Diana made in the Barry garden in Green Gables days. Anne and Leslie are in Anne’s own garden, and in response to Leslie’s question about whether Anne, having heard all the truth of Leslie’s hatreds and pains, still wants to be friends, Anne replies: ‘I am your friend and you are mine, for always … Such a friend as I never had before. I have had many dear and beloved friends – but there is something in you, Leslie that I never found in anyone else. You have more to offer me in that rich nature of yours, and I have more to give you than I had in my careless girlhood. We are both women – and friends forever’ (165). Montgomery has suggested all along that they are complementary spirits, and now they have allied themselves permanently; after this point, their joint story is all healing and rebuilding, culminating in the blessing of Captain Jim.
Montgomery wisely steers clear of too many of these solemn vows and blessings. As in the best of all her writing, here we find, too, the solemn and the serious alternating with the comic. The harmony of Four Winds, in fact, depends on this alternation as surely as it relies on the rhythm of the sea. The most amusing character is Miss Cornelia. Just when Montgomery is establishing the sea as the heartbeat of Four Winds, Gilbert describes Miss Cornelia’s arrival in a way that makes her seem elemental to the place: ‘Do I or do I not see a full-rigged ship sailing up our lane?’ (55). Throughout the narrative Miss Cornelia offers wonderfully pungent remarks: of their minister – ‘I consider him a reverend jackass’ (62); on the solidarity of women – ‘We’ve got enough to endure at the hands of the men, the Lord knows, so I hold we hadn’t ought to clapper-claw one another’ (90); on the vote for women – ‘I’m not hankering after the vote, believe me … I know what it is to clean up after the men’ (120); on the likelihood that Dick Moore did not get his head smashed in a drunken brawl – ‘Pigs may whistle, but they’ve poor mouths for it’ (227). Montgomery uses Miss Cornelia as an antidote to sentimentality and melancholy; her bustling energy makes her, the narrator tells us, personify ‘the comedy that ever peeps around the corner at the tragedy of life’ (197). Again and again in the novel her Dickensian self-contradictoriness (heart of gold / rough tongue) reminds us to enjoy the beauty and the perversity of human interactions.
Since poetry plays a large part in the descriptive passages and in the rhythms of Anne’s House of Dreams, it is not surprising to find poetry quoted often, as it is in most of Montgomery’s novels. But here we find a fascination with Tennyson in particular. Montgomery makes (at least) twenty-four allusions to the Bible (twelve serious and twelve jocular) and some nine playful references to Shakespeare; in addition we find Pope, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Burns, Wordsworth, James Montgomery, Mrs Hemans, Longfellow, and Robert Browning (Wilmshurst 26–9). There are ten references to Tennyson: two to ‘Ulysses,’ one to In Memoriam, one to ‘The Lotos-Eaters,’ one to the ‘The Miller’s Daughter,’ one to ‘Oenone,’ and four to ‘Crossing the Bar.’ Three of these works are preoccupied with the sea – Ulysses addresses his old mariners and urges them to follow him on new adventures rather than to stagnate at home; the shipwrecked mariners in ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ become incapable of action as they dwindle into passivity and memory on the enchanted beaches of the lotus land; in ‘Crossing the Bar’ Tennyson uses the ocean and the last voyage as images for death, and life beyond it, for a soul satisfied to have struggled with truth and right during this life. We recognize much of Captain Jim in the poems – and he himself identifies with them, choosing ‘Crossing the Bar’ as one of the wisest expressions of acceptance and faith he has heard. Ulysses’ yearning is what the land-locked sailor must feel with old age, and the apparent passivity of ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ is what Anne uses to characterize the apparent passivity of Four Winds to the newcomer, Owen Ford (175).
The truth of the novel is reflected in the simple but profound imagery of ‘Crossing the Bar,’ with its faith in the divine pilot. We are perhaps reminded of its language when we hear Captain Jim confer his blessing on Leslie and Anne. In the last stanza of the poem we find: ‘For though from out our bourne of Time and Place / The flood may bear me far, / I hope to see my Pilot face to face / When I have crost the bar’ (13–16). Captain Jim advises the young people to use love and trust because ‘You can weather any storm with them two for compass and pilot’ (274). When Captain Jim moves beyond Four Winds, he hopes to meet ‘face to face’ the great Pilot whose gifts of love and trust he has himself used all his life. There is a yearning in Tennyson’s poetry that is wholly appropriate to the self-searching and self-discovery of the novel’s main characters. And each character ultimately finds something of the promised peace of ‘Crossing the Bar.’ Captain Jim’s life associations with the sea and the lighthouse beacon are thus reinforced in the poetic (and thematic) echoes of the novel.
Anne’s House of Dreams is a very carefully constructed novel; even the sensational look-alike-cousin mix-up that frees Leslie is welcome and believable in the context of Four Winds. The novel begins with a leave-taking from the Green Gables world of childhood, and it ends with the leave-taking of the early married joy and sorrow of the house of dreams. Montgomery drew from favourite writings – prose and poetry – of her own to construct the Four Winds ‘enchanted shore’ (199). It is a novel about self-discovery and self-integration; Leslie and Anne as individuals or as parts of the same spirit come to recognize their greater powers. What is distressing about the book, when we examine it closely, is the final disappearance of Anne as she was suggested to be in Anne of Green Gables. We do not find here just the loss of childhood or the acceptance of adult sorrows; try to reinterpret as we will, we are bound to see that this Anne is not as free as the earlier Anne. This Anne day-dreams while Captain Jim and Gilbert talk about Real Ideas; this Anne downplays her writing ability and says she has a little knack of putting together pretty thoughts but could not, oh my, write something really serious or important. Not like Owen Ford, for instance. Anne endures the death of her child and yet claims to herself that she does not know tragedy and therefore cannot write Captain Jim’s story! While Captain Jim’s own dismissal of women’s writing seems funny in the story, since Montgomery is writing his story, Anne’s admission of inadequacy seems like a betrayal of old dreams and faith. And this dreamy Anne dismisses politics as meaningless beside the cooing of her little Jem. When the men talk excitedly over the surprising Liberal majority, Anne’s response suggests the (irritating) stereotype of the contented little homemaker. Anne ‘was not much excited over the tidings. Little Jem had said “Wow-ga” that morning. What were principalities and powers, the rise and fall of dynasties, the overthrow of Grit or Tory, compared with that miraculous occurrence?’ (251). Montgomery’s tone is mocking, and Anne is the object of it, and readers of the 1990s may ask themselves if Montgomery’s depiction of the harmony of Four Winds isn’t just a little too predictably diminishing of the female.
But there is, as always with Montgomery, another side to the mockery. After all, the whole book asks, where is the virtuous and admirable life? Captain Jim cannot write his own story, but he is the wise and beloved and honoured man. Anne is not a powerful writer but she has a powerful nurturing spirit and a genius for friendship and is the complement for Leslie. Gilbert’s professional life would be hollow without the house of dreams to come home to. And after all, the capitulation into marriage of the supposed man-hater Miss Cornelia reminds us that the book is determinedly genial in its treatment of life’s possibilities. Miss Cornelia’s dismissal of the vote as a panacea must have galled suffragists of Montgomery’s time5 – but Miss Cornelia’s scepticism about what the vote could do sounds very much like the most radical of feminist commentary today (Johnson). Even Anne’s dismissal of politics as of no consequence in comparison with the development of her baby sounds more like an affirmation of an ‘ethic of caring’ (Noddings 79–103) than a deliberate diminution of Anne. And didn’t war in Europe illustrate ably where (male) partisan politics can lead?
And so we continue to read Montgomery. In this last decade of the twentieth century we may not so readily endorse marriage and conventional romance as universally good (Kreps) – and we have Leslie’s marriage to Dick Moore as a warning about inappropriate marriages even here – but we can appreciate that Montgomery’s analysis of Leslie and Anne suggests a determination to explore what love and home can mean to the whole as well as to the tormented or to the grieving spirit. The magical backdrop and inspiration for this exploration is the sea and the shore of Montgomery’s beloved and yearned-for Prince Edward Island. And perhaps that is part of the reason for the book’s continuing appeal – it is written in the crisis of wartime by a woman separated from her roots and homeland. The poetic, loving descriptions make that romantic, wished-for, far-off home a reality – a place where the Four Winds light always flashes welcome and hope. Anne leaves at the end of the book, but she goes where she can still see the lighthouse ‘star’ – and readers are assured that Four Winds, with its harmonizing of harsh and sweet, is there any time they need it.