Anne’s House of Dreams was written in the middle of the war as though there is no war in store for Anne. The novel is set some twenty years before the First World War, and Montgomery is careful not to include anachronistic, direct references to it. Yet the whole book is really a response to war – it demonstrates what the home fires mean, what the beacon of faith and trust can mean. In short, Montgomery’s poetic novel suggests that love is an active force that can defeat evil. The Four Winds life is open to all who cherish the traditions of home and the interactions prompted by love and faith. The exploration of friendships focuses on (what Montgomery suggests to be) the yearnings closest to the human heart.
The next Anne book, Rainbow Valley (1919), makes a leap of thirteen years in the life of Four Winds, and it, too, is about traditions and love and home. But this fifth Anne novel is openly a war book. It is dedicated to three young men in Montgomery’s parish who died in battle, and the book itself is constructed upon the values that Montgomery believed prompted Canada and Britain’s other allies to fight against Germany. Even so, in the story the war itself is years away yet – this is a novel about the children who were to mature into the soldiers and the workers of the war.
For Montgomery, the Great War was a conflict between the powers of darkness and the powers of light, on a mythic scale (Journals 2:150–270). Her novel about Anne’s children and, more correctly, about the Meredith children, is a conscious rendering of the code of ethics that prepared Canada and the allies of Britain to fight against Germany. Like John Meredith and Anne Shirley Blythe in this novel supposedly about childhood, Montgomery believed that some fights must be fought. Rainbow Valley describes the moral childhood of the nations – and Montgomery hopes and suggests that, with such promising values and admirable souls winning adulthood through the battles against evil in Europe, the world could be, afterwards in peace, a better place than it had been.
Montgomery encourages us to believe that the sturdy children of Rainbow Valley hold within them the best of the past as well as their own fresh individuality. This patriotic novel shows how a romantic heritage of beauty, enchantment, love, and home is entrusted to the children who frequent the little valley below Ingleside. In this novel about values (most especially chivalry) and the childhood of free humanity, Anne is reduced to an echo, an image, a reminder of the past.
When the novel opens Anne (and Gilbert) have just returned from three months in the British Isles, and Miss Cornelia and Susan Baker are on hand to fill her in on all the local news.1 Montgomery’s immediate audience would no doubt have felt the intended jolt of the contrast between this depiction of a Europe before the war and the wartime Europe they had been reading of in the daily papers. The long-range suggestion is that Anne and Gilbert have seen Europe in peace and will remember vividly its beauty and goodness when the days of war come. Canada is thus allied with the best of Europe’s traditions. But the most obvious function of the trip and the discussion of it is to give Anne a basis for her patriotic assertion about Canada: ‘“The old world is very lovely and very wonderful. But we have come back very well satisfied with our own land. Canada is the finest country in the world, Miss Cornelia … And old P.E.I. is the loveliest province in it and Four Winds the loveliest spot in P.E.I.,” laughed Anne, looking adoringly out over the sunset splendour of glen and harbour and gulf’ (17–18). The love of Canada and pride in the maple leaf are imprinted everywhere in the book.
Surrounding this idyllic Four Winds is the shadow of war to come; to Montgomery’s readers at the time the painful irony of many of the novel’s references would have been plain. Anne remarks that thirteen-year-old Jem is ‘passing through the stage where all boys hanker to be soldiers,’ and Miss Cornelia refers to the Boer War as though it is the war to end all wars: ‘Well, thank goodness, he’ll never be a soldier … I never approved of our boys going to that South African fracas. But it’s over, and not likely anything of the kind will ever happen again. I think the world is getting more sensible’ (74). But even if Miss Cornelia and Anne and even Mr Meredith all believe that the world is safe from war, there is the warning of a shrewd woman like Ellen West, who believes that the Kaiser of Germany is the most dangerous man alive. Montgomery creates in the novel both the false calm and the Cassandra-like warnings she evidently believed characterized the post-Boer War Canadian political environment.2
Jem Blythe wishes to be a soldier, dreamy Walter Blythe reads about battles and the Holy Grail, and the Meredith children are brought up with Tennyson’s ‘Sir Galahad.’ We have only to remember the importance of Tennyson in Anne’s stories to note the continuity of vision and ideal here with Anne’s children and their dearest playmates. The young Anne Shirley delighted in the romance and chivalry of Tennyson’s courtly love stories; the bride Anne Blythe discovered that Tennyson’s noble, yearning lines perfectly captured the spirit of the sea and of Captain Jim’s chivalry; Anne’s children and their playmates are inspired by Tennyson’s romantic battles and high quest. Tennyson, chivalry, and romance are parts of the Rainbow Valley code of ethics: love of honour, defence of women and the weak (alas, these two often seem synonymous), demand for truth, insistence on justice. The children of the new generation play with Tennyson’s Camelot just as Anne Shirley did, but here fighting is central. Anne’s early romantic visions included battle, but this generation embraces conflict in more immediate ways. Walter fights; Faith battles public opinion; Carl braves illness to reclaim his dignity; Mary Vance struggles for her very life.
The central dramatic event of this novel, and Montgomery’s allegory for the First World War, is Walter Blythe’s fist-fight with Dan Reese. A dastard belittles faith and womanhood (read here also beauty, truth, good, motherhood, kindness) and a young knight vanquishes him. The bully, Dan, calls Faith Meredith names, and Walter knows he must defend her. But Walter hates ugliness and fighting and cannot bring himself to challenge Dan on the spot. He wrestles all night with his shame, and the next day, when Dan insults Faith and Walter’s mother (Anne), Walter challenges him. They cannot fight that same day, but they agree to meet the next afternoon. Walter goes home to agonize over his fear of pain and dread of the blood he knows he will have to see. Walter cannot eat or go to the sand hills with Jem, and while Walter broods and steels himself to the coming battle, Jem (ignorant of the impending fight and unwilling to go to the sand hills without Walter) goes to his own attic chamber to ‘picture himself a famous general, leading his troops to victory on some great battlefield’ (188). Meanwhile, Faith goes home to confide in Una that in issuing the challenge to Dan, Walter looked ‘just like Sir Galahad in that poem father read us on Saturday’ (185).
This schoolhouse battle appears midway through the novel, when we are well acquainted with the quality of Walter’s poetic visions and with his gallantry – he has already shielded Faith by pretending to his mother that it was his idea to race Faith through the village streets on pig-back (hence the epithet ‘pig-girl’ that Dan hurls at her). Walter knows from his reading and from the numerous kinds of discourse around him that chivalry demands the defence of Faith (and faith) and the sacrifice of his own feelings. The school battle would be meaningless in the context of the novel and in the larger context of the world war, if Walter, like Jem, had really relished fighting. It is Walter’s hatred of fighting that makes his self-sacrifice so noble and his belief so inspiring. Walter, like the Sir Galahad to whom he is compared, is high-minded, using violence only because it is necessary. Montgomery’s message is clear: the boy Walter Blythe, who detests blood, undertakes fighting in his clear-eyed recognition of right and honour, just as an adult Walter and other honourable men and women will also recognize the necessity to fight when faith is threatened and home values reviled by Germany.
The school battle itself is a swift victory for Walter because something almost murderous takes over his spirit. The schoolyard is not entirely jubilant in Walter’s victory because the avenging energy that takes over him is itself terrifying. The little girls cry when they see Walter’s expression, and Walter himself knows he could have killed Dan if something had not lifted the ‘red mist’ (190) from his eyes and made him look at Dan’s spurting nose and realize where he was. Interestingly, Montgomery does not openly pursue the murderous spirit battle obviously inspires in Walter. She suggests that vengeance – even in the name of honour – has a will of its own, but she then quickly turns the analysis away from it, and approves Walter’s fight. Walter cannot stay for the other boys’ approval, but runs to Rainbow Valley, where he ‘felt none of the victor’s joy, but he felt a certain calm satisfaction in duty done and honour avenged – mingled with a sickish qualm when he thought of Dan’s gory nose’ (191). But though Walter does not care to hear the boys’ applause in the schoolyard, he is gratified by adult approval. The values of Montgomery’s depicted culture are evident in the adult approbation of Walter’s battle. Walter’s chivalric code is endorsed by the Presbyterian minister (authority, tradition, religion, men) and by Anne (love, tradition, motherhood, women). Mr Meredith approves and then shares with Walter what is clearly the book’s attitude to war. Walter asks if the minister thinks it is right to fight, and Mr Meredith says: ‘Not always – and not often – but sometimes – yes, sometimes … When womenkind are insulted for instance – as in your case. My motto, Walter, is, don’t fight till you’re sure you ought to, and then put every ounce of you into it’ (191–2). Later Anne has much the same reaction and acts out in her ministrations to her young son the nurturing role traditionally assigned to women: ‘she sympathized with him and told him she was glad he had stood up for her and Faith, and she anointed his sore spots and rubbed cologne on his aching head’ (192). Walter tells her, ‘You’re worth standing up for’ (192). However appalling (or, alas, welcome) we may now find these sentimentalized assumptions about males, females, and conflict, we can see the brutal truth of what Montgomery’s story (perhaps partly unconsciously) suggests: chivalry and mothering shape the soldiers who will themselves fight wars to defend chivalry and mothering.
All the children of Rainbow Valley believe in chivalry and fight for what they perceive to be truth and goodness, each in a different’ way. While the code of ethics of the novel may seem to exclude an active expression of chivalry by the females, Montgomery shows that both chivalry and fighting come in many, surprising forms. The girls, too, are crusaders. The most obvious and vigorous champion of right is Faith. She mounts the pulpit to explain to a thunderstruck congregation that her father is not responsible for his children’s bad behaviour; terrified but determined she goes to wealthy and notoriously cantankerous Norman Douglas and asks that he return to church and contribute to her father’s salary; she writes a lengthy explanatory letter to the local newspaper explaining to shocked parishioners and local gossips alike why she did not wear stockings to church one Sunday. Faith speaks out, and she is clearly the woman warrior of this novel, the perfect female counterpart in spirit and (limited) vision for Jem Blythe.
No goody-goody, Faith has spunk and fire and a keen sense of humour; her brand of valour is particularly appealing because it is not so strictly high-minded as Walter’s. The episode about her pet rooster, Adam, and the unctuous Rev. Mr Perry is a good example of how Faith’s sense of justice is tempered by mischief. Old Aunt Martha murders Adam so that she can serve the visiting minister a chicken dinner. Faith can barely sit through the meal as Mr Perry (admittedly ignorant that Adam had been a pet) shows off his plump white hands while he carves and lectures to the children about good behaviour and the models his own children are. We are reminded by Faith’s boiling rebelliousness of the young Jane Eyre’s response to the Rev. Mr Brocklehurst. But in this comic episode, Faith gets revenge. After dinner, standing before the fire, Mr Perry lectures Faith on her rudeness; Faith watches silently as Mr Perry’s coat-tails get hot, smoke, and then burst into flame. How the young Jane Eyre would have enjoyed watching the black pillar Brocklehurst with his coat-tails on fire!
While Faith can be mischievous, she is almost invariably kind. When blue-legged, barefooted Lida Marsh of the harbour sits down on a tombstone to enjoy a chat with Faith and Una, Faith cannot bear what she imagines to be Lida’s conscious misery and pained neglect. She strips off her own boots and stockings and gives them to Lida, never dreaming that not one of the harbour children has shoes in the spring or that Lida will take them off to save for special occasions as soon as she is out of sight of the manse children and will walk through freezing slush back to the harbour as unconcernedly as she had come. Faith is generous and impulsive, and she is meant to be seen as a crusader for goodness as valiant and gallant in her own way as Walter is in his.
But ‘in her own way’ is a very important distinction in the novel and in our understanding. Recognizing Faith’s valour should not dull us to the fact that even in the story Faith is valiant in a different way from Walter or Jem because she is a girl. Chivalry imposes strict divisions between the sexes. Faith’s treatment of Mr Perry is doubly daring because she is female – we enjoy her revenge, understanding the special insubordination and pluck it represents. But we should not forget the importance of sex roles in other episodes where to be female is to be helpless. If Walter is to be the champion, Faith must be a victim and powerless. When Faith flouts authority and goes to church bare-legged rather than wear hideous, scratchy, striped woollen stockings, she causes an uproar in the congregation and community. Ladies do not show bare legs (notice the largely unexplored contrast with working-class Lida Marsh). Similarly, Faith and Una are expected to show fear and be useless in their fright, while Jerry and Carl are expected to resist any behaviour considered weak (and therefore female).3 Montgomery is not necessarily endorsing a diminution of the female, but we see in the story that chivalry demands certain limitations for the female, just as it demands certain rigidity from the males. Montgomery’s story cannot have it both ways – rejecting a part of chivalry while supporting its values. Faith’s energy may show Montgomery’s efforts in the story to stretch the role of the female, but chivalry is exacting, and Faith can rebel or fight only as Anne Shirley rebelled – within limits. (It is only a matter of time before Faith, like Anne, is absorbed by the various roles and expectations designed for her. In Rilla of Ingleside she becomes a nurse and virtually disappears from the story.)
Jerry enforces the Good Conduct Club, a club the children form to punish themselves when they do anything that might hurt their father. Though he is a very sketchily drawn character, we are assured that Jerry struggles to uphold the justice he knows his father believes in but is too abstracted to enforce. The Good Conduct Club itself goes awry, interestingly enough, over chivalry. When Carl and Una and Faith run from what they believe is a ghost Mary Vance has told them about, their screams and running frighten an old woman into a fit, not to mention disgracing the manse yet again with their loudness. Jerry decrees that Carl should be punished most harshly because ‘he was a boy, so he should have stood his ground to protect you girls, whatever the danger was’ (306). As penance for this double cowardice, Carl has to sit in the graveyard alone until midnight. And Carl does sit there, even when it begins to rain. He nearly dies of the double pneumonia he develops as a result of his chill. What parallels, we wonder, did Montgomery’s contemporaries draw between the misguided children and the young soldiers of the war acting under orders? Perhaps it is only in the sceptical 1990s that the parallel would be so sickeningly obvious. Perhaps Montgomery intended only that we see how courageous Carl is; he is willing to suffer for the code he trusts, and his heart is in the right place, even if Jerry’s judgment is not fair.
Shy, delicate Una is perhaps the bravest of all the children and the one who most closely fits a culturally endorsed sex-role stereotype – she is feminine, self-sacrificing, self-effacing, gentle, kind, and nurturing. Perhaps most in need of care herself, Una struggles valiantly to protect others. Her first act of real courage is to go to Miss Cornelia (Mrs Marshall Elliot), of whom she is afraid, and ask her to adopt Mary Vance. Braver still is her mission to Rosemary West, to ask her to marry her father, John Meredith. Mary Vance, that scrappy bearer of colourful misinformation, has told Una that stepmothers are all mean, no matter what they have been like before they marry, and that they invariably turn the father of the children against the children. Much as Una likes Rosemary West, she is terrified of losing her father’s love. But when Una overhears her father talking to himself about Rosemary, she decides that her own happiness must be sacrificed for her father’s. Montgomery pulls out all the sentimental stops here, and has Una make a secret visit to her mother’s wedding dress, stored away in the spare-room closet. The language and image here belong to Victorian, sentimental (orphan) fiction. The old wedding dress itself ‘was still full of a sweet, faint, haunting perfume, like lingering love.’ Una kneels and puts her face against the dress: ‘“Mother,” she whispered to the gray silk gown, “I will never forget you, mother, and I’ll always love you best. But I have to do it, mother, because father is so very unhappy. I know you wouldn’t want him to be unhappy. And I will be very good to her, mother, and try to love her, even if she is like Mary Vance said stepmothers always were’” (330). Una is willing to risk the only adult love she knows in order to fulfil her own code of honour – no one else’s chivalry surpasses this. (We note that Una’s love for her mother makes her sound like Walter, just as Faith’s fiery energy makes her sound like the imaginary general, Jem. Montgomery uses the chivalry of struggle to prefigure conventional romance.)
Roughly treated, rough-tongued Mary Vance is also valiant. Mary is a reminder of the outside world – the brutal world familiar to Lida Marsh – far from the privileges of Rainbow Valley. The Meredith and Blythe children welcome Mary Vance and do what they can to defend her against adult bureaucracy and rules. Mary’s background is a shock; for all the negligence of the manse, the Meredith children have never known cruelty or violence. When the children ask about her family, Mary’s cool unconcern speaks eloquently: ‘“I was two years in the asylum. I was put there when I was six. My ma had hung herself and my pa had cut his throat.” “Holy cats! Why?” said Jerry. “Booze,” said Mary laconically’ (49–50). Mary has run away from her foster home not because of the regular beatings but because she believes she is going to be turned over to someone even worse than Mrs Wiley. She shows real courage in running away when we consider what she knew her punishment would be if Mrs Wiley caught her. Mary’s slang and swearing and jealousy and anger and eventual smugness and self-righteousness make her a wonderfully realistic addition to the novel. The manse children can never forget the tongues and judgment outside their charmed valley so long as Mary is around to carry all information and misinformation to them. Within Rainbow Valley, Mary’s eager adoption of the values of the Meredith and Blythe children speaks forcefully for the shaping powers of generosity and good example. Chivalry (not to mention Christian charity) demands protection for Mary, and the worthy children and adults do well by her. Also her need for protection is a potent reminder of evil in the world – there are Dan Reeses and Mrs Wileys and Kaisers of Germany bent on destroying through ignorance and/or malevolence.
This novel keeps a fairly sharp focus throughout on the Rainbow Valley children who will grow up to fight in and work for the Great War. Montgomery uses Walter’s vision of the Pied Piper to suggest the inexorable movement of the world towards war and to give her novel shape. Just as Browning’s piper was betrayed and so piped away the children of Hamelin in payment for his work, so Britain and Canada and much of Europe failed to heed warnings about the Kaiser of Germany, and hundreds of thousands of young men and women were forced to pay for their elders’ mistake. Walter first sees the Pied Piper one day in Rainbow Valley “when they are all discussing Browning’s story. At first Walter speaks dreamily, but something else seems to speak through him when he says, ‘You’ll wait for us to come back. And we may not come – for we cannot come as long as the Piper plays.’ Walter is proud of the sensation his story makes, but he also feels ‘a queer little chill’ because ‘The Pied Piper had seemed very real to him – as if the fluttering veil that hid the future had for a moment been blown aside in the starlit dusk of Rainbow Valley and some dim glimpse of coming years granted to him’ (84).
At the end of the book the Piper comes again just at sunset when, Walter says, the clouds are ‘towers – and the crimson banners streaming from them. Perhaps a conqueror is riding home from battle – and they are hanging them out to do honour to him.’ And Jem, inspired by Walter, wishes he could go to battle and be a soldier. Walter slips into reverie again and says, ‘The Piper is coming nearer … he is nearer than he was that evening I saw him before. His long, shadowy cloak is blowing around him’; the girls shiver in dread, but Jem leaps up on a hillock and proclaims the final words of the novel: ‘“Let the Piper come and welcome,” he cried, waving his hand. “I’II follow him gladly round and round the world’” (341). Near the beginning and at the end, we share Walter’s vision of the irresistible, relentless Piper. And we know that it is these chivalry-loving children – whether frightened or jubilant – who will be the ones in a very few years to carry Canada through the Great War.
For all Jem’s assurance at the end of the novel, Walter’s vision and the girls’ dread remind us that chivalry has another face: Perhaps because it is a children’s story, the book only hints at the cruelty and terror of the war; perhaps because she wrote it in the final agonizing throes of the war, Montgomery was determined to applaud the bravery of the fighters and workers rather than to expose their naivety. Nevertheless, the bleak side of chivalry is encoded in the book.
We remember that Montgomery quickly switches the focus away from Walter’s murderous energy in his fight with Dan Reese and on to his grim satisfaction at a deed well done. But the murderous energy is there, and we have seen the little girls weeping in fear of it, even though the little boys cheer Walter’s victory. At the very end of the novel when Walter sees the Piper again, the sunset city fades into grey, and Jem leaps up to wave his boyish comrades on to imagined thrills and splendours of battle, the resulting picture is surely as chilling as it is inspiring. Like the carefree knights often depicted in romance, Jem is eager to fight – any fight, anywhere. The war could not have been fought had thousands not responded with Jem’s boyish, unthinking enthusiasm. In Montgomery’s terms, evil would have won had the lads of the maple leaf and Britain’s other allies not sprung to England’s side with just this alacrity; but Montgomery herself was under no illusions about the quality of life in the trenches – nor about the senseless loss of promising lives. We remember that she used as the motto for Anne’s House of Dreams lines from a poem by Rupert Brooke, one of the war’s casualties. And her awareness makes the final scene of this novel both touching and subtly ambiguous. Jem’s energy may be heartening because it is honest and warm and brave, but it is also heart-breaking because it is ignorant of the truth of war.
The various, perhaps conflicting, emotions evoked by the concluding pages of the novel are quietly encoded in the book itself. After all, when we look closely at situations involving adherence to a code of honour, the code itself seems seriously flawed: Ellen’s and Rosemary’s vow is unjust; the Good Conduct Club punishments are too harsh; the fight between Dan and Walter almost goes too far; Faith’s repeated attempts to square herself with the community get her into more trouble. An allusion to Tennyson suggests a dual reading of the novel’s chivalry and of the book’s overall comment on the war. We remember that when Faith describes Walter’s face to Una, she says he looked ‘like Sir Galahad in that poem father read us on Saturday’ (185). On the very next page she tells Una she is going to tie her colours on Walter’s arm, since ‘he’s my knight’ (186). Tennyson wrote two poems about Sir Galahad, a short piece in 1842 simply entitled ‘Sir Galahad,’ and a long section of the book ‘The Holy Grail’ in the lengthy Idylls of the King, published first in 1869. The difference between the tone of the two pieces is remarkable. The first depicts Galahad as a powerful and almost jaunty knight, proud of his prowess and his purity. The second shows Galahad as an unswervingly pious, no-nonsense knight who presses forward through darkness and decay, led by a vision. In the context of the full Idylls of the King, ‘The Holy Grail’ is the saddest book, for Arthur begs his knights not to go on the quest, knowing that only a tenth of them will return and that with their passing will pass the glory of the Round Table.
The difference between the two pictures of Galahad is really the difference between Jem’s exuberant view of combat and Walter’s grim determination. We cannot be sure which poem Faith’s father read to them, but the shorter piece makes no mention of ladies’ tying on of colours, and the long Idylls is full of such detail. Besides, it is quite possible Montgomery intended us to think of both poems, for both were familiar to readers of her time, especially readers hoping to find in Tennyson’s descriptions of war some grand reason for the fighting present-day England had undertaken.
The rhythm of the first Galahad poem makes the words sound jolly even when they are not. The prancing music (of alternating rhyme and alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter) matches Galahad’s surety:
My good blade carves the casques of men,
My tough lance thrusteth sure,
My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure. (1–4)
The whole of The Idylls of the King is written in the measured dignity of blank verse, and this noble Galahad is compelled forward by a holy ‘blood-red’ vision:
And hither am I come; and never yet
Hath what thy sister taught me first to see,
This Holy Thing, failed from my side, nor come
Covered, but moving with me night and day,
Fainter by day, but always in the night
Blood-red, and sliding down the blackened marsh
Blood-red, and on the naked mountain top
Blood-red, and in the sleeping mere below
Blood-red. And in the strength of this I rode,
Shattering all evil customs everywhere … (468–77)
Only Galahad completes the quest, and some good knights tempted away from Camelot die on their fruitless journey. Montgomery’s readers, and any now who read Idylls of the King, would recall Arthur’s sorrow when the quest is over and so many good men have died needlessly.
Both attitudes to war (or quest) – that it is glorious and that it is desperate and bloody and something to be averted – are suggested in Montgomery’s Rainbow Valley. At the end of the novel, the shades of mourning women and the chill of Walter’s fearful vision are placed deliberately beside Jem’s youthful gallantry and the red of the maple leaf. Montgomery’s own belief in the necessity of the Great War no doubt made her downplay her own acknowledgment of the wisdom of Idylls of the King. She chose not to explore here the ‘blood-red’ murderous mist before Walter’s eyes, nor to envision the slaughter on the battlefields of Europe. But true to her own clear perception of what war – any war – involves, she makes this child Walter grow in Rilla of Ingleside, a far more graphic book, into a Galahad of the Idylls. Though he is at first too horrified to enlist, the adult Walter is goaded by visions and, when he finally goes to war, he there pursues the grail relentlessly, charging through the charred quagmire of lost kingdoms until he, like Galahad, reaches the ‘celestial city,’ a conquering hero – dead.
Children are the life and centre of Rainbow Valley. Even the love story of the novel between John Meredith and Rosemary West supports the focus on the young – John wants a mother for his children as well as love for himself; Rosemary would like to mother the manse children as well as to find in John the soul mate she thought she had forfeited in her teens with the death of her young lover. It is interesting that, in this novel about values and chivalry, the obstacle to Rosemary’s marriage to John is a sacred vow Rosemary made to her sister, Ellen. Ellen will not release Rosemary from her promise to live always with Ellen and never to marry, and so Rosemary – never unchivalrously breathing the truth about her sister’s selfishness – refuses John’s offer. Ellen feels no such scruples herself, and when Norman Douglas proposes to her, she tells him about the pact made with Rosemary, though she does not tell him Rosemary has refused John Meredith because of it. Selfish though she may be, Ellen in her turn refuses to marry Norman – even though Rosemary has released her from the vow – because she will not leave Rosemary to live by herself, and Rosemary refuses to live with Norman Douglas (it is a relief to see that the gentle Rosemary has enough gumption to resist sacrificing herself completely for Ellen). All in all, the sisters’ double courtship is a romantic Gordian knot that only a child’s innocence can cut. And of course, herself something of a heroine in her refusal to betray Ellen and also in her refusal to betray herself by living in the same house with Norman Douglas, Rosemary rightly characterizes Una: ‘You’re a darling – a heroine–’ (334).
The adult heroine of this children’s (chivalry) novel is not Anne Blythe, but Rosemary West. A distant cousin of Leslie West Moore Ford, Rosemary belongs to the Four Winds world of love and faith and home. With her some of the romantic symbolism of Anne’s House of Dreams is revived. As with Anne and Leslie and Captain Jim, we associate Rosemary with the firelight of home, the beacon of hope, and the star of love. In Rainbow Valley Montgomery is careful to revive the image of the Four Winds light early on. We remember that at the end of Anne’s House of Dreams the lighthouse ‘star was gleaming northward’ (AHD 291) and that from the garret of the newly purchased Morgan house (later named Ingleside) you could see its light. In Rainbow Valley Una comforts Mary Vance in the garret of the manse, and she and Mary comment on the light. Una says, ‘I love to watch it,’ and Mary tells how it sustained her: ‘Do you? So do 1.1 could see it from the Wiley loft and it was the only comfort I had. When I was all sore from being licked I’d watch it and forget about the places that hurt. I’d think of the ships sailing away and away from it and wish I was on one of them sailing far away too – away from everything. In winter nights when it didn’t shine, I just felt real lonesome’ (58).
The lighthouse in this novel, too, suggests the power of love. We are reminded of Captain Jim’s lighthouse and of the windows of Leslie Moore’s home in the image Montgomery uses to describe John Meredith’s view of Rosemary West’s windows. Mr Meredith has gone to visit the sympathetic Anne, but she is not home, and ‘As he gazed rather hopelessly over the landscape the sunset light struck on a window of the old West homestead on the hill. It flared out rosily like a beacon of good hope’ (153). Later, when John Meredith is on his way to propose to Rosemary West, he is aware of the home lights of Ingleside and compares them with the lights of the West home: ‘On the right the lights of Ingleside gleamed through the maple grove with the genial lure and invitation which seems always to glow in the beacons of a home where we know there is love and good-cheer and welcome for all kin, whether of flesh or spirit … but tonight he did not look that way. Far on the western hill gleamed a paler but more alluring star’ (216). The identification of home light with the lighthouse and with the love star is Montgomery’s deliberate repetition of the earlier novel’s poetic pattern. To readers not knowing Anne’s House of Dreams, the imagery is obvious enough; but to those who know it from the preceding novel, the repetition here of the images is a confirmation of faith – all that is good of the traditions of Four Winds is alive and well for the children of Anne and for Rosemary West, John Meredith, and the Meredith children. In the very last chapter of Rainbow Valley when Anne heaps up a driftwood hearth fire, we are reminded of Captain Jim’s practice of bringing Anne driftwood for the fires of the house of dreams. Captain Jim’s traditions live on, and the hearth fires warm the homeland. But Rosemary West is this novel’s romantic Hestia.
Rosemary’s romance with John Meredith is touching partly for its realism – it is easy to imagine its not working out for the hesitant lovers – and partly because it is fairy tale, and thus a perfect complement for the children’s chivalry. John, the knight, comes to rescue Rosemary, the princess, and Ellen, the dragon, bars the way. The narrator prompts us to think in these terms, saying of Ellen’s determination to keep John off, ‘But not even the grimmest of amiable dragons can altogether prevent a certain change of eye and smile and eloquent silence, and so the minister’s courtship progressed after a fashion’ (222). As soon as John appears, Rosemary – long content with buried romance and old memories – begins to yearn for life. Montgomery describes Rosemary’s abrupt change with a subtle, mournful echo of Tennyson’s romantic ‘Lady of Shalott’4 and the familiar image of the passionate red rose. Rosemary has just faced Ellen’s warning reminder of her vow: ‘Upstairs, in her room, Rosemary sat for a long while looking out of the window across the moonlit garden to the distant, shining harbour. She felt vaguely upset and unsettled. She was suddenly tired of outworn dreams. And in the garden the petals of the last red rose were scattered by a sudden little wind. Summer was over – it was autumn’ (141). Tennyson’s poem ends in tragedy for the Lady of Shalott, and the dying red rose suggests that nature itself mourns with Rosemary and at the same time urges her to accept John Meredith before winter comes in earnest. Ultimately, Una brings springtime to the fairy tale when she acts out her own chivalry and rescues her father from despair. Chivalry, romance, and fairy tale are neatly tied together.
We spend more time thinking about Rosemary West than about Anne Blythe. After all, the Anne of this novel is really only a reminder of her earlier self. She is not a real person. She speaks to defend the manse children and to remind us of their similarities with her, but she is no longer an active individual. This Anne is a dreamy woman (maybe the Anne of Anne of Avonlea grown up?) in whom everyone wants to confide – Faith, Mr Meredith, her own sons and daughters, Miss Cornelia. We take everyone’s word for it that Anne is alivt; and well, for she seems most often to have just left. The narrator and other characters assure us by frequent reference to her that she is alive somewhere, and the book is at great pains to show Rosemary West as a kind of Anne-in-training. Faith wants to tell Mrs Blythe all about Adam, but Mrs Blythe has just left, and Rosemary persuades Faith to confide in her. Later Faith says to Una, and their father overhears: ‘She is just lovely, I think … Just as nice as Mrs Blythe – but different’ (214). For Mr Meredith, and presumably the initiated reader, this praise is the gold seal of approval. Anne is used throughout the book as a measure for others’ claims to forgiveness or indulgence. When, for example, Jem Blythe wants to give the Meredith children advice about setting up the Good Conduct Club, he refers to his mother’s assessment of them as proof to themselves that they are redeemable: ‘Mother says you’re all too impulsive, just as she used to be’ (246). From the first mention of the manse children and all their scrapes, Anne has assumed the attitude she maintains throughout: ‘“Every word you say convinces me more and more that the Merediths belong to the race that knows Joseph,” said Mistress Anne decidedly’ (17). Her recognition of them and her approval of them (apart from her slight shock over Faith’s bare legs in church) is a repeated reminder that this new Rainbow Valley world is really the inheritor of the values of Avonlea and Four Winds.
In the romance of Rosemary West and John Meredith5 we find the imagery of Anne’s House of Dreams revived. In John Meredith’s children we find kindred spirits for the young Blythes. In the adult and child values of the novel we find Montgomery explaining to us the inevitability of the Great War, given the collective chivalry of places such as Four Winds and the nature of the struggle in Europe. Unlike the shrewd, vocal pacifist Nellie McClung, Montgomery believed that fighting was necessary for Canada once Germany had begun its offensive. But Montgomery did not endorse fairy-tale versions of the bloodshed, and in writing a novel full of pride in Canada’s soldiers and workers, she is careful not to suggest that blind chauvinism is a good thing. Jem may exult, but Walter is sickened by blood.
The last three pages of this novel are lyrical – Montgomery’s narrator takes over the description of the red sunset, with its blood-red banners, and compresses into a few sentences a full commentary on the anguish of the war and on the childlike innocence of both the young men who signed up to fight in it and the young women left at home to carry on without them:
The shadow of the Great Conflict had not yet made felt any forerunner of its chill. The lads who were to fight, and perhaps fall, on the fields of France and Flanders, Gallipoli and Palestine, were still roguish schoolboys with a fair life in prospect before them: the girls whose hearts were to be wrung were yet fair little maidens a-star with hopes and dreams.
Slowly the banners of the sunset city gave up their crimson and gold; slowly the conqueror’s pageant faded out. Twilight crept over the valley and the little group grew silent. (340)
The readers of the novel knew just how deadly would be the darkness and the cold when the sun had set; even within the context of the children’s immediate story, the final chill is impressive. Walter’s vision and Jem’s exuberance are then together poignant reminders of the quality of talent and energy the darkness claimed.
Montgomery finished writing Rainbow Valley on 24 December 1918, fondly believing that war was over and hoping that the sacrifices made on ‘the fields of France and Flanders, Gallipoli and Palestine’ (340) would satisfy the Piper, perhaps even usher in a better world. She did not know that the war’s cruellest blow for her was to fall in another month with the death of Frede Campbell or that she would live to see Europe again inflamed by war in twenty years’ time. In the ending of the fifth Anne book, in which she celebrated and romanticized the childhood faith and chivalry of Canada’s embryonic soldiers and wartime workers, Montgomery was assuring her readers that the symbolic home fires of Four Winds would continue to burn as ruddily as the maple leaf, as steadfastly as the lighthouse star.