More than any of her other novels, Rilla of Ingleside (1920) is Montgomery’s celebration of the female. It is an authentic war novel, Canada’s only contemporary fictionalized woman’s account of the First World War, and Montgomery wrote it as a ‘tribute to the girlhood of Canada’ (Gillen 79). She dedicated it to Frede Campbell MacFarlane, her dearest friend, who had become a war bride and had died in January 1919 of the Spanish flu, the deadly plague the war brought in its wake. While Anne’s House of Dreams encapsulates home as an attitude and place beyond the desecration of bayonet or trench, and Rainbow Valley recreates the childhood of the nation’s soldiers and workers, Rilla of Ingleside follows the battles of the war and shows how the struggles of the women and men at home parallel the deadly combat on the eastern and western fronts of Europe. This fine novel offers a determinedly romantic view of heroism and the homeland vigil; because the women ‘keep faith’ with the spirit of their men, Canada is able to fight gallantly to preserve home from the ‘ravager.’
As the third of the war books, Rilla of Ingleside repeats some of the images and devices of the previous two novels. This novel begins, as Rainbow Valley began, with local news, the comfortable gossip of Glen St Mary. The same characters – Anne, Miss Cornelia (Mrs Marshall Elliot), and Susan Baker – discuss current events and catch us up on the doings of all the Ingleside and manse children. Here the lighthouse is also an important emblem and presence; colourful descriptive passages illustrate moments of intense emotion; romance and chivalry play parts in the self-styled roles of the young people; small scenes portray in miniature the larger dramas of life; the Pied Piper is frequently invoked. But Rilla of Ingleside is a novel of sacrifice and nightmare. Evil and barbarism are believed to be the foes, and even the Presbyterian minister, John Meredith, preaches Montgomery’s own belief about this war, using as a text Hebrews 9:22, ‘Without shedding of blood there is no remission of sins’ (51). Every symbol takes on new significance; every echo from earlier books has a sinister reverberation here. The chivalry of Rainbow Valley is concentrated in Walter, but Walter himself sees plainly the blood and cruelty of trench warfare. Jem’s boyish enthusiasm for jolly swashbuckling is sobered by the reality of rats and mud and vermin and sodden rations and acres of stiffening bodies. The lighthouse is a symbol of the old world – during an innocent dance for young people, held at the lighthouse, comes the announcement of war. News comes to mean only war news – everything is measured by doings in Europe. Even the Pied Piper, Walter’s childhood symbol of distant struggle, becomes the literal call to arms of war and the relentless, irresistible ‘dance of death’ for the young.
Montgomery used passages from her own diaries to recreate in Rilla of Ingleside the impact of European news on those who waited at home. Well over a hundred pages of the second published selection of Montgomery’s journals chronicle her responses to the battles of the war. She uses her journal’s very words throughout the novel – but gives them to different characters. Gertrude Oliver speaks much of Montgomery’s gloom and dreams Montgomery’s own dreams; Rilla learns to speak with the anguish and thrill of soul Montgomery felt; Anne occasionally slumps with Montgomery’s fears but more often rallies with Montgomery’s determination; Gilbert teases Susan with some of Montgomery’s own doubts (though Gilbert probably sounds more like Ewan Macdonald than Maud Montgomery Macdonald); John Meredith finds strength in the words that inspire Montgomery; sensitive, poetic Walter speaks with Montgomery’s voice; Susan Baker’s red-hot patriotism was Montgomery’s own. Authenticity breathes through the pages of the novel, and the reincarnation of Montgomery’s words – summaries of news dispatches as weh as summaries of emotional responses – sound appropriate in their concentrated, fictionalized context. The virtually unrelieved anguish of the real journals is leavened in fiction with humour, irony, and drama. Heroism takes many shapes.
Rilla of Ingleside is about heroism and womanhood.1 The novel is invaluable as a social record, but it is also a wonderful study of psychology – of what the women left behind use to support themselves, what fictions they create to make the days and months and years bearable. At first it seems that the glory and the sacrifice will be all male, but while the men fight heroically in the trenches and later in the air, the women become heroines at home. When they first receive news that England has declared war on Germany, Rilla feels that her first grown-up party is spoiled and that her romantic evening is over. Moments before, she and Kenneth Ford have been sitting outside the lighthouse in the moonlight together, and now, she reflects bitterly (with obvious help from the narrator), ‘His thoughts were full of this Great Game which was to be played out on blood-stained fields with empires for stakes – a Game in which women-kind could have no part. Women … just had to sit and cry at home’ (36). When Walter confesses to Rilla that he does not want to go to war because he is nauseated by the thoughts of pain and suffering, he expresses his self-contempt thus: ‘“I – I should have been a girl,” Walter concluded in a burst of passionate bitterness’ (47). But soon enough, with the young men away and all the work of running the home and community and keeping up the spirits of those who did not go, the women find their own heroism. The humble, earnest words Rilla speaks to her mother are the focus for the novel: ‘Mother, I want to do something. I’m only a girl – I can’t do anything to win the war – but I must do something to help at home’ (53). By the end of the novel we find that the apparently passive, apparently secondary role the women take is essential to the war effort and, equally importantly, to the continuation of a life of values and vision after the war.
We see very little of Anne in the book – she is there to mourn the going of Jem and Walter and Shirley, and the death of Walter, and we see her occasionally as she contemplates Rilla’s growing steadiness or some special campaign or celebration. But this Anne, like the Anne of Rainbow Valley, is a mere place marker for her former self. The energy of the book is with the other characters, and Anne serves sometimes as a device within the narrative, an audience for Rilla’s resolves or a recipient of Susan Baker’s pungent remarks. Even the death of her son Walter, a centrally important event in the novel, is seen more through Rilla’s eyes than through Anne’s. When she hears that Jem will not be able to come home before he is shipped overseas, she speaks in a voice that in its paleness and attempted humour characterizes much of her presence in the entire novel: “‘Perhaps it is as well,” said the disappointed mother. “I don’t believe I could bear another parting from him – now that I know the war will not be over as soon as we hoped when he left first. Oh, if only – but no, I won’t say it! Like Susan and Rilla,” concluded Mrs Blythe, achieving a laugh, “I am determined to be a heroine”’ (80). She serves as a reminder in the novel as a whole of the millions of quiet, nameless women who watched their sons and brothers and lovers and husbands and friends go to the front. And Montgomery makes it clear that for this she is heroic, for this and for running the Red Cross and carrying on her daily life. Nevertheless, this Anne’s heroism is suggested rather than explored. Anne has finally been absorbed completely by the roles conventionally prescribed for her – ones that Montgomery challenges only obliquely.
Rilla is active and at times reminds us a little of the young Anne Shirley. When she declares to her mother her determination to be a heroine, she is a vision the young Anne would have imagined for herself. She is a ‘slim, white-robed thing, with a flower-like face and starry young eyes aglow with feeling’ (59), and she says, ‘I have been thinking it all over and I have decided that I must be as brave and heroic and unselfish as I can possibly be’ (53). Anne Blythe listens to her daughter’s italics, and she does not smile.
Rilla’s heroism is impressive and inspiring because it grows with her. Like Walter, she is not brave and fearless to begin with, and she has to make painful leaps in soul development. She is a believable adolescent – more believable than Anne Shirley is at her age. Where Anne was simply impulsive or dreamy, Rilla is selfish and vain. She is even sarcastic to her mother in true teenager style and must learn to become generous and humble in order to keep faith with the women around her and with the men and women overseas. Because Rilla must develop as each new hardship comes to her, she is an inspiration for Walter as well as an uncritical admirer of him.
When the book opens, fifteen-year-old Bertha Marilla Blythe is content to laugh and sing and dance all day. She does not like school and has none of the ambition that drives Nan or Di or Faith Meredith; Gilbert calls her his one ‘lily of the field,’ and she is pleased with the epithet (15). Apart from looking pretty and having a good time she thinks she would like to be for poet Walter what Dorothy Wordsworth was for her brother, William (13). Such a sunny, thoughtless creature cannot realize the war, and when the grown-ups around her, including Walter, speak of it, she wishes it would go away and refuses to think about it. Montgomery does a wonderful job at the opening of the book in making Rilla seem believably adolescent and also likable. During preparations for Rilla’s first dance, the fateful evening at the Four Winds lighthouse, Miss Oliver worries aloud about news from Europe and hopes war can be averted. Rilla’s cheerful reply captures the unthinking insularity of the thousands who could not realize what was happening. Because Rilla is a mere child in awareness, and is looking forward to her first party, we forgive her unconsciousness. An unconscious adult – unless it is an eccentric like Susan Baker – could not be so charming. Rilla says of the possibility that war will not be averted: ‘It will be dreadful if it isn’t, I suppose. But it won’t really matter much to us, will it? I think a war would be so exciting. The Boer war was, they say, but I don’t remember anything about it, of course. Miss Oliver, shall I wear my white dress tonight or my new green one?’ (17). And, shortly afterwards, when Miss Oliver tells Rilla her frightening (prophetic) dream about waves rolling all the way up the Glen to the steps of Ingleside and touching her hem with blood, the uninitiated Rilla is immediately anxious, though not about blood: ‘I hope it doesn’t mean there’s a storm coming up from the east to spoil the party’ (19). Miss Oliver’s indulgent sarcasm is truly benign: ‘“Incorrigible fifteen!” said Miss Oliver dryly. “No, Rilla-my-Rilla, I don’t [think] there is any danger that it foretells anything so awful as that”’ (19).
But Rilla is intelligent and kind, and her unconsciousness is lost quickly with the events of that evening. She is soon making her vow to be a heroine, adopting a war baby, running the junior Reds, and – most difficult of all – trying to comfort her beloved Walter, who does not want to enlist. Rilla’s deep love for Walter, paralleled deliberately in the text with the sentimental story of Dog Monday’s instinctive worship of and vigil for Jem, makes her develop more rapidly than anything else. When Walter does finally enlist, and is for a moment exultant in his triumph over his own fears, Rilla, in listening to him, is transformed from adolescent into woman: ‘Rilla did not sleep that night. Perhaps no one at Ingleside did except Jims. The body grows slowly and steadily but the soul grows by leaps and bounds. It may come to its full stature in an hour. From that night Rilla Blythe’s soul was the soul of a woman in its capacity for suffering, for strength, for endurance’ (125). Only a fully conscious, expansive-souled woman could realize the truth in what Rilla tells her mother the next morning. In Rilla’s dictum we hear Montgomery’s assessment of the quality of women’s heroism – it is all love and sacrifice. Anne says that Rilla must bear up before Walter and ‘not add to the bitterness of his sacrifice,’ and Rilla’s new womanhood makes her reply with hard truth: ‘Our sacrifice is greater than his … Our boys give only themselves. We give them’ (126). In depicting the weary years of waiting for the war to be over and for the men to return, Montgomery supports Rilla’s new understanding.
Rilla’s first real act of heroism, the rescuing of Jims from certain death, is typical of this book’s mixture of realism and comedy. The genuine pathos of the baby’s plight is undercut by Rilla’s fastidious dismay. The father of the baby has gone off to England to enlist, the mother is lying dead in a squalid little shack, and the woman who is watching out for the infant until the mother’s funeral is over is getting drunk and doesn’t like children anyway: Mrs Conover ‘put away her pipe and took an unblushing swig from a black bottle she produced from a shelf near her. “It’s my opinion the kid won’t live long. It’s sickly. Min never had no gimp and I guess it hain’t either. Likely it won’t trouble any one long and good riddance, sez I”’ (64). Rilla puts the ugly, naked baby in a soup tureen, gingerly balances it on her lap, and takes it home with her, fondly believing someone else will look after it, as though it is a stray and rather nasty puppy. But Dr Blythe says Susan and Anne are too busy to look after a baby and tells Rilla that, if she won’t do it herself, it must be sent to Hopetown Asylum, where it is sure to die since it is so delicate. Rilla grits her teeth, accepts the challenge, and spends the next four years bringing up the baby with the aid of a book on infant care.
In finding that she can take care of the baby herself, and in finding too that she can manage her peers with the ease with which she changes the baby, Rilla comes into her own as an individual, a heroine. Out of the chaos of the war she finds reserves within herself. Caring for the baby teaches her to understand something beyond herself, to sacrifice for someone else. Montgomery is not suggesting through Rilla that all young girls should have to take care of babies – but she uses the baby to suggest Rilla’s own self-centredness and self-containment before the war. Having learned that the nurturing of the baby must take precedence over her own cares or pleasures, having suffered through the war in daily dread of what the news would bring about her brothers and sweetheart and childhood comrades, Rilla Blythe becomes an emblem of tried and tested young Canadian womanhood. Precisely because she is emblematic she is also inspirational; Rilla did what Montgomery’s readers had also done, or (so they could tell themselves) would have done.
Since to Montgomery the war against Germany was sacred, a holy cause, we should not be surprised to find the heroine, Rilla, and her war baby depicted as madonna and child (just as Leslie Moore and baby Jem are pictured in Anne’s House of Dreams when Montgomery is endorsing home). When Ken Ford comes to say goodbye to Rilla, little Jims, the war baby, cries, and Rilla finally has to bring him down to the porch with her to share Ken’s farewell. The idealized picture is characteristic of the novel’s romantic view of womanhood and sacrifice: Jims ‘cuddled down against her just where a gleam of light from the lamp in the living room struck across his hair and turned it into a halo of gold against her breast. Kenneth sat very still and silent, looking at Rilla – at the delicate, girlish silhouette of her, her long lashes, her dented lip, her adorable chin. In the dim moonlight, as she sat with her head bent a little over Jims, the lamplight glinting on her pearls until they glistened like a slender nimbus, he thought she looked exactly like the Madonna that hung over his mother’s desk at home. He carried that picture of her in his heart to the horror of the battlefields of France’ (139). Rilla may achieve individuality in her diary and may indeed develop ‘gimp,’ as the drunken Mrs Conover calls it, but she is certainly meant to be a cultural symbol worth dying for. The war against Germany becomes a crusade to restore what Montgomery’s contemporaries understood as purity. (For wartime anger against icon, see Gilbert 293–7.)
In Rilla’s and Ken’s story, we find several kinds of romance. For Rilla, he is the white knight charging off to war; for Ken she is idealized woman – virgin mother and waiting sweetheart. In their love story Montgomery ties together all the most conventional roles and images of romance, worship, and war. Truly they are the new generation of chivalry. In this novel of authentic feeling, however, Montgomery does not freeze Rilla into the image of a young madonna and leave her there. Instead, we find Rilla’s very worldly thoughts belying the picture she creates for Ken. He may romanticize her into icon, but we find her, in this farewell scene, confused and angry and eager to get rid of the baby. Rilla is furious that Jims will not stop crying and is spoiling her romantic last evening with Ken (just as she had been dismayed earlier when announcement of the war ruined her party at the lighthouse). But Rilla is no longer so selfish or self-absorbed as she was at the dance, and Jims makes her forget her anger here when he speaks for the very first time, and says her name. In her happiness over Jims’ word she even forgets Ken, and this is when he sees her as a madonna. The scene is emblematic for both Ken and Rilla, but in complexly different ways. He is affirmed in his view of sanctified womanhood and in his role as protector and worshipper; ironically, she overcomes her role as adored object only when she forgets Ken and hugs Jims and is thus spontaneously nurturing, maternal, and unselfconscious (as stereotype would have her in the first place). The scene begins with conventional romance and ends with adolescent indignation (Susan returns and determines to help Rilla entertain Ken), and in its middle Montgomery both preserves and questions romantic stereotypes.
Throughout the novel Rilla is a flesh-and-blood girl who grows painfully and matures perceptibly as she assumes an increasing number of war-related responsibilities. The parallels between the war struggles and Rilla’s home struggles are insistent throughout. Walter says of Rilla’s spirit: ‘It took more courage for you to tackle that five pounds of new infant, Rilla-my-Rilla, than it would take for Jem to face a mile of Germans’ (70). Other campaigns include the organizing and running of the junior Red Cross and of a concert for the starving Belgians, bitter ordeals similar to the ones Montgomery herself experienced in Leaskdale amid querulous parishioners.
It takes considerable strategy to arrange a war wedding. Rilla persuades Miranda Pryor, daughter of the detested German sympathizer Whiskers-on-the-Moon Pryor, to defy her father and marry Joe Milgrave on his last leave before going overseas. The spiritless Miranda, the antics of her spoiled and overfed dog, who groans through the entire ceremony, and the incessant weeping of the groom make Rilla think that some battles are not worth fighting. Though she has defeated Mr Pryor, the victory seems flat and pointless – not worth the tremendous cost in energy and emotion. Rilla’s questioning of the value of fighting is answered in Montgomery’s final comments on the newlyweds. When Miranda says goodbye to Joe (after their brief honeymoon in the appropriately emblematic Four Winds lighthouse), Rilla sees in Miranda’s eyes that which has transformed the colourless little bride into a woman who keeps the flame of homeland alive: ‘All that mattered was that rapt, sacrificial look in her eyes – that ever-burning, sacred fire of devotion and loyalty and fine courage that she was mutely promising Joe she and thousands of other women would keep alive at home while their men held the western front’ (168). Rilla has helped Miranda to belong to the sisterhood.
Even an episode in the novel that appears to be purely gratuitous, or simply an echo of Anne Shirley’s experience with the ipecac bottle and the romantic rescue of Minnie May Barry from croup (in Anne of Green Gables), has its parallels with the war. Rilla and Susan have tried every remedy they can think of for Jims, who is strangling to death on a thickening membrane in his throat, when Mary Vance suddenly appears in the middle of the snowstorm. She coolly sizes up the situation and smokes out the membrane with sulphur. The episode comes in the novel just after Walter has died and Rilla has read his last letter. In this bleak space in Rilla’s life, the rescue suggests that defeat is not inevitable, even with the threat of death. In the midst of the struggle to save the baby’s life, Rilla, as she recorded later in her diary, thought: ‘And I felt so utterly helpless. It was just as if we were fighting a relentless foe without any real weapons, – just like those poor Russian soldiers who had only their bare hands to oppose to German machine guns’ (206). Since the tardy U.S. participation in the First World War follows so soon in the narrative upon the rescue of little Jims, one is almost tempted to see the bragging but undeniably efficient Mary as a soul twin for the American public. (Perhaps others made the connection, too, since Montgomery’s American publishers were not pleased with the representation of the United States in the book [Journals 2: 404].) In any case, the surprise rescue of the war baby Jims reminds us of unexpected aid coming at the eleventh hour to those who have done their best.
Walter’s death is at the heart of the novel, just as his fight with Dan Reese is at the centre of Rainbow Valley. In describing Rilla’s view of the world after hearing of Walter’s death, Montgomery draws on her diary entries following the death of her beloved cousin and best friend, Frede Campbell. In the diary, Montgomery says: ‘When I returned to the apartment Wednesday night I found that my martyrdom was over. The fierce flame of torture had at last burned itself out – and gray ashes were over all my world. I was calm and despairing’ (Journals 2: 301). In the novel, the narrator says of Rilla: ‘The fierce flame of agony had burned itself out and the grey dust of its ashes was over all the world’ (196). The war has taught Rilla that she can endure almost anything, and now she must learn that she can survive the death of her beloved Walter. And Walter’s death is clearly emblematic of something else in the book – of the spirit of sacrifice itself. Walter, who so loved life and beauty, who wrote the most famous and inspirational poem of the war, ‘The Piper,’ who did not want to enlist and yet who felt no fear of the evils he could see, is emblematic of the sacrifice of youth and young dreams. His last letter, written the night before he is shot and arriving days after his death, inspires Rilla with its acknowledgment of truth and its determination for victory:
I’ll never write the poems I once dreamed of writing – but I’ve helped to make Canada safe for the poets of the future – for the workers of the future – ay, and the dreamers, too – for if no man dreams, there will be nothing for the workers to fulfil, – the future, not of Canada only but of the world – when the ‘red rain’ of Langemarck and Verdun shall have brought forth a golden harvest – not in a year or two, as some foolishly think, but a generation later, when the seed sown now shall have had time to germinate and grow. Yes, I’m glad I came, Rilla. It isn’t only the fate of the little sea-born island I love that is in the balance – nor of Canada – nor of England. It’s the fate of mankind … And you will tell your children of the Idea we fought and died for – teach them it must be lived for as well as died for, else the price paid for it will have been for nought. This will be part of your work, Rilla. And if you – all you girls back in the homeland – do it, then we who don’t come back will know that you have not ‘broken faith’ with us. (199)
Rilla knows that she will always ‘keep faith’ with Walter and shape her world so that his sacrifice will not have been in vain, and she begins anew by making a supreme sacrifice of her own – she lets Una Meredith keep Walter’s letter, knowing that Una has nothing else of his and suspecting Una’s wordless love for him. The letter itself is Montgomery’s message about the war – all Walter’s fierce determination and faith are echoes from Montgomery’s journal entries. Perhaps in making Walter the hero, Sir Galahad, who is willing to be sacrificed for a noble idea, Montgomery was able to make some sense of her own immediate grief over Frede Campbell as well as to find a central figure whose worthiness makes him symbolic of the thousands like him who lay ‘in Flanders fields.’
Montgomery is careful throughout the novel to emphasize the bond between Rilla and Walter. We identify Walter (as we did his mother, the young Anne Shirley) with beauty, and especially with the loveliness of the glen and Rainbow Valley. Most of the nature descriptions in the novel are of Rainbow Valley, and most of the passages are given as though through the eyes of Rilla. But Walter is always there, too. The first nature description of the novel is given through Walter’s eyes just after Jem has been reminding Walter of his old vision of the Piper:
How beautiful the old Glen was, in its August ripeness, with its chain of bowery old homesteads, tilled meadows and quiet gardens. The western sky was like a great golden pearl. Far down the harbour was frosted with a dawning moonlight. The air was full of exquisite sounds – sleepy robin whistles, wonderful, mournful, soft murmurs of wind in the twilit trees, rustle of aspen poplars talking in silvery whispers and shaking their dainty, heart-shaped leaves, lilting young laughter from the windows of rooms where the girls were making ready for the dance. The world was steeped in maddening loveliness of sound and colour. He would think only of these things and of the deep, subtle joy they gave him. (20–1)
Already Walter is fighting with himself about the war and knowing that he will have to go away and leave all this familiar beauty behind. He does not have Jem’s eagerness for battle, and that is why Montgomery uses him to speak the inspirational words about the war and the necessary sacrifice he – eventually, freely – makes. In the later descriptive passages we are reminded of Walter simply because everything around Ingleside is so precious to him and because Rilla thinks of him with every beautiful thing she sees. She has loved him so well, Montgomery suggests, that she is indeed as thoughtful of her brother as Dorothy Wordsworth was for ‘William’ (Journals of).
Poetry is important to Rilla of Ingleside in the nature descriptions – though there are only a little over half as many here as in the poetic Anne’s House of Dreams – and in reminding us of a larger context for Walter’s and Rilla’s sacrifices. With Walter chivalry is mentioned directly only briefly, early in the book when he and Rilla and Miss Oliver talk (11), but it is there in everything Walter does. Interestingly, Montgomery has Walter, Rilla, and Miss Oliver quote from Sir Walter Scott when they want to make important statements about their ideas. Rilla quotes from Scott’s romantic Highland poem The Lady of the Lake when she writes in her diary to declare that she wishes she, too, like Jem, could enlist and fight with the men (43). Walter quotes to Rilla from Scott’s romantic battle poem Marmion when he explains to Rilla why he is proud of himself for having enlisted (124). And at the end of the book, when Miss Oliver has had another prophetic dream about the war, she persuades a reluctant Rilla to listen to it when she, too, quotes from The Lady of the Lake (254). These three good friends cherish the same values and obviously eventually see the sacrifices of war in the same way, and Montgomery’s three uses of Scott are (to those familiar with Scott) subtle, almost subliminal, reminders of the quality of their shared vision and code of honour.
Montgomery uses Walter’s Rainbow Valley vision of the Piper, as well as his poem about him,2 to draw together the entire novel. First Walter and Jem discuss Walter’s old dream (20); a chapter entitled ‘The Piper Pipes’ (29) announces the war, and in the same chapter Jem exults in the truth of Walter’s old dream while Walter laments it (34); Walter confesses to Rilla that he cannot enlist, even though ‘The Piper’s music rings in my ears day and night’ (96); on his last evening of leave Walter visits Rainbow Valley with Rilla, and there he sees the vision of the Piper again (130); Rilla watches Ken walk away after his last visit, and the narrator remarks that ‘still the Piper piped and the dance of death went on’ (144); Walter’s poem ‘The Piper’ is published in England and becomes famous around the world (174); after the country battalion marches through the glen before going overseas, the final ceremony includes a reading of ‘The Piper’ (186); the night before Walter dies he sees the Piper clearly again and knows he is among his followers (198); at the Ingleside victory dinner when peace has been declared, Miss Oliver recites Walter’s poem (275). The image of the Pied Piper piping away the boys of the homeland and piping them in death on to victory is both sentimental and poignant and gives continuity to the story of the lives of the children and adults of Canada’s emblematic Rainbow Valley. Montgomery was careful to choose in the Piper an image that suggests simultaneously the helplessness of the listeners and the strength of their united numbers.
By the time Kenneth Ford returns from the war Rilla has changed from the schoolgirl who can look like a madonna to ‘a woman with wonderful eyes and a dented lip, and rose-bloom cheek, – a woman altogether beautiful and desirable – the woman of his dreams’ (284). The novel reads, on this level, like a formula romance. But this level is hardly ever exposed alone – instead, Rilla’s budding love for Ken is kept well in the background of her love for Walter and Jims and the daily grind of junior Reds and sewing and home care. ‘Keeping faith’ is in the forefront of the novel, and some of the forms of heroism it takes give the novel a pathos and humour that are entirely separate from conventional romance.
Rilla is central to many levels of the narrative as the one who must mature to ‘keep faith’ and as one of the women who then endures with admirable strength. The heroism in the novel is often a solemn, even a poetic thing. Nevertheless, the most colourful heroine of Rilla of Ingleside belongs to comedy rather than to poetry. Susan Baker, not Rilla, most often serves in the book as the spirit of Canada. She makes her announcement about her determination to be heroic in characteristic dress and attitude. Standings the foot of Anne’s bed, ‘arrayed in a grey flannel nightgown of strait simplicity … [with] a strip of red woolen worsted tied around her grey hair as a charm against neuralgia,’ she declares, ‘Mrs. Dr. dear, I have made up my mind to be a heroine’ (59). Susan, who in her comfortable sixty-four years before the war had known nothing of world geography, memorizes maps, rehearses war strategy, and argues with the newspapers about the military significance of villages and hillocks. Susan’s indignation over the declaration of war, and especially over the necessity for the eldest Blythe boy to enlist, is expressed eloquently: ‘She had her little store of homely philosophies to guide her through life, but she had nothing to buckler her against the thunderbolts of the week that had just passed. What had an honest, hard-working, Presbyterian old maid of Glen St. Mary to do with a war thousands of miles away? Susan felt that it was indecent that she should have to be disturbed by it’ (50). But she never fails to give the appropriately patriotic response – even forgetting herself on the railway platform when the village has turned out to say farewell to its first batch of recruits. Rilla looks on in amazement to see staid Susan ‘waving her bonnet and hurrahing like a man – had she gone crazy?’ (58)
Susan bangs pots and pans when the Kaiser does anything particularly disgusting, knits drawers full of socks, bakes bags of cakes and sweets to mail to Jem and then Walter at the front, and through it all she lives by the philosophy the women of Canada have found to be most true: ‘Whining and shirking and blaming Providence does not get us anywhere. We have just got to grapple with whatever we have to do whether it is weeding the onion patch, or running the Government. / shall grapple. Those blessed boys have gone to war; and we women, Mrs Dr. dear, must tarry by the stuff and keep a stiff upper lip’ (60). Susan is a delightfully Dickensian eccentric; she mouths Montgomery’s own observations about the war, but is able to give them a comfortable homeyness, or a sentimental poignancy, since we are meant to see her as the staunch woman warrior spirit of Canada – at once a reminder to the boys at the front of the homespun goodness behind them and a symbol to those who cannot go to Europe that the values and traditions of the country will be upheld as long as women like her stand guard. When her lugubrious Mrs Gummidge-like cousin moans that the Germans will probably be in Canada soon, Susan counters: ‘The Huns shall never set foot in Prince Edward Island as long as I can handle a pitchfork’ (248).
One of Susan’s ways of ‘keeping faith’ is to help with the harvest. The farmer is at first dubious that a woman in her mid-sixties can keep up with the vigorous pace of the fields, but Susan triumphs in her ability to outwork any of the men there. The narrator’s description of Susan makes her at once into a symbol of Canadian grit: ‘Susan, standing on a load of grain, her grey hair whipping in the breeze and her skirt kilted up to her knees for safety and convenience – no overalls for Susan, if you please – was neither a beautiful nor a romantic figure; but the spirit that animated her gaunt arms was the self-same one that captured Vimy Ridge and held the German legions back from Verdun’ (224). Susan gives a red-hot speech at a war-bond meeting and demands that all the men there pay up to support their country, and they do. And Susan routs her gloomy cousin Sophia at every bad turn of events, always believing that God is firmly on the side of the Allies. Perhaps the most endearing thing about Susan’s passionate love of home is that she translates everything in the war into something local that she can understand (hence the destruction of ‘Rangs Cathedral’ is appalling to her because she can imagine how she would feel if it were the Glen church [79]). She believes that the Kaiser of Germany knows and cares about everything that happens in Glen St Mary, and she thus takes delight in every local event that suggests upset to Germany. The focus for this antipathy is Whiskers-on-the-Moon, the supposed pacifist, whom Susan and others believe to be a German sympathizer. Moreover, Susan believes he is a German spy who rushes immediately to Germany word of any anti-German goings-on in the Glen. Whiskers-on-the-Moon has the audacity to make an anti-war prayer at a church meeting held to support the morale of the families and friends of the soldiers, and Norman Douglas stops the prayer by grabbing the little man by the throat and shaking him like a rat, loudly denouncing him all the while. Afterwards Susan, who has never countenanced Norman Douglas before, says admiringly, ‘You will never, no, never, Mrs Dr. dear, hear me call Norman Douglas a pagan again … If Ellen Douglas is not a proud woman this night she should be’ (183).
Montgomery thus carefully prepares the way for Susan’s personal encounter with Whiskers-on-the-Moon. The scene in her kitchen is another of those instances where we see acted out domestically what is happening in Europe on the battlefields. Susan is admired by loyal citizens and also, unbeknownst to her, by Whiskers-on-the-Moon, whose daughter, Miranda, much to his disgust, has become a war bride. He knows that when the war is over he will lose his cheap live-in housekeeper, and he eyes the capable Susan Baker as a good and easy catch. Since we know that Susan has entertained herself through the war with imagined torment of Pryor, we expect fireworks when we see him in her kitchen. And we are not disappointed – the scene is delightfully recounted to satisfy expectation. When he proposes to Susan, she loses her head completely. The usually decorous Susan, careful always to apologize elaborately to the Blythes for any behaviour she fears is unladylike, stands stunned for a second by Pryor’s smug proposal, and then, electrified, catches up from the stove a huge iron kettle of boiling dye and chases him out the back door and through the backyard. Fat Whiskers-on-the-Moon almost knocks Anne Blythe over as he lunges past her at the gate, and Susan then plumps down the kettle and confesses. The routing of the German sympathizer on P.E.I. comes close to the end of the war, and Montgomery thus uses it as a comic miniature of the imminent German defeat.
When the miracle of the Marne is repeated, Anne Blythe knows that it is the beginning of the end. Montgomery turns our attention away from Anne or Rilla or Miss Oliver (who has had a dream about victory) and focuses as usual on Susan, whose words remind us of Canada’s danger and of its loss, and yet whose gesture acknowledges the coming end of the death vigil:
‘Thank God,’ said Susan, folding her trembling old hands. Then she added, under her breath, ‘but it won’t bring our boys back.’
Nevertheless, she went out and ran up the flag, for the first time since the fall of Jerusalem. As it caught the breeze and swelled gallantly out above her, Susan lifted her hand and saluted it, as she had seen Shirley do. ‘We’ve all given something to keep you flying,’ she said. ‘Four hundred thousand of our boys gone overseas – fifty thousand of them killed. But – you are worth it!’ The wind whipped her grey hair about her face and the gingham apron that shrouded her from head to foot was cut on lines of economy, not of grace; yet, somehow, just then Susan made an imposing figure. She was one of the women – courageous, unquailing, patient, heroic – who had made victory possible. (255)
In Anne of Green Gables and Anne’s House of Dreams love of home breathes in all the rapturous nature descriptions; in Rilla of Ingleside, the nature descriptions take second place to the colourful slides of Susan Baker’s vigorous gestures.
Because of older women such as Susan, middle-aged women such as Anne, and young women such as Rilla, the homeland ‘keeps faith’ with its men and women overseas. Rilla herself gives credit and modestly takes some: ‘It is mother and Susan who have been this family’s backbone. But I have helped a little, I believe, and I am so glad and thankful’ (267). Montgomery focuses on women throughout the novel, but in doing so she also emphasizes the connections between women and men. Notice, for example, how careful Montgomery is to align Miss Oliver’s mysticism with Walter’s prophetic visions and poetic responses. They are both, as mentioned before, readers of Scott, and it is Miss Oliver who reads Walter’s poems and sees the promise in them. When Anne discusses her in the first chapter, she mentions Miss Oliver’s dreams and says that she has a ‘mystic streak in her’ (9). Montgomery gives us three of these dreams, and all three come true – the first one, as mentioned above, predicts the beginning of war with the tide rushing up the Glen and bloodying Miss Oliver’s skirt; the second involves the holding of the Germans back at Verdun (‘They shall not pass’ 170); the third is the reverse of the first, and heralds the allied victory as the tide quickly recedes from the Glen (254). Even the sceptical Gilbert (who has degenerated in this book to sound very much like the crusty old Doctor Dave whom he replaced in Anne’s House of Dreams) learns not to sneer at Miss Oliver’s dreams. The use of Miss Oliver’s three dreams reinforces the frequent use of Walter’s Piper; vision and dream are shared by the good friends and give the war itself an air of inevitability and high destiny.
Walter’s quality of chivalry is evident in the way he views the war, just as Jem’s and Shirley’s views of the war also suggest their very different estimations of self and responsibility. In describing the differences among the three brothers’ attitudes to war, Montgomery is also suggesting a range of attitudes shared by other young men – and the women who support them – and is also possibly suggesting a difference in the attitude to war that the passing of years brings – Jem is among the first enthusiastic recruits; Walter goes slightly later when the Lusitania atrocities make it clear that evil is the enemy; Shirley enlists late in the war when tenacity rather than high valour is called for: ‘So Shirley went – not radiantly, as to a high adventure, like Jem, not in a white flame of sacrifice, like Walter, but in a cool, business-like mood, as of one doing something, rather dirty and disagreeable, that had just got to be done’ (214). Walter’s ‘white flame of sacrifice’ is related to Miss Oliver’s mysterious dreams, to the shared literature of chivalry and romance and scripture, and particularly to the picture of Miss Oliver as she announces the allied victory she has just heard about over the telephone: ‘Gertrude turned and faced the room dramatically, her dark eyes flashing, her dark face flushed with feeling. All at once the sun broke through the thick clouds and poured through the big crimson maple outside the window. Its reflected glow enveloped her in a weird, immaterial flame. She looked like a priestess performing some mystic, splendid rite’ (274). It is no accident that Montgomery uses the maple leaf and the mystic flame to dramatize the news of victory – and we feel Walter’s presence in the implications of the ‘crimson … glow.’
The sacrificial and the mystic flames belong to vigil, a unifying impulse in the book. Interestingly, the symbol for vigilance in the previous two books has been the lighthouse, and in this novel the lighthouse plays the parts, as already suggested, of the scene for announcing the war and for the honeymoon retreat of the German sympathizer’s disobedient daughter and her soldier. But early in the book, with news of war, the lighthouse supports the flag, and the flag replaces the lighthouse star as the beacon for the homeland during war: ‘Outside, the dawn came greyly in on wings of storm; Captain Josiah, true to his word, ran up the Union Jack at the Four Winds Light and it streamed on the fierce wind against the clouded sky like a gallant unquenchable beacon’ (39). We remember that when the little war bride bids her husband farewell, after their short stay in the lighthouse, she sends him away with her eyes bright with ‘sacred fire of devotion and loyalty and fine courage’ (168). Every time the flag flies or spirits soar, flame is invoked, and sacred vigil is implied. Keeping the faith, tending the flame, legions of Hestias guard the homeland and its symbols.
Montgomery’s war novel is an ingenious, impassioned reconstruction of her own journals. In building her story around Rilla’s developing spirit, Montgomery comments implicitly and explicitly on the demands of sacrifice and love. Though the novel was written as a tribute to Canadian girlhood and womanhood, it was also meant to be a farewell to the Anne series. Montgomery made a ‘dark and deadly vow’ in her journal that this sixth book about Anne would be her last. Moreover, she said she had already been brooding up a new dark-haired, purple-eyed heroine named Emily, and she wanted to write about her (Journals 2: 390). Rilla of Ingleside is in many ways an appropriate conclusion for the Anne books – as Montgomery herself said, Anne ‘belongs to the green, untroubled pastures and still waters of the world before the war’ (Journals 2: 309), and Montgomery wanted to leave Anne’s children with the promise, but not the working out, of a new world (a personal present Montgomery herself was finding ever more difficult in real life at the time). Anne’s youngest (and auburn-haired) child fights her way to adulthood in the novel, ironically keeping a war baby from going to the very asylum in Hopetown that Anne gratefully left to come to Green Gables. And Rilla (named after Marilla) becomes engaged to Kenneth Ford of the House of Dreams lineage, the son Leslie Moore Ford named for her beloved younger brother who was killed before her eyes in childhood. The childhood and the adult friendships of Anne are thus involved in the unfolding of Rilla’s story. Rilla is a living link between the old world and the new. Though she has spunk and eventually comes to be seen as a ‘born manager,’ she is certainly not one of the new women Montgomery’s contemporaries were lauding (Prentice et al. 190–211), nor one, probably, that women of the 1990s can embrace without some qualifiers. Rilla wants no career outside the home; she is not violently moved by the prospect of the vote; she has no interest in high school or college. Anne Shirley had (at least in early life) far more ambitions than her youngest daughter. But Rilla is not a painted doll either, and while she may not be in her culture’s terms a modern woman, she does not fit perfectly the stereotype of contented domesticity – she hates sewing, cooking, and working with a budget. Clearly Rilla is destined to be a wife and mother, but the episode with Mrs Mathilda Pitman (entirely unnecessary as it may appear) at least shows us that Rilla has a will of her own and can stand up for herself. In fact, one gets the feeling that Rilla will pack a lot of living and observing and organizing into her future life with husband and children. At least we are assured that she has the best of the Avonlea and Four Winds and Glen St Mary traditions and values involved in the shaping of her life.
By the end of Rilla of Ingleside, Rilla and Anne have become close friends (the motherless Montgomery was never really comfortable depicting mother-daughter relationships). As keepers of the faith and as kindred spirits they are both richly endowed with the gifts the world around them evidently needs so much (and gives romanticized endorsement for): courage, imagination, faith, (a measure of) independence, and love of home. Anne seems to have lost her voice with age, but Rilla develops a voice as she writes in her diary, and readers can hope that in her life with Ken she will continue to cultivate the speaking out and the speaking up that the war has released in its womenkind.