As we experience Emily’s growing up, we feel how the books and poems she savours are shaping and reflecting her own sense of self. The narrator reinforces, by allusion or echo or ironic association, what Emily is actually going through. Emily of New Moon (1923) chronicles Emily’s early development – the book opens when she is eleven years old and ends when she is thirteen. At the outset her father is about to die and leave her an orphan. The narrator tells us, in a few paragraphs, about Emily’s rapture with language and her determined search for the right words in her diary to describe what she sees and how she feels. Her father, too, is a writer and has nurtured her love of language and encouraged her to read aloud to him her early pieces. All this we learn in a few pages, and Emily’s closeness to her father is sustained through much of this first novel in the form of letters she writes to ‘Mr. Douglas Starr, on the Road to Heaven.’
Living with her old aunts and old Cousin Jimmy, Emily develops in private her love for writing. She is only allowed to read select books from the Murray shelves, and her own father’s books are locked away from her when stern Aunt Elizabeth finds her putting a pencil dot under the words she loves most. She is forbidden to read novels, though she reads some at Use’s, where virtually nothing is forbidden, and she is permitted to read the Bible, Tennyson, Mrs Browning, Mrs Hemans, Thomson’s The Seasons, Hans Andersen’s fairy tales, Irving’s The Alhambra, Scott’s poetry (and stolen glimpses of Rob Roy), Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, some Shakespeare (she loves A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Pilgrim’s Progress, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Memoirs of Anzonetta B. Peters, the stories of Little Katy and Jolly Jim, and Reuben and Grace (which, she tells her father in a letter, are not novels because the hero and heroine are ‘brother and sister and there is no getting married’ 104), and Nature’s Mighty Wonders. There is no restriction on her reading when she goes to Wyther Grange to visit Great-aunt Nancy Priest, and she borrows some books from Teddy and Use. In school she revels in the Royal Reader series, and she probably found a journal or two somewhere about, as Montgomery herself had with the popular monthly magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, which her grandmother Macneill subscribed to in Cavendish. All the books Emily was allowed to read and reread and that she loved are ones we find mentioned in Montgomery’s journals (and then in The Alpine Path).
Since most of Emily of New Moon is written from Emily’s viewpoint, and often – through letters to her father – in her own words, we expect, and find, the references to literature to belong to a budding consciousness. When writing in 1917 of the importance of her own early reading to her, Montgomery says of poetry what her three novels prove also to be true for Emily: ‘Poetry pored over in childhood becomes part of one’s nature more thoroughly than that which if first read in mature years can ever do. Its music was woven into my growing soul and has echoed through it, consciously and subconsciously, ever since … ’ (Alpine 49). The magnificent cadences of the Bible, the electric power of Shakespeare, the sonorous music of Tennyson, the impassioned convolutions of Mrs Browning, the melancholy tread of Thomson, all, Montgomery’s story suggests, worked their lasting magic on Emily the writer and the woman. Emily tells us the words she marked in her father’s books – ‘dingles, pearled, musk, dappled, intervales, glen, bosky, piping, shimmer, crisp, beechen, ivory’ (190) – and in her choices we hear the Romantic and Victorian preferences that characterize Montgomery’s own volume of verse, The Watchman and Other Poems. Throughout Emily of New Moon, Emily is tasting words and testing ideas; she is groping towards a sense of self and an understanding of her gift to see and her desire to tell.
Emily identifies her favourite authors and pieces in Emily of New Moon, and in Emily Climbs and Emily’s Quest she debates the merits of works of literature. In Emily of New Moon, we perceive the impact of literature on Emily partly through her self-dramatizations. Like Anne Shirley, Emily imagines herself a heroine, but Emily’s heroism is tied to her identity as a writer. When Emily does not characterize her own adventures in terms of or with the consciousness of literature, the narrator does it for her. Either way, we are always reading Emily as though Emily is reading herself writing. When she sits underneath the table in her old home, listening to the unflattering assessment of her by the relatives who are trying to decide who will have to bring her up, she consoles herself with finding the right words to describe each of her kinspeople. She first becomes conscious of herself as a writer when she faces jeering classmates at recess during her first day at school. They taunt the New Moon girl simply because she belongs to the proud Murray clan, and in resisting them, Emily, for the first time, proclaims herself. Asked about her accomplishments in a humiliatingly long list of questions she can only respond to with a ‘no,’ Emily is forced to answer a final question: ‘“Then what can you do?” said the freckled-one in a contemptuous tone. “I can write poetry,” said Emily, without in the least meaning to say it. But at that instant she knew she could write poetry. And with this queer unreasonable conviction came – the flash!’ (83). Emily’s ‘flash’, that tantalizing glimpse of a world beyond, where beauty lives, consecrates her to poetry. In standing up to her peers she has found a voice and has declared herself.
From that moment Emily begins to write poetry and even discovers the rapture of listening to a thrilling reading of Tennyson’s ‘Bugle Song.’ Perhaps it is one of Tennyson’s unfortunate maidens she imagines herself to be when she eats a large apple in Lofty John Sullivan’s workshop, is told as a joke by him that it was full of rat poison, and goes home to die. She imagines out her death and the remorse of everyone around and laments to herself that, ‘She had thought she was going to live for years and write great poems and be famous like Mrs Hemans’ (141). Her farewell note to Use echoes the death scenes in the most melodramatic of Victorian and Romantic verse: ‘Don’t let anybody do anything to Lofty John because he did not mean to poison me and it was all my own fault for being so greedy. Perhaps people will think he did it on purpose because I am a Protestant but I feel sure he did not and please tell him not to be hawnted by remorse. I think I feel a pain in my stomach now so I guess that the end draws ni. Fare well and remember her who died so young. Your own devoted, Emily’ (142–3). Later, Aunt Elizabeth’s bitter words to Lofty John for teasing Emily with the story of rat poison cause the fiery Irishman to swear he will retaliate by cutting down the protective bush that means so much to New Moon farm, and to Cousin Jimmy’s flower garden in particular. When Emily is sorrowing over the prospect of losing Lofty John’s bush the narrator suggests Emily’s despair with a Biblical echo: ‘One day by the banks of Blair Water Emily sat down and wept’ (196). The parody of Psalms 137:1 (‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion’) captures the rhythm of Emily’s self-dramatization.
Emily tests herself or is tested by three men in Emily of New Moon: Father Cassidy, Mr Carpenter, and Dean Priest. In each of these situations literature is directly or indirectly involved, and each man somehow challenges Emily’s conception of herself as writer-heroine. It is interesting that Montgomery makes Emily’s principal early mentors and critics male, having Emily, as T.D. MacLulich says, ‘define her identity through her relationships with men’ (‘Literary’ 13). Her first teacher is her father, whose imagined presence continues to influence her until she feels fully comfortable with New Moon. Cousin Jimmy provides constant support and the blessed blank books for writing. Father Cassidy appears to approve Emily’s writing; Dean Priest feeds her reading and imagination; Mr Carpenter admonishes her to take pains but also encourages her to ‘climb.’ The females, on the other hand, are npt supportive. Aunt Elizabeth, a female-clad patriarch (Rubio, ‘Canada’s’ 4) of the old world, strongly disapproves of Emily’s writing and, as a gatekeeper of the establishment, insists on duty to tradition and domesticity. Aunt Laura, Elizabeth’s stereotypically female opposite, cannot understand why Emily doesn’t give up writing, since it vexes Elizabeth. As we follow Emily’s career, we find that males and females both thwart Emily. On the surface of it, the males, as Judith Miller says, ‘seem to encourage writing’ (163), but the underlying and encoded messages about woman’s place in the male literary establishment eventually make their quality of support suspect (not Cousin Jimmy’s or her father’s, but then Cousin Jimmy is ‘simple,’ and her father is dead). Emily clearly has to write her own drama if she is going to be a literary heroine.
Emily’s decision to visit Father Cassidy is itself heroic – since she is a Protestant and he is a Catholic priest. When she is there, she is delighted to find that he knows all about fairies; she talks to him about writing an epic and the difficulty of working into her poem ‘dispensation,’ which is what, he dryly assures her, her heroine needs. Emily’s earnestness is touching, since she little suspects what is really happening with him. The scene with Father Cassidy reminds the reader how imperfect Emily’s understanding is, but it also alerts us to a familiar patronizing of children and females. Emily is pleased, though not completely at ease, with Father Cassidy, but we see that he is baiting her for his own fun. He is charmed by her pretty unconsciousness and does intercede with Lofty John, but he does not take her writing seriously, whatever he may say to her. To many readers this will be a chilling chapter – though Montgomery may not have meant it to be. As I read it, the Catholic priest is emblematic of knowing, tolerant, amused, male authority as it indulges the young female’s vivacious ignorance. Emily herself at one point suspects he is laughing at her, but when she ‘gravely’ asks, ‘Are you making fun of me?’ she is disarmed by his reply (though the reader may not be): ‘The saints forbid! It’s only that I’m rather overcome. To be after entertaining a lady av New Moon – and an elf – and a poetess all in one is a bit too much for a humble praste like meself. Have another slice av cake and tell me all about it’ (205–6). His subsequent muttering over her trite, sentimental, melodramatic poem does not seem entirely unfriendly since the reader, too, knows Emily has not found her own voice and is merely imitating – as Anne Shirley does – her own undigested reading. However we choose to interpret Father Cassidy’s overall treatment of Emily, we will probably agree that his sarcastic (and to Emily baffling) aside – ‘One av the seven original plots in the world,’ (206) – is a reminder to readers that adults have hidden standards and make veiled criticisms that a frank and intense spirit will be too trusting to perceive. Emily leaves Father Cassidy feeling validated as a writer and is content to ignore what she cannot fathom in his behaviour. Readers may be nettled by his humour, but as we read the series, we see that his patronizing is but a gentle prelude to the caressing contempt Dean himself will later show for Emily’s ‘pretty cobwebs.’ Here Emily’s innocence helps her to feel heroic; later with Dean she must undergo a psychic experience to be able to free herself. Montgomery’s novels suggest how radically life scripts must change if the female is to read herself as heroine.
The most important test over her writing that Emily faces in Emily of New Moon is her interview with Mr Carpenter, the gruff, irascible teacher who rants at Emily’s mistakes in composition and is clearly one of the gatekeepers of the literary establishment. Montgomery ends this first volume of Emily’s life with the chapter ‘Emily’s Great Moment,’ describing how Mr Carpenter responds to Emily’s work. He requests the interview: ‘Probably you can’t write a line of real poetry and never will. But let me see your stuff. If it’s hopelessly bad I’ll tell you so. I won’t have you wasting years striving for the unattainable – at least I won’t have it on my conscience if you do. If there’s any promise in it, I’ll tell you so just as honestly. And bring some of your stories, too – they’re trash yet, that’s certain, but I’ll see if they show just and sufficient cause for going on’ (342). Even if we are bothered by the gatekeeper’s attitude to the presumptuous female, the chapter still makes delightful reading to anyone curious about Montgomery’s ideas about poetry and criticism. Many of the comments made by Mr Carpenter to Emily are ones critics could have made about Montgomery’s own verse or prose:1 he questions her sincerity, tells her to describe only what she knows and can see on Prince Edward Island, insists that she avoid the trite topic of June, warns her away from imitations of Wordsworth, mocks her preference for the colour purple, and yet ends by telling her to ‘go on – climb!’ He takes her seriously if irritably; he sees ten good lines amid the trash and, when she mistakenly gives him an unflattering description of himself after a week-end bender, rather than the short story she meant to give him, he cries, ‘Why, I wouldn’t have missed this for all the poetry you’ve written or ever will write! By gad, it’s literature – literature – and you’re only thirteen’ (349). From this interview, unlike the one with Father Cassidy, Emily leaves truly triumphant. She has asked for validation from the (male) world and has received it – her friendship with Dean Priest and her brush with death (in a psychic experience I will describe later) have hastened her maturity and consciousness. The novel ends with Emily back in her room, savouring Mr Carpenter’s few drops of praise. She hears Use and Perry and Teddy playing and knows she will go to them, but she wants first to begin a new work, a diary. Into this, as did Montgomery, the maturing Emily will pour out her disappointments and dreams – the novel closes with Emily confident that she has a story of her own and a voice to tell it.
Though Mr Carpenter’s interview with Emily ends the book and shows Emily in relationship to her work, it is the encounter with Dean Priest that marks Emily most significantly as female and as writer. His instant sympathy with her is an invitation to a new dimension of thought and feeling. Teddy is always there as her (apparent) equal and beloved, but Dean offers her the allure and mystery her own dramatic interpretation of literature has encouraged her to believe is her true element. The narrator and Dean Priest together show us the literary influence that best suggests the quality of Emily’s self-dramatization. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre shapes much of Emily of New Moon.
Emily does not herself refer to Jane Eyre in the first Emily book – it is Dean and the interpreting narrator who call our attention to it. But readers familiar with Jane’s story will inevitably make comparisons between the heroines, especially since Jane’s autobiographical account of her early years, in particular, parallels what in her most depressed or angry moods Emily thinks of herself. They are both orphans; they both nurture their romanticism through early reading (Rowe 69–89); they both live with an unsympathetic relative; they are both consigned to punishment in a ‘haunted’ room by a stern aunt; they are both passionate, desperate for friendship and love, convinced of the importance of the affections over arbitrary rules, devoted to one special friend who is neglected by her father, hungry for experience and a larger scope than convention allows to females, eager to earn their own way in the world, and pleased to acknowledge as superior that which they feel to be larger or better than themselves. So much any reader of the two novels could point out without having to deal with the presence of Dean Priest. But it is Dean’s use of Jane Eyre and his evident identification with its hero that suggests a stronger purpose in Montgomery’s parallels and echoes of the famous, polemical novel. When we realize that Dean Priest identifies himself with the brooding, Byronic Edward Rochester, we know that Emily is going to have to confront in him an almost irresistible romantic pattern (Radway 119–56, Kreps 14–38). He is the dark, passionate, self-destructive exile who can be redeemed only by the love of a woman powerful enough to fling her soul into the void between them. The pattern Brontë exploits with Rochester is one that has held women in thrall for centuries – the self-immolation on the altar of this wounded god who chooses her and her alone as his redemptress. In Emily’s case the wounded god seems to offer her the knowledge she craves about the exotic world far beyond the ken of New Moon. For the child Emily, Dean’s friendship seems a harmless gift – but the reader remembers the Rochester connection and the fetters Emily feels and knows that Emily the woman will have to struggle with her very life to escape the supposed ideal her culture has told her is the reward for passionate difference. The woman will have to choose between her own understanding of herself and what the traditions she has honoured tell her she should feel and choose. No wonder Montgomery conferred psychic powers on Emily – only a vision can break the spell literature and imaginative traditions have cast over her. (Ironically, we remember that a supernatural voice frees Jane from slavery to St John Rivers so that she can return to Rochester.)
But this story of the weaving of the spell and the breaking of it belong to the second and third books, where Emily herself refers to Haworth Parsonage and the Brontë sisters and where Dean begins to disparage Emily’s ambitions. In Emily of New Moon we are alerted to the imaginative stage upon which Emily’s later drama will have to be enacted. Let us look at some similarities between the novels Emily of New Moon and Jane Eyre.
The opening pages of Jane Eyre offer an unforgettable picture of the ten-year-old orphan sitting in a window recess reading about the savage, icy splendours of Norway, Lapland, and the Hebrides, while she is trying to escape the notice of her cruel cousin, John Reed. When he finds her and then knocks her down and cuts her head, she flies at him like a wildcat, driven at last to turn on her long-time tormentor. No one who has read the famous opening can forget how the cold aunt refuses to listen to Jane, and chapter one ends with these words of aunt and narrator: ‘“Take her away to the red-room, and lock her in there.” Four hands were immediately laid upon me, and I was borne upstairs’ (9). Without even knowing what the ‘red-room’ is we shiver with the horror of it. The inexplicable cruelty of adult to child is nowhere better painted than here, where all the weight of privilege and class and age bear Jane down; Brontë captures perfectly the spirit of the passionate, intelligent child unjustly punished by a baffling adult code.
Emily would have loved the savage power of this scene and the almost Gothic terror of the next chapter, where Jane is imprisoned in the red-room, which she remembers suddenly to be where her uncle died. She terrifies herself by looking into the gloom and seeing her own Haunting face in the mirror. The description of Jane’s view is enough to conjure up all the fear of childhood: ‘A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows, with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; … the bed rose before me; to my right hand there was the high, dark wardrobe, with subdued, broken reflections varying the gloss of its panels; to my left were the muffled windows; a great looking-glass between them repeated the vacant majesty of the bed and room’ (Brontë 10–11). Soon Jane remembers her dead uncle and thinks his ghost may decide to relieve her here in her distress. The thought almost paralyses her, and then she sees a gleam of light gliding up the wall to the ceiling, and her screams bring her aunt, who thrusts her back into the room and turns the key. Jane falls unconscious and is roused from stupor much later to find herself in her own bed being tended by an apothecary.
Whether or not Emily herself had read Jane Eyre early in the pages of Emily of New Moon is doubtful. But Montgomery had read it, and Montgomery’s readers would probably have read it, and Emily’s imagination has been fed – even in the early pages – by reading from her father’s books. Besides, Brontë is capturing the quality of terror the sensitive orphan feels; Montgomery’s description of Emily’s similar adventure echoes Brontë’s and suggests the quality of Emily’s imagination and spirit.
Shortly after Emily comes to New Moon, she defies Aunt Elizabeth in a way that makes that headstrong woman eager to have revenge. For punishment, she locks Emily in the spare room where so many Murrays have died. Montgomery’s style is very different from Brontë’s – third person rather than first, explanatory rather than minutely evocative – and yet we hear in Montgomery’s lines echoes of Brontë’s famous passages. In Brontë we find windows ‘with their blinds always drawn down’ and ‘shrouded’ in drapery; the bed ‘rose before me’ and a ‘great looking-glass’ repeats the ‘vacant majesty of the bed and room.’ In Montgomery we see: ‘The window was hung with heavy, dark-green material, reinforced by drawn slat-blinds. The big canopied bed, jutting out from the wall into the middle of the floor, was high and rigid and curtained also with dark draperies. Anything might jump at her out of such a bed. What if some great black hand should suddenly reach out of it – reach right across the floor – and pluck at her? The walls, like those of the parlour, were adorned with pictures of departed relatives. There was such a large connection of dead Murrays. The glasses of their frames gave out weird reflections of the spectral threads of light struggling through the slat blinds’ (114). When Jane remembers her dead uncle, suddenly ‘a light gleamed on the wall … gliding up to the ceiling and quivered over my head’ (Brontë 14). When Emily has stared at all the portraits of the dead Murrays and terrified herself with imagining the stuffed owl leaping at her from the wardrobe, suddenly: ‘A beam of sunlight struck through a small break in one of the slats of the blind and fell directly athwart the picture of Grandfather Murray hanging over the mantel-piece … In that gleam of light his face seemed veritably to leap out of the gloom at Emily with its grim frown strangely exaggerated. Emily’s nerve gave way completely’ (115). The feelings of injustice and terror of the two children are similar; the settings for their torture, the unused room with the bed and windows with full, gloomy drapery, are similar; both children remember dead relatives. The glass on the pictures of the dead Murrays acts like the huge mirror in the red-room; the beam of light drives each child to action. Afterwards, Jane wakes up in the nursery seeing this emblematically appropriate combination: ‘a terrible red glare, crossed with thick black bars’ (Brontë 15); her unconscious acknowledges hell and prison and shadows of the red-room before her consciousness translates them into the fire’s glow beyond her crib rails. So much of Jane’s story is a story of flight from imprisonment – the red-room scene is suggestive of the plight of a female of her condition in the England of her time. Jane leaves the Reed home, she leaves Lowood, she flees Thornfield Hall, she turns from Moor House – each place threatens her identity and values in a peculiar way. Thornfield Hall, suggestive of all the opulence and privilege that have oppressed a determined individualist such as Jane, must become a charred ruin before Jane is free to join Edward Rochester in marriage.
The aftermath of Emily’s terror, though radically different from Jane’ s, is appropriate to Emily’s individualism within the culture surrounding her. While Jane falls unconscious, Emily leaps to the window and tears open the blinds. In floods the light, and terror is banished. And not only is there sunshine, but there is a ladder to take her out to meet up with the vibrant Use, who is to become her best friend and is truly her complement in every way. As in all Montgomery’s novels, so here: freedom is literally in your own backyard. The destined mate, in such a world, is again almost literally the boy next door, whether he is Teddy or Gilbert or Jingle. Joy and salvation would seem to be more accessible to a female in Emily’s world than in Jane’s, but the apparent simplicity of Emily’s difficulties is deceptive. Terror and taboo are complexly intertwined for Emily with creativity and self-assertion. When Teddy and the sunny Tansy Patch are inaccessible to Emily she mistakes Dean Priest’s shadowy world of art for the rightful home of the artist spirit. To burst into sunlight – so simple in this early (disrupted) echo of Brontë’s red-room episode – becomes the most difficult of Emily’s challenges.
A playful reminder2 of Brontë’s red-room appears later in one of Emily’s adventures at Wyther Grange, the home of Great-aunt Nancy Priest. Here Emily experiences terror in the Pink Room. The name ‘Wyther Grange’ is itself reminiscent of Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and it is Gothic horrors Emily thinks of when she first enters the old house. The Pink Room episode is Montgomery’s miniature parody of Gothic terror and Gothic novels. Emily’s over-fed imagination brings to mind not only Jane Eyre but also Catherine Morland, Jane Austen’s heroine of Northanger Abbey, that novel-length joke about Gothic thrillers, especially Mrs Radcliffe’s. Montgomery seems at pains to show Emily in a comic light, as though to emphasize that Montgomery’s narrative distinguishes clearly between what is genuinely terrifying and what is merely the product of imagination nurtured inappropriately. Emily has been indulging in too much Gothic-horror reading, and the narrator interprets her responses to the rooms of Wyther Grange: ‘They went through the spacious hall, catching glimpses on either side of large, dim, splendid rooms, then through the kitchen end out of it into an odd little back hall. It was long and narrow and dark. On one side was a row of four, square, small-paned windows, on the other were cupboards, reaching from floor to ceiling, with doors of black shining wood. Emily felt like one of the heroines in Gothic romance, wandering at midnight through a subterranean dungeon, with some unholy guide. She had read “The Mysteries of Udolpho” and “The Romance of the Forest” before the taboo had fallen on Dr. Burnley’s bookcase. She shivered. It was awful but interesting’ (247). Great-aunt Nancy and her cousin Caroline are like crones, and Emily feels only pleasantly spooked when she is told she will sleep alone in the Pink Room. But in the night, when she hears an incessant rustling and fluttering and crying in the wall behind her bed, her Gothic-fed imagination betrays her: ‘Every ghost and groan, every tortured spirit and bleeding nun of the books she had read came into her mind’ (255). Emily’s very real terror in the spare-room experience is not reproduced here; Montgomery instead is having fun with the Wyther Grange chapters and their references to Mrs Radcliffe’s popular Gothics and allusion to Brontë’s red-room. The reader is intrigued to know the source of the noise, not indignant or frightened on Emily’s behalf.
The Gothic play would seem a gratuitous departure in the book if it were not so soon followed by two very real and chilling episodes. Comparing Emily’s fright in the Pink Room with what later happens at Priest Pond is, as Montgomery no doubt intended, like comparing melodrama with drama. The Gothic allusions remind us of artifice, and then Montgomery’s narrator introduces us first to the shatteringly and then to the agonizingly real.
Since coming to New Moon and first hearing about Use’s mother, Emily has wondered what happened to her. No one will speak about her, and no one is allowed to mention her to Use’s father. Use indifferently assumes she is dead. She suffers herself from her father’s hatred, and she does not trouble herself with a mother she cannot remember. Emily is innocently reading the popular romance The Scottish Chiefs one day when Great-aunt Nancy and Caroline revive the sordid story about Use’s mother. Young Beatrice Burnley is supposed to have left her little baby in order to stow away on board the ship of a dashing cousin. Her husband had waited patiently at home for her return from her farewell visit to the cousin. People had seen Beatrice enter the cousin’s ship, but none had seen her leave. The ship later sank, taking all lives. Emily’s horror over what she hears has none of the comforting picturesqueness of melodrama or Gothic romance. The old women think she is going to faint, but Emily turns on Caroline: ‘“Don’t touch me!” she cried passionately. “Don’t touch me! You – you – you liked hearing that story!”’ (268) Emily cannot believe Use’s mother would desert her; the hideousness of such betrayal poisons her days and nights. The very depths of her beauty-loving soul are stirred and she broods over the story – she cannot believe it and despairs that she cannot solve what she knows must be a mystery.
It is as though the springtime of Emily’s young life is blighted by the story. The narrator quotes from Browning to suggest this loss: ‘There was a drop of poison in every cup. Even the filmy shadows on the great bay, the charm of its fir-hung cliffs and its little purple islets that looked like outposts of fairyland, could not bring to her the old “fine, careless rapture’” (270). The phrase from Browning’s famous, yearning poem, ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad,’ written in Italy about the beauties of spring in England, tells us that the ‘wise thrush’ repeats his song ‘Lest you should think he never could recapture / The first fine careless rapture!’ (15–16). The poetical phrase underlines the yearning of the normally beauty-loving Emily for her own spiritual innocence – a time she can never now recapture – before she had heard the hideous story of Use’s mother’s suspected betrayal. Emily is all but numb to the transporting charm of her surroundings.
Suffering about Use’s mother, Emily then faces her own death. She goes on an evening ramble, thinking ‘I wonder … how much longer I have to live’ (270), ventures too close to a cliff’s edge in order to pick a spectacular aster, and when the ground gives way finds herself clinging to the crumbling bank. As she pictures herself smashed on the stones below, the will to live returns, but still mixed with thoughts of Use’s mother: ‘She had faced death once before, or thought she had, on the night when Lofty John had told her she had eaten a poisoned apple – but this was even harder. To die here, all alone, far away from home! They might never know what had become of her – never find her. The crows or the gulls would pick her eyes out. She dramatized the thing so vividly that she almost screamed with the horror of it. She would just disappear from the world as Use’s mother had disappeared’ (272). In Emily’s earlier brush with death (or imagined brush) she had borrowed from her reading to think of herself as part of a Victorian death scene complete with woeful mourners; now she faces her death and tries to read beyond the simple story of Use’s mother’s disappearance. Intuition prompts the developing artist to move beyond the familiar, to review Use’s mother’s death as though it is a misunderstood text.
Suddenly, Dean Priest appears and rescues her. He, like Emily, has been lured to the cliff’s edge by the beautiful aster and then sees her below him. The dramatic and psychological moment is perfect – she has already abandoned despair and is working out alternatives for Use’s mother. It is as though she thinks, if I am here and no one knows it, she could have disappeared in a way no one guessed. The artist in her identifies with the wronged woman, and her knowledge is profound. Her later vision of Use’s mother is beginning here, where Emily, too, hovers close to death. She will have to go back to the borderland between worlds again before the clear vision of Use’s mother can come to her. Montgomery may be suggesting that the artist is gifted to see truth because she will not settle for easy answers and because she dares to cross into the shadow lands where her spirit may face its own death. Just at this moment, when Emily is intuiting the truth about Beatrice Burnley, Dean Priest, pursuing the same love of beauty that has lured Emily on, arrives. As the deus ex machina of this drama, he seems at first an odd hero. Sitting on the bank beside him, she remembers what she has been told about him – that he is thirty-six, college educated, aloof, cynical, has a malformed shoulder (hence his hateful nickname’ Jarback’), travels the world, and is feared by his clan for his ‘ironic tongue.’ We listen to their dialogue and enjoy his dawning appreciation of Emily’s worth. When we understand their meeting and ensuing friendship in relationship to Jane Eyre, we appreciate even more the position of rescued and rescuer.
Within half an hour of their meeting he says, only half ironically, ‘I perceive you are an artist in words.’ And seconds later he adds, ‘I think I’ll wait for you’ (278). Emily thinks he is talking about their immediate situation, but the reader knows better. Already Dean Priest has focused his lonely soul on Emily. But when he, half laughing, lays claim to her a few pages later, Emily’s spirit rebels even though she does not understand the vehemence of her own reaction. He tells her the old myth that the one who saves a life then owns that life, and Emily experiences ‘an odd sensation of rebellion. She didn’t fancy the idea of her life belonging to anybody but herself – not even to anybody she liked as much as she liked Dean Priest.’ Dean sees what she is feeling and presses the point: ‘“That doesn’t quite suit you? Ah, you see one pays a penalty when one reaches out for something beyond the ordinary. One pays for it in bondage of some kind or other. Take your wonderful aster home and keep it as long as you can. It has cost you your freedom.” He was laughing – he was only joking, of course – yet Emily felt as if a cobweb fetter had been flung round her. Yielding to a sudden impulse she flung the big aster on the ground and set her foot on it’ (281). This is the most important gesture in all three of the Emily books – instinctively Emily fights against the power that wants to dominate her. And yet she leans towards Dean Priest, bends to him in the subsequent episodes, and does not understand that she, here, has rejected only part of his domination in refusing to acknowledge his right to own her. She will have to learn that, whenever she has accepted his judgment in place of hers, she has added to the cobweb fetters he flings round her. We notice that the narrator does not say that Emily broke through the fetters when she crushed the aster. Instead the fetters get tighter the closer she comes to accepting his standards of taste and value. The beginnings of a vision have brought them together and eventually, in the third Emily book, a vision will separate them – Dean Priest is deliberately associated with the most powerful forces in Emily’s being.
Dean’s use of Jane Eyre at the end of this rescue chapter throws the whole episode into a richly ambiguous context. As Dean watches Emily walk away, the narrator explains his actions for us:
He stooped and picked up the broken aster. Emily’s heel had met it squarely and it was badly crushed. But he put it away that night between the leaves of an old volume of Jane Eyre, where he had marked a verse –
All glorious rose upon my sight
That child of shower and gleam. (282)
Dean’s choice (Montgomery’s choice for him) is fascinating. Dean’s choice seems high-minded – it sounds as though he is putting the emblematic aster next to a Wordsworthian stanza that praises the fresh innocence of childhood. A closer look at Jane Eyre shows how false is this impression. You would have to know Jane Eyre very well indeed to know these two lines, buried as they are in the middle of a song Rochester sings to Jane. The song is not about childhood at all, but about a passionate, romantic love that is willing to brave all kinds of disasters, vengeance, and hatred. The lover says ‘For Might and Right, and Woe and Wrath, / Between our spirits stood,’ and yet ‘I dangers dared; I hind’rance scorned; / I omens did defy’: for finally, as the last stanza declares, he is rewarded because ‘My love has sworn, with sealing kiss, / With me to live – to die; / I have at last my nameless bliss: / As I love – loved am I!’ (Brontë 239–40). Rochester sings this to Jane when she has accepted him and they are spending together one of the evenings of the month before their planned wedding day. The song seems to be about Jane and Rochester, although we later see how differently they would interpret it: for her the barriers to their marriage are those of convention – money, age, rank; for him, the barriers are far greater, since he intends to defy the marriage vow itself in taking Jane as his wife while Bertha Rochester still lives. Within the context of the novel, the song thus gains poignant significance – Rochester’s bold claims and ardour cannot hold Jane when she knows it is wrong to marry him.
Dean’s choice of this passage is truly ironic and, on Montgomery’s part, surely ingenious. On the surface he is praising the image of vivid freshness Emily has given him, but the deeper suggestion is that he already identifies himself as the middle-aged Rochester, craggy, misanthropic, and Byronic, who yearns towards the purity and revitalizing youthful love of Jane Eyre. In declaring that he will wait for her, Dean has cast himself in the role of future lover. The immediate context of Rochester’s song is also revealing of the exchange Emily and Dean have just had. In the novel Jane has been trying to think of ways to fend off Rochester’s too-ardent wooing. She refuses to see him, as he would wish, at all hours of the day, and eventually confines him to the evening, where she devises all kinds of distractions (such as having him sing to her) to keep him at arm’s length. Rochester has greeted her injunction about evening meetings with loving threats about the future: ‘“it is your time now, little tyrant, but it will be mine presently: and when once I have fairly seized you, to have and to hold, I’ll just – figuratively speaking – attach you to a chain like this” (touching his watch-guard)’ (Brontë 238). Possession is what Dean wants and what Emily has already resisted. The working out of Emily’s story is, in fact, a lengthy response to the kind of love that Rochester seems to propose and that Jane eventually gives to him. The violent, passionate, desperate love of Jane and Rochester is a tortured yet joyous duet of dominating and yielding strains. Such love – where the younger, purer woman redeems the darkened soul of a passionate equal – is translated for Emily into the realm of art. Dean believes that in order to possess her love he must master her love of writing and, in struggling to dominate her sensibility and eventually her voice, he forfeits any real tension for equality. He tries to tame Emily and he loses her. The dastardly thing is that Dean does, like Rochester with Jane, understand so much of Emily’s soul. But while Rochester wants Jane as Jane, Dean Priest wants to change Emily (which makes Dean resemble St John Rivers rather than Rochester).
Montgomery alters Jane’s story in significant ways. The meeting of Emily and Dean is an inversion of the meeting of Jane and Rochester, and since Brontë had deliberately made the meeting of Jane and Rochester an inversion of the pattern of the beautiful, helpless heroine / handsome, valiant hero, we see that the roles of Emily and Dean have been designed to suggest fairy-tale and damsel-in-distress motifs; Dean even refers to himself as her ‘knightly rescuer’ (276). In Jane Eyre, Jane is out walking to relieve the tedium of her predictable round at Thornfield Hall when Rochester appears on horseback and, having ridden past her, clatters to the ground when his horse slips on ice. The diminutive Jane rushes to assist the burly Rochester and endures his oaths and surliness as she lends him her shoulder. He later says he had thought she was a fairy that had stepped from the greenwood to bewitch his horse. When Brontë’s novel appeared, this first encounter between hero and heroine was startlingly original – the reading audience had already come to expect a more conventional fairytale model (like the one Montgomery uses). Just as Jane’s life is a series of imprisonments and flights from imprisonment, so her story with Rochester is one of demanding and expecting recognition of equality. The first meeting, then, rightly reverses the old order – the apparently weak Jane is the strong, essential staff for the apparently self-sufficient Rochester. Their story continues the balancing between forces; they find equilibrium in shared values and mutual acceptance. (It is a continuing and delightful irony in the history of literature that this most romantic of novels is also one of the most radically feminist.)
Now in Montgomery’s story, Emily does not have the liberating surprise of physically rescuing Dean Priest. Instead the old order prevails, and the knight rescues the maiden (whom he also calls a fairy). And though Dean can identify himself as Rochester on one level, he does not learn Rochester’s wisdom on a profounder level. He tries to curb Emily, not ‘just’ own her. Eventually his love for Emily resembles Rochester’s for Jane only in that he, too, is an older man in need of a younger woman’s respect and love. One wonders if the hump-shouldered Dean Priest identified himself with Rochester after he is blinded and maimed; in such identification his jealousy of everything she loves would be easier to understand, but no easier to forgive. For it is Emily’s writing self, her very essence, that he eventually tries to destroy. Rochester lies to Jane in not telling her that his first wife is alive, but Dean lies to Emily by telling her that her writing is no good. Rochester seeks to alter circumstances; Dean tries to quench Emily’s fire.
Dean’s love for Emily, despite his intelligence and literariness, is really a very conventional thing, and the fairy-tale rescue is perfectly representative of his unconscious as well as conscious expectations for Emily. In the very next chapter after he rescues her, they are having one of their wide-ranging talks about history and literature when they disagree about the necessity for pain in the world. True to her own willingness to suffer to see the truth, Emily avers that some causes are worth blood. Dean dismisses her arguments with ‘“And, like all female creatures, you form your opinions by your feelings … remember that if there is to be drama in your life somebody must pay the piper in the coin of suffering. If not you – then some one else.” “Oh, no, I wouldn’t like that.” “Then be content with fewer thrills’” (284–5). Sensitive as he is to art and literature, to the stars and natural beauties around, Dean Priest does not want to suffer for knowledge. And he does not want Emily, either, to pay any price that may take a part of her away from him.
Yet Dean is no monster, and he has charm for Emily and for many readers because he is capable of Rochester’s passion and perception of worth. A large part of him, too, belongs to the exotic world Emily’s own love of beauty prompts her to admire. Unlike Jane and Rochester, Emily and Dean do not stand as true equals until each has caused the other great suffering and each has had to face the fact that neither loves the other as she or he thought.
In addition to the literary allusions and explorations, we find in each of the Emily books a central psychic experience. In each instance Emily rescues someone – as though her unconscious mind asserts itself to counteract the obligation Dean’s rescue has placed on her. Her artistic powers make her an active, restorative force, equal to and surpassing the male (silencing) power she must resist if she is to develop as a writer. In Emily of New Moon Emily rescues Beatrice Burnley’s reputation; in Emily Climbs, she saves a little boy; in Emily’s Quest, she saves Teddy. Like the literary dimension of Emily’s conscious (and unconscious) mind, the psychic experiences, too, belong to Emily the artist. They suggest that Emily is indeed attuned to another, deeper, richer dimension than most people can touch, and they give her legitimacy as an artist. The psychic experiences are to her intuition what the flash is to her visions of beauty: Emily touches the artistic realm within and beyond the world of appearances. Each of the psychic experiences calls out from the deepest places in Emily’s spirit. Emily’s first vision stirs when she broods over Use’s mother and clings to the earth above Malvern Bay – in the blankness she feels as her soul stretches over the borderlands, she meets Dean Priest. Later in the novel Emily comes down with measles and, when she is again on the borderland between life and death, she has a vision of Use’s mother, actually sees her walking alone across the Lee pasture, singing as she returns home to her child and husband from the shipboard farewell to her cousin. Emily ‘sees’ her fall into the uncovered well and makes Aunt Elizabeth promise to have the well searched. When the now-unused well is uncovered and investigated, they find what is left of Beatrice Burnley. On the fateful day that Emily had herself clung to a cliff above Malvern Bay, she had identified with Beatrice Burnley’s lonely death, though she had not yet recognized what she felt. Just as the whole first book shows Emily groping her way to recognition of herself as a writer, so this psychic experience suggests the struggle to consciousness of Emily’s intuition and values.
Emily’s psychic vision of Use’s mother brings together a host of forces in Emily’s life. Emily restores Use’s mother to her, just as she feels her own mother has been restored to her, since she now occupies her mother’s room. Aunt Elizabeth’s promise to search the well strengthens the bond between Emily and the traditions of New Moon. The vision itself suggests the fertile, (re)creative powers of Emily’s conscious and unconscious and gives her credibility within her clan and community as an old-world seer. Emily as daughter, friend, clanswoman, niece, mother-of-dreams, artist, and creator is validated in her value-affirming vision of a happy mother anticipating the return home to her child. Emily as artist lays claim to the past and the future and demonstrates her ability to see behind the veil that separates this world from ‘the flash.’ Emily, like Jane Eyre, knows herself to be the heroine of a rich and surprising story – her own.