Tired out from writing Anne of Avonlea (1909) at breakneck speed, Maud Montgomery was not ready to create a third novel for the Page Company right away. Instead she decided to take a 24,000-word story she had already published under the title ‘Una of the Garden’ and stretch it into a 48,000-word novel. The Page Company was pleased but changed the heroine’s name and the work’s title to Kilmeny of the Orchard. The writing in it belongs to formula romance fiction and shows little of the sophistication or irony we find in Anne of Green Gables or even Anne of Avonlea.
Readers curious about turn-of-the-century magazine-quality fiction that acts out unquestioningly the popular stereotypes for (rising) middle-class men and women will find a good example in Kilmeny of the Orchard. Montgomery’s readers probably enjoyed seeing the new knight errant in the son of a merchant educated in the liberal arts, trained to achieve, and at leisure to go on a mission of mercy to help out a less robust college friend in distress on P.E.I. In this affirmation of middle-class values we note that Kilmeny represents the best of the old-world stock: ‘Thrawn and twisted the old Gordon stock might be, but it had at least this one offshoot of perfect grace and symmetry’ (117). Kilmeny marries the man who is himself the son of a Nova Scotia farmer and we thus find that the new mercantile aristocracy – the wealthy middle class – is firmly rooted in the thrifty strength of the land. The formula Montgomery used in creating Kilmeny of the Orchard was one that flattered the middle and the working classes in its suggestion of worth transcending ‘taint’ and virtue rewarded with material success. Kilmeny may look like the ‘Madonnas of old paintings’ (61), but she is really a picture drawn by Montgomery’s accommodating and flattering pen of the middle-class conception of its own new order of chivalry and righteousness. Montgomery outgrew this formula (had already outgrown it, really), even if she did not put aside all the cultural assumptions encoded in Kilmeny.
Those readers who assume that formula romance fiction and fairy tale are always the same (and also that they are equally inferior) should compare the admittedly flimsy construction of Kilmeny of the Orchard with the fairy-tale pattern of Jane of Lantern Hill. The differences in the treatment of the heroines (leaving age aside) tells almost everything. Beautiful Kilmeny Gordon, mute daughter of a fanatical and twisted mother, is brought up to believe that she is ugly and that all strangers – especially men – are dangerous. She is told that love is a curse and that she must not try to mingle with a wicked and thwarting world. She lives on a secluded homestead on Prince Edward Island, where she makes an old orchard into an enchanted garden, going there to play her violin. Kilmeny’s music – all of her own spontaneous composition – speaks the feelings and thoughts she cannot herself utter. And in telling the outline you have told almost all. Kilmeny is beautiful, loving, sweet-natured, and highly principled. The one thing about her that surprises the adoring Eric Marshall is that Kilmeny means what she ‘says’ when she tells him that she will not marry him unless she can speak like other women. The only changing Kilmeny does in the story is to grow less frank about her feelings after Eric declares his love for her. She supposedly changes before our eyes from a child to a woman because (Prince Charming) Eric kisses her and she becomes conscious of love. And that is it.
Apart from being unbending, Kilmeny is without surprises. The narrator tells us that she writes little notes that show wit and humour, but we are never given any of these, and Kilmeny remains a beautiful picture, even at the end of the story when she screams Eric’s name and warns him that Neil Gordon is about to pounce on him from behind and murder him with an axe. Everything is decorous and predictable. Old Mr Marshall takes one look at Kilmeny and pronounces her the perfect wife for his son. In keeping with formula-romance roles, Kilmeny does not have to do anything but look beautiful and act sweet for the world to be hers. She eventually goes off with Prince Charming to live in his commercial palace and leaves her homely, faithful relatives behind, next to the enchanted orchard. Kilmeny is nothing more than her story; she is static. Jane Stuart is also rescued by a Prince Charming and lives part of the year in an enchanted place, but Jane herself changes and grows and learns to think and plan and struggle for what she wants. Jane is human; Kilmeny is not. The enchanted worlds of Lantern Hill and Lakeside Gardens of Toronto become backdrops for Jane’s creative powers. Kilmeny remains as unearthly as her music. Formula often uses stereotype; fairy tale, archetype.
Everything about the story belongs to formula. Eric Marshall is good looking, wealthy, young, and in need of ‘one quixote thing’ (4) to make him perfect. He has never been in love and has made no time in his busy, ‘clean,’ active life for romance. His father is the gruff but loving patriarch who wants Eric to find a perfect woman for a wife so that he can enjoy grandchildren. Prince Edward Island is pastoral perfection; Eric’s landlord and landlady are the perfect kindly gossips; Eric’s rival for Kilmeny’s affections is a dark, passionate, unscrupulous foreigner (Montgomery’s story makes unblushing use of xenophobia and bigotry); Kilmeny’s guardians are rough-tongued, God-fearing Scots; Kilmeny’s mother was an abused and misunderstood woman who herself became twisted and unforgiving. In formula romance there must be a rival and there must be an apparently insurmountable obstacle to the protagonists’ love. Italian Neil Gordon, adopted by the Gordons when his peddlar mother died after giving birth to him and his father deserted him, is the expected hot-blooded murderous rival, and the barrier is Kilmeny’s virtuous firmness. Montgomery makes the story pleasing to read and lifts it briefly beyond formula with her loving descriptions of sunset and garden; we are carried along by the lyric passages and by the predictable events.
Today Montgomery’s story appears crude in many ways. The racism is disturbing. Neil is described as a ‘feline creature basking in lazy grace, but ever ready for an unexpected spring’ (39) and as giving vent to ‘the untamed fury of the Italian peasant thwarted in his heart’s desire’ (155). The unchallenged snobbery is off-putting. Old Mr Marshall dismisses the kindly and generous Williamsons thus: ‘If Thomas Gordon had been a man like Robert Williamson I shouldn’t have waited to see your Kilmeny. But they [the Gordons] are all right – rugged and grim, but of good stock and pith – native refinement and strong character’ (253–4). In such a context, Eric Marshall’s refusal to be influenced by the possible ‘taint’ on Kilmeny’s birth (Kilmeny’s father was a bigamist) is no doubt meant to seem large-minded. Eric and Kilmeny are porcelain dolls.
Interestingly, though Kilmeny is meant to be a paragon, she does not represent the only alternative for women, even within the formulaic thinking of the story. The book begins with a college graduation, and we find at least twenty women, beautiful and brainy, among the men. Eric is good friends with one of the top female scholars, and even Eric’s father is pleased to see women taking their degrees. But whether for contrast or as a reassuring touch of verisimilitude, only the frame for Montgomery’s story is really modern. The story itself takes its pattern from old-fashioned chivalry and its offspring: the maiden in distress in her own turn saves her rescuer through love.
The Story Girl was a personal favourite of Montgomery. Perhaps it is more closely modelled than her diaries or letters will show on actual episodes with her ‘merry cousins’ in Park Corner and with Well and Dave Nelson, the two little boys who boarded with the Macneills in Cavendish. And whether based on real events or not, the two books, but particularly the first, capture the flavour of children’s interactions and inventions. The five King children – cousins and siblings – the hired boy Peter Craig, the weepy friend Sara Ray, and Sara Stanley herself are breathing, (usually) believable children with tempers and dreams and a love of eating and good times.
But there is more to The Story Girl, in particular, than a remembrance of joys past or even an exploration of those precious ‘spots of time’ of the kind that Wordsworth paints. From the first to the last Montgomery’s fourth novel is a celebration of story and the story teller (Coldwell 12535) Sara Stanley (the Story Girl) is the most important and colourful person in the group, and it is her fascinating voice and captivating manner that make her central to the children’s lives. Through Sara Stanley we find the art of narrative given lavish praise. The other children are always eager to hear one of her stories, and she has a story for just about everything. The heroine of the two books is, thus, the artist who revels in life and creates from it what will take her audience beyond itself.
The two books fit together, The Golden Road picking up the narrative exactly where The Story Girl leaves it, but the tone and atmosphere of the two is very different, suggesting the contrast between recreation and nostalgia. In The Story Girl we witness life; in The Golden Road we hear Bev remembering.
Sara Stanley is unquestioningly the centre of life in The Story Girl; the boy narrator, Beverley King, and the other characters he quotes frequently remark on her gifts even when she is not herself performing. When the two brothers first meet her they are struck by her voice: ‘Never had we heard a voice like hers. Never, in all my life since, have I heard such a voice. I cannot describe it. I might say it was clear; I might say it was sweet; I might say it was vibrant and far-reaching and bell-like; all this would be true, but it would give you no real idea of the peculiar quality which made the Story Girl’s voice what it was’ (15). And her voice creates the air of romance in all that she speaks: ‘The Story Girl’s words fell on the morning air like pearls and diamonds. Even her prepositions and conjunctions had untold charm, hinting at mystery and laughter and magic bound up in everything she mentioned. Apple pies and sour seedlings and pigs became straightway invested with a glamour of romance’ (24). She makes even the oldest story sound interesting and thrills her listeners with the multiplication table itself (80). And some of the stories are truly delightful – whether they are retellings of Montgomery’s own clan tales, as with the story of the courtship of Betty Sherman, or something eerie and new, as with the Proud Princess. Most of the stories are short and poignant.1 Sara Stanley, in telling them, becomes an old-world minstrel or scop continuing the traditions of her clan and creating new sensations among the young and old. Even Emily Byrd Starr is not more successful than Sara Stanley at the weaving of tales.
In The Story Girl, except for a few long descriptions of the usual Montgomery type, Bev makes only brief interjections about adult life or lessons or truths. For example, at the end of an episode concerning Peg Bowen, the supposed witch who is believed to have cast a spell on the children’s cat, Bev winds up the chapter succinctly: ‘Thus faith, superstition, and incredulity strove together amongst us, as in all history’ (269). Or he says about the sermon contest and the wisdom of not asking adult permission: ‘You could never tell what kink a grown-up would take. They might not think it proper to play any sort of a game on Sunday, not even a Christian game. Least said was soonest mended where grown-ups were concerned’ (278).
But in The Golden Road a much older-sounding Bev indulges in frequent asides about youth and waxes philosophic in purple passages. The quick pace and short paragraphs of The Story Girl give way to paragraphs and pages of explanation and interpretation. Note, for example, how Bev privileges description over characterization or action in the two opening paragraphs of chapter thirteen, ‘A Surprising Announcement’:
‘Nothing exciting has happened for ever so long,’ said the Story Girl discontentedly, one late May evening, as we lingered under the wonderful white bloom of the cherry trees. There was a long row of them in the orchard, with a Lombardy poplar at either end, and a hedge of lilacs behind. When the wind blew over them all the spicy breezes of Ceylon’s isle were never sweeter.
It was a time of wonder and marvel, of the soft touch of silver rain on greening fields, of the incredible delicacy of young leaves, of blossom in field and garden and wood. The whole world bloomed in a flush and tremor of maiden loveliness, instinct with all the evasive, fleeting charm of spring and girlhood and young morning. We felt and enjoyed it all without understanding or analyzing it. It was enough to be glad and young with spring on the golden road. (157)
The Story Girl’s restlessness is put aside for Bev’s remembering, as though he sees no contrast between her discontent and his own nostalgic observation that, ‘It was enough to be glad and young.’ Would we really rather read his sweetly melancholy memories of springs long past than feel the active, eager chafe of the spirits he is supposedly trying to capture?
A conspicuous instance of insistent describing and remembering comes towards the end of the book with the visit of Sara Stanley’s father, the artist. Bev, Sara, and Mr Stanley take a walk in the woods, and Bev’s relentless poeticizing must surely grate on even the most determinedly receptive of readers. The Story Girl is silenced in Beverley King’s remembering, as though years later he believes he speaks with her fascinating voice. For some of (what I believe to be) the most contrived and self-conscious prose Montgomery ever put into a novel, read the whole chapter ‘The Path to Arcady’ (321–35). (Emily Byrd Starr would have called it ‘fine writing.’)
Excess marks even the fun parts of the second novel. The King newspaper, Our Magazine, is quaint and funny, but we are given too much of it. Often Sara Stanley loses prominence in favour of a general hilarity. Nevertheless, as with all Montgomery’s novels, there are some wonderful scenes. ‘Great-Aunt Eliza’s Visit’ (67–89) is funny; ‘The Love Story of the Awkward Man’ is well told, supplied to an old Beverley King by an old Story Girl, and the only piece we have from Sara Stanley as a mature woman artist.
When Beverley King lets Sara Stanley and the other children speak for themselves, and when the pace of the narrative imitates the quicksilver movements of a child, both The Story Girl and The Golden Road are captivating. But when Montgomery allows Bev to intrude and interpret and moralize and generally hold forth, I believe the stories are dull. Nevertheless, while Beverley King is not himself ever an entirely believable person, the others are, and Peter Craig, the hired boy, stands out as one of the most convincing boys Montgomery created. Even if Sara Stanley remains somewhat blurred despite her power and presence, her stories are often crisp, vivid reminders that for Montgomery a heroine was she who found and appreciated drama and beauty in the everyday world around.
Having completed (she thought) the Anne series and having written two of the books about her new dark-eyed heroine Emily, Montgomery turned away from Prince Edward Island, and from childhood and adolescent stories, and wrote the first of her two adult novels. Set in the beautiful Muskoka area of Ontario, which Montgomery had holidayed in and loved, the new novel deals with twenty-nine-year-old Valancy (originally called Miranda [CM 67.5.9]) Stirling, who can endure her drab, pinched, loveless life only because she envisions for herself a romantic blue castle in Spain where she is the honoured and much-sought mistress. Something like Kilmeny of the Orchard, The Blue Castle has the shape of a formula romance, but there are enough comic reversals and surprises in the story to keep it from being wholly predictable, and there is as much liberating fairy tale as limiting formula. Its plot undoubtedly belongs to romance fiction: thinking she has only one year to live, Valancy defies her clan and goes to nurse the (social outcast) Cissy Gay, who is dying of consumption. After Cissy dies, Valancy asks the local, mysterious suspected reprobate to marry her, informing him of her impending heart failure. They have an idyllic year, but at the end of it a terrible fright reveals to both of them that Valancy’s heart is not so frail as she had believed, and she finds that the doctor had sent her the wrong letter by mistake. A healthy and depressed Valancy returns to her clan, believing Barney does not love her and that she must give him a divorce since she is not going to die. Meanwhile, Valancy has discovered that Barney is really the son of a millionaire who wants his run-away child to come home and marry the girl he had originally been in love with. But Barney really does love Valancy and carries her away from her suddenly obsequious and obliging clan to live a life of travel and woodlore and eternal romance. The sudden fright was one Montgomery borrowed from a newspaper story (Letters 154–5), but the appearance of old Doc Redfern, the patent-medicine millionaire, and the happily-ever-after ending certainly belong to formula romance and melodrama. The differences between Montgomery’s romance and one of strict formula – such as Colleen McCullough’s 1987 novel, The Ladies of Missalonghi (which echoes, whether consciously or unconsciously, Montgomery’s Blue Castle in a startling number of ways)2 – are found in comedy and in character motivation. We can believe in Valancy in a way we would never dream of believing in McCullough’s cardboard Missy.
The opening chapters of The Blue Castle are both poignant and funny – Valancy’s sudden rebellion turns the chill monotony of her life into comedy. She says what she thinks and, after a lifetime of timidity and fear, laughs at the self-absorption of her clan. This tiny portion of a family dialogue at dinner gives an idea of Montgomery’s handling of Valancy’s rebellion:
Aunt Alberta, to save her dinner, plunged into an account of how a dog had bitten her recently. Uncle James, to back her up, asked where the dog had bitten her.
‘Just a little below the Catholic church,’ said Aunt Alberta.
At that point Valancy laughed. Nobody else laughed. What was there to laugh at?
‘Is that a vital part?’ asked Valancy. (59–60)
Valancy is a heroine because she flings aside restraint, rules, and Deerwood respectability (though not respectability altogether). She follows her own heart where both Cissy Gay and Barney Snaith are concerned, and leaves behind forever the galling imprisonment of being ‘one of the Deerwood Stirlings.’ As with so many of Montgomery’s heroines, however, we see that Valancy’s rebellion is not really against morality or the established order but against the petty corruption of the values of the old order. Valancy wants marriage and home life and the security of a husband who responds possessively to the desire of a famous artist to paint her portrait: ‘I didn’t know what you wanted. But I told him / didn’t want my wife painted – hung up in a salon for the mob to stare at. Belonging to another man’ (173). Valancy, we are assured, has been looking for genuine (read that as traditional but not necessarily always conventional) romance and beauty, and she has been heroic enough to recognize them when they were magically disguised in a homespun shirt or log house. Fashionably beautiful cousin Olive, with her pretty curls and complexion, proves to be the ugly stepsister, and Valancy is Cinderella.
But even if Valancy’s story is predictable in shape, and Valancy herself is, after her first rebellion, largely conformist in her own desires and expectations, Montgomery skilfully gives the novel some unexpected developments. One of them is to include a description of an ‘up back’ dance at Chidley Corners, where Valancy is having a wonderful time until a drunken crowd arrives. Swearing and fighting break out, and one of the men forces Valancy onto the dance floor. Montgomery’s description of the reeking whisky and the ‘girls, swung rudely in the dances … dishevelled and tawdry’ (106) is worth reading in full.3
The novel as a whole has quite a few romantic, moonlit moments, and the portion of the story describing Valancy’s and Barney’s life on Mistawis is really one protracted lyric in Montgomery’s best style – the manuscript of the novel shows that Montgomery took great pains with the writing and revising of these numerous descriptive passages.4 And, as an added twist, instead of just having rapturous descriptions of nature given by the narrator as though through the eyes of Valancy or even Barney, we find Valancy inspired by and quoting her favourite nature writer, John Foster. In fact, it has been John Foster’s philosophic and poetic books that have kept Valancy’s soul alive for the five years before her heart trouble; she has borrowed them with stealth from the public library, memorizing long passages and savouring every turn of phrase. In a sense, then, many of the nature descriptions in the book are given through John Foster, since those that are not his are given as though through Valancy’s or Barney’s eyes, since Valancy has been trained by her reading of Foster, and since Barney is Foster. Only one-fifth of the novel’s descriptions come right from the pages of Foster’s Thistle Harvest, Magic of Wings, or Wild Honey, but we feel in many of the outdoor descriptions Foster’s (Barney’s) desire to find truth or message in the quality of beauty described. Foster’s passages and the narrator’s descriptions would make an interesting comparative study – in the subtle turnings of their similarities and differences perhaps we would find encoded Montgomery’s estimation of what distinguishes the male voice from the female (itself fashioned into an apparently neutral narrator’s). Whether Foster or the narrator is speaking, we find in the descriptions an incredibly rich concentration of colours and jewels, reminding us of the highly romantic, poetic infusions in Anne’s House of Dreams.
Perhaps the most interesting development in the novel has to do with the similarities between male and female, rather than their differences. After all, the love story of Valancy and Barney is a continual discovery of their similarities and sympathies – they know how to talk about poetry and life in the same language, they laugh at the same jokes, they share silences, they love the out-of-doors, she worships John Foster, they both hate society’s niceties and expectations. At the outset, when Valancy is still stuck with her mother and cousin, she sees Barney and begins to romanticize his freedom: ‘Men had the best of it, no doubt about that. This outlaw was happy, whatever he was or wasn’t. She, Valancy Stirling, respectable, well-behaved to the last degree, was unhappy and had always been unhappy. So there you were’ (29). We later find that Barney has had a miserable childhood and young adulthood and that he had disappeared from society and civilization because he had turned bitterly misanthropic. His apparent freedom and happiness are recklessness and desperation, and his only solace has been the woods and his John Foster writing. Thus it is that when Valancy and Barney face each other at the end of the novel, we see them as the same: both believe themselves to be unlovable; neither can believe that the other finds her or him worthy. Valancy fears her own unloveliness; Barney, the taint of his father’s patent-medicine millions. They are twins. Ironically, this similarity is in the tradition of the finest romance literature, rather than in the conventions of formula romance. In Valancy and Barney we hear, unspoken, the words of Jane Eyre’s famous declaration to Edward Rochester: ‘equal, – as we are!’ (Brontë 222), the most hopeful, ecstatic, and self-persuading words an independent woman can utter.
The recognized equality of spirit and similarity of feeling are what make Valancy’s and Barney’s story appealing, combining traditional romance and fairy tale. Valancy’s story begins with dreams of chivalry, knights, and castles, and she finds an unshaven scapegrace living on a lonely island. Valancy recognizes the chivalry-in-disguise in a moment; unlike Anne Shirley, who cannot see Gilbert as anything but a school friend, or Pat Gardiner who cannot see Jingle, Valancy is willing to accept cheerfully the muddy overalls and rattling car of her chosen knight. But behind the stories of Anne and Valancy is the same conception of romance. Each heroine rebels against her surroundings in order to find her own conception of the romantic: Anne is twenty-two when she finds that her everyday world is every bit as romantic as the world of poetry and chivalry she imagines, and that Gilbert shares her values; Valancy is long past girlhood when the novel begins, and John Foster has already been training her to believe that the everyday world around is as full of glamour and surprise and beauty as any castle in Spain. We remember that, from the time Valancy gets a good look at Barney, her hero changes from the inscrutable and Byronic inhabitant of a castle to the rough-chinned reprobate of ‘up back.’ Valancy learns quickly as an adult the very same lesson that Anne learns over three novels and ten years of late girlhood: the romancing of the world of nature is a romance that lasts; friendship can be a solid foundation for love.
As a person Valancy ceases to be really interesting once she is married to Barney – she becomes his other self and an almost mute appreciator of the enchanted world of Mistawis. She sheds every spark of bitterness or anger or piercing irony that made her initial break from her clan both entertaining and meaningful. The nature descriptions take over and the comical surprise of Doc Redfern’s arrival provides interest, but Valancy and Barney both dissolve into the romance. Their reconciliation scene, where they learn they are the equals they have seemed to be, offers a flicker of interest, and then Valancy and Barney disappear forever into their travels to the Alhambra, a genuine castle in Spain that is now the real-life counterpart for Valancy’s imaginary blue castle.
In other words, Montgomery plays with romance convention, seems to overturn it, and then submits to it, as she always did with her promising heroines, who never fully flout the expectations of the surrounding culture but who continue to offer readers a brief vicarious flight of imagined rebellion and escape. Their rebellions are, after all, harmless (as far as the establishment is concerned) since the heroines eventually adopt traditional attitudes and values (and roles). As usual in Montgomery’s novels, this returning to the establishment leaves us with a scrap of hope too: beyond the ending of the novel Valancy and Barney may just live the harmonious partnership their story promises – they may even become individuals again. With Montgomery, conventional expectations triumph, but not completely, and that little glimmer of ‘might yet be’ keeps exacting (and woman-affirming) readers from wanting to throw away what is truly delightful in Valancy’s pursuit of romance and self.
What can a late-twentieth-century reader make of the values implicit in this puzzling book? Montgomery originally published parts of Magic for Marigold in the Delineator as a series of short stories (Gillen 156), but the episodic quality of the narrative, a standard feature rather than an aberration of Montgomery’s fiction, is not the real problem here, although one might wonder about the book’s construction and pace when Montgomery devotes two full chapters to the Leslie clan’s deliberations about a name for a new baby. Marigold herself belongs to the worlds of poetry, fairy tale, and enchantment, and seems at times a spirit sister of Anne, Emily, the King children, and Sara Stanley. She has an imaginary playmate called Sylvia with whom she spends many delicious hours. One of the most poignant episodes of the book describes Marigold’s temporary loss of Sylvia. Grandmother, who disapproves of Marigold’s having an imaginary playmate, waits for Marigold’s mother to go away on a visit and then tells Marigold that she cannot have the key to the garden door. Marigold does not argue, knowing all too well how stubborn her grandmother can be; but Marigold eats little and gradually becomes so thin and pale and listless that grandmother is alarmed. Montgomery shows the grandmother to be loving but also angry – she does not want to give in to Marigold even when she can see that the child is failing. She is, Montgomery shows, one of those hard, prosaic people who cannot understand others’ beliefs and dismisses what she cannot understand. An old friend of hers, a noted psychologist, convinces her that Marigold is dying of a broken heart, and she – very grimly – places the key beside Marigold’s breakfast plate. Marigold is at once transported with joy and rushes out to her beloved Sylvia.
Marigold’s predicament over the key to the magic door is typical of her powerlessness. And this is the central difficulty with the book. Although Marigold is a winsome and even charming little girl, she is so often consciously helpless against the adults and the children around her. It is not that she is exactly weak-willed; it is, rather, that others are livelier, and she gets caught up with their schemes. In fact, the other children’s devilment, though sometimes ‘int’resting,’ to use Marigold’s own favourite descriptor, seems hectic and cruel, and two-thirds of the way through the book we may well wonder why Montgomery stacks one frantic episode on top of another without exploring more of the steady, even tenor of Marigold’s own mind and imaginings.
What Marigold learns, evidently with the narrator’s approval, is disturbing. Montgomery’s recreation of the culture around Marigold is realistic with a vengeance. The French are ridiculed throughout; Marigold learns not only that the French hired man, Lazarre, cannot speak ‘correctly,’ but that when he gets drunk and gives his wife a black eye his proper punishment is to be scolded like a child by Marigold’s great-grandmother. Similarly, a Russian princess who comes to play with Marigold behaves with all the passionate savagery of the stereotyped foreigner (the only bit of humour here is that Marigold thinks Varvara is American rather than Russian). Or there is the episode where devilish Gwennie persuades Marigold to dress up in old clothes from the attic and go to an adult costume party that they have been forbidden to attend. Marigold wears a dress that belonged to her father’s first wife, Clementine, a celebrated beauty who died young. Gwennie steps on a ball at the party and goes shrieking to the floor, taking Marigold with her, so that Marigold lands in front of Clementine’s mother. The narrator is not in the least sympathetic with Clementine’s mother’s hysterics at the sight of her dead daughter’s dress. Instead, old Mrs Lawrence, of whom we have been told nothing really prejudicial before, is ridiculed by the narrator and reviled by Gwennie: ‘“My heart broke – when Clementine died – and now to have it brought up like this – here –” people made out between Mrs Lawrence’s yoops’ (174). Gwennie shouts at her: ‘“Shut your face, you old screech-owl,” she said furiously. “You’ve been told Aunt Lorraine had nothing to do with it. Neither had Marigold. It was me found that mouldy old dress and made Marigold put it on. Now, get that through your dippy old head and stop making a fuss over nothing … you fat old cow”’ (174). The narrator merely says, ‘Mrs. Lawrence, finding some one else could make more noise than she could, ceased yooping’ (175). On the way home Uncle Klon laughs and says, ‘I don’t believe any one ever told her the truth about herself before’ (175), and while we are wondering if the truth is that she is a ‘cow,’ we find out the one really damning thing about Clementine, the thing that can make Marigold stop feeling jealous of Clementine’s beauty. We find out that Clementine had the unpardonable effrontery to have big feet. Is the narrator – is Montgomery – endorsing the treatment of old Mrs Lawrence who may be an obnoxious bore but is here ridiculed for publicly showing her grief? And is Clementine to be pitied and despised and, ironically, forgiven by Marigold for being her father’s first wife simply because she had big feet?
The world around Marigold is full of hidden ugliness. Great-grandmother’s stories to Marigold reveal the humorous and very disturbing passions and peculiarities of clan members of the past. Some of great-grandmother’s confidences to Marigold are in questionable taste in a supposed children’s story, though they are certainly the stuff of real life. How do we feel in the late twentieth century – for that matter, how did Montgomery’s contemporaries feel – to hear that great-grandmother’s husband fell in love with his cousin and that she, his wife, learned that a man will come back to you if you wait: ‘They generally come back if you have sense enough to keep still and wait – as I had, glory be’ (70).
And perhaps it is the novel’s assumptions about male and female that are hardest to accept in the 1990s. There are many lessons along the way, but at the end of the book Marigold receives her ‘Chrism of Womanhood’ when she learns how to respond to the delightful boy Budge. Marigold tries to be the ideal companion for Budge – she pretends not to mind snakes and toads because she fears Budge would despise her if she did. When Budge begins to neglect her to play with a new boy, Marigold sulks when Budge does come back to her. As Aunt Marigold explains to a grieving Marigold, ‘We – women – must always share’ (273). So far so good. Aunt Marigold is sharing with her niece and making her feel the importance of women’s ways of knowing and being and understanding. But the final sentences of the novel reinforce a very different lesson. Marigold has been encouraged throughout the book to be passive – her playmates show more vitality than she does – and now the book ends with a final endorsement of this passivity. Marigold learns not just to share, but to wait – as her great-grandmother had said – to be ready when the boy decides to whistle his way back again. Marigold has outgrown Sylvia, but if she is generous and forgiving she will have Budge:
Yes, she must share Budge. The old magic was gone forever – gone with Sylvia and the Hidden Land and all the dear, sweet fading dreams of childhood. But after all there were compensations. For one thing, she could be as big a coward as she wanted to be. No more hunting snakes and chivying frogs. No more pretending to like horrible things that squirmed. She was no longer a boy’s rival. She stood on her own ground.
‘And I’ll always be here for him to come back to,’ she thought. (273–4).
Perhaps Montgomery meant the final line to show Marigold’s sturdiness and reliability. Perhaps others read those last sentences and see Montgomery’s praise of individuality and the female. I see instead acknowledgment of the boy’s standards as the measure (if she can be a ‘coward,’ who defines the term and applies it?) and Marigold’s failure to measure up as self-acknowledged inferiority. Of course she will be there for Budge – how good of him to come back to such a little coward as herself. Previous episodes, too, have taught Marigold that what little boys really want from little girls is a sympathetic ear and lavish praise. Is Montgomery slyly exposing the foibles of the sexes or is she exposing and endorsing them? The latter seems likely.
While the male-female debate is puzzling, other parts of the book are not. Old grandmother (Marigold’s great-grandmother) flavours the pages with salt and vinegar – with worldly wisdom and clan scandals. Montgomery was incensed that people wondered if her crusty matriarch had been inspired by Mazo de la Roche’s grandmother of the Jalna books (Gillen 169–70) – perhaps she answered them by writing A Tangled Web. But it is true that – if a questionable moralist – old grandmother is one of the best characters of the book. In a rare moment of praise, old grandmother tells Marigold about a woman she loved, and gives us one of the best passages of the novel: ‘I loved Annabel. She was the only one of the Lesley clan I really loved. A sweet woman. The only woman I ever knew who would keep secrets. A woman who would really burn a letter if you asked her to. It was safe to empty your soul out to her. Learn to keep a secret, Marigold. And she was just. Learn to be just, Marigold. The hardest thing in the world is to be just. I never was just. It was so much easier to be generous’ (73).
Unfortunately, for adult readers, old grandmother dies in the first quarter of the book. The book as a whole suffers from the lack of a real heroine. Marigold has her moments, and Montgomery gives us some wonderfully joyous descriptions through the laughing Marigold’s eyes – but the potentially sinister world overshadows its uncertain centre. Is old grandmother right about men and women and life in general? Montgomery’s unusual book shows us sorrow, cruelty, madness, and unimaginativeness alongside dancing joy, imaginative ecstasy, and loving kindness. The narrator is sometimes surprisingly – and disturbingly – partial and at other times surprisingly removed. If Marigold Lesley is not an inspiring heroine, however, she at least struggles to know herself and revels in the beauty of her home and the Island. And even if we cannot ourselves endorse Marigold’s or the narrator’s assumptions about women and men and their roles and limitations, we will probably find Marigold and her world ‘int’resting.’
Montgomery’s second adult novel makes a startling contrast with a children’s novel such as Magic for Marigold; the passivity recommended for and assumed in Marigold plays virtually no part in the middle-aged world Montgomery depicts in the adult comedy. Marigold learns to be a receiver of confidences and also learns to desire contact with a male action and passion she as a girl evidently lacks. The narrator encodes multiple messages in this assessment of Marigold’s response to Budge: ‘She liked his scarlet boy-stories better than her rose-pink and moon-blue girl-fancies’ (MM 267). Both the women and the men of A Tangled Web are passionate and misguided – and the narrator of the adult book makes us laugh at almost everyone. Somewhere between Magic for Marigold and the writing of A Tangled Web Montgomery-made a shift in thinking about the essential differences between male and female and their mutual and independent needs. Or perhaps, Montgomery chose to be honest in the adult novel in a way that she did not feel free to be in the children’s book.
As always in Montgomery’s novels, the quality of romance in A Tangled Web reveals the quality of the male and female personalities involved. Only one of the five main stories of the book deals with Montgomery’s usual subject – a young girl learning through pain and (varying degrees of) self-reflection to be a woman. Gay Penhallow is in love with good-looking Noel Gibson, and they become engaged. Gay’s daydreams are everything we would expect a girl such as Marigold to feel, too. But Gay’s romance goes sour – her malicious cousin Nan decides to steal Noel, and does, and Montgomery chronicles Gay’s slow realization that her lover is wavering and then false. Interestingly, too, though Montgomery paints Nan as a selfish and heartless woman, she does not lay all the blame with her. Noel comes across as a spineless, self-important man who deserves to be dropped by Nan as well as Gay. Montgomery even allows Gay the luxury of seeing Noel again and realizing for herself what he really is. Thus, even in the one story line that looks most familiar to a Montgomery reader, we find some surprising developments in the thinking of the heroine. She learns to see for herself what her cousin is and also what her young dreams had made her imagine her hero to be.
Donna Dark’s romance with Peter Penhallow is a violent and sudden thing. They are both passionate and stubborn people, and Montgomery gives a good scene showing their stormy recriminations and resentments. Donna has decided to give up her morbid mourning for her boy-husband, who was killed in the war ten years earlier, and to elope with Peter. A more conventional romantic telling would have the fiery lovers meeting and blazing through the night to a secret wedding and a honeymoon in South America or Africa. But in Montgomery’s adult comedy, Donna and Peter, instead, behave in perfect consistency with their pride and temper. Donna is cold and rattled from waiting for an hour in the chilly night air, and Peter ignores her physical and mental coolness since he is caught up in his own exuberance and heat; they argue, and Donna gets out of the car with this most realistic admonition to Peter: ‘“Go to hell” she said’ (203).
Jocelyn and Hugh Dark have never lived together because at their wedding Jocelyn has fallen in love with another cousin and, when she and Hugh arrive at their new home, she tells him what she has just realized and goes back to live with her mother. For ten years she is faithful to her dream of love for a man she has never seen since. Hugh is brooding and faithful, and Jocelyn sickens of life but is true to her own dream. Montgomery does not encourage laughter over their tragedy until the fateful cousin reappears on Prince Edward Island and Jocelyn must see how she deluded herself, throwing away years of happiness for the false infatuation kindled in a glance. So much for love at first sight.
The openly comic romance of the novel is the one Pennycuik creates in deciding he must marry Margaret Penhallow if he is to stay in the running for the jug. Slick, dapper, strutting little Penny imagines he is conferring great honour on the faded Margaret. Little does he know that Margaret has her own dreams. Though she accepts Penny, since to be unmarried is to be despised in her clan, she is thrilled when Penny wants to break the engagement. And here Montgomery makes a wonderful departure from the usual conventions of romance. Margaret finds romance and happiness without adult love or marriage – instead, she is in love with a little house she has secretly named Whispering Winds and wants more than anything to live there with a child to love and raise as her own. Margaret, in other words, suggests that the loving maternal spirit has other ways to fulfil itself than through marriage – especially when the marital option is Penny Dark. Initially believing she has no other way to become mistress of her own house than marriage to Penny, Margaret becomes engaged to him, but ‘Margaret felt positive anguish when she realised that marriage meant the surrender of all the mystery and music and magic that was Whispering Winds’ (236). Interestingly, too, Montgomery makes Margaret a dressmaker and a poet – she creates beauty for young women to wear and she writes of the love and beauty she sees in the world. When the old copy of Pilgrim’s Progress that Aunt Becky leaves her turns out to be a first edition worth $10,000, Margaret is free to buy her little house and to adopt the abused child Brian. There she will work in her garden and make dresses and write poetry and love little Brian and be a perfectly happy woman. No other Montgomery novel heroine escapes conventional romance with such success.
All the stories have happy endings; Montgomery’s puncturing of romance is an illusion, just as it had been much earlier in Anne of Green Gables. The undercutting of sentimentality through the pungent and pervasive cynicism and irony of Aunt Becky and the narrator is in turn undercut by the positive resolution to all the stories. Gay falls in love with Roger, Donna and Peter have a big clan wedding, Margaret gets her house and child, Hugh and Jocelyn are reunited, Big Sam and Little Sam overlook their differences and live together again (though their inclusion in the story and their final reunion is to be regretted, since it occasions one of Montgomery’s worst racial slurs),5 Lawson recovers his memory when the jug shatters against his head, and Aunt Rachel gets real Jordan water for her vial. Montgomery’s apparent satire on human foibles and entanglements is really a comedy with wedding bells and treasure for its beleaguered participants.
Even in this adult book that suggests a unifying and equalizing foolishness in men and women, Montgomery reverts to her favoured pattern of irruption, upheaval, and restoration. No one is irrevocably warped by anyone else’s cruelty or misapprehensions, but yet the cruelty and misfortunes are there for us to see and remember. We find that Brian’s uncle strangles Brian’s kitten; Staunton Grundy contemplates the sermon of a man with whom his own wife was always in love. The relations between men and women are the substance of life, the book suggests, but there is no limit to misadventures and also to the discoveries that can be made for new ways to work out old problems. In other words, Montgomery’s comic, romantic, adult novel does have the distinction of suggesting that life is full of interesting possibilities and that no single answer or pattern can fit all people and all occasions. Compromise and growth and humour are constantly demanded of those who want to make the best of life.
The character of Aunt Becky, obviously kin to old grandmother of Magic for Marigold, is a triumph of humour and acerbity. Her mock obituary, that she reads to the clan at her levee, is the best thing in the book, and one of the best pieces of comic realism Montgomery wrote. The whole of it is worth reading, but part of it suggests how far this book departs from Montgomery’s others in assessing the power and position of women as Montgomery probably saw it. Of herself, old Aunt Becky says: ‘She longed for freedom, as all women do, but had sense enough to understand that real freedom is impossible in this kind of a world, the lucky people being those who can choose their masters, so she never made the mistake of kicking uselessly over the traces’ (60). Aunt Becky’s longing for freedom takes the form of delight in others’ slavery – she holds everyone in the clan who cares about it to ransom for the heirloom Dark jug.
This frame story and collective motive is the weakest aspect of the book. The novel begins and ends with the Dark jug, and supposedly everything in the book is initiated by or intimately connected with the jug: Nan would not have been around all summer if her aunt had not wanted to find out who would inherit the jug; Peter would not have seen and fallen in love with Donna or rescued her from the burning Dark house had it not been for the jug, and so on. It is not possible, however, to believe that bold and independent Donna could hesitate to marry Peter because she might lose her chances for the jug, nor is it believable that Penny and Margaret are tempted to become engaged at least partly to stay in the running for the jug. Even as an admittedly ridiculous, deliberately satirical device, the jug is largely unconvincing and ineffective. Montgomery always had trouble constructing a plot, and though the jug cannot be dismissed, since it is the motivator behind and the reason for the stories themselves, we must often ignore it in order to think about the human interactions Montgomery paints so well.
There is no single heroine in A Tangled Web, though the novel does focus on females, as do all Montgomery’s novels. But the focus here is different from the focus in Montgomery’s other stories in that the men and women really do seem to play equal parts in the fabrication, destruction, and reconstruction of romance. We may see through the eyes of Donna and Gay and Margaret and Jocelyn, but we also see clearly what Peter and Roger and Penny and Hugh think. Everyone suffers; everyone changes; everyone gives up some secret dream or delusion and then recovers something of it. For the first time, perhaps because it was an adult novel, but more probably because it came later in her career, Montgomery tries to show women and men as similarly deluded and self-deluding and as equally entangled in a great pattern of events over which they have, paradoxically, both ultimate and little control. When each is true to what she or he really wants, the Dark jug doesn’t matter at all. Heroism becomes the ability to see, suffer, and repair.
This novel’s assumptions about the interconnectedness of life suggest an essentially female view of the world. If, as Carol Gilligan describes it, men see the world in terms of argumentation and separation, and women see it in terms of interconnection and co-operation, then the principles underlying Montgomery’s comedy about equality are essentially female, sporadically feminist. In assessing the difference between men’s and women’s understanding of structure and connection, Gilligan, too, uses the image of the web: ‘Just as the language of responsibilities provides a weblike imagery of relationships to replace a hierarchical ordering that dissolves with the coming of equality, so the language of rights underlines the importance of including in the network of care not only the other but also the self (173). In Montgomery’s scheme the clan acts both as a metaphor for the larger human community and as a microcosm of human interactions and foibles. Montgomery uses conventional romance as a kind of comic, universal touchstone for character and also as a serious initiator of individual self-analysis. Romance is inevitably bound up with finding or establishing a home, and home is a tangible link with the clan as well as an emotional centre for the individual.
This adult novel about men and women and clan life expresses most clearly Montgomery’s lifelong view that the (female) principles of cooperation and interconnection best sustain the individual and the community. Men and women will be equally culpable and equally heroic in a culture that values both sexes. And this valuing of women and men, who, in turn, value clan and home, suggests that for Montgomery the ultimate romance begins with a beauty- and community-embracing self.