When Montgomery had finished what she hoped would be the last of the Anne books in 1920 and badly wanted a new heroine, she conjured up Emily. But in the very same breath that she told her journal about Emily, she also said: ‘And I want – oh, I want to write – something entirely different from anything I have written yet. I am becoming classed as a “writer for young people” and that only. I want to write a book dealing with grown-up creatures – a psychological study of one human being’s life’ (Journals 2: 390). She did not write an adult novel until The Blue Castle (1926) and later, more determinedly, A Tangled Web (1931). Perhaps she was finally free to try adult stories because she had truly explored, in a ‘psychological study’ of Emily Byrd Starr, the boundaries between child and adult. She had created with Emily her literary autobiography (Emily of New Moon, 1923; Emily Climbs, 1925; Emily’s Quest, 1927).
To draw this portrait of the artist as a young girl and woman, Montgomery had to explore thoroughly her own thoughts about writing1 and the female as artist. Montgomery had to come to terms – far more explicitly than she ever had with Anne – with forces that shape and thwart the female who aspires: tradition, established sex-roles, male and female gatekeepers for the establishment, and conventional romance. Emily’s is a passionate struggle for voice as well as a (perhaps partially unconscious) record of Montgomery’s own ambivalent battles with autonomy and conformity. As far as they are able, Montgomery and Emily transcribe themselves as literary heroines, offering us a fascinating double portrait, of the kind that Mary Jacobus and Jonathan Culler (43–64) describe, of reading women reading and writing themselves as women. Emily, like Montgomery, uses what she reads and what she writes to determine the limits and the context for her own voice.
Montgomery gives a chronicle of her childhood reading and its influence on her in the ‘story of her career,’ supposedly written expressly for Everywoman’s World in 1917 and eventually published separately under the title of The Alpine Path (1975). Now that Montgomery’s journals are available, we know that the autobiographical article was taken right out of her own diaries. When she was fifteen Montgomery had destroyed her childhood journals. In 1916 she had begun to think that she should jot down ideas about her childhood so that if she were asked to give an account of her life, she would have the material ready in her journal. The long pages of recollections were thus at hand when she needed them for the prominent Canadian magazine. But more important for our study of Emily is the fact that in 1919, just as Montgomery was trying to escape from Anne and come up with a new heroine, she decided to recopy all her journals – from 1898 to the present – into uniform-sized ledgers. So, in the early 1920s, when she was establishing Emily, Montgomery had recently published her autobiographical account of her very young career and was also copying out recollections of her own early adult life. Is it any wonder that we find whole sections of her journal transcribed into the Emily novels? Events in Montgomery’s life and writing career are found in Emily’s story, as are clan stories and accountings of Cavendish customs and doings. The Emily trilogy reproduces, in a way no ‘great-man’ or ‘great-event’ history can, the cultural rhythms and values of turn-of-the-century Prince Edward Island farm life.
But this is not all. Montgomery gives to Emily her own imaginative heritage as well – Emily reads what Montgomery read; Emily’s ideas about art and life are fashioned by the same Romantic-Victorian-feminist views that inspired Montgomery the woman and writer. From the time Montgomery herself had been a small girl, she had devoured books and poetry and magazine fare – whatever came her way in the intelligent but somewhat limited range of materials found in the Macneill homestead and on the shelves of the Cavendish schoolhouse or of friends. By looking at what Emily read and loved, we gain insight into what Montgomery is doing with Emily. At the same time, as we see the deliberate intertwining of Emily’s imagination with the imaginative lives she has read about, we appreciate a dimension of Montgomery’s artistic struggle that it would otherwise be easy to undervalue. Passages in Montgomery’s journals – especially where she talks about her passionate love for Herman Leard, her wedding, the birth of her first child, and the death of Fredericka Campbell MacFarlane – sound very much like the literary works that influenced her powerfully.2 Both Emily and Montgomery are revealed most tellingly with Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm.
The Emily novels’ romances are enriched by literary allusion and exploitation of literary formulae. The rough outline of the Emily trilogy is purely conventional, conforming to the expected romance formula of denial-recognition-separation-reconciliation in Emily’s love story with Teddy Kent. But the story is far from simple, and Teddy Kent is not the most powerful romantic presence in the novels. Instead Emily’s real threat and temptation as woman and artist come from the needy, sexually powerful,3 consummate art critic, Dean Priest. In Montgomery’s happy-ending series, the struggles with Dean eventually bring out Emily’s powers as woman and writer and actually enable her to free herself from his stifling romanticism, but her escape is narrow and she turns from one man to another. Teddy may seem a pale rival for Dean, but at least with him Emily is free to pursue her own work. Teddy, who becomes a famous painter, accepts Emily as his equal without question – and that, Montgomery’s story slyly encourages us to see, is fairy tale.
Montgomery is unwilling or unable to explore fully the tremendous energy she generates with Dean Priest, and it is no wonder many romance-endorsing readers lament that Emily could not somehow have worked out things with Dean. And yet what Montgomery is doing is having Emily face in Dean – at once – the most seductive and deadly forces of romance and, implicitly, culturally accepted roles for men and women. From his very introduction in the series, Dean is associated with the most romantic of novels, Jane Eyre, and we see that Emily’s struggles against Dean are also the artist’s struggle against the lies and silencing of conventional romance. It is ironic that Emily’s enduring love for Teddy and eventual marriage to him make the trilogy look like a simple love story. In fact, Montgomery’s apparently conventional fairy-tale plot is a peculiarly wry and complex commentary on the alternatives and possibilities available to a woman. Since Montgomery did believe, along with Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh, that love was preferable to lovelessness, Emily is destined to be with someone. Montgomery had no wish, in Emily’s final solution at least, to accept Olive Schreiner’s radical, disturbing vision of how a woman’s passion can destroy her in a culture where sex-roles and life scripts are rigidly prescribed. Probably neither the romance-loving nor the truth-seeking reader can be wholly satisfied with Teddy, but then Teddy is pictured as a liberating rather than a restraining force.
When Emily is able to deny Dean Priest, she declares her right to her own woman’s voice. His very name suggests the potent patriarchy behind him and its excluding knowledge and powers. The manuscript of the novel shows that Montgomery considered the name carefully; she originally called him Dean Temple.4 It is no accident that Dean Priest is a connoisseur of literature; for Emily’s struggle to have meaning, Dean Priest must be sublime and authoritative as well as crushingly condescending. To join him means she is one of the privileged few, one of those chosen to share the glimpses into the tombs of the nineteenth Egyptian dynasty or the heart of Emerson’s transcendentalism; her guide will be the cynical, mysterious, passionate self-exile who sees in her a worthy intellect and spirit. If Emily succumbs to Dean’s authoritative, flattering entreaty, she will consign herself to silence or to mimicry of his male voice. In struggling against him, Emily Starr is fighting against the collective weight of male privilege and authority. She can join the voice of privilege and authority if she loses her own voice; Emily’s apparent love struggle with Dean Priest is nothing less than the female writer’s fight for survival. Just as Montgomery inverts the conventions of romance fiction with Anne Shirley, so with Emily, Montgomery makes the apparently conventional love story of Emily and Teddy actually a triumph of the female artist over the crippled and crippling constraints of male authority and domination. Emily wins, keeps her voice, and is true to the imaginative influences that have enriched her individuality.
Emily’s reading is a key to her personality and to her conceptions of art; reading and writing are the first romances of her life. In her reading we find the love of beauty and the rebellion against authority that enable her to attract and eventually withstand the very literary Dean Priest. We can look at Emily’s reading – the texts Montgomery chose from her own reading – to see how Montgomery prepares the reader for the dimension of profound struggle involved in Emily’s later refusal of Dean. And we can trace in Emily’s awareness of and responses to literature and language the growing self-awareness of the artist and the woman. Each of the three Emily novels is characterized by a special treatment of allusion and the power of language.