Is that really the only reply you have to my post(s)? It seems you tend to ignore any good counter-argument ever made in your threads.
What can I say, Julie? I found a scholarly book to support my thesis, namely, that L.M. Montgomery was strongly influenced by a prevalent idea during the late nineteenth century, which said that women can find happiness only through obedience. I demonstrated - at least I think I demonstrated - that Leslie Moore gains wonderful happiness
precisely because she is prepared to turn her husband into an abusive tyrant again, for
his sake. Because she is willing to be badly oppressed rather than let her husband suffer from an unnecessary case of amnesia, she is gloriously rewarded, is released from an oppressive marriage that she could otherwise never have gotten out of, and finds wonderful love. All because she was prepared to be abused by her husband again, just so that he could get well!
However, let us examine the case. Was Leslie's choice really the right one? Oh sure, it certainly turned out that way. But is it likely that something similar would have happened in reality? In other words, is this the kind of story we should learn from? To make you see what I mean, I once read a story about a young boy who escaped from a man he was afraid of by jumping out of an airplaine and miraculously landing in a haystack. The boy was completely unhurt, and he had escaped from the man who frightened him. So, was it right to jump out of the plane? Yes, it clearly was. So is this a lesson that you want to teach your children? If you get scared when you are a thousand feet up in the air, then jump out of the plane, because there will be a haystack below you which will break your fall? I think not.
Was it right of Gilbert to operate on a man to restore his personality, even though he had reason to believe that the man's personality was a bad one? Yes, in this story it was definitely the right thing to do. But would it have been the right thing to do in real life, too?
Of course, I keep insisting that it was absolutely improbable that an operation could give Leslie's husband his memory back in the first place. The man had been hit on the head at least a year, probably several years, before he had the operation - how was the operation supposed to fix whatever injuries that blow had caused at least a year earlier? Dead brain cells are dead brain cells! They don't grow back.
Anyway, Julie, I presented my reasons for not believing that you can cure amnesia surgically. If you seriously want me to consider the possibility that it is possible to do so, then please present some actual evidence, some cases where doctors have operated on amnesiac patients to give them their memory back, and the patient's memory has actually been restored.
Let's discuss the other details of the story about Leslie Moore. How likely is it that she wouldn't even have known that her husband had a twin brother? And how likely is it that her real husband would die, but his twin brother would be hit on the head and become amnesiac, and people would bring the twin brother back to Leslie many years after her real husband died, telling Leslie that this was her husband? And nobody would have a clue that the man was the twin brother and not the husband? Really, Julie, the story is more full of holes than a Swiss cheese. So if you believe that you will get Leslie's kind of reward if you make the leap of faith that Leslie did, how likely is it that you would find that reward? Are you really willing to tell your kid that there is a haystack waiting below him if he jumps out of a plane without a parachute?
Let's get back to what I said about the reason for L.M. Montgomery to tell the story about Leslie Moore. I think that her reason for telling it was that she wanted to teach young women obedience and submissiveness. And she wanted to do that because that was the sort of thing she was supposed to do if she wanted to be regarded as "safe", mainstream, moral and religious.
You say that what happened to Leslie was a moral lesson. I say it was a lesson meant to teach young women obedience. Now imagine a case where a father had lost his memory. Imagine, too, that the neighbours knew that the father used to beat up his children and generally treat them cruelly. Suppose that he had been hit on the head and become docile. Let's pretend that there was a cure available which could restore his true personality. Would it have been right to restore that man's personality and thereby his cruelty to his children? Would that have been the moral thing to do?
And if not, why would it be morally right to restore a man's personality so that he could treat his wife cruelly, if it would not be morally right to restore another man's memory so that he could treat his children cruelly?
In that scholarly book I referred to (Beate Lundberg: Kom ihåg att du är underlägsen! (Remember that you are inferior!), Studentlitteratur, printed in Sweden 1986, ISBN 91-44-25471-7), the author pointed out that young women were told to respond to cruelty and abusiveness from their husbands by becoming even more submissive to the men who oppressed them. Do you think that will help, Julie? Will wife abusers stop abusing their wives if the wives become even more docile, humble and self-effacing?
In another thread, I recently wrote about a Norwegian couple, Helen and Mikael, where Mikael insisted that Helen could be saved only if she completely deferred to her husband and obeyed him in everything. Every time he "felt" that she was thinking "defiant thoughts", he also felt that she was full of demons, and he beat her up in various ways to drive the demons out of her. They saw a Christian marital therapist, who told them that Helen could only find peace and happiness by becoming totally submissive to Mikael. Do you believe that that is true, Julie?
Let's return to the story about the haystack for a moment. How likely is it that a young boy will ever be kidnapped on board a plane? I'd say it is extremely, extremely unlikely. I'd say it's pretty okay to tell your son that if he is kidnapped on board a plane he should jump, because there will be a haystack below him to break his fall. It is
extremely unlikely that there will be a haystack in the right position below him. But, honestly, it is also extremely unlikely that he will be kidnapped on board an airplane. So what if you tell him to jump? He will not ever find himself in that particular situation.
Similarly, how likely is it that a young woman will be told that her husband can have his true, abusive personality restored by having an operation? Frankly, such a thing will just not happen. So what if we tell her that she should make sure that her husband has the operation?
Only - is it right to teach young people that general outlook on life? If you are are a young man and you are in any sort of danger, jump, even if your chances of survivial are nearly zero? And if you are a young woman and a man wants to treat you badly, by all means don't try to stop him? Is that a good lesson to teach young people?
Okay. Did L.M. Montgomery want to hurt and torture young women by teaching them to obey wife abusers? No, I don't think she wanted young women to have bad lives at all. I don't think she had any interest in seeing young women being hurt. It is quite possible that she believed that in a society where women were so powerless and had so few real options, being obedient was really the best recourse and the best way for a woman to find happiness. It is quite possible that she wanted to believe that there was a God who would reward the obedient women for their obedience. And for all I know many young women who were moderately unhappy in their marriages may have drawn strength from Montgomery's lesson: if they were obedient they would be rewarded, sooner or later. Maybe quite a few young women were able to feel optimism about their own situation thanks to the story about Leslie Moore.
There are two reasons why I didn't respond more in detail to what you said. The first reason is that I thought that I had already replied to and countered the points you made. The second reason was that I felt that you and I are too far apart in our views, and in the end we must agree to disagree. But if you want to discuss any of the points I have raised here, please do so.
Ann
