Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Boring Anne (of Green Gables) syndrome

Hasini, I have to admit that I had forgotten many things about Anne of Green Gables. I read the first book when I was about ten, which would have been around 1965. Then I read the next in the series when I was about thirteen, and the rest when I was around sixteen. Thanks to your quotes, I do remember that I thought that Anne seemed to have a happy life when she had small children at home. But I remember, too, how much the last book depressed me.

Many years later, probably when I was around thirty, I re-read some of the books. Not all of them, because I had never owned all of them, and I couldn't find all of them in the library. I don't think I re-read the one(s?) where Anne had young children at home.

When I re-read the Anne books, I had come across an article saying that L.M. Montgomery had a rather unhappy marriage herself. I have no idea if that is true, but when I read that, I wanted to read the Anne books again to see how Anne's marriage was portrayed. The story about Leslie Moore absolutely fascinated me. You are right, Julie, I now remember that Leslie's husband used to be mean, but when he came back he was just child-like and needed to be taken care of. In any case, she was not happy with him, and she wished that she could marry the young man, Owen Ford, that she had met while her husband was missing.

I strongly remember that Gilbert insisted that Leslie Moore's husband could be cured of his amnesia if he had an operation. That seemed like complete nonsense to me - I have never heard of anyone who was cured of amnesia by having an operation, and if it was not possible to give people their memories back in the late twentieth century by operating on them, then it certainly wasn't possible in the early twentieth century. Therefore, the whole story about giving Leslie Moore's husband his memories back by performing brain surgery on him seemed like a complete wishful-thinking scenario to me. But since it was so unrealistic, why did L.M. Montgomery write it?

This is my answer. The story about Leslie Moore is a didactic one, meant to teach young women a lesson about proper female behaviour. When Leslie Moore is told that her husband can have his memory and his earlier personality back if he has an operation, she doesn't want him to have that operation. Like Julie said, earlier her husband had been mean, but now he was at least docile. Was Leslie Moore really supposed to pay a lot of money to give her husband his tyrant-like personality back?

Anne shuddered at the prospect that Leslie Moore would become the victim of her husband's earlier viciousness again. Therefore she argued fiercely with Gilbert that he mustn't let this operation take place. Gilbert waved aside all of Anne's objections. It was the duty of the physician to look out for the best interests of his patient, and if that could only come with the restoration of the patient's evil personality, then so be it.

So the act of turning an invalid into a healthy wife abuser was a righteous one, according to Gilbert. Or maybe he didn't think like that; maybe he felt that God wouldn't let a good and generous act, like the curing of a man's mind, lead to the cruel oppression of a woman. And Gilbert was right, of course. Thanks to the fact that the amnesiac man had the operation, he could explain to the world that he was in fact not Leslie Moore's husband at all, but his twin brother. So because Leslie Moore had dutifully paid for her husband's operation, and because Gilbert had refused to be swayed by his wife's objections, Leslie Moore was now free.

Lesson? It is this. If a woman accepts that she must subordinate herself to her husband, and always put his best interests above her own, then God will reward her and give her the kind of happiness that she could never have found if she had selfishly looked out for her own best interests rather than her husband's.

I'm pretty sure that L.M. Montgomery was repeating a message that young girls of that time were likely to hear from other quarters, too. I have a book at home, "Remember That You Are Inferior!", written by a Swedish scholar who has studied didactic books and magazines from the 1880s, aimed at young girls and women. The message of these books and magazines is always the same: only through obedience and submissiveness can a woman find true happiness.

I was thinking, as I was mulling over the story of Leslie Moore, that L.M. Montgomery tried to be mainstream and "safe" when she wrote that young girls find happiness in obedience and in submissiveness in their marriages. Parents needn't be afraid that her books would inspire their daughters to be rebellious. But I thought that maybe, maybe L.M. Montgomery was trying to reassure herself that God would reward her, too, if she accepted her own (not necessarily happy) marriage without complaints. Maybe, maybe there might come an Owen Ford even into her own life. (Yes, Hasini, this is pure speculation.)

When I first read the story about Leslie Moore, when I was about sixteen, it didn't particularly stick in my mind. What did stick was the last book, and the evaporation of Anne in it. That shocked me enough to make that the thing that I really remembered about Anne: how the lively little girl from the first book became a shadow of a woman after twenty-plus years of marriage. But when I reread the books - some of the books, not all of them - then the Leslie Moore story became a sort of key to the message of the books. A woman must obey. That is her lot. And accepting her lot and her duty will bring her happiness. And yet, and yet - after twenty years of obedience, she had nevertheless faded into the wallpaper.

I'm sure that if Anne had figured as prominently in "Rilla of Ingleside" as Marilla did in "Anne of Green Gables", then I would never have thought of Anne as a victim of her own marriage. Now I do. And that is what makes me wonder about what role Lois will play after twenty years of marriage to Clark.

Ann

Me! I loved them even more than the Anne series, personally. When I was pregnant, I called the baby "Emily". At least I did until an ultrasound showed that my son would probably not appreciate the name.

Ann, if I did misread your comments on being a housewife as being negative, I apologize. I admit to being a little hypersensitive on the subject. Just a number of years ago, as more and more women started having children and then returning to their careers, they faced contempt from society about abandoning their children to caregivers. The tide turned relatively quickly, however, and now the 'stay-at-home' moms, unless they have several pre-school age children, are often looked down upon. I've been to any number of dinners where one of the first questions I'm asked is "What do you do?", and you can just see their eyes glaze over with my reply.

But again, that is present-day society, which is not the same as the times that Anne was living in. So when you write in what appears to be horror:
Hasini has already commented very well to that, but let's suppose that it is really true: some women did practically nothing. You are viewing it through modern eyes, apparently seeing them as unfulfilled or lazy or simply not living up to their potential. Maybe that was in fact true, but these were the restrictions set out by the society of the time. And if a woman was perfectly content living that kind of life - whether it was because she enjoyed it or whether she honestly never thought of challenging it - what was wrong with that? The sorrow would have been for the women who chafed under such restrictions, but didn't know how to - or couldn't - change things.

And again, as Hasini has mentioned, no matter the size of the household you are managing, there is a lot to do. Ann, surely you, as a working woman, struggle at times to take care of the various minutiae of your life around your teaching responsibilities. I may be a stay-at-home housewife, but I can assure you that I do not spend most of my day actually cleaning house. I hate cleaning house. But believe me, even if I'm not dusting and vacuuming all the time, there is enough to do. I'm not overstressed (not most of the time, anyway), but I can't imagine trying to get everything done while raising children and still working a full-time job outside the house. These women who "have it all" really are superwomen, in my books.

Back to the issue of L&C with children: as so many have mentioned, I think we're more interested in reading about L&C than the children, and the focus of your life shifts considerably once you have a child. I suppose I prefer reading about their romance because, no matter how happy or content I may be with my marriage and my family, I remember the days when our relationship was just starting, when we were on the cusp of romance. My feelings of love, of anticipation as the relationship was growing, were different than now, and reading about L&C's path to love helps remind me of that.

There are many next-gen stories, as I and others have listed, that I have enjoyed very much, and have reread time and again. And I'm sure there are others that I have forgotten. Both Yvonne and Sheila have written several awesome "married" stories, but I didn't mention them earlier in this thread because there are no kids in those stories. It's not my favorite genre, but that hardly means that I hate it or even dislike it. Nothing of the kind. It's just not my first or second choice.

And now that I've made so many of your eyes glaze over with this rambling post , I'll shuffle out of here...

Kathy

Kathy, I have no right whatsoever to criticize a woman for choosing to be a housewife. You are so right, there are so many demands made on women these days, and if a woman chooses to concentrate on being a stay-at-home mom instead of trying to combine motherhood a and job, no one has any right to ciritcize her for that. My point was always that after twenty-plus years of marriage Anne of Green Gables was "out of the story", and that is something I hate. There is no way that a woman should be treated as so uninteresting that she can be left out of the story!

A relatively famous Swedish book series tells the story of a few Swedish women who belonged to the Swedish nobility in the early twentieth century. The books insist that these women truly had almost nothing to do. They didn't do any housework, not even any planning of the housework, and there were so many things they weren't allowed to do, because the activities were unsuitable, or beneath them, or immoral, or something. Two of these women had nervous breakdowns. But I quite agree that they belonged to another social stratum than Anne of Green Gables, and there really weren't many other women who were in their situation.

On the other hand, I have also read another book about some people who knew absolutely nothing about how to take care of a home. The book was written by Darwin's granddaughter, and it is not the least bit darwinistic - the woman doesn't even mention her grandfather's world-shaking new theory - but instead it is delightfully full of a lovely sense of humour. The woman tells, very lovingly, a story about her many eccentric relatives. She says that because they had so many servants, they were absolutely helpless if they were left alone. They could do nothing practical on their own. On the other hand, they all seemed content and happy.

Ann

Ann, the story of what happened to Leslie was a moral lesson. The series is aimed at probably the under-15 crowd (at least, almost anyone I know who is a fan of it read it around 12, though of course anyone older will enjoy is as well. I've lost track of how many times I've reread them now ).

She did the right thing, even though selfishly she could have let him go on as before and make her own life easier, and was rewarded by the result.

The lesson is not even subtle. They quote the Bible once and again (something along the lines of "the truth shall set you free" - forgive me for the probable misquote, I'm not religious, and have never read the Bible in English).

So how you could possibly misintepret it, I have no idea. Perhaps you need to start taking stories at face value and stop looking for chauvinistic subtle messages in everything this world has to offer - contrary to what seems to be your belief, not everyone is out to put women in the kitchen. Especially, I daresay, a female author.

(Also, I would just like to say that, irrelevant as it is to the topic at hand, it made sense to me that a surgery could cure him - I think Gilbert said that the procedure would involve reshaping a part of the skull or somesuch to remove the pressure on the brain. Do you have a medical degree? If you do, fine. If not - again, don't rat on the books without knowing better. .)

Furthermore, all of your claims about how Montgomery played it safe by not mentioning sex, including religious allusions and putting the woman in the role of housewife - Ann, you forget when this book was published. It was published at a time when this was the norm.

And, frankly, I think sometimes the idea that a couple loves each other and is happy together without the outright mention of sex is refreshing and beautiful. Whatever age group a book is aimed at. I think a lot of today's writers could take note (though of course this sort of content is welcome and encouraged as well in many cases <g>).

Julie

I googled "surgical cure of amnesia", "surgical cure for amnesia" and "surgical treatment of amnesia". Google came up with exactly nothing.

Ann

His condition was not "amnesia." His condition would probably be better described as brain damage. To that I say, stranger things have happened.

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.

Julie

I was going to respond, but Julie beat me to it. I agree, Julie!

While I've always admired how well-read and well-informed you are, I really do think that you are sometimes guilty of tunnel-vision when it comes to feminism and religion, Ann. Not to say that I don't enjoy your discourse on them, but sometimes it seems to me that your opinions would benefit from a more objective standpoint that explores the counter-arguments more thoroughly?

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

You found a textbook from around the time Montgomery was born. You did not find textbook evidence that she read it and was influenced by it. In fact, the book was written by a Swedish scholar, as you say, so I have no idea how likely it might even be that she'd heard of it.

It's fact that chauvinism was a widespread attitude at the time, true; but there were enough feminists back then, that assuming someone lived around the time the book was published means they were influenced by it or even read it is quite ridiculous, you can see why.

In fact, I present my own evidence to the contrary .

From the link:
Clearly your logic and my logic are different, because I don't see the connection. I knew a guy who cheated at school by plagiarising an essay but wasn't caught, and got an A on it. Should I teach my kids to cheat? No. Likewise, most people who jump out of airplanes are likely to die as a result (as they are to be caught if they cheat at school), so - no. Not everything that sometimes has a fortunate result is a good lesson to be learned.

You still haven't gotten the point of Leslie's story. They were religious, back then. Very religious. Morality in accordance with religion was important to them. This is why Gilbert insisted on the surgery. It was the right thing to do from an unselfish point of view, whatever Anne and Cornelia thought of it (and they did argue with him over suggesting the possiblity to Leslie). Eventually, it was proven that Gilbert was right. This is what they call, I suppose, a parable. Not to be taken as something that's likely to happen in real life by taking the lesson learnt and applying it to real life; i.e., doing the morally right thing will eventually reward you.

As for the medical stuff, okay - I won't argue over that because it's irrelevant and because the extent of my medical knowledge comes from Grey's Anatomy and House. I know that it's highly improbably to reverse the effects of brain damage, but it's a book - suspend your disbelief. (Also, it had been 10 years since his injury.)

Because it wasn't his twin brother. It was his cousin, as I said in my previous post. If the subject had never come up - if he had never told her - why would she know about it? The reason the mix-up happened was that Dick (her husband) died of illness on his voyage, and no one but his cousin knew. Then his cousin was found, brain damaged, and was assumed to be Dick, because, as I said, of the similarities between them. If no one knew he had an identical cousin, why would anyone think differently?

Montgomery's story was not only targeted at women. Her aim was to teach ANYONE to live by the truth. And be rewarded by it. Okay, so Leslie was instantly rewarded to reinforce the lesson; sometimes you might only be rewarded in your next life. But still. That was her point.

The situation would have been handled in exactly the same way if Montgomery was writing it. I don't see your point.

No. But there are many religious Christians and people from other religions with whose opinions I disagree. I don't believe the Bible says anywhere that it was a sin to disagree with your husband... this is completely different from Leslie's situation. It would have been morally wrong to take Dick's fate into their hands (i.e. not give him a chance to heal when there was one) when God was the only one who could judge him.

The question with the couple you presented is, what exactly was Helen doing that wrong in Mikael's eyes? If she was out killing puppies, then yes, I believe she should have listened to her husband. Otherwise, if she did nothing morally wrong, obviously the marriage therapist was wrong.

Leslie's lesson was not "you should listen to men"; it was "live by the truth." Nothing to do with Helen and Mikael.

Lessons learned in life are not always applied in exactly the same way they were learned. This one, I would say, say never to give up when you're fighting for your life.

So absolutely, if the man he was afraid of was going to kill him otherwise, jump. If not, it was pretty foolish and lucky that he lived.

I don't believe Montgomery's lesson was about obedience at all.

I like discussions that bring out vastly different points of view. The point of this discussion is not to convince each other that either one of us is right, but to try and understand those points of view.

Corrent me if I'm wrong (please do), but having grown up in a strictly religious environment, I imagine you were probably taught many of these lessons, about obedience etc., and you might be so used to it that you're finding these lessons in everything you watch and reach.

But sometimes a potato is just a potato.

Julie

I see I didn't respond to your first post, Julie. I should do that.

First, you know the books so much better than I do, and I simply can't argue with you when you say that Anne was happy during much of her married life. I'm sure she was. I guess one reason why the sense of happiness somehow didn't penetrate when I read them is that L.M. Montgomery seemed to tell me rather than show me that Anne was happy. I was told more about her happiness than I saw of it.

Anyway, my main objection was always the "disappearance" of Anne in the last book.

I guess the difference to me was that in the first book, I felt Anne's happiness so intensely. I felt how much she loved the nature around her, every little rock and flower, like you said. I didn't feel that she was that totally caught up in the loveliness of the nature she had around her when she was a young married woman. Case in point: I can quote several passages (in Swedish, unfortunately) where Anne declares her love for a cherry tree or a brook in the first book about her, but I can't remember a single instant when she admires a particular tree, rock or flower after she had married Gilbert. But that could just mean that I was much less responsive to the later books than to the first one, of course.

I don't want to say anything negative about being a housewife and devoting all your time to your home and family if that is what you really want to do. My problem was that I didn't get the impression that this is what Anne really, really wanted to do with her life. All right: I never doubted for a moment that she loved her children, and when her children were young I'm sure that she liked nothing better than being with them and taking care of them. But when they were older, and she was a totally "spent force" who could seemingly do nothing with her life, I was actually horrified. This was so wrong! This woman had seemed so gifted! Why did she have to be like an empty shell now?

Consider Martha in LnC. She is a housewife, and she may well have been a housewife all her life. But she is so interesting! So well-rounded! So full of life! And she has so many hobbies! Anne most certainly didn't seem anything like that when her children had grown up.

I agree. I shouldn't have said what I said about her. But let me say this. I do think that Diana's marriage made her and Anne grow apart more than they had grown apart already. Also, interestingly, I think that Diana's marriage may have put pressure on Anne to marry Gilbert. She was reminded that she was supposed to get married instead of studying at a college, and instead of becoming a teacher. Diana reminded her what a woman's proper place was - but Diana, I think, was perfectly happy in her marriage, and it doesn't necessarily follow that Anne was equally happy in her marriage. At least that was my own gut reaction. When I think about Diana and Fred, I feel Fred's love for Diana. But when I think about Anne and Gilbert, I don't feel Gilbert's love for Anne in the same way. Of course, that may very well just be me.

I'm sure that Anne loved her children. Of course I'm not saying that she should not have had her kids! I just wish that she could have done other things as well, like Martha Kent of LnC. I would have loved to see her paint, take various courses in various subjects, laugh and smile, be a part of the world... and be a source of strength and wisdom for her kids when they had grown up, not just be a woman who couldn't say another word when she had discovered her first grey hair.

Ann

OMG! Is that how it works? Geeeeeeez, I should have shut up years ago.

Sue (who thinks being a mother/housewife is the best part of womanhood)

I haven't read any of the books yet. But after having read most of this discussion, it has been pushed up to the top my to-read-list. It sounds like something I'd truly enjoy.

Anyway, I'm posting to ask you a question, Ann. The books have been written in the early to mid 19th century. The series Lois and Clark is from the very late 19th century. They are two different worlds, not at all comparable in how people lived. Woman like Martha had the freedom to pursue hobbies because, well, we're past the sixties and seventies where that freedom had been gained. You can hardly expect that of Anne, who lives in a world where she would be looked upon by her society if she were to take up a hobby. I believe the world back then had even been introduced to such novelties. So I'm kind of missing the point how the two can be compared.

Saskia

Ann, I'm going to make a point that several people have already made to you, but which you seem not to be appreciating - to the point that I'm almost getting the impression that you're sticking your fingers in your ears and going "Lalala, not listening, not listening."

Anne lived in a tiny rural village on the coast of a Maritimes province in the early 1900s. No internet. No adult education. No 'various courses in various subjects' available to her. School was for children, and only up until the age of around 14 or so anyway.

How could she have been 'a part of the world' in this time and place? She was certainly a vital part of her community - if you're not aware of that, then are you sure you've actually read the books? She was a vital, necessary and valued part of her children's lives, and also Gilbert's life - again, if you've somehow missed that point, I wonder whether your knowledge of the books is similar to your knowledge of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

It does seem to me that several of us who've been posting on this thread have read the Anne books, and you're the only one with such a different perspective on them and even memory of them. Might I suggest that you re-read them, particularly the ones after Anne's marriage, so that you can see for yourself how Anne most certainly did not fade into the distance? Yes, her children got more attention than she did, but that's the nature of family sagas. What's very evident is that she loved her family and found complete fulfilment in having a family. This is a little girl who had no family; who was taken in by Matthew and Marilla but who always wanted a real family of her own, no matter how much she came to love them. Here, she finally has one and it's obvious that she's happy.

Yes, staying at home as a wife and mother is not every woman's vision of a fulfilling life, but (a) for some women it's everything they want and - as people here have attested - it makes them very happy, and (b) in the 1900s, and even for decades after that, it was what women did. Yes, some chafed against the restrictions, but we're never given the impression from the books that Anne is one of those. My view of her, from the books, is of not only a satisfied and fulfilled wife and mother, but also a pillar of the community, with many friends and with lots to do. If you have a different perception, maybe you're thinking of a different book?


Wendy

Okay. I need to press this point. My point is that Gilbert had reason to believe that he was going to turn an invalid into a healthy, but rather evil, person. Was he morally right to restore a person to his natural state of health and evilness? Where do you draw the line there?

I'm going to give you an example that I hope you can't misunderstand. Let's assume that the amnesiac man in question had been a pedophile. Oh, he wasn't the worst kind of pedophile. He had never actually raped a child. But he liked to show himself naked to children. Who knows if he would some day go further than that?

Now imagine that this man had had an accident which had given him amnesia. Also imagine that his amnesia had somehow altered his personality, so that he had lost his sexual interest in children. And let's assume that Gilbert could restore this man's memory and his personality. Including his sexual interest in children.

Would it have been right to return this man to his former self? I think most people would have answered in the negative.

What if you had been a parent of a young child? What if this man lived close to you and your family? Would you have wanted him to be restored to his former self? I really, really think not.

But should we applaud a woman for wanting to restore her formerly abusive husband to his former abusive self? So that she would once again become his victim? Why should we admire that kind of self-flagellation in a woman? And why should we admire a doctor who insists on turning an invalid into a healthy wife-abusing tyrant once again?

I think Gilbert was prepared to return a man to his former healthy abusive self, and I don't think he deserves any praise for that. On the contrary, I think he should be chastised for risking to bring more evil into the world than was there already.

Well, there are at least five passages from the New Testament where it says that a wife must obey her husband: Ephesians 5:22-24, Colossians 3:18, 1 Timothy 2:11-15, Titus 2:4-5 and 1 Peter 3:1.

Let me tell you one thing that Helen said in a radio documentary about her marriage. She explained that she might be ironing some shirts, and then Mikael might come into the room and just feel that she had become possessed by demons. And how could he feel that? Well, that was because he could feel the lack of total submissiveness in Helen at that moment. Instead of being totally concentrated on what Mikael wanted, she might have some thoughts of her own. That meant she was possessed. So Mikael would push her, hard, so that she fell, and then he would throw the hot iron after her.

Well, I believe it was. But of course Montgomery wouldn't have thought that Leslie's husband would ever be as unreasonable and horrible as Mikael was.

I think Montgomery's point was simply this: A woman should obey her husband (like the Bible says so many times), and if she does that, if she obeys, then God will reward her for that. But I think that this is a dangerous assumption to make, because there really are men who are wife abusers. Obeying them will generally solve nothing. Like Mikael, they will just ask for more and more and more submissiveness, demanding ever more abject self-flagellation from their wives.

But I agree with you that Montgomery wasn't trying to make the point that women should obey men like Mikael. She may very well not have believed that men like Mikael existed. On the other hand, she may well have believed that a woman's obedience was the guarantee that a man would never become a really out-of-control wife abuser.

I do think that Montgomery's point was to teach young women obedience. The fact that Anne is proved to be so wrong when she tried to sway her husband, and the fact that Leslie is so gloriously rewarded for being willing to sacrifice her own well-being and peace of mind for her husband's health and restored (evil) personality, very strongly suggests to me that Montgomery's message was that a woman's obedience carries its own reward. The fact that Montgomery so often quotes the Bible only strengthens my belief that she was telling young women to obey their husbands and put their husbands' well-being above their own, just like the Bible tells them. And just like the texts in the book I referred to earlier, Montgomery told the young women that obedient women will find happiness. (By the way: that book contains large numbers of quotes from British, French and German texts, so most of them were not originally Swedish.)

But once again: I really don't think that Montgomery wanted to torture young women. Instead, she probably really wanted to believe that women become happy if they learn to subordinate themselves to their husbands.

Let me tell you a story that I myself read as a young child. It was about a small girl who was playing on her own in a decrepit shed. Suddenly she heard her mother call for her. The obedient girl immediately left the shed and went to her mother to find out what she wanted.

"I have not called for you, dear daughter," said the mother. "Go and play again."

The daughter went back to the shed. Almost immediately she heard her mother call again. Instantly she went back to her mother, only to be told once again that her mother had not called.

The girl went back to the shed for the third time. Again she heard her mother call. Immediately she went back to her mother.

"Stay, my daughter," said the mother. "I have not called for you, but someone has. The one who called for you can only be your guardian angel. Stay here. Don't go back to the shed."

The moment the mother stopped talking a horrible crash was heard. It was the shed that had collapsed. If the girl had been inside it, she would have been crushed. But thanks to the fact that she was so obedient, she had left the shed in time.

Moral: All children (and particularly all little girls, because for some reason there were few or no such stories about boys) should always and immediately obey their parents.

This story is like the story about Leslie Moore in important respects. First, it is about a girl or a young woman who obeys the person that she is supposed to obey, and puts that person's wishes above her own (the little girl cares more about obeying her mother than about playing her own games, and Leslie Moore cares more about her husband's health than about her won well-being). Second, both the girl and Leslie Moore are splendidly rewarded for their obedience. And third, both of the stories are highly unlikely. Because when did you last read or hear of a child who was saved because her guardian angel called for her repeatedly and made her leave a place of acute danger? And when did you last hear of a man whose memory was restored thanks to an operation - and then it was found out that he wasn't his wife's husband, but the husband's cousin?

So yes, Julie, I believe that the story about Leslie Moore is a story about the moral righteousness of a woman's obedience. Alternatively, it could be said to be about something that is closely related to obedience, namely, the humility that a woman shows when she is putting a man's wishes and well-being above her own. Leslie Moore would have to assume that if the man she believed to be her husband had been able to, he would have told her that he wanted the operation, and he would have ordered her to make sure that he got it. He would have told her this if he had been able to, or at least Leslie Moore had to assume that he would have, so she was obeying his unspoken command.

When all is said and done none of us can go back in time and meet L.M. Montgomery and ask her what she really meant with her story about Leslie Moore. I believe it was a story about a woman's obedience, and you believe it was just a story about unselfishness. I guess none of us is ever going to convince the other one of our point of view.

Ann

I've read stories along this line myself, but it's about equal whether they were about boys or girls. To me, the moral is that the little girl and then her mother were following the promptings of the Holy Ghost. I firmly believe that we should always follow promptings like that, but that's something I've learned through personal experience. This forum is not where I'd share something that private and sacred to me.

I'm really not sure that I would, Ann. Do I support bad men who do bad things? No. But, I have to ask in the examples you've given in your posts - what gives this Gilbert (whoever he is <g>) the authority to decide what this man should be? What gives him the right to judge him? Or interfere in his life in any way? Or decide whether he gets medical treatment or not?

If he's a bad man, try him in a court and if he's found guilty lock him up for as long as it takes to keep children safe from him. But from your examples, it's not even certain that he would do evil. Gilbert merely assumes that he may.

To suggest that someone should take it upon themselves to decide that he should be denied a cure for a medical condition on the basis that he's 'not a nice man' is quite appalling to me.

What you seem to be saying, in fact, is that medical treatment should be reserved solely for the good in society. I'm afraid, for me, that would lie in the area of two wrongs don't make a right.

LabRat

Well, the old saying: "Trust me, I'm a doctor."

But seriously, and sadly, doctors here in Canada make those sorts of decisions all too frequently. I suspect it's even more true in the U.S., although I gather the Insurance companies do too. Don't know much about how things go in other parts of the world, though.

As for Gilbert, now don't go maligning Gilbert Blythe. Clark Kent pales in comparison.

c.

What you say about *feeling* Anne's happiness versus simply reading about is a point of view and rather belongs in a discussion about the style of writing, not content. There is no question that Anne was happy. Somehow all of the rest of us successfully got that impression. I felt Fred's love and Gilbert's love certainly just as strongly.

And I disagree that Anne was an empty shell, but I see Wendy covered that.

LabRat covered my next point. No, I don't think it was Gilbert's place to decide that because Dick Moorehad been a bad man, he should be denied treatment, and that is precisely the moral lesson they learn. Whether he was a paedophile or whatever, the point is the same. The point is that I don't have the right to deny him treatment.

We're not applauding obedient women. We're applauding people who do the morally right thing even at the possible cost of their own happiness and well-being.

I stand corrected on the Bible, but I guess Montgomery chose to convey the truly useful lessons... so it's still irrelevant. And yes, I do think that their marriage therapist was wrong. Not because he is a Christian but because he is a chauvinist.

If Montgomery wanted to teach girls to be submissive and obedient, she chose the wrong heroine to write a book about. Anne was hardly that. And she was the focus of the story, after all, and found happiness.

Finally - doctors do not have the right to decide who gets treatment and who doesn't. This is up to God to decide. This is Montgomery's message. It's stated clearly enough.

Julie

Morality is an important issue, but Gilbert also functioned under the Hippocratic oath, along with his own heart and consience, which says that if you can help, you must help to the best of your ability. Without the surgery, Lesley would have been stuck taking care of a man-child for the rest of her life. He saw a way of alleviating that, but didn't know the extent of how much it would help.

This thread has made me want to read the books again. I'll have to put it on my reading list, and really makes me want to get the Emily books.

And sad to say, it's also made me decide to never visit Sweden. And I'm sure it's a lovely country, too. *sigh*