And I don't want to discuss deathfics in connection with Anne of Green Gables, Julie, because it is true that "death happens equally" to both men and women in the Anne books, and in both instances it is equally tragic.
What I mean by saying that Montgomery portrayed the Anne books as "ideal" is that society itself is not seen as a problem or an impediment to the characters' happiness, and an important message of the book is that it is indeed possible to find great happiness in the world which is presented to us if you only obey the "right rules". Some books do say that society itself is wrong or unfair, and therefore it is impossible for some people to find happiness in them. Consider, for example, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Of course that book is very idealistic in its portrayal of the slaves, particularly of Uncle Tom himself, but its message is nevertheless that those who were born slaves, or bought into slavery, can never live really good lives as long as they are kept enslaved. The message of Harriet Beecher Stowe's book was that the key to happiness was to be found outside the individual human beings themselves, and it required that the system of slavery must be abolished.
Let's compare that to Rousseau's book Emile. Rousseau didn't like the society he lived in at all, but to him the solution was that men - only men - must realize that they were born to be free, to be equals and to be brothers, and after they have realized that they must live the kind of lives where they fulfill their own potential. Emile, of course, has indeed been raised in order to be the best man he can to himself and to other men, and he does indeed find happiness and satisfaction. Basically, Rousseau's message is that men are stronger than the unfair society that traps them, and they can break free. Women can't do the same thing, but so what? They don't matter. It's not a problem if things go badly for Emile's girlfriend. There is a world full of women out there, and Emile can go out and graze his fill among them, like a happy horse.
The message of Emile is not that the existing society is perfect, but rather that it is perfectly possible for men to rise above their society and reach their full potential. Montgomery's message is rather that society is perfect, or rather, it is as perfect as it can be in view of the fact that it is an aspect of the imperfect world. I think Montgomery would have agreed, mostly, with Voltaire's comical character Pangloss, who insisted that we live in the best of all possible worlds. And I think that she would have agreed with Rousseau that it is ultimately up to the individual to make himself or herself happy. But where Rousseau insisted that man must break with the rules of society, Montgomery's message is that woman must obey the rules and the expectations of society. Because if she does that, she will be happy.
Let me return to the parable of Leslie Moore, which I consider a key to Montgomery's belief in how a woman can find happiness. Leslie married a man who was a mean drunk and who treated her very badly. This is certainly unfair to Leslie. She has done nothing to deserve the bad treatment her husband was giving her. But what can she do about it?
Today we would probably say that the best recourse for Leslie Moore would be to divorce her husband. But that was impossible for Leslie. If divorce was even legally possible for her in the society that she was a part of, then at least it was totally against the expectations of that society. And because it was condemned by society, Montgomery would have argued, it was also morally wrong. (If Leslie Moore had somehow managed to divorce her husband, she would almost certainly have been shunned by her society.)
Fortunately for Leslie Moore, her husband disappeared at sea. Now she was free from his meanness. But was she free to move on with her life? Was she free to marry again, now that she had met a young man that she loved?
Leslie Moore was not allowed to break the rules or disregard the expectations of her society. In Sweden at that time, a woman was allowed to remarry if her husband had been missing for a sufficiently long time. But what was a suffciently long time?
This summer there was a radio dramatization of a novel which had been very popular in Sweden in the nineteenth century. The story was about a young girl, Gabriella, who grows up surrounded only by her own family on a small island. When she is fifteen, she briefly meets and quite likes a young man from the mainland. However, her father dislikes the young man's father, so their possible romance comes to naught. Instead, just a short while later, a shipwrecked sea captain is rescued by the Gabriella's father and brother. The shipwrecked man, Captain Rosenberg, stays with the family on the island for months, and young Gabriella slowly learns to like him. And when she is sixteen, she becomes engaged to him.
The following years Captain Rosenberg tries to make enough money to marry Gabriella, which means he is out sailing again. He is away for months and years, occasionally writing letters. Sometimes he comes home for short visits, and then he leaves again. One day Gabriella receives a letter telling her to expect him to come home soon. If he had not come back within a year, he would not return at all. Then Gabriella could assume that he was dead, and she could considered their engagement broken.
During Captain Rosenberg's long absences, Gabriella had met the man from the mainland again. She really liked him a lot better than Captain Rosenberg, and she wished that she could marry him instead. But of course, that was impossible.
But then Gabriella received a letter telling her that Captain Rosenberg was dead. She resolved to wait for him, even so. She waited for a year. She waited for two years. She waited for almost three years. But then she decided that Captain Rosenberg was indeed dead, and she had waited for him considerably longer than he asked her to. So she started seeing the man from the mainland for real.
But wouldn't you know it? Just when things really start heating up between Gabriella and her new man, Captain Rosenberg returns. He is furious. How could Gabriella let him down like that? How could she be so faithless? Gabriella retorts that he has let her down by being gone for so long. Anyway, she no longer wants to marry Captain Rosenberg, and that leaves her with only one socially acceptable option. She will marry neither of her two men. In fact, she will never marry at all! And so Gabriella and her sea captain go their separate ways, doomed to spend the rest of their lives in horrible loneliness. But the man from the mainland met and married another young woman and was happy.
My point? My point is that Leslie Moore wasn't exactly free to marry Owen Ford just because her husband had been missing for years and was presumed dead. He might still return, and if Leslie had married Owen Ford while her husband was gone, the scandal would be unspeakable if he actually returned. And indeed the husband returned, or so it seemed. Now he wasn't mean anymore, but he was like a child who needed to be taken care of. And still Leslie Moore couldn't have what she wanted, a life with Owen Ford and a family.
Leslie Moore might have despaired, or raved against the powers of the universe. But L.M. Montgomery's message is that God has a plan for everything. The key to finding happiness is to accept one's lot in life and do the best with what you have, because then God will reward you. Let me quote a passage from the Bible:
1 Corinthians 7
20 Each one should remain in the condition in which he was called. 21 Were you a slave [1] when called? Do not be concerned about it. (But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity.) 22 For he who was called in the Lord as a slave is a freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was free when called is a slave of Christ. 23 You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men. 24 So, brothers, [2] in whatever condition each was called, there let him remain with God.
What Paul the Apostle says here is that those who were slaves when they became Christians should accept being slaves as their lot in life, unless the opportunity presents itself to let them become free. Generally, however, they should not fret about being slaves, but accept it. Happiness will come to them anyway if they are good Christians. This is really quite different to what Harriet Beecher Stowe said in her book.
Leslie Moore was not technically a slave, of course, but it could be argued that she was a "slave" to her husband. He was free to treat her badly, and society did not intervene to stop him, because she was his "property". Interestingly, it seems to me that L.M. Montgomery accepts this situation, and instead she argues that God will intervene to right horrible wrongs, if the wronged party proves himself or herself worthy of a miracle. And Leslie did indeed prove herself worthy. She put up with her husband's cruel treatment of her without complaint. She did not file for a divorce or try to get rid of him in any other way. Her meetings with Owen Ford were totally innocent, and she never crossed any moral lines with him. When her husband disappeared and was presumed dead she patiently waited for confirmation of his death before she tried to get any closer to Owen Ford. When her husband was returned to her, she accepted him without complaint, and accepted that she could never have a life with Owen Ford. When her husband needed to be cared for like a child, she cared for him. When Gilbert Blythe told her that her husband's memory (and personality) could be restored, she accepted that it was her duty to help make her husband well, even if it meant that he would start treating her cruelly again. Always and in every situation, Leslie Moore acted humbly, meekly and unselfishly and never tried to get anything for herself that Fate or God had not already given her.
And because Leslie Moore was so humble, God granted her a miracle. Precisely because she agreed to let her husband have the operation, and because Gilbert Blythe did not let himself be swayed by his wife's unwise advice, Leslie Moore found the proof that she could otherwise never have found that her husband was indeed dead. Now she was finally free to slowly build a relationship with Owen Ford, and no one in her society could blame her or accuse her of being forward or immoral.
Like I said, I consider the parable about Leslie Moore a key to the message of the Anne books. The message is that if you accept your lot in life and make the best of it, then God will reward you and give you happiness.
I think the Anne books can be regarded as a tale about "the education of Anne", where Anne is really taught to be this humble woman who knows and accepts her station in life. That is something she doesn't know in the first book. The way I remember it, when Anne first arrives in Avonlea, one of the Avonlea women, Mrs Rachel Lynde, takes a look at Anne and proclaims that Anne is ugly, or something like that. That is a very cruel thing to say to a child, and Anne is rightfully furious. Except I don't think L.M. Montgomery thought that a child ever had the right to be furious. Certainly Montgomery believed that a child never had the right to be furious with an adult, and therefore Anne was properly chastised. The education of Anne had begun.
Consider Anne's hair. She hated the red color of it. When she was eleven or twelve, an itinerant salesman came to Matthew and Marilla's house and found Anne home alone. He tempted her by saying that he could sell her hair dye which would give her hair a lovely chestnut color. Anne fell victim to his temptation. She was vain. She was not happy with what God had given her. So God punished her. Anne's hair became puke-green, as Hasini put it, instead of chestnut brown. So she had to let Marilla cut her hair all off. Anne was properly chastised. But because she had learned her lesson and would never complain about the color of her hair again, God rewarded her. When her hair grew back, it had miraculously(?) become chestnut brown, just like Anne had always wanted.
When Anne was a child, she was full of energy and exuberance, and she had a natural sense of fairness. Her sense of fairness told her that she had the same rights to be treated well and have a good life as other people. But during the course of the first book her exuberance was bled out of her, and her sense of fairness was replaced with a sense of duty. "Don't ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Except Anne's duty was not so much to her country as to her family and to the mores of her society.
Because Anne learnt to do what others expected her to do rather than what she wanted to do herself, there were times when I thought she seemed lost. When she was a young married woman who had not yet had any children, she seemed a bit lost to me. What was she to do? She could not yet be a mother to children that she did not yet have, and her husband was away all day. Maybe she could do a lot of housework, but if so, L.M. Montgomery chose not to show us the housework she did. It is probably not a coincidence that Anne met Leslie Moore at this time. This was also, I think, the last time that Anne really tried to assert her own will and rebel against what she saw as unfairness. As a wife she was most certainly expected, both by God and by her society, to defer to the will of her husband. Yet Anne tried to talk Gilbert out of performing the operation on Leslie Moore's husband. As was fitting, and in accordance with what the Bible teaches us, Gilbert did not listen his wife's advice, but performed the operation anyway. And once again Anne was shown to be in the wrong when she had tried to assert her own will and rebel against the unfairness of life.
After this, if I remember it correctly, Anne no more rebelled. She soon had small children, and I agree that she was happy with them. She had been trained to be a mother, and she had learnt what wisdoms she should impart to her children. I have no reason to think that she was not happy during this this time of her life.
But when her children had grown up and did not need her in the same way anymore, what was she to do with herself? The way I see it, Anne had been taught not to ask what she wanted for herself, but to do what God and the mores of society expected of her. But what did God and the mores of society ask of her, when her children didn't need her anymore?
I don't agree that it is good for a woman to be taught never to ask for anything for herself, but only to ask what the mores of society expects of her. That doesn't mean I think that this kind of education must always be bad. I don't believe that a woman who has been given this kind of education must always end up being unhappy. I realize that human beings have an enormous capacity to adapt themselves to living in societies and to become parts of existing hierarchies, and that means that most of us must have an enormous capacity to subordinate ourselves to the will of others. In other words, being taught that you must always obey can't in itself be something that makes people unhappy.
However, since I don't necessarily and easily believe that this kind of unconditional obedience and subordination is a good thing, certainly not that it is always or even usually a good thing, I want anyone who advocates this kind of subordination to show me that it can lead to happiness. I want to see proof. Because I do think that Anne has been presented to us as an example of the happiness that a woman can find through submissiveness. That is exactly why I want to see Anne's happiness. I want L.M. Montgomery to follow through. You don't abandon a parable or a tale of morality before it is finished. And that is precisely why I was so shocked at "Rilla of Ingleside". Because to me Anne's absence in that book meant that L.M. Montgomery had no more proof to show me. Anne's happiness had been exhausted. Montgomery had taught Anne humility and submissiveness and subordination, and then she left Anne alone, rudderless, when her children didn't need their mother in the same way as they needed her before. I realize that you can simply assume that Anne's life went on much as before, and that her days were full of good work and that she herself was satisfied. But that is not something that I myself can accept just like that. I want to see how Anne turns her life's lesson about submissiveness into a good and happy life for herself. And therefore, if I see her fading into the wallpaper, then I assume that she has finally reached an impenetrable impasse, exhausted her source of happiness, and found herself unable to do anything more with her life and her person. I actually see her just standing there, mute and helpless, because the world no longer needs her.
That is why I use Martha Kent as an example. The way I understand it, Martha Kent has always been a housewife, but she has not learnt Anne's lesson to always subordinate herself to others and never ask for anything for her own sake. That is why she can find new things to do with herself when her son has grown up and moved out.
I'm not saying it would be impossible for Anne to be happy after her children have grown up and left her. But I am saying that because I question the lesson of submissiveness that Anne has learnt, I want to see how she turns that submissiveness into middleaged happiness. And L.M. Montgomery has nothing to show me.
Ann
