#the Canadian LMM

[abigailspinach]

Emily of New Moon Quotes

“Ilse lost her temper at once and went into a true Burnley tantrum. She was very fluent in her rages and the volley of abusive "dictionary words" which she hurled at Emily would have staggered most of the Blair Water Girls. But Emily was too much at home with words to be floored so easily; she grew angry too, but in a cool, dignified, Murray way which was more exasperating than violence.” ― L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

“It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and her hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside- but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond-only a glimpse and heard a note of unearthly music.” ― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

“If at thirteen you can write ten good lines, at twenty you'll write ten times ten-if the gods are kind. I think there's something trying to speak through you- but you'll have to make yourself a fit instrument for it.” ― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Emily of New Moon: Emily #1

“Aunt Elizabeth was one of those people who never do understand anything unless it is told them in plain language and hammered into their heads. And thy they understand it only with their brains and not with their hearts.” ― L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

He had an explosive temper which generally burst into flame at least once a day, and then he would storm about wildly for a few minutes, tugging at his beard, imploring heaven to grant him patience, abusing everybody in general and the luckless object of his wrath in particular. But these tempers never lasted long. In a few minutes Mr. Carpenter would be smiling as graciously as a sun bursting through a storm-cloud on the very pupil he had been rating. Nobody seemed to cherish any grudge because of his scoldings. He never said any of the biting things Miss Brownell was wont to say, which rankled and festered for weeks; his hail of words fell alike on just and unjust and rolled off harmlessly.

He could take a joke on himself in perfect good nature. “Do you hear me? Do you hear me, sirrah?” he bellowed to Perry Miller one day. “Of course I hear you,” retorted Perry coolly, “they could hear you in Charlottetown.” Mr. Carpenter stared for a moment, then broke into a great, jolly laugh.

He had taken Emily’s advice and told his mother he would not love her if anything happened to Leo, and Leo flourished and waxed fat and doggy.

Perry had no one to say him nay and he went at them with the same dogged determination he showed in all other matters. Perry’s status at New Moon had changed subtly and steadily. Aunt Elizabeth had ceased to refer scornfully to him as “a hired boy.” Even she recognised that though he was still indubitably a hired boy he was not going to remain one, and she no longer objected to Laura’s patching up his ragged bits of clothing, or to Emily’s helping him with his lessons in the kitchen after supper, nor did she growl when Cousin Jimmy began to pay him a certain small wage—though older boys than Perry were still glad to put in the winter months choring for board and lodging in some comfortable home. If a future premier was in the making at New Moon Aunt Elizabeth wanted to have some small share in the making.

Even when she read over Evening Dreams a year later and wondered how she could ever have thought it any good.

This sort of thing was happening frequently now. Every time she read her little hoard of manuscripts over she found some of which the fairy gold had unaccountably turned to withered leaves, fit only for the burning. Emily burned them,—but it hurt her a little. Outgrowing things we love is never a pleasant process.

[lizzy-bonnet]

L.M. Montgomery really wrote an entire book about the placebo effect.

[freyafrida]

ali michael by yelena yemchuck, lula september 2008

[witchwives]

I think Ellen Greene is supposed to be Irish- The "I says, says I" thing is common with Irish English speakers. She's also The Help, and both Emily and her father treat her with disdain. Explains a lot, doesn't it.

[gogandmagog]

C’mon, I know you have a niche LMM post in your drafts to post, the tags are so empty 🤣

Lmaooo, I wish I had something good for this.

I don't know if it's really niche in a satisfying way, but it is certainly niche in a would-anyone-else-bother-themselves-thinking-about-this sort of way? 🥸 Here’s my most recent draft (that isn’t just a note to myself):

All just because a couple of weeks ago, I was reading this book of letters/correspondence between two Cambridge Apostles from around 1910 to 1915. Of course, the Apostles weren’t exactly a frat, so much as a secretive intellectual society, but as with most things, even the tiniest incidentals mentioned in (nearly any) text (or letters, in this case) will immediately return me to splitting Montgomery hairs, so basically I was (am, really) just over here fixating on the possible origins of the (quite fictional lol) Lamba Theta of Redmond.

To begin with, I’m 99% certain that it ought to actually be Lambda Theta* (lambda [λ] is the eleventh letter in the Greek alphabet), since Lamba doesn’t appear anywhere in the Greek dictionary, never mind the alphabet. That kind of small error was enough to launch me properly down a rabbit hole of Victorian (and then Edwardian) frats at Dalhousie University (Redmond’s basis), to see if there were any similarly named that might’ve presented itself as serving for Maud’s basis for the Lambs. As it turned out, there’s nothing. 🙃 The very first frat established at Dalhousie was Phi Kappa Pi, and that wasn’t until 1923... when LMM had attended some three decades earlier, back in 1895. Anne of the Island even predates frats meeting at DU, since it was first published in 1915.

For some scale, the first Canadian frat ever was est. in 1879 (Zeta Psi) at the University of Toronto, and then again in 1883, the same frat opened another chapter over at McGill.

Anyway, I guess was/is just interesting to me that when Maud was inventing up a whole fraternity for her alma mater’s fictional stand-in, she really wouldn’t have had any first-hand experience with one. 🤨 And yet… she understood enough of them to’ve had Gilbert rush/be initiated (with sun-bonnets and calico aprons), in order to become a fully pledged member. Google says that fraternities as we know them now didn’t become notable or popular in the States (which Canada was rather behind) until the mid-late 19th century. Sooo, I suppose Lamba Theta is attributable to just that (a thing of cute pop-culture), or else Zeta Psi at UT was infamous enough for word to get around, to even the more rural areas (there’s 1,801.7 km between UT and Dalhousie btw), about their proceedings.

*the first real Lambda Theta frat/sorority was founded in 1973, at Kean University, and it is a Latino/Latina fraternity; their colours are burgundy and grey - actually quite alike the colours of Redmond University

[no-where-new-hero]

Chapter 26: On the Bay Shore

I was dreading this day of the book club.

I do think this chapter succeeds extraordinarily well in setting up everything that Dean will be for the rest of the series. LMM's overall tone really changes with regard to Dean from book to book, but the tension of the dynamic is here from the outset. It spells romance, but with a shadow over it. Dean saves Emily's life, coded as romantic and chivalrous. Dean saves Emily's life and also immediately tries to have a claim on it that she resents. The push-pull of the scene is bewildering, and I feel as though Maud herself is finding herself almost distracted by her problematic new character.

We also cannot quite ignore the loving detail Maud gives us about his appearance: "beautiful" voice, "dreamy and attractive" eyes. "Dreamy" is only ever used as an adjective for Douglas, apart for Emily herself. Emily likes his mouth (show me a reaction to a mouth that doesn't immediately connote sensuality). She does not think him handsome like the Jane Eyre analogue that she is, but these reactions to his looks are more how she responds to Perry or Teddy than, say, to Father Cassidy the Brown Nut. Twice in one paragraph, Maud tells us Emily's likes "a flavor" about him and "that lean clever face of his." He has a connection to her beloved father and gives her the impression that she has known him for a long while, an apparently kindred spirit that will wait for her--romantic in notion, cringy to our modern ears, but also more universally symbolically troubling the more and more you realize that Emily's journey has to be, almost by definition, a solitary one.

I think part of why Maud seems to be trying to get us on Dean's side is the way that he's a character whose thoughts and reactions we're privy to (Aunt Elizabeth is the only other one): we know he "never forgot" how Emily smiled at him here (oho, the foreshadowing, Maud!). We know he knows she wants to recite her whole poem to him. He becomes, for the span of this chapter, a strangely immediate secondary main character. In other LMM novels, this kind of primacy is afforded to such important people as Gilbert Blythe. In addition, of course, is the fluency of his conversation. Maud's gift for dialogue shines through Dean, and despite the imbalance we can perceive between the lines, the relationship that evolves between Emily and Dean has a tangible realism not felt elsewhere in the novel (Alice Munro, in her afterward to the book in one of the Canadian editions, points this out). I think this is due, in some measure, to the tension between said and unsaid, between two natures that are similar but desiring two different things.

Dean is very interested in symbols and metaphors; he thinks of Emily as a fairy, a star: it's dehumanizing but, right on the heels of Aunt Nancy's vivid portrait of adult womanhood in Beatrice, such a romanticized and abstracted attitude feels safer, childlike in its fancy. It is so very nearly like the return of a Douglas analogue--except for the fact that Emily is no longer a child. The preceding few chapters have assured this for us. And Emily's own obsession with the transgressions of Beatrice start echoing onto her own desire to reach out for the aster. She, like Beatrice, overstepped. She, like Beatrice (according to Dean--though he was only joking, says Maud!), cannot get off scot-free. Again, the tension between two opposing appearances confuse our takeaway.

I will always stand behind my own hypothesis that Maud just really enjoyed writing Dean. Right before she began drafting Emily of New Moon, she wrote in her journals about wanting to write a "novel for grown up people ...a psychological portrait of one person's life" that she titled Priest Pond, and my favorite LMM headcanon is that Dean would have been the main character of this novel. He has similarities to other prominent male figures in her canon (Walter Blythe and Barney Snaith), and he's also so fully rendered in a way a lot of her supporting male characters are not, which makes me suspect she had done a bit of planning for him beforehand. I think she absolutely set him up in this conflicted way because of Emily's necessary arc, but I also think that she was interested in him on his own behalf. And I'm rather sad she never wrote that other novel, going by the complexity and layers at play in this chapter.

[arizonapoppy]

Emily of New Moon Chapter 1

Here I am slinking in a day late, but I brought coffees for all!

I did read it yesterday, I just couldn't write my thoughts coherently. My spoon level is low lately, so here are some bullet points:

I thought it was interesting that the Emily book starts elsewhere than New Moon. Anne is dropped upon us already orphaned and at the train station on PEI (although in the 1985 version we got a glimpse of the lumber camp). We are seeing what she has lost

Rachel Lynde and Ellen Greene in their grumpiness and lack of hesitation to speak their minds make great info dumpers- much more direct than a drawing room tea scene infodump.

Ellen keeps giving Emily food as treats, but none of it is food that Emily actually likes. I think I'm turning into an Ellen apologist, because she's trying.

My favorite quote: "But to be alone, ah Emily shivered with the delicious horror of it." It made me think of Horrid Novels in Northanger Abbey, but instead of Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily is reading Pilgrim's Progress. It's not very lurid, but probably more age appropriate. Tying back to the first bullet point, I think of the Northanger quote: "If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad." However, abroad is all relative and Emily seemed to have plenty of adventure at her home walking in the woods. It's setting up the contrast of LMM wanting to write purely Canadian heroines and Emily's rejection of working in Boston later on.

[keefessketchbook]

Lets talk about episode 3

I enjoyed episode 3, honestly. It was good and i just have a few things i want to talk about.

I loved percy's line about the golden drachmas being Canadian or from Chuck E Cheese

THE SONG :)

I loved Medusa. I loved how she talked about Percy's mom and said they were like sisters. There's a YouTuber I follow, Crazy Cae and she has great adaptations of what happened to Medusa, and I thought the show was gonna talk about the interpretation that says Poseidon sa'd medusa in Athena's temple and it definitely felt like that with her words of how sally and her were haunted by the same monster (I dont remember the exact wording, dont come for me) and how she was punished not him.

I loved how they used the head on Alecto and didnt just send it straight to Olympus

I felt it when Percy said he chose Annabeth because he thought they never could become friends and grover because he could never see Grover betray him

LIN MANUEL MIRANDA. I knew he was gonna be in it and I was so excited. I dont know why people are bashing him, but i love him. Him hand delivering the head and his little smirk. i love LMM and nobody can stop me

"I am impertinent" yes you are

Annabeth grabbing all the candy in the store just shows how she's never left camp and is just trying to have all the experiences she can before she has to go back

I loved how Alecto and Medusa played on Percy's and Annabeth's fatal flaws. How Alecto would make the quest easier if she just gave up percy and how percy could get his mother back if he gave them over to medusa.

The oracle scene was okay, but i liked how the remembered to have Gabe voice the prophecy to Percy

I enjoyed how Chiron picked out people he thought would be best for the quest, and percy was like "nah, i chose my best friend and the girl who has been stalking me :)"

I was talking to my mom after and was like "the show is so visually dark but hey at least i know where the actors are because of those orange chb shirts"

[echoes-lighthouse]

To answer a couple of questions that were asked in the tags of my Thomas Jefferson intro

a) for @astronomicalgarbage, who asks if my Jefferson has a thing for Mac and Cheese:

Absofuckinglutely. There's an ongoing fight between me (Canadian) and him (American) about whether Kraft Dinner counts as mac and cheese or an abomination before the lord, and it's one of our favourite meaningless battles. We also correct each other's spelling on papers of words like favourite/favorite and colour/color.

b) for @tex-treasures, who wanted to know our favourite Pokemon and our favourite art periods!

My favourite Pokemon is Ditto, same as it is IRL ^-^ I also have a soft spot for Caterpie and Eevee. My favourite art period is the Pre-Raphaelites.

Thomas's favourite Pokemon are uhhhhhh Luxray, Rayquaza, and he likes Vulpix content. I feel like I don't have the actual knowledge to say what an actual fan like him would like! He likes Neo-Classicalism and chibi art -_-

c) finally, the big question from several people, IS THIS AN APRIL FOOL'S PRANK?

Short answer: yes, I thought it would be fun to do for April Fool's, Miku Binder Thomas Jefferson is not going to be a member of my F/O list. But I do appreciate everyone who turned out to support me <3 <3

Long answer: LMM's version of Thomas Jefferson was genuinely one of the first ten characters I drew selfship art with. As much as I like the aesthetics of the character, I simply have no desire to dive back into that fandom and the politics thereof. My Hamilton/Les Mis era of my life was one of rampant idealism and huge energy and I feel very far away from that earnest wide-eyed first year who was making eight-hour drives to the capital to wave signs on the weekend.

If I was going to selfship with LMM's Thomas Jefferson, I would probably make my own modern design without some of the details from Miku Binder TJeff, but with the same nostalgia for the exaggerated characteristics of the Hamilton fandom (ie. Alex never sleeps, Laurens loves turtles, Lafayette is nonbinary, Thomas loves mac and cheese, everyone has dated everyone else).

But ultimately I'm not going to put in that work. Suffice to say that although this was an April Fool's prank, it was with a lot of heart and genuine enjoyment that I got to explore this dynamic!

[roses-red-and-pink]

For my LMM followers, this is at Cows, “the Canadian ice cream shop”

[abigailspinach]

From the comment section

I feel like Mr. Carpenter spent 80% of his teaching time on complicated classroom projects so that he wouldn't get caught making this face all the time.

Also if you thought you were going to read treacly stories about fairies and dew and ended up reading a cutting profile of your personality as written by a Madaline Bassetesque 11 year old, wouldn't you be delighted too?

I am indebted to the Emily series for the idea that writing two good sentences in a pile of drivel is progress.

Teddy's not much to write home about, but I accept that Emily loved him. And one thing I much preferred about Emily over Anne, was that she admitted to herself all along that she was in love with Teddy, rather than being all oh I hate Gilbert I hate Gilbert I hate Gilbert ok Gilbert is not so bad but I will toy with Roy's affections until I admit that I am in love with Gilbert and want to live in a house-of-dreams and have 27 babies.

Okay. I'm now worried because I adored Dean Priest and would cheerfully have seen the ghastly Teddy poison himself with his own paint.

Also acceptable: Emily/Ilse/Perry.

EMILY IS THE BEST. HATERS DOWN THE WELL.

I mean, who's that woman who comes to stay with the Blythes and is a jerk and doesn't leave for months in "Anne of Ingleside"? Emily would have given her the Murray look and sent her packing.

On the other hand, it would be super easy to know what to get her for her birthday.

NOTEBOOKS. Piles and piles of notebooks. She would be enraptured.

[kingedmundsroyalmurder]

Blue Castle chapter 24 and 25

Cissy is the daughter the Stirlings wish Valancy had been. Pretty, sweet, meek, innocent in the ways of the world, eager to please and quick to forgive. Someone who would do as she was told and look pretty in church without outshining Olive. And, of course, Cecilia Stirling would have had no need to go out to work, and thus never would have met her child's father.

I'm struck in particular by the juxtaposition of these two passages:

From chapter 24: " And I—didn’t know—some things. I didn’t—understand. Then his father came and took him away. And—after a little—I found out—"

Back in chapter 11: " Poor Mrs. Frederick was almost in a state of collapse. She had believed—or pretended to believe—that Valancy still supposed that children were found in parsley beds."

Cissy was raised by a single father who knows perfectly well how sex works, to the point where it likely doesn't even occur to him that people aren't just born knowing where babies come from. Her other main influence was her church community, made up of people who, one assumes, do not talk about these things publicly, and certainly not to Cissy Gay. It's implied that Cissy's mother, had she lived, would have (or at least should have) taught her these things. Clearly she never learned on her own, until it was too late.

Valancy, meanwhile, knows perfectly well where babies come from, to the point where she's embarrassed to even think about wanting them. Wanting to be a mother is perfectly respectable, even laudable for a woman in Valancy's position. Wanting the process of becoming a mother is most certainly not. It's not said where Valancy learned about sex and how it works, although my vote is from Olive, who has had boyfriends and been engaged.

So meek, innocent Cissy Gay might well have been better tolerated by the Stirlings than odd, never quite fitting in properly Valancy. (Cissy would, most likely, have been utterly crushed by the Stirlings in a way that Valancy never quite was. But then again, Olive wasn't. Maybe a Cecilia Stirling who was pretty and clearly had some marital prospects because of her looks would have been treated better by the extended family, if not Mrs. Fredrick and Cousin Stickles.) And, in contrast, Valancy might well have thrived as Abel Gay's daughter. Without discounting the impact of Abel's neglect, Valancy is clearly more outspoken than Cissy, and stronger willed. She grew up in a stifling and domineering society and the second she got out she not only knew her own mind but had no fear speaking it. If she'd been left to raise herself, I think it wouldn't have taken the promise of imminent death to set that part of her free.

I have AUs in my head now. Moving on...

Other thoughts about these chapters --

I did a little bit of research into the Canadian turn of the century education system back when we learned about Olive's engagements. She graduated from college at 18, and from what I could tell, it seems like College was for students roughly 15-18ish. So if that's correct and college is the word LMM uses to mean high school age students, with University being for 18+, then Cissy's young college student would have been a teenager. Probably 18 or 19 at oldest, possibly (likely?) younger.

And Cissy went to work at the hotel "4 years previously". At 25 or 26 at time of death (since she's three years younger than Valancy, who just turned 29), she would have been ~21 at time of boyfriend. So probably older than the boy.

Given that, it's likely that the boy was probably just as surprised and horrified by the pregnancy as Cissy was. I can't even be mad at him -- he screwed up and tried to make it right by offering to marry her and Cissy turned him down. Just a bad situation all around.

Even just reading about Cissy's funeral makes me furious. No wonder Valancy hated it ad Barney refused to go.

"her slanted eyes smudged with purple" -> Another purple mention. Is LMM subtly foreshadowing that Valancy has no intention of going back to her mother's house?

[casualoddities]

Jane of Lantern Hill Mass Post *Ch 7 to Ch 12

It's a lovely bit of foreshadowing that Jane takes support from her father before even meeting him. Habitant poetry is French-Canadian and does use a lot of patois. Like other folks here there isn't anything much like the Little Baby of Mathieu but the poems I saw were more like someone telling story. In LMM's works there is a unfortunate stereotyping to French Canadians and you see a bit of that in Grandmothers' disdain.

Jane and her mom get to spend a bit of time together. A thing that's in common later is Jane enjoying talking beautiful nonsense and having playful chats with the people she loves.

The theme of being left with a bombshell of news and not being able to talk about it or deal with it came up in the Blue Castle too. LMM is really good at describing that drawn out sense of dread and confusion.

It is also very being *seen* that if you can't be loved the next best is to be left alone. I'm not familiar with the hymns described but do like the sheer passion and joy of hymns and choirs.

Yeesh Phyllis is so rude and blunt. Condescending and a bit superior (Not Superior : P ) it's hard to connect with someone that just either wants to talk about surface things or digs a knife in each time they speak.

It pisses me off that Robin can't grow a big enough backbone to comfort her daughter before the PEI trip and Grandmother is spiteful and shortsighted enough to make it worse.

Poor Jody! The sheer bleakness of her explaining she'll be sent to a orphanage soon and her love for Jane by giving the shell just hurts.

Environmental writing is so well done, Jane's afraid, lonely and resentful of going, so PEI is unwelcoming and everything is grey, dark and foreboding.

[mzannthropy]

From time to time I like to muse about what book adaptations I'd like to see Sam Claflin star in (like, there is no law that say he can't do more of them, is there). More under the cut:

Of course, the first one I will say is Agatha Christie. There are quite a few suitable characters that he could play, be it murderers or heroes. Remember Chris Evans in Knives Out, particularly that scene when the will is read out, where he goes "eat shit" at everyone--Sam would totally kill it playing someone similar. Benoit Blanc films are Agatha Christie derivative and Ransome is a very typical Agatha Christie character, so he could be one of those. As for the heroic ones, there's still plenty, for example I've just thought about Angus from Towards Zero. The good thing about Agatha's books, aside from them being fantastic mysteries, is that there is almost always a love story (usually two people who met thanks to the crime and may have been suspects but are innocent getting together), so there'd be that too.

My second favourite author is L.M. Montgomery, and you know who I'm gonna suggest as a character for Sam to play--it's got to be the one and the only Barney Snaith from The Blue Castle. (For those unfamiliar, he's the swoon worthiest of all swoon worthy romantic heroes, also go read the book, it's in the public domain.) That is if people are okay with a British actor playing a Canadian. Sam would have no problem getting the accent right, but seeing as LMM is such a cultural treasure, they might prefer a Canadian actor.

Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall surely needs a new adaptation. I'd like to see Sam playing Gilbert Markham, the main male character of the story. Anne doesn't get as much recognition as her sisters bc Charlotte cancelled her, but she deserves it as much as them. The book is about a woman escaping from her abusive husband, undoubtedly an important topic.

Dracula, if we could finally get a proper accurate adaptation. Sam could play any of the suitor squad (Jonathan should be someone younger, imo), but the one I think he'd capture best is Jack Seward.

These are the main ones I thought about. Not much, but then my reading has been... tragic for the last decade or so. I like Daphne du Maurier, though I've only read some of her works and Sam's already done My Cousin Rachel. But the other day I imagined Sam as Jem Merlyn in Jamaica Inn and got myself all hot and worked up.

[gogandmagog]

Thanks to some friends at the Lucy Maud Montgomery institute (what up, University of PEI), I was recently put on to the ‘100th Anniversary Scholarly Annotated Anne of Green Gables,’ and you guys… you know how the Grinch’s heart ‘grew three sizes’ that one Christmas in Whoville? Well, similarly, my little brain grew three sizes by the time I was even a quarter of the way through that book.

I cannot recommend it enough, to any dedicated Anne fans. I’s guess I personally still need several months, to fully process everything.

Lucy Maud!!! She was so so so… deep, and thoughtful, and capable of weaving together stories of such intricacies that one scarcely can begin realize what seeds are being planted. The stealth feminism that is so natural and abundant, because feminism is natural and abundant.

In the annotated book (so many contributors to credit, I’ll update this post for sure when it’s somewhere less than midnight), we learn so much. You see things you provably never saw before.

And a major disclaimer right here, before the cut, because I’m doing by best here to summarize a level of absurd genius that is not necessarily easy to grapple, and HEAVY quoting the brilliance of this piece, and other essays others have written on this piece, so pls understand that 0% of what’s coming was borne of my own insight. Just straight up copy/paste behavior here. And also, consider doing yourself a favor at this point by sitting down or holding on to something.

From the jump, the ‘100th ANNEiversay Scholarly ANNEotated Book’ outlines Montgomery's evolution of the first Anne text drafts to make very deliberate and clearly feminist points.

For example, as they say, it is one of the first (perhaps the very first) bildungsromans about a woman who comes of age in mind and spirit as well as in body and community. “In traditional European symbolism, men get associated with sky and spirit, women with earth and body.” In the long, lyrical passages that describe the beauty of Prince Edward Island, Montgomery begins with the trees and the flowers -- which she scoured Canadian and American sources to find feminine vernacular names for -- like "Lady's Slipper." Masculine flower names, such as "Bachelor's Button," are changed out for "aster" or for feminine alternatives. Anne usually gives them feminine personal names too, "Snow Queen" we are looking at you. Sometimes LMM writes the masculine name in her first-pass manuscript and later comes back with a neutral or feminine alternative. She was purposefully locating the feminine in the flowers and then -- in just about every passage describing flowers at length -- she expands the focus to the sky. Sunsets, stars, sunrises, clouds, all of that symbolically extends Anne from the bodily world of the earth into the spiritual and intellectual world symbolized by the sky. A traditionally masculine world. It's deliberately transgressive. She isn't just waxing poetic about the vast beauty of Canada; she's locating Anne within a symbolic structuring of the world where Anne, crucially, has an emotional and intellectual life that is put on an equal plane with traditional masculine coming-of-age stories ... but without denigrating the femininity of the earth. She also applies flower words to the sky itself, describing its colors as "marigold" and "saffron" and so on. The down-to-earth stories of women doing women's work is a feminist point, that Anne can dream and learn and love and go to college and teach, but she can also sew and weave and care for children and become a wife and mother. She uses a symbolic structure of Earth Mother/Sky Father that dates back to Plato and that reaches its full flower in the Romantic poets that Anne loves -- in order to subvert it and locate women and men on an equal footing, and to make the claim for young women reaching for the profoundly-metaphorical stars.

Anne appears in spring, like Persephone, and starts bringing Avonlea to life -- and almost the first thing she does in Avonlea is wear live flowers into the church. HEY SYMBOL OF PATRIARCHY, HAVE SOME FEMININITY IN UR TEMPLES. The actual Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown becomes Queens College -- COLLEGE IS FOR LADIES, YO.

Quotations in Montgomery are never JUST the apt point to the moment, but virtually always point to the larger work the quotation comes from and, if you know the reference, underlines her themes or make deeper points about the characters or situations. (Like referencing the masculine romantic epics that Anne loves, to make the point that Anne is going through the same quest, just like a boy.) Names too -- Biblical Anne is the mother of Mary -- Marilla -- who in the book is a virgin-become-mother, who both mothers Anne and is mothered by her as Anne helps give birth to Marilla's long-repressed true self. Rachel Lynde, as in Judaism, stands for fertility, the mother of Avonlea, a symbol of plenty and fecundity and earthy women -- it's no accident she's fat and poor love-starved Marilla is thin. Diana is a pagan, sensual girl, who is always described as wearing (or eating) something red, and is the only character in the book to get drunk. Her physicality is sometimes set against Anne's spirituality -- but not too much, because this isn't a book about either/or but about both/and when it comes to the physical and spiritual.

It's a book about mutually-supportive relationships between and among women and how that love helps them self-actualize. There's only ever room for one man at a time in these novels -- not until Matthew dies can Gilbert enter Anne's life, because men are so secondary to the narrative in Anne, which is about the webs of support that women weave to support and uplift each other, to hold together communities, to make it possible for women to become fully self-actualized, spiritual, intellectual, bodily people.

I think, in some ways, it would have been a bit of a cheat for Anne to become a famous writer, because a large point the novel makes is not that women can be just like men, but that women are fully-actualized human beings as women and don't have to imitate men; that the world of women is rich and valuable, and that women are not thereby less intelligent or less spiritual than men. Having her become a wife and mother, as most women of that era did, and leading a rich, fulfilling life in that role is probably a more fit ending to Anne's story than if she'd been "exceptional," since Lucy Maud Montgomery's (hereafter to be known as literary Beyoncé) entire point is that it's not just the rare, unusual woman who has a rich interior life -- it's all women.

[arizonapoppy]

Tangled Web Book Club: Feb 5th

I have never heard of a "black cat's wish bone." So off to Google I went. There is apparently a folklore surrounding the bones of a witch's black cat as a talisman. I am guessing that LMM's knowledge of it is from the "German-Canadian" branch of folklore rather than the enslaved African-Americans.

As for the clan giving all their advice to Gay, I see it from the perspective of someone who is hopelessly old in the eyes of today's youth. I know that Gay wishes they would butt out of her life. But I sympathize with the clan elders. 18 is awfully young. And while I am not prejudiced against Gibsons like they are, I do occasionally try to dissuade people from doing ill-advised things. (But only in a "I'm only going to say this once" sort of way.) I recently tried to get someone to listen to my experience in grad school and trying for my PhD because they were absolutely sure they want to get their PhD and everything would be just fine and my life experience could not possibly apply to them. So after saying my piece I backed away.

Will Gay listen to them or end up like the dwarves in the stable in Narnia?