Thesis First Draft (Body)

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Dearly Beloved...and Departed

Reevaluating the Narrative of L.M. Montgomery’s

Anne of Green Gables Series

~ Vivianne Knoppert ~

OGC Research Master Thesis

Literature in the Modern Age

Supervisor: Dr. Kiene Brillenburg-Wurth

August 2007

Table of Contents

Introduction3

Chapter 1: Narrative and the Bildungsroman10

The First Novel of the Series: Anne of Green Gables (1908)

Chapter 2: Différance and the Suspension of Marriage23

The Second Novel of the Series: Anne of Avonlea (1909)

Chapter 3:Cycles of Repetition and the Arrêt de Mort36

The Third Novel of the Series: Anne of the Island (1915)

Chapter 4: Ends, ends and Ending48

The Fourth Novel of the Series: Anne of Windy Poplars (1936)

Chapter 5: Life, Death and Narrative Time60

The Fifth Novel of the Series: Anne’s House of Dreams (1922)

Chapter 6: Repetition, Différance and Narrative Construction70

The Sixth Novel of the Series: Anne of Ingleside (1939)

Chapter 7:The Self-Reflexive Narrative80

The Seventh Novel of the Series: Rainbow Valley (1919)

The Eighth Novel of the Series: Rilla of Ingleside (1921)

Conclusion 91

Bibliography 95

Introduction

“All my life it has been my aim to write a book – a ‘real live’ book. Of late years I have been thinking of it seriously but somehow it seemed such a big task I hadn’t the courage to begin it. I have always hated beginning a story. When I get the first paragraph written I feel as though it were half done. To begin a book therefore seemed a quite enormous undertaking. Besides, I did not see just how I could get time for it. I could not afford to take time from my regular work to write it.”[1]

When my boyfriend proposed to me on a windy beach on February 3, 2007, I was trying hard to decide on a topic for my master’s thesis. With a wedding to plan and major research to conduct, the choice was easily made: something to do with weddings in literature. But weddings in literature are scarce: there is often the promise of a wedding, the courtship leading up to a wedding, or the insinuation of a wedding, but no actual wedding represented in the text itself. Thinking back to all the books I’ve read, I recalled the high incidence of weddings in the Anne of Green Gables series by the Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery. I’d found my text, but settling on a research question was more difficult. A wedding must be relevant, after all, since it would do little good to demonstrate my acquired research skills merely by cataloguing and describing the various weddings represented in the eight novels comprising the series. What has always struck me as interesting, and rather limiting, is the choice of the literary establishment to treat the Anne series as children’s literature or, at best, as young adult fiction.[2] Treating Montgomery’s novels based on their supposed audience may have produced some interesting analyses of the text, but its relevance to scholarly development and debate was thereby limited to a select group of critics dealing with the genre of children’s literature.

In the past fifteen years, Anne scholarship has expanded to include feminist interpretation of the novels, as well as some psychoanalytical and historical research based on Montgomery’s most popular texts.[3]However, the novels have rarely escaped from their designation as children’s literature, and most analyses tend to concentrate on the social and historical elements of the text, particularly the treatment of women, marriage and its alternatives and the status of the female author.[4]Most ‘new’ analyses of the Anne of Green Gables series focus on Montgomery’s treatment of sexual roles, and follow some form of the argumentation that while Montgomery allows most of her old maids and single women to be married, she does so only because she has to as an author of female fiction. According to these critics, it is really the “dichotomies in [Montgomery’s] work [which] can be seen as direct confrontation of the discordances of [her] world, an exploration of the dualistic nature of female experience, both protest against and accession to convention.”[5] While this line of argumentation is interesting, and an improvement over the initial analyses of the texts, it is still too limited, it still does not recognize the full potential of the novels. It is the aim of this thesis to introduce a new type of analysis of the Anne series, using a site familiar to the previous analyses: the wedding.[6]

As a female author writing at a time in which literature was presided over by male publishers, Montgomery is often defined by her precarious position. Female writers were encouraged to write female fiction: stories about love and courtship, domestic life and harmonious marriage, stories which, written for and by (young) women, appealed to “affairs of the heart,” that specific terrain of women which “was in reality a thinly-disguised weapon of limitation.”[7]By creating characters of a distinct and individual personality, Montgomery was able to revise the female stereotypes dominant in society and literature: “spinsters who defy the passively angelic stereotype [Miss Cornelia Bryant and Marilla Cuthbert]; the wives who manage to exert power within the confines of marriage [Mrs. Rachel Lynde, Emily Harrison and Mrs. Marshall Elliott, née Miss Cornelia Bryant]; and the women who, though eventually subsumed into sexual relativity, expand their own personalities before marriage [the eponymous heroine Anne Shirley and Miss Lavendar Lewis].”[8] While this analysis of Montgomery’s female characters is an interesting and relevant one, it will only serve as a point of reference for the purposes of the present research. In order to properly analyze the wedding in the texts, it is necessary to recognize the importance of the alternatives to marriage which Montgomery offers. These alternatives, too, become the site of weddings in the text, and are hence important for this research. The figure of the female friend, the old maid, the single woman and the eventually married woman each serve as an alternative to the husband and function in the same way a (future) husband might, for the purposes of marriage.

Marriage and weddings, then, form the site of analysis for this research. But to which end? What about weddings in a female-authored text for young women is interesting, since it is rather an expected fact in this type of fiction? And how do weddings translate into an interesting research question? Weddings in the Anne of Green Gables series are interesting for two reasons: firstly, because they occur not only between male-female couples and, secondly, because they often conflate with funerals. As mentioned above, several alternatives to marriage in the Anne novels have already been identified by other critics; these alternatives are the site of several of the weddings presented in the texts. Old maids are married after being single for decades, young women are subsumed into marriage after developing their individual identity, and young friends are married in mock-ceremonies. Even in the novels where actual weddings are conspicuously absent, the figure of the wedding and of marriage governs the action of the characters and the development of the plot.

The second reason for concentrating on weddings in the novels of the Anne series is the conflation of weddings with funerals. This conflation is rather surprising in a series which depends so heavily on weddings for its plot development, and which has as its intended audience (young) women preparing for marriage or recently married. The fact that Montgomery conflates weddings and funerals raises a number of questions which will be dealt with in this thesis. Most notable among these is the question of happy endings: if weddings and funerals are conflated, how do we interpret the happy ending typical of Montgomery’s novels, and the traditional female romance in general? It is here that the most interesting questions about the Anne of Green Gables series arise, and it is among these questions that this thesis is situated.

The conflation of weddings and funerals in the eight novels of the series begs the re-examination of the narrative structure of Montgomery’s work. Weddings, traditionally the happy ending of the female romance, have a rather different chronological placement in the Anne novels, often at the beginning or in the middle of each successive narrative. Anne Shirley’s wedding to Gilbert Blythe, for example, occurs at the very beginning of the fifth installment in the series, Anne’s House of Dreams, and best friend Diana Barry is married in the middle of the narrative of the third novel of the series, Anne of the Island. Funerals, traditionally the unhappy alternative to the happy marriage ending in novels for women, also disturb the chronological order of things, occurring as they often do in the middle of the narrative action. What Montgomery’s novels thus seem to ask for is a re-evaluation of narrative structure, which can be anchored by the wedding. The question which this thesis asks, and which it seeks to answer is therefore: How does the narrative of the Anne of Green Gables series function? And, more specifically: How does the narrative of the Anne of Green Gables series relate to the traditional female romance? And finally: “What role does the wedding play in the narrative of the Anne of Green Gables series?”

The nature of this type of research and the kinds of questions which it seeks to answer requires a somewhat non-traditional approach. Instead of relying on theory to analyze and explain the text, the text itself must be treated as a self-reflexive entity, as theory. In order to discover how a narrative functions, it is necessary to study both the narrative itself, and the manner in which it is constructed; that is, the manner in which it constructs itself. With questions of this kind, it is impossible to divorce the content from the form, as one constitutes the other, and the other makes the one happen. Since the questions dealt with are quite complex, to work without a theoretical basis or method would be to get lost already with the first step taken. Since it is necessary to ground the research in a methodology, but the methodology required is one which must have both form and content as its object, it must necessarily be a methodology which itself is both form and content, content as form and vice versa. This requirement inevitably leads to a source which is itself an analysis of a text: Jacques Derrida’s analysis of Sigmund Freud’s influential work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Like Derrida, I must ask myself “What happens when acts or performances (discourse or writing, analysis of description, etc.) are part of the objects they designate? When they can be given as examples of precisely that of which they speak or write?”[9] What happens when a narrative is self-reflexive, when it recalls its own nature, in the form of the conflation of weddings and funerals, in itself? As with Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the narrative of the Anne series “is one of its objects, whence its pace (allure), and this is why it does not advance very well, or work by itself. One of its objects among others, but also the object for which there are other objects with which to effect trans- and to speculate. This object among others is not just any object. It limps and is hard to close.”[10] Following Derrida’s argument as it develops in relation to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I borrow concepts and methods to aid my analysis of Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series.

By focusing on weddings and the various forms which these take, I am able to structure my research as an inquiry which reflects on itself as it develops, much as is the case in the texts it studies. This thesis is not one in which theory seeks an application, or a novel seeks a theoretical explanation, but one in which theory and novel develop each other in an interactive process. I allow the narrative of the Anne series to influence the narrative of inquiry suggested by Derrida, and vice versa, thereby creating a new narrative, this thesis. I have tried to interfere as little as possible with the natural development of the narrative, and have therefore structured my thesis as an interaction with each installment of the series in the chronological order of the life of the heroine, Anne Shirley.[11] Each chapter of the thesis examines one or two of the novels and develops an analysis of the series narrative as a whole by building on each of the previous installments and introducing new, revised or expanded concepts as they present or develop themselves in the narrative of the novels. The end of the analysis represented in this thesis is arbitrary, based on Montgomery’s choice to leave the series to end with the eighth novel, Rilla of Ingleside. An analysis of this kind might continue indefinitely, always returning to itself, returning to the narrative which it studies and the narrative which it produces, allowing them to interact at every point. For the purposes of this research, this would be impractical, not to mention impossible, and it is therefore that an end is elected. What the reader of this thesis must keep in mind, however, is that while the analysis is structured in regard to the chronology of the series installments, the end of the series is equally important to the beginning as it is to the end. I will ask the reader to consider the nature of all narrative as he or she reads this thesis, and never to forget in the process that all structure but an inevitable end is arbitrary. I would like to ask the reader to consider the following model of narrative suggested by Frank Kermode, and to read it, if necessary several times, before she or he proceeds to the chapters which follow:

Let us take a very simple example, the ticking of a clock. We ask what it says: and we agree that it says tick-tock. [...] Of course, it is we who provide the fictional difference between the two sounds; tick is our word for a physical beginning, tock our word for an end. We say they differ. What enables them to be different is a special kind of middle. We can perceive duration only when it is organized. [...] The fact that we call the second of the two related sounds tock is evidence that we use fictions to enable the end to confer organization and form on the temporal structure. The interval between the two sounds, between tick and tock is now charged with significant duration. The clock’s tick-tock I take to be a model of what we call a plot, an organization that humanizes time by giving it form; and the interval between tock and tick represents purely successive, disorganized time of the sort that we need to humanize.[12]

It would be more appropriate, perhaps, considering the nature of narrative, to have started this thesis at the end, and from there to re-examine all that comes before as it works up towards the end. But this would be disorienting: in our experience, research begins with a question which it seeks to answer in the body of the text, and which is answered in full in the conclusion. For the sake of clarity, I, too, will “ ‘begin at the beginning [...] and go on till [I] come to the end : then stop.”[13]

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Narrative and the Bildungsroman

~ Anne of Green Gables (1908) ~

The sun was coming in at the window warm and bright; the orchard on the slope below the house was in a bridal flush of pinky-white bloom, hummed over by a myriad of bees.[14]

The series begins with the image of a wedding. As Mrs. Rachel Lynde watches Matthew Cuthbert departing Avonlea one afternoon, dressed in his best suit, the view from her window shows the orchard in a “bridal flush.”[15] Being somewhat of a busybody, Mrs. Lynde rushes down to Green Gables to question Matthew’s sister Marilla about Matthew’s destination. Seated in the Green Gables kitchen, Marilla answers Mrs. Lynde’s storm of questions with the announcement that she and Matthew are adopting a boy to help out in the fields. The shocked Mrs. Lynde reacts unenthusiastically to the news, warning Marilla not to wait until “ ‘he burns Green Gables down or puts strychnine in the well’ ”; she has “ ‘heard of a case over in New Brunswick where an orphan asylum child did that and the whole family died in fearful agonies.’ ”[16] Within the first seven pages of the novel, the reader is introduced to marriage and death, weddings and funerals.

The theme of weddings and funerals introduced in the first chapter of Anne of Green Gables is developed further in chapter two, which finds Matthew in his buggy, returning to Green Gables with a girl instead of a boy. Anne, talking almost without pause, remarks to Matthew that a tree along the road reminds her of “ ‘a bride all in white with a lovely misty veil.’ ”[17] Anne tells Matthew: “ ‘I don’t ever expect to be a bride myself. I’m so homely nobody will ever want to marry me – unless it might be a foreign missionary.’ ”[18] Anne, emphasizing her homeliness, excludes marriage from her future possibilities, excepting marriage to a foreign missionary, who “ ‘mightn’t be very particular.’ ”[19] It is this exclusion of marriage as possibility which first attracts attention to the narrative convention of the female Bildungsroman.