Something has been
bothering me for a long time now. I’ve tried to ignore it and not let it worry
me. I’ve even tried to remind myself that it’s just a story and it doesn’t
actually matter, but it just won’t do. It’s infiltrated by daytime thoughts,
it’s troubled my sleep. Try as I might, for over a year now, the final chapter
of Anne of Island has bugged the hell
out of me.
You know the one.
Where they get engaged. The “diamond sunbursts and marble halls” scene. The
moment when Anne and Gilbert declare their love for each other. Where after all
the years of doubt and confusion, of rejection and regret, they are united.
They know they will have to wait three years while Gilbert finishes medical
school, but they will be happy years “waiting and working for each other—and
dreaming...”
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| Lover's Lane, Cavendish, PEI |
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I am willing to
tolerate a significant amount of poetic licence when it comes to L.M. Montgomery,
and I certainly do not subscribe to the school of thought that Anne Shirley is
a better character than Anne Blythe – I’m actually a huge sucker for Anne’s House of Dreams and readily admit
that the final couple of chapters of Anne
of Ingleside are my go-to when I need something nice and romantic to read. Fine, I like happily married couples, and he runs up the stairs “three steps
at a time, as Gilbert used to do long ago in the House of Dreams…” At the end
of Anne of Island however, everything
is said as it ought to be said and the plot is tied up neatly – there’s even
plenty of “scope for the imagination” about what will come next, but there’s too
much talking, not enough doing, and the narrative is just so unreliable.
Now, before anyone
presumes I have an issue with the typhoid, I don’t. This is a classic crisis,
realisation, resolution trope. I love a good almost dying love scene. Have you
ever read Christy by Catherine
Marshall? That’s a cracker of an almost-deathbed scene. And if you can get past
the undeniable evangelism[i]
of that book, it’s also a fascinating snapshot of early twentieth-century Appalachian
life. Anyway, Anne gets back from a “happy three weeks” with the Irvings at
Echo Lodge, and little Davy let’s slip that that Gilbert Blythe is dying.
“Anne stood quiet
silent and motionless,…”; She has her “Book of Revelation,” her night of “I have
been a complete and utter fool and now I will pay for it for the rest of my
life and I can’t even go to him because a) it’s typhoid, which is totally gross
and there is no way, between fever and rampant attendant dysentery, they’re
about to admit visitors, b) I kind of blew that opportunity by rejecting him
over two years earlier, and c) it was made clear earlier in this book that Mrs.
Blythe is pretty pissed off with me, and although I’m almost certain if Gilbert
wasn’t in a state of dehydrated, malnourished, feverish delirium, he would be
cool with me showing up, I know for sure that Mrs. Blythe would be seriously
unimpressed. I mean, who wouldn’t? Your only son is dying and little Miss Stuck
Up shows up for the deathbed scene. Not going to happen. No matter how much a certain
mini-series would like to believe it would. Really, this has all been extremely
stupid, because in my whole narrative, which so far is a bildungsroman trilogy focused
on my development through intellectually adventurous, but fundamentally domestic,
if not wholly conservative womanhood, the signs have been pretty clearly
pegging Gilbert as my intended. I apparently have just received high honours in
English at Redmond (read Dalhousie), but I couldn’t see this bleeding obvious plot
trajectory of my own.”
Then morning comes
with the “fairy fringe of light on the skirts of darkness” and Anne hears Pacifique
Buote’s words of redemption, “He got de turn las night”. Ah, yes, Arcadian
Habitant. That’s what French Canadians are useful for in this world – hired
help and local colour.
[…]
“Weeping may endure for a
night but joy cometh in the morning”
CHAPTER XLI - Love takes up the Glass of Time
I’ve come up to ask you to go for one of our old time
rambles through September woods and ‘over hills where spices grow,’ this
afternoon,” said Gilbert, coming suddenly round the porch corner. “Suppose we
visit Hester Gray’s garden.”
Anne,
sitting on the stone step…
Hang on there, Maud,
did you just write September? It was the end of July a few lines ago
and while I’m aware that it takes almost a fortnight after the crisis for
typhoid to fully run its course, have we skipped some things? No, no, you’re
the author, keep going. I’m also interested in this wedding Anne is going to, because
it’s lovely the way you have set up this scene with Anne fixing a green dress while
they discuss the various nuptials that are going on in their set. I especially
like how you get Anne to wear an older green dress the next day when they go
for their walk. One that Gilbert had “liked especially” at Redmond, and then
how you bring back the memory of this dress at the end of Anne of Ingleside. You do that sort of thing really well.
[…] Anne looked after him as
he strode away, and sighed. Gilbert was friendly--very friendly--far too
friendly. He had come quite often to Green Gables after his recovery, and…
Ok, stop now. They’ve
been hanging out? They’ve been hanging out and you’ve denied the reader?
Gilbert was dying and Anne wretched with loss, longing, and hopeless love, and
you choose to wait until everyone is all better before you let us see them
together? Come on! You’re not letting us in on that moment when they first see
each other? When was it? TELL ME.
Did Anne concoct ways
to pass by the Blythe house? Did Mrs. Lynde conspire to task Anne with the
delivery of helpful meals for the Blythe family? When Gilbert read Phil’s
letter telling him “there was really nothing between Roy and Anne” and “to try
again”, did he reply instantly to Phil and also figure out a way to get a note
up to Anne? Did Gilbert, bored from bed rest insist on inviting his dearest
friend over for a visit? Did they have to suffer the indignity of a first
meeting in public view at some awful afternoon tea at the Blythe homestead? Was
Mrs. Harmond Andrews there to dig in the knife? Did Gilbert’s swift recovery
from that point facilitate getting the buggy out for an impromptu visit to
Green Gables? Or did he wait till he was hale enough to wander up there
himself? Did Anne make sure she knew the town gossip sufficiently to ensure she
was at church the first Sunday Gilbert was there? WHEN WAS IT? More to the
point, how the devil given all that had happened did they manage to meet again
for the first time and for them not to know. Just to know. I will not of course
pad out any of these ideas, because that’s fan fiction and, well, you know.
I also know what L.M.
Montgomery is doing. She is teasing out the uncertainty and saving all the
resolution for Gilbert’s proposal and their defining discussion. This allows
her to put all the action into dialogue, and to give her hero a formal
declaration. It fits the comfy romantic with a small r plot arc. There in
Hester Gray’s garden all is revealed. You see their old camaraderie return and
the waiting forces Anne to have to experience the uncertainty Gilbert has
experienced for the better part of a decade. I can believe that Anne would keep
her council for a month, because she has already proven that she can avoid talking
to Gilbert for over four years. I can definitely believe that it might have
taken Gilbert a few weeks to pluck up the nerve to propose again, but it’s a
big stretch to accept that they’re only just discussing now that Christine Stuart has
never really been on the scene, or that Phil has been writing to Gilbert
filling him in on Anne’s situation.
What’s more, I
actually resent Montgomery not allowing her Anne to have to go cap in hand to
Gilbert and say she made a mistake. He is rejected and then almost dies, but still
has to initiate the action.
It’s also just
unrealistic for Avonlea.
Let’s look at the
facts, and by facts, I mean the Avonlea depicted by Montgomery herself. The
Blythe place isn’t far from Green Gables and it’s a small community. I can
confirm having been to the real Cavendish that short of holing herself away at
Green Gables and not even talking to the people she lives with, Anne would not be able to
avoid anyone directly connected with the Blythes during the fortnight that Gilbert is coming back to the land of the living. Note that throughout June and July,
Montgomery has had Anne away to Phil and Jonas’s wedding in Nova Scotia, had her
distracted by Jane Andrews’s marriage, and then sends her on a three week visit
with the Irvings to prevent Anne and Gilbert from seeing each other after
college. She even makes a point of Gilbert not being invited to Jane’s
wedding.
What’s more, the very morning
after she finds out Gilbert is ill, Anne bumps into his uncle’s hired man who
willingly tells her that Gilbert is on the mend. And remember, Pacifique will
be related to Jerry Buote who used to be Matthew Cuthbert’s hired boy, so
Montgomery wants us to know that this is an utterly interrelated
community. There’s a reason why Pacifique freely tells Anne about Gilbert’s
health – he’s probably known her for most of his life and just presumes that
Anne and Gilbert are a thing.
Additionally, we know
from the chapters prior, that people in Avonlea are still making digs at Anne
about Gilbert, and Charlie Sloan has been telling everyone that Gilbert is
engaged to Christine Stuart. What’s more, the entire village knows that Anne is
going to be principal of Summerside High School in the Autumn, which means that she is
not getting married to Roy Gardner. You don't need to work if you're engaged to a young man from one of the richest families in Nova Scotia. There’s no uncertainty on that point. Mrs. Harmon Andrews
has come right out and told Anne that she “once thought you and Gilbert would
have made a match of it” and “If you don’t take care, Anne, all your beaux will
slip through your fingers.” Mrs Lynde is equally open in her opinion about how they
make a “fine looking couple” and even Marilla breaks her usual silence to
mention to Anne that Gilbert was looking thin and worn out.
Despite Mrs. Blythe’s coldness
to Anne since she refused Gilbert, are we also expected to believe that while Anne was away, no one let Gilbert in on the news that
Anne wasn’t getting married? Even if he didn’t listen to gossip, we can surely
imagine Mrs Lynde making a point of mentioning in Mrs Blythe’s presence – say at
some church ladies’ meeting - that Anne was off teaching in September and “well,
we thought she would marry that Kingsport man, but it turns out she loves the
Island too much,” or some such thing.
I also don’t believe for a second that their Redmond associates did not know that Anne had
refused Roy, and that it wasn’t around the Kingsport gossip in a matter of days.
But we don’t even need to imagine what might have happen, because Montgomery
gives us the wonderful Philippa Blake, nee Gordon, who writes to Gilbert.
Bless Phil and her
perfect meddling, but even here, Montgomery asks us to swallow a good deal of licence
if we aren’t to assume that Anne doesn’t know full well what Phil is writing to
Gilbert.
It is entirely
possible that someone from Kingsport has heard about Gilbert and told Phil, but
the woman has just got married and has been on her honeymoon. The most likely
scenario is that Anne herself wrote to Phil that “fairy fringe” morning. Phil
being the one who berated her for being a fool when she first refused Gilbert
and who has been her chief confidante throughout college.
If you map out the
timeline for the Anne books, using the only clear date we have – 1914 and the
start of the Great War in Rilla of
Ingleside, and working backwards to Rilla’s birth in what has to be 1899, the
late 1880s and early 90s stretch out for more years than they ought to.
However, we know that Montgomery is writing of a time when there is a solid and
regular railway across Prince Edward Island, and regular ferries to the
mainland. It’s only going to a take a day or two at best for a letter to get
from Green Gables to Phil’s new home in the manse of the Patterson Street slums
in Kingsport (read Halifax), and this news would even cause a distracted young
bride to down tools and write a swift response. First to Anne and then of course
to Gilbert.
Wonderful, outwardly frivolous,
fundamentally goodhearted, fiercely intelligent and gossipy Phil, would not be
leaving it at that. Details and updates would be demanded, and admonishments if
things that needed to be done were left undone.
If I were to write fan
fiction, it would be the story of the letters that pass between Phil and Anne
and Phil and Gilbert during those weeks. I want to hear the frustrated cry of “would
you two just get on with it!” And “Anne Shirley, you now know your own mind, so
hightail yourself down there and let Gilbert know!”
Furthermore, I reckon
that wherever and whenever Gilbert and Anne first meet during Gilbert’s
recovery, the business of whether or not they were respectively engaged to
other people would have been dealt with in the first five minutes. In my
version of romantic with a small r, there would have been no need for a few
weeks of courting, because the truth would have been apparent to all.
You know, like Laurie
and Amy in Little Women – yes, them
again:
If he had any
doubts about the reception she would give him, they were set at rest the minute
she looked up and saw him, for dropping everything, she ran to him, exclaiming
in a tone of unmistakable love and longing...
"Oh,
Laurie, Laurie, I knew you'd come to me!"
I
think everything was said and settled then, […]
Or Montgomery’s own Emily
Star when she hears Teddy’s whistle out of the blue one June evening - “An old, old call--two higher notes and one long and soft and low” - and she knows: “It came again. And Emily knew that Teddy was there, waiting
for her in Lofty John's bush--calling to her across the years.”
If I was going to be
really unfair, I would also compare this to the final chapters of North and South. For what it’s worth, I
think Elizabeth Gaskill’s union of Margaret Hale and John Thornton is the
sexiest engagement scene of the nineteenth century.
That would be very unfair
though, and I’ve come to view the final chapter of Anne of the Island as the author’s fancy of a clearly spoken
engagement. Maybe we’re seeing a bit of wish fulfillment on Montgomery’s part. A dream of highfaluting mumbo-jumbo even when Montgomery’s trying so hard not to
make it that way. An ideal of romance which sadly undermines the glorious everyday
descriptions that bring life to Montgomery’s characters and stories.
Me, I just want that
scene when Anne and Gilbert first meet again and know, but I’ll take Marilla’s
advice to “never mind your imaginings.”
[i]
Christy is the sort of evangelical book that reprobates like myself approve of.
The central character is a nice Southern Christian woman who plans to save a
few souls when she goes to teach in rural Appalachia. Of course, she will get
the biggest education when she encounters the poverty, but also the entrenched traditions
of the mountain communities. Marshall doesn’t shy away from the social deprivation
or the moonshining, the open-minded attitude towards sex, and she makes no
apologies for the hypocrisy and even violence of the religious and social elite.
Marshall does not hold back - a central character is raped by a visiting
minister. Furthermore, she makes Miss Alice, a Quaker woman and Neil MacNeill, an agnostic doctor the
spokespeople for the philosophy of the novel, which includes Scandinavian
education theory about folk schools and the preservation of local culture. It’s
that socially-minded, intellectual evangelism of the early-to-mid-twentieth century
and I often wonder how the Southern Evangelical movement of today reconciles
itself to the book, despite regularly claiming it to be one of the great novels
of the American evangelical movement. Unsurprisingly, the mini-series made by
CBS in the 1990s did what TV often does (the Anne series included) – in one
breath they modernised some of the religious themes, made everyone a bit
cleaner and open-minded, and consequently sanitised the story.
Interestingly, Catherine Marshall and
L.M Montgomery were both the wives of Presbyterian ministers and in their very
different responses to being ministers' wives (Peter Marshall was Chaplain to
the US Senate in the 1940s and a good old-fashioned Scots firebrand preacher; Ewen Macdonald
was a unobtrusive, Gaelic-speaking minister more concerned with the
philosophical and metaphysical matters of faith), they challenge many of the
tenets of good Christian womanhood: the temperance movement, the hypocrisy of
the outward appearance of faith, the small-mindedness of small communities,
even as they celebrated them. They also make it very clear that a woman marries
a man, not his vocation.
Significantly, while both authors
married ministers, Christy, like Anne, marries a community focussed, but
scientifically forward-thinking doctor. Both characters are saved by their
creators from the enforced social responsibilities of the minister’s wife.
