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
2
August 2007
Table of Contents
Introduction
3
Chapter 1:
Narrative and the Bildungsroman
10
The First Novel of the Series: Anne of Green Gables (1908)
Chapter 2:
Différance and the Suspension of Marriage
23
The Second Novel of the Series: Anne of Avonlea (1909)
Chapter 3: Cycles of Repetition and the Arrêt de Mort
36
The Third Novel of the Series: Anne of the Island (1915)
Chapter 4: Ends, ends and Ending
48
The Fourth Novel of the Series: Anne of Windy Poplars (1936)
Chapter 5:
Life, Death and Narrative Time
60
The Fifth Novel of the Series: Anne’s House of Dreams (1922)
Chapter 6:
Repetition, Différance and Narrative Construction
70
The Sixth Novel of the Series: Anne of Ingleside (1939)
Chapter 7:
The Self-Reflexive Narrative
80
The Seventh Novel of the Series: Rainbow Valley (1919)
The Eighth Novel of the Series: Rilla of Ingleside (1921)
Conclusion
91
3
Bibliography
95
4
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
1
Montgomery, L[ucy] M[aud]. The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery. Ed. Rubio, Mary and Elizabeth
Waterston. 5 vols. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1985. 1: 330. In a later volume of her journals, Montgomery again
laments her problems with beginnings: “Beginning a story is always a hard thing for me to do. I feel as if it were
half done once it were already begun. And I never feel satisfied with my beginnings. [...] I can’t believe this third
Anne book will be any good. [...] It seems going backward to try to write it. I feel as if Anne and all pertaining to
her had been long left behind.” In: Journals 2:147.
* Note: I will hereafter refer to Montgomery’s published journals by the designation Journals.
2
Gabriela Åhmansson traces the critical categorization of L.M. Montgomery’s work as ‘children’s literature’ to
Canadian literary critic Desmond Pacey, whose 1952 Creative Writing in Canada: A Short History of EnglishCanadian Literature classifies Anne of Green Gables as “ ‘a children’s classic’ ” to which “ ‘it would be silly to
apply adult critical standards.’ ” Quoted in Åhmansson, Gabriella. A Life and Its Mirrors: A Feminist Reading of
L.M. Montgomery’s Fiction. Vol. 1. Diss. Uppsala University, 1991. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell
International, 1991.
5
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)
3
For examples of this type of research and analysis, see Reimer, Mavis. Such a Simple Little Tale: Critical
Responses to L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Metuchen, NJ: The Children’s Literature Association
and The Scarecrow Press, 1992. The title of such articles as “The Decline of Anne: Matron vs. Child” and
“‘Queer Children’: L.M. Montgomery’s Heroines” indicate the child-centered approach to the analysis of the
Anne series.
4
In her journal, Montgomery writes: “I did not write Green Gables for children. And Avonlea was not written
for anybody or any class but merely to carry on Anne’s adventures for anybody who was interested in them.” In:
Journals 4:41.
5
Foster, Shirley. Victorian Women’s Fiction: Marriage, Freedom and the Individual. London and Sydney:
Croom Helm, 1985. 14.
6
Montgomery herself said of weddings: “Weddings seem, for the most part, to be rather vulgar things, stifled in
a dust of sweeping and scrubbing and baking and borrowing, with all the various harrassments thereof. The
beauty they should stand for seems wholly lost sight of.” In: Journals 1: 312.
6
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
7
8
Foster 3
Foster 59
7
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?”
8
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.
9
Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1987. 391.
10
Ibid. 391
9
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
11
Though I will be treating the novels chronologically according to the development of the heroine, Anne
Shirley, it is important to note that the novels were not written or published in chronological order. Would I have
been able to write an entire dissertation on this topic, I would have included the element of return and repetition
in the writing of as well as the existing series as a whole. For the purposes of this thesis, however, I must limit
myself to the remark that the novels were not written in order, and to giving the order in which they were
written: Anne of Green Gables (1908), Anne of Avonlea (1909), Anne of the Island (1915), Anne’s House of
Dreams (1917), Rainbow Valley (1919), Rilla of Ingleside (1920), Anne of Windy Poplars (1936), Anne of
Ingleside (1939).
10
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
12
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1967. 44.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 1865. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the
Looking-Glass. Ed. Roger Lancelyn Green. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 106.
13
11
1
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 “
14
Montgomery, L[ucy] M[aud]. Anne of Green Gables. 1908. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. 2.
I will hereafter refer to the novel using the abbreviation AGG.
15
Ibid. 2
16
Ibid. 7
17
Ibid. 13
18
Ibid. 13
12
‘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.
The traditional Bildungsroman is a novel in which, according to Joseph Allen
Boone, “the story of a youth’s progress from innocence to adulthood, from the realm
of illusion to the world of reality, is marked by the vicissitudes and trials of love.”20
The Anne series certainly fits this description of the traditional Bildungsroman, but
Boone also makes an important distinction between male and female plots within the
Bildungsroman. A typical (male) Bildungsroman “often merely uses the love-plot as a
kind of narrative scaffolding upon which to hang the various independent concerns,
the ‘innumerable events,’ of the hero’s growth to adulthood and social integration.”21
Anne of Green Gables is most often treated as a Bildungsroman in the female tradition, a
love-plot, as Boone would have it.22 Since in female variations on the Bildungsroman
“the climactic event of marriage confers on the heroine her entire personal identity
(as wife) as well as her social ‘vocation’ (as mother), the growth of the female
protagonist has come to be seen as synonymous with the action of courtship.”23
Three feminist critics, however, identify two separate narrative patterns which
predominate among the female-gendered Bildungsromans: the apprenticeship pattern
and the awakening model.24 The apprenticeship model shows “a continuous
development from childhood to maturity [and] adapts the linear structure of the
male Bildungsroman.”25 The awakening model, on the other hand, allows the
heroine to “grow significantly only after fulfilling the fairy-tale expectation that they
will marry and live ‘happily ever after.’ ”26 The reader familiar with the Anne of Green
19
Ibid. 13
Boone, Joseph Allen. Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction. Women in Culture and
Society. Ed. Catherine R. Stimpson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. 74.
21
Ibid. 74
22
Rachel Blau DuPlessis also argues, with Boone, that the female Bildungsroman defines development by love,
and therefore can have only two appropriate endings: marriage or death. The development of the heroine is
always finally subordinated to marriage: “This contradiction between love and quest in plots dealing with
women [...] has in my view, one main mode of resolution: an ending in which one part of that contradiction,
usually quest or ‘Bildung,’ is set aside or repressed, whether by marriage or by death.” Quoted in Åhmansson, p.
73.
23
Boone 74
24
Abel, Elizabeth, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland. Introduction. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female
Development. Ed. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland. Hanover and London: University
Press of New England, 1983. 11.
25
Ibid. 11
26
Ibid. 12
20
13
Gables series as a whole will recognize that the development of Montgomery’s
heroine more closely follows the apprenticeship model, at least in a superficial
reading of the texts.
While it is generally accepted that the Anne series belongs to this love-plot
female Bildungsroman tradition, it already becomes apparent in the first novel of the
series that this is an oversimplification of a rather more complex set of novels.27
Though the novels do contain elements of the female Bildungsroman in its traditional
form, they also confront this form, beginning with Anne’s adoption in Anne of Green
Gables. This first major event in the first installment of the series exposes what Abel,
Hirsch and Langland identify as the change of position of the developmental process
frequently adopted by the female-oriented Bildungsroman. Anne’s arrival at Green
Gables sets in motion
[t]he tensions that shape female development [which] may lead to a disjunction
between surface plot, which affirms social conventions, and a submerged plot, which
encodes rebellion; between a plot governed by age-old female story patterns, such as
myths and fairy tales, and a plot that reconceives these limiting possibilities; between
a plot that charts development and a plot that unravels it.28
Anne of Green Gables is a female Bildungsroman to the extent that these are identified
by Abel, Hirsch and Langland, but even this categorization is rather limiting, and
fails to account for the full range of narrative movement in the text. The limits of this
classification of the Anne novels will present themselves in the analysis which
follows.
Anne first comes to Green Gables as an orphan, mistakenly taken out of the
orphanage instead of the boy Matthew and Marilla have requested. From the outset,
Anne’s progression is thwarted, by virtue of her gender; a future at Green Gables is
denied Anne, whereas it would have been granted to a male counterpart. Initially,
this would seem to support the characterization of the Anne series as a female
For example, see Thomas, Gillian. “The Decline of Anne: Matron vs. Child.” Such a Simple Little Tale:
Critical Responses to L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Ed. Mavis Reimer. Metuchen, NJ: The
Children’s Literature Association and The Scarecrow Press, 1992. 23-28.
28
Abel, Hirsch and Langland 12
27
14
Bildungsroman: the (male) plot has nothing to do with courtship, and Anne is
therefore denied participation, turned away in order to find a more femaleappropriate love-plot. This division of male and female plots, however, is already
challenged when Anne readies herself to leave Green Gables. As she tells Marilla:
“ ‘There is no use in loving things if you have to be torn from them, is there? And it’s
so hard to keep from loving things, isn’t it? That was why I was so glad when I
thought I was going to live here. I thought I’d have so many things to love and
nothing to hinder me.’ ”29 Anne introduces love into the male plot destined for the
orphan adopted by the Green Gables folk, thereby altering the plot to include her.
Anne, who describes her life as “ ‘a perfect graveyard of buried hopes’ ” because it
sounds “ ‘so nice and romantic, just as if I were a heroine in a book,’ ” challenges the
female Bildungsroman convention by referring it to literature and to life, by
questioning the primacy of the love-plot.30 To Anne, the female Bildungsroman is
romantic, but does not necessarily revolve around love and courtship; the plot Anne
writes for herself is a Bildungsroman appropriate to both male and female
protagonists.31
While Anne creates a Bildungsroman by ‘writing’ her own future into Green
Gables, Anne of Green Gables cannot be considered a Bildungsroman. The female
Bildungsroman, which the Anne series is often classified as, takes its courtshipdominated form from the narrative convention of ending in marriage. As one critic
presents the dominant opinion, the Anne novels “essentially repea[t] the pattern of
popular sentimental fiction that centers around the theme of courtship with marriage
as the inevitable happy ending.”32 The heroine of the Bildungsroman receives her
identity from her (future) role as wife and mother, and her progress is guided by
courtship with her future husband. Anne of Green Gables begins by excluding
29
AGG 34
Ibid. 38
31
Anne also turns what Perry Nodelman identifies as the ‘classic novel for girls’ into what he depicts as the
‘classic novel for boys.’ The start of the novel with Anne’s “arrival at what is to be her home, after a series of
unsettling adventures which are glossed over rather than described” does not end in her doing “nothing but
grow[ing] up quietly,” but rather in “exciting confrontations with hardship and evil in wild, uncomfortable
places” where “things start badly and get worse, almost until the very end,” at least from the perspective of
traditional female upbringing. Nodelman is quoted in Åhmansson, p. 131.
32
Genevieve Wiggins, quoted in Gubar, Marah. “ ‘Where Is The Boy?’: The Pleasures of Postponement in the
Anne of Green Gables Series.” The Lion and The Unicorn 25(2001): 47-69.
30
15
marriage as future possibility, thereby freeing Anne from the traditional love-plot for
the duration of the novel. Anne’s future role of wife and mother are denied, and
other ‘wife and mother’ roles are subverted. When Marilla concedes to Matthew’s
request to keep Anne, she becomes orphaned Anne’s ‘mother,’ and Matthew’s ‘wife.’
The traditional wife and mother are replaced in the novel by an old maid who says of
the matter: “ ‘It seems sort of a duty. I’ve never brought up a child, especially a girl,
and I dare say I’ll make a terrible mess of it.’ ”33 Marilla experiences Anne’s adoption
as motherhood, but the awkwardness of the situation (motherhood without
marriage) is emphasized when she shares her first mother-daughter moment with
Anne: “Something warm and pleasant welled up in Marilla’s heart at touch of that
thin little hand in her own – a throb of the maternity she had missed, perhaps. Its
very unaccustomedness and sweetness disturbed her.”34 Marilla is now mother, but
the awkwardness of the situation expresses the awkwardness of a non-traditional
motherhood, of non-marriage; it is, however, an awkwardness which is only
awkward for its newness, an awkwardness which will fade in time.
Anne’s status as orphan and Marilla’s new status of wife and mother are a
revision of the traditional love-plot division of characters. As one critic suggests, “it
could be argued that the real romance in this series develops between young people
and grown-ups who are not their parents.”35 Marilla’s becoming wife and mother
guarantees Anne’s freedom from the courtship plot, and the banishment of the
traditional courtship plot in general, since courtship is proven to be no prerequisite
to wifehood and motherhood. This reversal of (future) roles and the banishment of
courtship from the novel prevents, in the words of one critic, “the ideological
polarity for women of family/autonomy: on the one hand, the safe female world in
which, by definition, nothing happens, and a woman’s identity replicates her
mother’s; on the other, the dangerous world of the unprotected female, who has her
own identity, about which stories can be written.”36 Anne is given a safe female
world and the autonomy and independence to develop her own identity. Anne of
33
AGG 47
Ibid. 76
35
Gubar 65
36
Cosslett, Tess. Woman to Woman: Female Friendship in Victorian Fiction. Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester
Press, 1988. 2.
34
16
Green Gables and the whole of the Anne series can no longer be considered a female
Bildungsroman; the female variant has ceased to mean anything for the analysis of the
series as a whole.
At this point, a question arises which needs answering before the analysis can
continue: Why does Montgomery employ wedding imagery while excluding
courtship from the narrative? A short background is in order at this time. At the time
Montgomery was writing her Anne series, and at the time in which the novels are set,
society valued the traditional family: husband/father, wife/mother and their
children. Marriage and motherhood were considered the proper goals for young
women. Female authors often preserved these ideals in their writing, despite their
own displeasure and discomfort with these ideals. In her study of Victorian women
writers’ dissent, Shirley Foster argues that writers embedded their dissenting
opinions within a basic conservatism, since they often “felt that wifehood and
motherhood were the most important aspects of female experience; what was wrong
was the pretence that these roles were available to all” and that “the state of
singleness is for most women a second best.”37 Furthermore, the ideology of the age,
Foster states, “rested on the assumption that the ideal womanly virtues – sacrifice,
self-effacement, moral purity, service – were best expressed in the vocations of wife
and mother.”38 In an age when sexual activity was taboo and spirituality and faith
were central to the role of women in society, the possibility of wifehood and
motherhood without sexual stain would allow women to retain their innocent and
pure nature, and would therefore have been considered ideal, were it possible.39
While excluding a courtship plot from the narrative of Anne of Green Gables,
Montgomery relies on wedding imagery to convey the possibility of alternatives to
marriage, without denying the merits of marriage. By allowing Marilla to become
wife and mother outside the bonds of marriage, Montgomery shows that the value
resides in the womanly values themselves, rather than in the social, legal and sexual
state of marriage. This rather simple initial explanation for the use of wedding
imagery in the novels is by no means a complete one. The question will be answered
37
Foster, Shirley 11.
Ibid. 5
39
Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion Books, 1960. 52.
38
17
as the analysis progresses, arriving at a more exhaustive (though arguably still
incomplete) answer by the end of the series.
One of the ways in which wedding imagery is used in Anne of Green Gables is
in presenting alternatives to the heterosexual relationship which is marriage. Since
the narrative has been freed from the courtship plot, the place of the traditional malefemale relationship is taken by other relationships: mother-daughter, fatherdaughter, teacher-student, and, most importantly, friend-friend. Friendship is one of
the main themes of this first novel in the series, and it is friendship which is
suggested as the best possible alternative to marriage. Shortly after Anne has been
adopted by Matthew and Marilla, she begins to look around for the next relationship
in her life: a bosom friendship. Marilla, having never heard the phrase, asks Anne
what she means; “A bosom friend – an intimate friend, you know – a really kindred
spirit to whom I can confide my inmost soul” is Anne’s reply.40 This description of a
friend resembles closely the traditional conception of true love as a union of souls, a
marriage between kindred spirits. It is not surprising, then, that when Anne meets
her bosom friend, Diana Barry, she asks Diana to exchange vows of eternal
friendship:
“We must join hands – so,” said Anne gravely. “It ought to be over running water.
We’ll just imagine this path is running water. I’ll repeat the oath first. I solemnly
swear to be faithful to my bosom friend, Diana Barry, as long as the sun and moon
shall endure. Now you say it and put my name in.”
Diana repeated the “oath” with a laugh fore and aft.
[...]
When Marilla and Anne went home Diana went with them as far as the log bridge.
The two little girls walked with their arms about each other. At the brook they parted
with many promises to spend the next afternoon together. 41
While Anne takes the matter quite as seriously as a wedding vow or oath, Diana,
laughing “fore and aft” is more representative of the heroine of the traditional
narrative, for whom alternatives to marriage are always secondary, less, laughable.
40
41
AGG 57
Ibid. 87
18
Nevertheless, Anne and Diana proceed as bosom friends, setting up a house together
and walking to school by way of Lover’s Lane. When Anne accidentally gets Diana
drunk, Diana’s mother forbids her to be friends with Anne, and the girls bid their
farewells in a scene reminiscent of lovers parting:
“Ten minutes isn’t very long to say an eternal farewell in,” said Anne tearfully. “Oh,
Diana, will you promise faithfully never to forget me, the friend of your youth, no
matter what dearer friends may caress thee?”
“Indeed I will,” sobbed Diana, “and I’ll never have another bosom friend – I don’t
want to have. I couldn’t love anybody as I love you.”
“Oh, Diana,” cried Anne, clasping her hands, “do you love me?”
“Why, of course I do. Didn’t you know that?”
“No.” Anne drew a long breath. “I thought you liked me of course, but I never hoped
you loved me. Why, Diana, I didn’t think anybody could love me. Nobody ever has
loved me since I can remember. Oh, this is wonderful! It’s a ray of light which will
forever shine on the darkness of a path severed from thee, Diana. Oh, just say it once
again.”
“I love you devotedly, Anne,” said Diana staunchly, “and I always will, you may be
sure of that.”
“And I will always love thee, Diana,” said Anne, solemnly extending her hand. “In
the years to come thy memory will shine like a star over my lonely life, as that last
story we read together says...”42
Anne and Diana act as lovers in a novel they have read, parting forever, never to see
each other again. As in the stories they cherish, a heroic act of Anne’s (saving the life
of Diana’s baby sister) reconciles Diana’s parents to Anne, and the girls are reunited.
In every respect, the relationship between Anne and Diana progresses as the plot of
the traditional romance. Anne and Diana’s friendship, as it progresses, mirrors the
courtship narrative of the female Bildungsroman, but it never resolves in a marriage.
In fact, marriage is the complicating factor, that which creates the necessary tension
in the relationship as it moves towards a final narrative fulfillment.
Throughout the novel, female friendship takes the place of courtship. Anne
rejects all attention from boys, while becoming close friends with several girls, Diana
42
Ibid. 131
19
first among them. Anne responds to the school habit of writing ‘take-notices’ on the
porch walls by rejecting boy-girl relationships, but not without some recognition of
its consequences:
“...But I do think that writing take-notices up on the wall about the boys and girls is
the silliest ever. I should just like to see anybody dare to write my name up with a
boy’s. Not, of course,” she hastened to add, “that anybody would.”
Anne sighed. She didn’t want her name written up. But it was a little humiliating to
know that there was no danger of it.
“Nonsense,” said Diana, whose black eyes and glossy tresses had played such havoc
with the hearts of Avonlea schoolboys that her name figured on the porch walls in
half a dozen take-notices. “It’s only meant as a joke. And don’t you be too sure your
name won’t ever be written up.”43
Anne’s opinion of the take-notices contrasts sharply with Diana’s more conventional
position in the courtship tradition. While Anne’s rejection of traditional courtship
with boys results in a rejection of marriage as a future possibility, Diana, as the
traditional heroine, is more hesitant to give up marriage as a goal. Anne, knowing
her friend well enough, fears the break-up of their friendship in the face of courtship
and marriage:
“It’s about Diana,” sobbed Anne luxuriously. “I love Diana so, Marilla. I cannot ever
live without her. But I know very well when we grow up that Diana will get married
and go away and leave me. And oh, what shall I do? I hate her husband – I just hate
him furiously. I’ve been imagining it all out – the wedding and everything – Diana
dressed in snowy garments, with a veil, and looking as beautiful and regal as a queen;
and me the bridesmaid, with a lovely dress, too, and puffed sleeves, but with a
breaking heart hid beneath my smiling face. And then bidding Diana good-bye-e-e-“
Here Anne broke down entirely and wept with increasing bitterness. 44
Anne’s disavowal of marriage forms a break with literary convention, while Diana
reestablishes the convention in the novel. The traditional female Bildungsroman is
contained within a non-traditional Bildungsroman, and its heroine is Diana Barry, not
43
44
Ibid. 109
Ibid. 119
20
Anne Shirley. There is here a certain self-consciousness of narrative tradition and the
author’s decision to break with that tradition.
This is a novel which not only rejects the courtship plot tradition, but which
also self-consciously examines the workings of traditional versus non-traditional
narrative. The traditional narrative is contained within the non-traditional narrative,
is examined and commented upon, accepted or rejected by the non-traditional ‘outer’
narrative. The traditional female Bildungsroman we might entitle Diana Barry is the
least explicit of these examinations. Anne, an avid writer with a vivid imagination,
produces several stories and imaginings which become the place for narrative selfexamination, the most prominent of which is the composition she writes for Miss
Stacy’s class assignment. The story, entitled “The Jealous Rival; or, in Death Not
Divided,” is a thinly veiled parody of the traditional love-plot novel, which Anne
takes only too seriously as her own masterpiece of writing. The story’s heroines,
Cordelia Montmorency and Geraldine Seymour are two intimate friends who have
been close since childhood. The story is set in their late teenage years, and begins
when they are sixteen and a suitor, Bertram DeVere, enters their lives. Bertram,
saving Geraldine from a runaway carriage, falls in love with her and proposes
marriage. Anne continues to Diana:
“Geraldine accepted him in a speech a page long. I can tell you I took a lot of trouble
with that speech. I rewrote it five times and I look upon it as my masterpiece. Bertram
gave her a diamond ring and a ruby necklace and told her they would go to Europe
for a wedding tour, for he was immensely wealthy. But then, alas, shadows began to
darken over their path. Cordelia was secretly in love with Bertram herself and when
Geraldine told her about the engagement she was simply furious, especially when she
saw the necklace and the diamond ring. All her affection for Geraldine turned to bitter
hate and she vowed that she should never marry Bertram. But she pretended to be
Geraldine’s friend the same as ever. One evening they were standing on the bridge
over a rushing turbulent stream and Cordelia, thinking they were alone, pushed
Geraldine over the brink with a wild, mocking, ‘Ha, ha, ha.’ But Bertram saw it all and
he at once plunged into the current, exclaiming, ‘I will save thee, my peerless
Geraldine.’ But alas, he had forgotten he couldn’t swim, and they were both drowned,
clasped in each other’s arms. Their bodies were washed ashore soon afterwards. They
were buried in one grave and their funeral was most imposing, Diana. It’s so much
21
more romantic to end a story up with a funeral than a wedding. As for Cordelia, she
went insane with remorse and was shut up in a lunatic asylum. I thought that was a
poetical retribution for her crime.”45
Montgomery has Anne, the non-traditional heroine of a non-traditional narrative,
write a traditional narrative in which the traditional heroine marries/dies and the
traditional villain faces insanity due to guilty feeling. Anne would rather kill the
heroine than let her be married, would rather have the villain go insane than be
married. Marriage, even in the traditional narrative, is not achieved; the characters
are punished for wanting to be married. Anne rejects the narrative convention of
ending a love plot in marriage with the consciousness that she is doing something
untraditional, that she is writing a non-traditional ending to a traditional plot. To end
a story with a funeral is “more romantic” than to end with the more conventional
wedding.
The non-traditional element in the traditional narrative exists in this ending,
the simultaneous wedding and funeral, the lovers “buried in one grave.” This is the
grave of the traditional narrative with the traditional ending; the insane asylum is for
the uneasy, failed non-traditional ending to the traditional narrative. Anne’s
“poetical retribution for her crime” is Montgomery’s rejection of traditional narrative
as a whole. Death substitutes for marriage in Anne’s narrative, but a substitution for
the end alone is not enough to write a narrative free from the constraints of tradition.
What this substitution does do, however, is allow the limitations of narrative to
present themselves:
In effect, once the objects can substitute for each other to the point of laying bare the
substitutive structure itself, the formal structure yields itself to reading: what is going
on no longer concerns a distancing rendering this or that absent, and then a
rapprochement rendering this or that into presence; what is going on concerns rather
the distancing of the distant and the nearness of the near, the absence of the absent or
the presence of the present. But the distancing is not distant, nor the nearness near,
nor the absence absent or the presence present.46
45
46
Ibid. 209
Derrida 321.
22
Following Derrida’s logic, Anne’s story serves both to establish the presence of
traditional narrative in the novel, and to banish all traditional narrative from it. It is
clear, then, that the narrative of Anne of Green Gables is both traditional and nontraditional at the same time, in the same instances. Each example given for why the
narrative is non-traditional (da, to borrow from Derrida and Freud, ‘here’) is at the
same time traditional (fort, ‘away’). The traditional and non-traditional, the fort and
da of Derrida, are never the same, but are always different, but equally present or
absent, equally distant or near. No matter how it is defined, the narrative is at the
same time traditional and non-traditional both; no distinction can be made between
the two, no division of these two concepts is possible. To quote Derrida, it is “an
overlap without equivalence: fort:da.”47 The frustrated end of Anne’s story, her
intended funeral instead of wedding, is both wedding and funeral at once, both
traditional and non-traditional. The story lays bare its own narrative structure only
to find that it could do nothing else, that any other alternative ending or storyline
would be the same, a thinly-veiled disguise for fort:da. Montgomery’s own narrative,
then, is also no less traditional than it aims to be non-traditional, no less a female
Bildungsroman than a rejection of it.
The novel confirms its complicated dual nature by ending with a funeral.
Matthew Cuthbert has passed away from a heart attack, and his funeral is held at
Green Gables. It is the first death of the Anne series, setting the tone for the many
others which follow:
In the parlor lay Matthew Cuthbert in his coffin, his long gray hair framing his placid
face on which there was a little kindly smile as if he but slept, dreaming pleasant
dreams. There were flowers about him – sweet old-fashioned flowers which his
mother had planted in her bridal days and for which Matthew had always had a
secret, wordless love. Anne had gathered them and brought them to him, her
anguished, tearless eyes burning in her white face. It was the last thing she could do
for him.48
47
48
Ibid. 321.
AGG 294
23
Matthew’s death, the death of a bachelor, is simultaneously a marriage, his funeral is
his wedding. This conflation is emphasized by his mother’s bridal flowers which
Anne has placed in his coffin, to serve as wedding and funeral flowers alike. It is thus
that what this chapter began as treating as a non-traditional narrative, rejecting the
conventions of the female Bildungsroman, is now found to be more traditional than
expected. By ending with a wedding, the novel situates itself within the tradition of
the female Bildungsroman, but simultaneously distances itself from this tradition by
ending with a funeral. It is, in this sense, no Bildungsroman at all, but a denial of the
expected end. The expected ending, aided and abetted by peripeteia, which
“depends on our confidence of the end...is a disconfirmation followed by a
consonance.”49
The ending of Anne of Green Gables upsets the balance of expectations,
necessarily relying on a set of conventional, more or less rigid, expectations to upset.
The novel does not end with a wedding, as we expect with from a female
Bildungsroman, nor does it end with a funeral, which Anne suggests is the nontraditional alternative to the marriage ending. Instead, the novel ends with a
funeral/wedding, a fort:da. Anne of Green Gables no longer fits the description of the
male or female Bildungsroman because of its conflation of weddings and funerals. The
Bildungsroman assumes progress, while the funeral/wedding is a simultaneous
progress (fort) and return (da); while Anne has aged, she has not yet progressed
beyond her initial state upon arrival at Green Gables. Anne, while looking to the
future for new experiences, looks to the present as her guide towards that future, and
the final image of the first novel is at the same time ‘away’ (fort) and ‘here’ (da):
“Anne’s horizons had closed in...but if the path set before her feet was to be narrow
she knew that flowers of quiet happiness would bloom along it...And there was
always the bend in the road!”50
49
Kermode 18.
*Note: Kermode uses ‘peripeteia’ in the sense of the narrative equivalent of irony in rhetoric.
50
AGG 307
24
2
Différance and the Suspension of Marriage
~ Anne of Avonlea (1909) ~
“You see, Prince Charming is coming tonight. He came long ago, but in a foolish moment went away and
wandered afar and forgot the secret of the magic pathway to the enchanted castle, where the princess was
weeping her faithful heart out for him. But at last he remembered it again and the princess is waiting
still...because nobody but her own dear prince could carry her off.” 51
The second novel of the series, Anne of Avonlea, finds Anne “half-past sixteen,” and
sitting on the porch of Green Gables musing about her first day as teacher of the
Avonlea school, determined to make of at least one of her students a celebrity.52 Life
in Avonlea has changed: Matthew Cuthbert is dead; Marilla is going blind; Green
Gables has a new neighbor, the old bachelor Mr. Harrison; and Anne has accepted
Gilbert Blythe as her friend, after having rejected him several times throughout Anne
of Green Gables. Anne’s friendship with Diana is still intimate, though she has come
to realize that there are some things which cannot be shared with her bosom friend.
When she “[wanders] into the realm of fancy,” Anne must go alone.53 The theme of
weddings and funerals continues into this second novel, and comprises a significant
part of the story. Again, the courtship and love-plot tradition is rejected in favor of a
traditional/non-traditional plot in which courtship also plays a role, but which does
not directly concern the heroine, Anne Shirley.54
In her position as secretary of the Avonlea Village Improvement Society, Anne
meets all manner of Avonlea citizens whom represent all manner of marriages and
alternatives. When Anne and Diana go door to door to raise funds in order to repaint
the town hall, they call first on the Andrews girls, who “had been ‘girls’ for fifty odd
years and seemed likely to remain girls to the end of their earthly pilgrimage.”55
Catherine, the optimistic sister, responds pleasantly to Anne and Diana’s request, but
51
Montgomery, L[ucy] M[aud]. Anne of Avonlea. 1909. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. 258.
* Note: I will hereafter refer to the novel by the abbreviation AA.
52
Ibid. 1
53
Ibid. 13
54
Montgomery herself was not very happy with her second instalment in the Anne series, and admits to her
journal that “I know it is not nearly so good as Green Gables.” In: Journals 1:338.
55
AA 42
25
Eliza, the prototype of a bitter old maid, finds the request silly and the society an
unfitting activity for young women. Eliza is in charge, acting the mother to
Catherine, who secretly comes running after Anne and Diana to give some of her
own money towards the hall, so Eliza doesn’t find out.
The next house Anne and Diana canvas belongs to Daniel Blair, whom they
find in a state of frenzy, swearing and tearing at one of his wife’s big gingham
aprons, which he can’t get off. Once he has calmed down, Mr. Blair tells the girls his
wife left him to bake a cake while she went to the station to pick up her sister, but he
can’t seem to mix the cake correctly. Recalling the event to Marilla, Anne remarks
that she “ ‘felt sorrier than ever for the poor man. He didn’t seem to be in his proper
sphere at all. I had heard of henpecked husbands and now I felt that I saw one.’ ”56
Mr. Blair’s “proper sphere,” according to the contemporary ideology, would have
been the workplace or outdoors, whereas he is caught by the girls in the sphere
deemed proper for women, the home.
From the non-traditional Blair household, Anne and Diana move into the
traditional sphere-divided White home, where Mrs. White’s neurotic cleanliness and
housekeeping scares them into leaving sooner than intended. This contrast between
the Blair and White households becomes the first site of criticism in the novel.
Montgomery, by playing out against each other the non-traditional and traditional
spheres of influence, criticizes the strict division of gender in marriage, if not the
institution of marriage itself. Anne and Diana are received more heartily by the
“henpecked husband” than by the model wife and housekeeper, who, Diana
remarks, thankfully has no children, since “it would be dreadful beyond words for
them if she had.”57 Again, we have a case in which the non-traditional and traditional
are part of the same, if not equal. To return to Derrida, there is a fort:da in both the
Blair and White households, which is emphasized by their narrative situation in
following each other chronologically.
In her final attempt of the day, Anne goes alone to call on Mr. Harrison for a
subscription. Though they have established a kind of friendship unlikely between a
56
57
Ibid. 45
Ibid. 47
26
grumpy old bachelor and a lively young girl, Mr. Harrison refuses to contribute to
the improvement society. When Anne returns to Green Gables, she finds herself
comparing her day to Eliza Andrews’ rather bleak outlook on life, telling her
reflection that “a few more experiences such as I have had today would make me as
much of a pessimist as Miss Eliza Andrews.”58 Anne compares herself to the old
maid, the first of several such comparisons in the novel, and, indeed, in the whole of
the series. It is therefore time to examine the character of the old maid.
The old maid, then, as an alternative to marriage. As discussed in Chapter
One, at the time Montgomery was writing, marriage was considered the goal of
every woman. To remain single was to remain forever in a second-best position,
regardless of any personal fulfillment achieved in acting according the womanly
virtues of “sacrifice, self-effacement, moral purity and sacrifice.”59 Many old maids
were not so by choice: taught to expect marriage, they were also taught to remain
passive in the process of finding a husband; women and girls were to be sought out,
rather than do the seeking. An additional complication was the relative shortage of
men, due to the fact that many men chose to marry at a later age or not at all, or
emigrated West in search of opportunity, leaving women without the possibility of
marriage. As Foster explains the situation:
Given this state of affairs, it is not surprising that the issue of marriage became a
primary source of anxiety for Victorian women, trapped between pervasive ideology
and countering fact. Taught that a husband was essential to their existence, and all
their training directed to the art of catching one, they had the choice of being relegated
to the ranks of abnormality if they did not marry, or being forced into what many
regarded as degrading sexual competition, in which the losers faced economic
hardship as well as social obliteration.60
Eliza Andrews’ bitterness is understandable in light of the rather depressing
situation for unmarried women. Unmarried women were the outcasts of society, and
while their independence might be more appealing than life as a married woman, the
58
Ibid. 49
Foster 5
60
Ibid. 7
59
27
alternative of remaining single, by choice or by fate, was regarded as “pitiable or
unnatural.”61 In order to guarantee economic, social and psychological well-being,
women found themselves pressured to accept a proposal of marriage from a
pragmatic point of view. A woman who rejected a suitor could be considered selfdestructive, and could count on very little support from her community. When Anne
and Diana take shelter from a rainstorm at the Copp household, Miss Sarah tells
them she is tired of living under her sister’s rule, and that she is going to be married
“ ‘to Luther Wallace. He wanted me twenty years ago. I liked him real well but he
was poor then and father packed him off. I s’pose I shouldn’t have let him go so
meek but I was timid and frightened of father. Besides, I didn’t know men were so
skurse.’ ”62 Marriage twenty years late is better than staying unmarried, living with
your sister.
This contemporary ideology of old maidenhood is to some extent countered
by Montgomery. In Anne of Avonlea Anne meets Miss Lavendar Lewis, a very
untraditional old maid. When approaching the cottage in which Miss Lavendar lives,
Anne’s musings about the kind of person who must live there stand in stark contrast
to the social and literary stereotype of the old maid:
“Didn’t I tell you we would come to an enchanted palace? I knew the elves hadn’t
woven magic over that lane for nothing.”
“But Miss Lavendar Lewis is hardly a spellbound princess,” laughed Diana. “She’s an
old maid...she’s forty-five and quite gray, I’ve heard.”
“Oh, that’s only part of the spell,” asserted Anne confidently. “At heart she’s young
and beautiful still...and if we only knew how to unloose the spell she would step forth
radiant and fair again. But we don’t know how...it’s always and only the prince who
knows that...and Miss Lavendar’s prince hasn’t come yet. Perhaps some fatal
mischance has befallen him...though that’s against the law of all fairy tales.”
“I’m afraid he came long ago and went away again,” said Diana. “They say she used
to be engaged to Stephen Irving...Paul’s father...when they were young. But they
quarreled and parted.”63
61
Foster 6
AA 159
63
Ibid. 185
62
28
A number of interesting things occur in this passage. While Anne has a very
romantic and untraditional opinion of Miss Lavendar as an old maid, she
reestablishes the proper ending or aim for the old maid: marriage. An old maid is
“young and beautiful still” at heart, but she nevertheless needs her prince to
“unloose the spell.” The very fact that Miss Lavendar is characterized as an
untraditional old maid is because she is still waiting for her prince; the single old
maid’s identity is defined by the possibility of her marriage, not the denial thereof.
Diana, the voice of social values and convention, initially gives the stereotype of the
old maid to describe Miss Lavendar. However, it is also Diana who attempts to
divorce Miss Lavendar’s identity from marriage by adding that the prince has
already gone away, and Miss Lavendar’s chance has passed.
Already the argument becomes more complicated. For, as we have already
demonstrated in relation to Anne of Green Gables, in every alternative there is
contained a relation fort:da, a simultaneous duality of possibilities. Both Anne and
Diana define Miss Lavendar’s identity in relation to marriage and old maidenhood.
Anne, by refusing to deny Miss Lavendar the possibility of marriage, simultaneously
characterizes her as an old maid who is not married, and is therefore pitiable. Diana,
by recalling that Miss Lavendar missed her opportunity to marry and is therefore
now an old maid relies on marriage to define why Miss Lavendar is an old maid, and
therefore to be pitied. And indeed, when they go inside the cottage to meet Miss
Lavendar, they find that she has staged her own wedding, in lieu of marriage:
“We’d like to stay,” said Anne promptly, for she had made up her mind that she
wanted to know more of this surprising Miss Lavendar, “if it won’t inconvenience
you. But you are expecting other guests, aren’t you?”
Miss Lavendar looked at her tea table again, and blushed.
“I know you’ll think me dreadfully foolish,” she said. “I am foolish...and I’m ashamed
of it when I’m found out, but never unless I am found out. I’m not expecting
anybody...I was just pretending I was. You see, I was so lonely. I love company...that
is, the right kind of company...but so few people ever come here because it is so far
out of the way. Charlotta the Fourth was lonely too. So I just pretended I was going to
have a tea party. I cooked for it...and decorated the table for it...and set it with my
mother’s wedding china...and I dressed up for it.”
29
Diana secretly thought Miss Lavendar quite as peculiar as report had pictured her.
The idea of a woman of forty-five playing at having a tea party, just as if she were a
little girl! But Anne of the shining eyes exclaimed joyfully,
“Oh, do you imagine things too?”64
Again Diana is the one who represents the socially accepted view of marriage, which
holds that an old maid has missed her chance, and should act in a decorous manner
without expecting any further opportunities for marriage. Anne again likens herself
to an old maid, but this time to an untraditional old maid, one who has not yet given
up hope, but who in the meantime will stage her own wedding. There is a yearning
for the social acceptance which marriage implies, but there is at the same time a
celebration of all that being single implies. While Diana seems destined for marriage
via the conventional pathways, Anne, like Miss Lavendar, seems destined for any
number of variations on or alternatives to marriage. But as Miss Lavendar tells Anne
on a later visit:
“At seventeen dreams do satisfy because you think the realities are waiting for you
further on. When I was seventeen, Anne, I didn’t think forty-five would find me a
white-haired little old maid with nothing but dreams to fill my life.”
“But you aren’t an old maid,” said Anne, smiling into Miss Lavendar’s wistful woodbrown eyes. “Old maids are born...they don’t become.”
“Some are born old maids, some achieve old maidenhood, and some have old
maidenhood thrust upon them,” parodied Miss Lavendar whimsically.
“You are one of those who have achieved it then,” laughed Anne, “and you’ve done it
so beautifully that if every old maid were like you they would come into fashion, I
think.”
“I always like to do things as well as possible,” said Miss Lavendar meditatively, “and
since an old maid I had to be I was determined to be a very nice one. People say I’m
odd; but it’s just because I follow my own way of being an old maid and refuse to
copy the traditional pattern.”65
Whether she is born, she achieves or she has it thrust upon her, Miss Lavendar is
never described as anything but an old maid. Her identity, regardless of the fact that
64
65
Ibid. 187
Ibid. 200
30
she has “achieved” it, is still dependent on the fact that she is not married. Since the
identity conferred upon her is not that of wife and mother, she is automatically
identified by the only other title available to women at the time: old maid.
According to expectation, Anne admits she would like to be married, but,
rather than making a pragmatic decision, Anne also tells Diana she will only marry
her ideal. Diana, worried that Anne should never meet her ideal husband, asks Anne
what she will do if she never meets him. Anne replies that in that case she shall die
an old maid, which “isn’t the hardest death by any means.”66 Diana admits that “the
dying would be easy enough” but that it is “the living an old maid I shouldn’t like.”67
Instead of replying to Diana’s concern, and shunning the opinion society holds of old
maids, Anne recalls to Diana their own alternative marriage:
“Do you remember that evening we first met, Diana, and ‘swore’ eternal friendship in
your garden? We’ve kept that ‘oath,’ I think...we’ve never had a quarrel nor even a
coolness. I shall never forget the day you told me you loved me [...] You don’t know
what your friendship meant to me. I want to thank you here and now, dear, for the
warm and true affection you’ve always given me.”
“And always, always will,” sobbed Diana. “I shall never love anybody...any girl...half
as well as I love you. And if I ever do marry and have a little girl of my own I’m going
to name her Anne.”68
Here we find a good example of Derrida’s fort:da. The same short talk between
friends demonstrates both alternative marriage and traditional marriage, which, if
we believe Diana, can exist simultaneously, but without equivalence. One can be
married in both ways at once; the alternative marriage does not exclude marriage
itself. This is further confirmed by two of the most interesting plot turns in the novel:
the arrival of Mr. Harrison’s wife in Avonlea, and Miss Lavendar’s marriage to
Stephen Irving, to whom she had been engaged when she was young.
When Anne and Gilbert decide to write a short column of notices for the
Avonlea paper, they include a notice about Mr. Harrison’s supposed courting and
66
Ibid. 236
Ibid. 236
68
Ibid. 237
67
31
impending marriage, knowing that the perceived bachelor is highly unlikely to be
courting anyone. When a strange woman appears asking Anne the directions to Mr.
Harrison’s house, and whether the notice in the paper is correct, Anne quickly replies
that “ ‘Mr. Harrison has no intention of marrying anybody. I assure you he hasn’t.’ ”69
The old bachelor has been keeping something from the people of Avonlea, as Anne
finds out: “ ‘I’m very glad to hear it,’ said the rosy lady... ‘because he happens to be
married already. I am his wife.’ ”70 Mr. Harrison, it turns out, has been married while
being a bachelor. As Marilla’s new adopted son, Davy, tells Anne and Marilla, “ ‘Mr.
Harrison has a new wife...well, not ezackly new, but they’ve stopped being married
for quite a spell, Milty says. I always s’posed people had to keep on being married
once they’d begun, but Milty says no, there’s ways of stopping if you can’t agree.’ ”71
Mr. Harrison, of course, has been married even while being unmarried in the eyes of
Avonlea. Mr. Harrisons married status is fort:da, there and not there simultaneously,
without one status excluding the other, quite literally in this case.
The other interesting case in which an alternative (to) marriage does not
exclude marriage is Miss Lavendar’s marriage to her childhood sweetheart Stephen
Irving. Once Anne finds out that Miss Lavendar was once engaged to her favorite
student Paul’s father, now a widower, she makes it her mission to bring the two
together again. Anne, caught up in the romance of the story, sees it rather like the
happily ever after to the fairy tale she has concocted about the princess in her palace,
waiting for her prince. When Mr. Irving makes his intentions towards Miss Lavendar
known to Anne, more than twenty years after the fact, she reassures him of his
continued chances: “ ‘You know time always does stand still in an enchanted palace.
[...] It is only when the prince comes that things begin to happen.’ ”72 Miss Lavendar,
identified as an old maid by her community, has never been an old maid, only a
princess waiting for her prince to return. Mr. Irving’s proposal does not undo Miss
Lavender’s self-acknowledged “old maidenhood,” for she was always old maid and
future wife/mother in one, she was always fort:da. The potential for marriage is part
69
Ibid. 216
Ibid. 216
71
Ibid. 219
72
Ibid. 259
70
32
of what defines the old maid, whether she has given up all hope, like Eliza Andrews,
or still dares to dream, like Miss Lavendar and Catherine Andrews. Marilla, too, is an
old maid by choice, but as discussed in the previous chapter, she also represents the
wife and mother in the old maid, the simultaneous yet unequal roles available to
women. There is a “rewriting and even eroticizing [of] the figure of the old maid” in
her single state which results from the relation to the (eventual) married state.73
When Miss Lavendar accepts Mr. Irving, her identity still remains the same, as much
defined by marriage as before, as much an old maid as a wife and mother.
Anne, however, romantic as she finds the outcome of Miss Lavendar’s fairy
tale, can’t help being a little sad when it ends, because “ ‘it’s all so beautiful...and
story bookish...and romantic...and sad. [...] It’s all perfectly lovely...but there’s a little
sadness mixed up in it too, somehow.’ ”74 Anne, while actively precipitating a happy
ending for Miss Lavendar, is also sad to see it arrive, wishing that the fairy tale could
go on forever with the promise and happiness of an ending, but without the ending
itself. The romantic old maid which Miss Lavendar is must be always dreaming of
her prince, must be always expecting him, must accept him when he does come, but
must not end the fairy tale by riding off into the sunset with him. Marriage must be
postponed indefinitely, and so “the lengthy postponement of Miss Lavendar’s
romance takes on the quality of a fortuitous detour, rather than a tragic loss of
time.”75 Marriage to Anne is an end, the end to dreaming and imagining, the choice
made which discards all other alternatives. By equating sadness with marriage, Anne
disavows the happy ending, as she disavowed a happy ending in marriage in her
story about Cordelia and Geraldine in Anne of Green Gables. Anne wants the romance
of possibility without the finalization an end brings, she wants romance without
attainable aim; Anne wants romance, perhaps, without any aim.76 Anne would
gladly have romance for the sake of romance, romance without the threat of reality,
romance as an endless detour towards the happy ending.
73
Gubar 50
AA 261
75
Gubar 50
76
Several (feminist) critics point to Anne’s reluctance to be married as a strategy of Montgomery’s to keep Anne
safely unconventional. See Gubar and Åhmansson. The latter’s aim is to “pinpoint the strategies that
Montgomery had to resort to in order to postpone Anne’s inevitable transformation into conventionality as long
as possible.” (Åhmansson 71)
74
33
What Anne wants is a love story without a thesis, a love story in which one
plot turn does not exclude the other turns which could have been made in its stead,
in which one ending does not end the story, in which other possibilities may
continue. What Anne wants is what Derrida calls a différance without thesis.77 There
is no thesis, no aim, no logic of opposition or position in Anne’s ideal romance, a
romance in which everything is possible and no choice is made at the cost of any
other. Just as Marilla can be wife and mother without getting married, so Miss
Lavendar must continue to hope for her prince and marry him, too. She must be able
to have her (wedding)cake and eat it, too. A thesis “would be the death sentence
(arrêt de mort) of différance.”78 A story must necessarily preclude any ending and must
suspend only the sense of an ending, to borrow Kermode’s phrase. A story must
leave open all possibilities, must always allow différance full play. There is
nevertheless, as différance demands, always a certain arrêt de mort, not only a death
sentence, but also an arrest of death. The syntax of this arrêt de mort, Derrida argues,
“arrests death in two différant senses,” namely, “a sentence which condemns to death
and an interruption suspending death.”79
We can easily replace the word ‘death’ in this context with the words ‘end’ or
‘marriage.’ Montgomery’s narrative technique, expressed not only in her novels but
also through Anne’s imaginative and storytelling experiences, creates a syntax of the
arrêt de mort (marriage, end) which both condemns to death (marriage, end) and
suspends death (marriage, end). Conducting Miss Lavendar’s romance is a way for
Anne to suspend marriage, but it also condemns her to the end, to marriage. To
speak merely of Miss Lavendar’s marriage as a way to postpone Anne’s marriage as
Gubar does is to fail to recognize marriage as something which is already happening
to Anne by virtue of her denial of it for herself.80 Anne’s wish to suspend marriage as
a romantic concept indefinitely is impossible, since she is by virtue of the narrative
process condemned to see marriage and experience the end, and to do so from the
moment she comes into being as the series’ heroine. Montgomery’s narrative gives
77
Derrida 285
Ibid. 285
79
Ibid. 285
80
Gubar 52
78
34
itself over to différance, thereby foregoing thesis, and allowing progress to be arrested
in the two différant senses. The conflation of marriage and its alternatives, of
weddings and funerals, in the relation fort:da emphasizes the différance which is the
narrative structure of the Anne series. Thesis is an impossibility in this narrative
structure, and it is therefore that traditional ends (weddings, funerals, marriage,
death) are confused and conflated, condemning to death (marriage, end) the
characters, and causing interruptions suspending death (marriage, end). One is
reminded of that other famous children’s work, where the cry “Off with her head!” is
simultaneously carried out and suspended when Alice wakes from her dream.81
Miss Lavendar’s wedding, postponed for more than twenty years and
suspended for forty-five, finally takes place, with Anne and Diana as bridesmaids.
Miss Lavendar and Mr. Irving are married in a small, simple ceremony in the garden
of Miss Lavendar’s cottage, after which they depart for their honeymoon. In
accordance
with
tradition,
“as
Miss
Lavendar...I
beg
her
pardon,
Mrs.
Irving...stepped from the door of her old home Gilbert and the girls threw the rice”
over her.82 Rice, a symbol of fertility, is strewn over the bride to help ensure her new
status as wife and, especially, mother, but it may also be interpreted, as Simon
Charlesley suggests, as a liminal rite, occurring as it did as the bride passed out from
the house or location in which she assumed her new status as wife.83 The tossing of
rice makes “an admirable assertion of the abnormal state of the bride, already
married but not yet inducted into her new role,” by emphasizing fertility or
sexuality, which the bride has not yet participated in, despite her new identity as
wife.84 Miss Lavendar, at the moment at which rice is tossed over her, is wife-not-yetwife, old maid and married woman at once, both fort and da in a single instance. The
ritual plays out both the condemnation to and suspension of marriage, a moment in
which the bride is suspended between her old life or that to which she was
condemned and her new life or that to which she is condemned. To complete the
progression towards its intended end, marriage is conflated with death, completing
81
Carroll 109.
AA 274
83
Charlesley, Simon R. Wedding Cakes and Cultural History. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 107
84
Ibid. 107
82
35
the arrêt de mort, the death sentence. As Charlotta the Fourth remarks as she and
Anne clean up after the wedding, “ ‘a wedding ain’t much cheerfuller than a funeral
after all, when it’s all over, Miss Shirley, ma’am.’ ”85
Though Miss Lavendar’s wedding is over and the death sentence has been
carried out by an act of marriage, marriage itself is a condemnation which remains
suspended over Anne’s life as well as Miss Lavendar’s. The night before Miss
Lavendar’s wedding, she finds herself an accidental witness to Fred Wright’s
proposal of marriage to Diana Barry. Anne’s discovery is “succeeded by a queer,
little lonely feeling...as if, somehow, Diana had gone forward into a new world,
shutting a gate behind her, leaving Anne on the outside.”86 Anne, who is happy with
her alternative marriage to Diana, for the first time faces a difference rather than a
différance with regards to marriage. Diana is now fort (traditional), while she, Anne,
remains da (non-traditional), left behind by the perceived breakup of the relation
fort:da, which in fact always remains intact. There is, however, besides the direct
condemnation Anne experiences, the différant of the prolonging of Diana’s marriage
in the form of a three year engagement and the preparation of an elaborate trousseau.
Anne is also confronted with a narrative moment of différance in her own life.
As she walks back to Green Gables with Gilbert after Miss Lavendar’s wedding,
Anne is confronted with her own alternative marriage, now that her marriage to
Diana faces a viable alternative, which is, however, not exclusive. As Gilbert suggests
that Miss Lavendar and Mr. Irving’s romance could have been more romantic had it
not been prolonged, the
...veil that had hung before her [Anne’s] inner consciousness had been lifted, giving to
her view a revelation of unsuspected feelings and realities. Perhaps, after all, romance
did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down;
perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it
revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung
athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music; perhaps...perhaps...love
85
86
AA 275
Ibid. 266
36
unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship , as a golden-hearted rose slipping
from its green sheath.87
Montgomery, however, will not allow Anne to realize or act on her true feelings for
Gilbert yet, though it is among the possibilities offered to her. Anne must first,
following the rules of the narrative structure, find herself suspended as well as
condemned simultaneously. Her condemnation to a relationship with Gilbert, an end
in marriage to Gilbert must bend and be prolonged to allow Anne to move away
from the alternative which Gilbert offers, and towards other opportunities in
suspension: “the veil dropped again; but the Anne who walked up the dark lane was
not quite the same Anne who had driven down it the evening before. The page of
girlhood had been turned, as by an unseen finger, and the page of womanhood was
before her...”88 Anne, despite her reluctance to accept change, is confronted with her
own progression, with the différance produced by change which marks her transition
from one phase of life to another, from one narrative phase to another, marked by the
same suspension of marriage, of end.
87
88
Ibid. 276
Ibid. 276
37
3
Cycles of Repetition and the Arrêt de Mort
~ Anne of the Island (1915) ~
“Everything is changing – or going to change,” said Diana sadly. “I have a feeling that things will never be the
same again, Anne.”
“We have come to a parting of ways, I suppose,” said Anne thoughtfully. “We had to come to it. Do you think,
Diana, that being grown-up is really as nice as we used to imagine when we were children?”
“I don’t know – there are some nice things about it,” answered Diana, again caressing her ring with that little
smile which always had the effect of making Anne feel suddenly left out and inexperienced. “But there are so
many puzzling things, too. Sometimes I feel as if being grown-up just frightened me – and then I would give
anything to be a little girl again.”89
The third novel about Anne Shirley begins with a parting of friends. Anne will soon
leave for Kingsport to attend Redmond College, while Diana remains behind in
Avonlea to prepare for her marriage to Fred Wright. Anne and Diana realize that
they are changing, drifting apart by virtue of their chosen future alternatives. Diana
has chosen the traditional path: a long engagement in preparation for marriage to the
sweetheart of her youth. Anne has elected an alternative to marriage: a college
education in a distant town. Anne, thoroughly convinced she has chosen her
alternative to the exclusion of all others, tells Diana upon parting that “ ‘[i]n no time
you’ll be a staid, middle-aged matron, and I shall be nice, old maid Aunt Anne,
coming to visit you in vacations.’ ”90 Diana laughs at Anne’s vision of the future, and
tells Anne she will “ ‘marry somebody splendid and handsome and rich’ ” and
become quite too good for Avonlea.91 While Anne scoffs at Diana’s suggestion, the
theme of marriage has been proposed, and it is with marriage proposals that much of
the novel is concerned. However, before proposals comes a graveyard which needs
examining.
When Anne, accompanied by Gilbert Blythe and Charlie Sloane, arrives in
Kingsport, she is met by her friend, Priscilla Grant, who takes Anne to the house
89
Montgomery, L[ucy] M[aud]. Anne of the Island. 1915. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. 3.
* Note: I will hereafter refer to the novel by the abbreviation AIs.
90
Ibid. 4
91
Ibid. 4
38
where they will be boarding. Opposite Anne’s room at the front of the house is St.
John’s graveyard, which has “ ‘been a graveyard so long that it’s ceased to be one,’ ”
according to Priscilla.92 Walking in the graveyard together the first day after Anne’s
arrival, the girls are greeted by a girl they had noticed earlier at college registration.
Remarking that “ ‘[i]t’s easier to get acquainted in a graveyard than at Redmond,’ ”
Priscilla suggests they introduce themselves.93 Sitting down upon a gravestone and
starting up a conversation, Philippa Gordon soon becomes one of Anne’s closest
friends. The site of death, of endings, becomes simultaneously the site of new
beginnings. The fort (the end) is the da (the beginning), fort becomes the site for da,
that which it is dependent upon. The graveyard, fort, makes it easier to get
acquainted, da, with a new girl. The friendship which arises from hours spent talking
while sitting on a gravestone is the relation fort:da, the end and the beginning, even
more so since it calls to attention also the end of this beginning as soon as it begins,
Derrida’s arrêt de mort. The graveyard gives rise to a friendship of which the end is
already foreseen, an end in death, like the inhabitants of the graves. Anne, who puts
forth “ ‘a tiny soul-root into Kingsport soil’ ” does so in the home of the dead,
establishing the end of her time in Kingsport as she establishes her beginning there.94
Anne’s first semester passes without too many notable events. The first event
of importance occurs when Anne returns for Christmas to an Avonlea looking “as if
pale autumn had flung a misty bridal veil over her hair and was waiting for her
wintry bridegroom.”95 As the new year announces itself in a storm, Anne’s future
alternatives announce themselves as well, in the form of a marriage proposal.
Spending the night at Green Gables, Jane Andrews turns to Anne in bed and asks her
if she would like to marry her brother, Billy. Anne, horrified at the thought of having
been proposed to, and by proxy, finds that “the thrilling experience had turned out
to be merely grotesque,” not at all how she had dreamed her proposal.96 Returning to
Kingsport after the holidays, Anne is proposed to a second time, by Charlie Sloane,
92
Ibid. 21
Ibid. 27
94
Ibid. 34
95
Ibid. 54
96
Ibid. 61
93
39
“another heart-rending disillusion” which results in another rejection by Anne.97
Another year passes, and springtime finds Anne done with her second-year exams,
sitting in the orchard of the house she has rented with her friends, Patty’s Place.
Gilbert Blythe, on one of his many visits to the house, tells Anne he loves her, and
asks if she will she promise to someday be his wife. Anne, still waiting for the perfect
romance of her imaginings, rejects Gilbert, who replies that he cannot remain friends
if she will not give him hope of anything more in the future. “ ‘My world has
tumbled into pieces. I want to reconstruct it,’ ” Anne replies to Philippa when the
latter accuses her of being an idiot for refusing Gilbert.98
When Anne returns to Redmond for her third year, she finds Philippa in love
with the young minister Jonas, whom she is trying to make propose to her, and finds
Gilbert slowly moving on. No one has yet stepped up to fill his place as Anne’s
suitor, until Roy Gardner saves Anne from a rainstorm with his umbrella. Convinced
Roy is her Prince Charming, Anne and her friends assume her eventual marriage to
Roy. Philippa announces her engagement to Jonas Blake at the end of their third year
at Redmond, and, after a rather uneventful fourth year, Roy Gardner proposes to
Anne. Roy’s proposal is the proposal Anne has always imagined: romantic,
beautifully worded, “the whole effect quite flawless...no false note to jar the
symphony,” but Anne refuses him nevertheless, with the most emphatic rejection
thus far, realizing she does not really love him.99 The following summer finds Jane
Andrews and Philippa Gordon married, Anne attending both of their weddings,
without any prospect of her own. When Gilbert proposes to her at the end of
summer, after his severe illness has made Anne realize she loves him, Anne finally
accepts a proposal, and accepts Gilbert. It is telling that this final end to the
prolonging of engagement takes the form of a condemnation, a “concession wrung
out of [the] heroine in the most extreme circumstances imaginable,” Gilbert’s neardeath.100
97
Ibid. 63
Ibid. 143
99
Ibid. 223
100
Gubar 59
98
40
While everyone around her is proposed to only once, accepting their
proposals whether they come after a few months or twenty years of courting, Anne is
the only one to receive and reject several proposals before finally accepting one, one
which is a repetition of a rejected proposal. There is a certain compulsion to repeat
the proposals and rejections on the part of both Anne and the author, of which Freud
states:
It is clear that the greater part of what is re-experienced under the compulsion to
repeat must cause the ego unpleasure, since it brings to light activities of repressed
instinctual impulses. That, however, is unpleasure of a kind which we have already
considered and does not contradict the pleasure principle: unpleasure for one system
and simultaneously satisfaction for the other. But we come now to a new and
remarkable fact, namely that the compulsion to repeat also recalls from the past
experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and which can never, even long
ago, have brought satisfaction even to instinctual impulses which have since been
repressed.101
The compulsion to repeat the cycle of proposals and rejections, on Anne’s part, and
proposals and engagements, on the part of Anne’s friends, can be interpreted,
following Freud, as one of two things: unpleasure which also causes pleasure, or
unpleasure which has never caused pleasure. But how to distinguish one from the
other? And how to distinguish Anne from her friends, and the characters from their
creator? Freud offers no method for distinguishing one type from the other, but
following Derrida, we must come to the conclusion that this does not matter, as any
compulsion must be both pleasurable and unpleasurable; even the purely
unpleasurable alternative suggested by Freud recalls the pleasurable alternative,
therefore, we might suggest, establishing the reason to repeat endlessly the same
experience.
Now, to distinguish Anne from her friends, and the characters from their
creator in their compulsion to repeat. The repetition of proposals cannot be traced to
Anne or her friends, but to their various suitors. It is the men who do the proposing,
the women whose decision it is to accept or refuse a proposal, as Philippa laments
101
Freud BPP 21
41
when she tells Anne that Jonas still hasn’t proposed.102 The women are passive in the
act of proposing, the men are active. When Freud discusses the compulsion to repeat,
he takes it as an active compulsion, “when we can discern in [the actor] an essential
character-trait which always remains the same and which is compelled to find
expression in a repetition of the same experiences.”103 Freud’s actor can actively
repeat the experience which gives him pleasure or unpleasure (which, following
Derrida, recalls pleasure), but Anne and her friends have a passive experience “over
which [they have] no influence, but in which [they meet] with a repetition of the
same fatality.”104 The experience is repeated for Anne and her friends, without their
having any power over the repetition. If we interpret what little Freud says on the
matter, we may infer that the active or passive role does not influence the experience
of the event as pleasurable or unpleasurable, that the person experiencing the event
passively is equally capable of experiencing pleasure or unpleasure in the
repetition.105 Freud suggests, in recounting his grandson’s game of fort and da, that
the passive experience of an unpleasurable repetition may be turned into an active
game of repetition, but he does not tell us whether this active mastery of events turns
the unpleasurable passive experience into a pleasurable or unpleasurable (and
therefore also pleasurable) active experience.106 Anne and her friends, however,
constrained by the social (and literary) norm, are unable to become active in the
matter of proposals. To obtain mastery over the act of proposing, perhaps, the only
option Anne and her friends have is to refuse their suitor and actively pursue an
alternative. Anne, by refusing her various proposals, gains the only mastery available
to her to turn the situation from passive to active. The passive repetition of the
proposals is answered by Anne’s active repetition of refusals; the compulsion of
passive repetitions forced on Anne gives rise to an active compulsion to repeat the
102
AIs 167
Freud BPP 23
104
Ibid. 24
105
Freud continues by relating an anecdote about a woman whose three husbands each fell sick shortly after their
marriage, followed by a literary example from Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. However, Freud leaves the
subject at this, and fails to return to it, thus leaving it undecided whether the passive recipient of the repetition
experiences pleasure or unpleasure, and whether this is in fact also a result of the compulsion to repeat.
106
Freud BPP 15
103
42
refusal,
which
seeks
to
turn
something
unpleasurable
into
something
unpleasurable/pleasurable.
Anne’s passive experience of the repetition of proposals is, however, the direct
result of the choices Montgomery has made in writing the novel. There is a second
layer of the compulsion to repeat in the novel, the narrative layer which is controlled
by the author of the text. Anne is also the passive recipient of Montgomery’s
compulsion to repeat the proposal theme, allowing Anne’s friends to accept their
proposals, while Anne is subjected to a series of proposals and rejections. Following
the traditional love-plot, a novel ends when the heroine is married off. One way for
Montgomery to retain the mastery of her novel, to remain active in a passive
narrative tradition, is to present her heroine with various alternatives, and to have
her reject those which lead to marriage. Montgomery, by attempting an active
mastery over the narrative, however, is the passive sufferer of narrative tradition, in
the form of the love-plot. Montgomery must repeat the cycle of proposals and
rejections in order to deny the love-plot its course; it is the inevitable end which
delays the end, it is Derrida’s arrêt de mort, a death sentence and the simultaneous
suspension thereof. The suspension of the end reduces Montgomery to the passive
author, the victim of her own mastery over the narrative, forced to repeat proposals
and rejections as long as she attempts to keep the marriage ending at bay. Finally, in
order to escape a narrative deadlock, she must have her heroine accept a proposal,
breaking the cycle of repetitions.107
Montgomery’s attempt to move forward with the narrative while prolonging
the engagement and marriage of her heroine results in a cycle of proposals and
refusals in which Anne moves forward in her schooling and her life, only to be thrust
back with each proposal to something which she has already experienced and
rejected. Montgomery’s mastery of the narrative leads to a fixation on proposals and
107
Montgomery did not want to write a third instalment in the Anne series, since Anne was now grown up, but
gave in to the pressure of her publisher, L.C. Page. As she confides in her journal in a passage feminist critics
love to quote (Gubar, Åhmansson): “I don’t see how I can possibly do anything worth while with it. Anne is
grown-up and can’t be made as interesting as when a child. [...] It is the time of sentiment and I am not good at
depicting sentiment – I can’t do it well. Yet there must be sentiment in this book. I must at least engage Anne for
I’ll never be given any rest until I do. So it’s rather a hopeless prospect and I feel as if I were going to waste all
the time I shall put on the book.” In: Journals 2: 133.
43
their subsequent rejection, but far from furthering her aims, it is this very fixation
which prevents the narrative from moving forward. As Freud suggests,
The stronger the fixations on its path of development, the more readily will the
function evade external difficulties by regressing to the fixations – the more incapable,
therefore, does the developed function turn out to be of resisting external obstacles in
its course. Consider that, if a people which is in movement has left strong
detachments behind at the stopping-places on its migration, it is likely that the more
advanced parties will be inclined to retreat to these stopping-places if they have been
defeated or have come up against a superior enemy. But they will also be in the
greater danger of being defeated the more of their number they have left behind on
their migration.108
Because Montgomery fixates on proposals by having Anne refuse them, she is more
likely to return to them in a cycle of repetitions, and less likely to succeed in properly
moving forward. While Montgomery attempts to create an alternative to the
traditional love-plot, the alternative itself results in a compulsion to repeat which can
only be stopped by following the traditional narrative progression, by allowing the
heroine to marry, or at least to become engaged. By keeping Anne from accepting a
proposal, and by allowing her friends to move forward with their weddings and
engagements, Montgomery places her heroine at a constant distance from the end.
The author ensures that Anne is no nearer the traditional narrative end, but also
establishes the influence of the ever-present end on Anne’s progression, which is
more a series of regressions than a progression, a progression which is limited by
Montgomery’s denial of an ending which is nevertheless influential in the form of the
arrêt de mort.
To relate Montgomery’s narrative situation to Freud’s observation of his
grandson, as analysed by Derrida:
What is to play train, for the (grand)father? To speculate: it would be never to throw
the thing (but does the child ever throw it without its being attached to a string?), that
108
Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Trans. and Ed. James Trachey. The Standard
Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1966. 423.
* Note: I will hereafter refer to this text by the abbreviation ILPA.
44
is, to keep it at a distance continuously, but always at the same distance, the length of
string remaining constant, making (letting) the thing displace itself at the same time,
and in the same rhythm, as oneself. This trained train does not even have to come
back, it does not really leave. It has barely come to leave when it is going to come
back.109
Montgomery’s repetitive proposals, like the train, never really leave before they
come back. As the author or child moves forward, the narrative or train follows in
the same rhythm, always there, always moving, but never getting any farther away,
always suspended at the same distance. When the child throws the train away, only
to retrieve it, he is doing something which Montgomery can only do by having Anne
accept a proposal: the author and the child are detaching themselves from their cycle
and their toy, at least for the time being, until the cycle is deliberately restarted, or
the train retrieved. If, however, the child still keeps the string in hand, as
Montgomery keeps the traditional love-plot in the narrative, the throwing away or
moving out of the cycle is simultaneously a return of the train or the narrative
repetition. As long as the child intends to continue his game, as long as Montgomery
continues her narrative, the end is a determining factor in the progression of the
game or narrative. The threat of ending the game, the threat of ending the novel,
keeps the game or narrative moving in a cycle of repetitions which seeks to deny the
end which gives it its character and motivation. It is, again, a game of arrêt de mort,
which can be played endlessly, as long as the compulsion to repeat operates. When
progress is made, when the child starts to pull the train, when the author allows her
heroine to accept the proposal, the compulsion to repeat shifts to a new method or
fixation, maintaining fort:da, and confirming the arrêt de mort.
Through the compulsion to repeat and Montgomery’s fixation on proposals,
various alternatives to marriage are presented to Anne: college, career, old
maidenhood. But one of the most striking alternatives Anne is presented with is the
alternative ending to the traditional love-plot: death. When Anne returns to Avonlea
after her first year at Redmond, she hears from Marilla and Rachel Lynde that her
childhood friend Ruby Gillis is ill. Ruby, acting in denial of her illness, lives as any
109
Derrida 315
45
heroine of the love-plot might, “always gay, always hopeful, always chattering and
whispering of her beaux, and their rivalries and despairs.”110 Anne, rejecting Ruby’s
approach to death, realizes that “[w]hat had once been silly or amusing was
gruesome now; it was death peering through the wilful mask of life,” making it hard
for her to visit her dying friend, who seems to cling to her now more than ever.111
Ruby, like Anne, is afraid of change, unwilling to change, but, unlike Anne, is also
unprepared for that change when it comes. When Ruby confides in Anne that she is
afraid to die, not because she won’t go to heaven, but because it won’t be the same as
she knows it now, Anne understands that before death the thought of heaven is no
comfort in the face of all one will miss. Ruby almost pleas with Anne:
“I want to live like other girls. I-I want to be married, Anne – and – and – have little
children. You know I always loved babies, Anne. I couldn’t say this to any one but
you. I know you understand. And then poor Herb – he – he loves me and I love him,
Anne. The others meant nothing to me, but he does – and if I could live I would be his
wife and be so happy. Oh, Anne, it’s hard.” 112
It is not Anne who is faced with death, but her flirty friend. The flirty friend who has
rejected several proposals of her own must now face the alternative chosen for her:
not marriage, but death. It is the character of Ruby who first confronts the character
of Anne with the narrative possibilities available to love-plot
heroines,
demonstrating that death is an alternative which excludes continuation, while
marriage may yet offer the narrative possibility of continuation, albeit in altered
form.
Anne, allowed the continuation of alternatives which are already leading her
towards that other heroic end, marriage, tries to comfort Ruby by sharing her
conception of heaven, a heaven which is not so different from life on earth:
“I think, perhaps, we have very mistaken ideas about heaven – what it is and what it
holds for us. I don’t think it can be so very different from life here as most people
110
AIs 103
Ibid. 103
112
Ibid. 106
111
46
seem to think. I believe we’ll just go on living, a good deal as we live here – and be
ourselves just the same – only it will be easier to be good and to – follow the highest.
All the hindrances and perplexities will be taken away, and we shall see clearly. Don’t
be afraid, Ruby.”113
Anne emphasizes the continuity of life and afterlife, and impresses on Ruby that she
must accept her fate. Ruby, wanting to live but knowing she must die, eventually
accepts her fate and leaves the world silently. Ruby’s wish for self-preservation,
however, is not so much a fear of death as it is the fear of a narrative end which must
inevitably come, but which she does not expect to come so soon, and in this form.
Ruby’s confidence in the end is challenged by the narrative device of peripeteia, “a
disconfirmation followed by consonance.”114 Ruby, thinking her end is to be married,
must accept that her end is, instead, to die. The end, however, is eminently present,
always suspended, it is only a question of when it arrives. The tendency to progress,
to live, is only part of the tendency towards the end, another example of Derrida’s
arrêt de mort, or, as Freud conceives it, the death instinct:
We have no longer to reckon with the organism’s puzzling determination (so hard to
fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle. What
we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.
Thus these guardians of life, too, were originally myrmidons of death. Hence arises
the paradoxical situation that the living organism struggles most energetically against
events (dangers, in fact) which might help it to attain its life’s aim rapidly – by a kind
of short-circuit.115
The aim of all narrative is the end; narrative is informed by ends, formed by it.
Denying Anne’s proper end as love-plot heroine for the full duration of the novel,
Montgomery bestows a proper ending upon Ruby Gillis, allowing Anne to
experience an end without it being her own. Ruby’s narrative end is essential to
Anne’s narrative progress, because it allows Anne’s own end to be prolonged. When
Anne’s end comes, in the form of her acceptance of Gilbert’s second proposal, it is the
113
Ibid. 105
Kermode 18
115
Freud BPP 46
114
47
possibility of death which again creates progress: Anne, caught in the cycle of
proposals and rejections, escapes when she realizes her love for Gilbert, a realization
triggered by his impending death. Having broken free from the cycle of repetitions,
Gilbert’s death is delayed or, as Derrida would have it, prolonged, in the face of an
alternative end: marriage. Ruby’s narrative end in death guarantees the narrative
preservation and progress of Anne and Gilbert to their natural narrative end. Ruby
Gillis is the arrêt de mort, the suspension and the condemnation, for Anne and Gilbert.
Death is end, progression and beginning. Death is the end of Ruby Gillis, the
progression of Anne, and the beginning of Anne’s own end. Death is present in life
as in death, death is an end, a middle and a beginning, death is the arrêt de mort and
fort:da. Returning home from the funeral, Mrs. Rachel Lynde remarks that
Ruby Gillis was the handsomest corpse she had ever laid eyes on. Her loveliness, as
she lay, white-clad, among the delicate flowers that Anne had placed about her, was
remembered and talked of for years in Avonlea. Ruby had always been beautiful; but
her beauty had been of the earth, earthy; it had had a certain insolent quality in it, as if
it flaunted itself in the beholder’s eye; spirit had never shone through it, intellect had
never refined it. But death had touched it and consecrated it, bringing out delicate
modelings and purity of outline never seen before – doing what life and love and
great sorrow and deep womanhood joys might have done for Ruby. Anne, looking
down through a mist of tears at her old playfellow, thought she saw the face God had
meant Ruby to have, and remembered it so always. 116
Ruby’s beauty shows her end as it was meant to be: the narrative alternative end
selected for her instead of marriage. Her corpse, lying in the coffin, appears to have
aged from the time of death, adding the experience that years of marriage would
have added to her face. Ruby’s death is simultaneously Ruby’s wedding. Ruby’s
death is not only an end, but also a continuation of her life, as her corpse attests.
Ruby’s corpse, looking more lively than in she had looked in life, exemplifies what
James A. Farrell calls the ‘dying of death,’ the end of death as such. Farrell explains
that funeral directors almost always “tried to blur the distinction between life and
death...By disguising or denying the reality of death, they expedited the dying of
116
AIs 108
48
death.”117 By emphasizing life over death even in death, death as an end is
discredited, and the focus is shifted onto death as a continuation or beginning, death
as a suspension of life. Death becomes more like marriage, transcending their
common narrative purpose as end, and claiming a narrative purpose as beginning
and as factor influencing progression.
Marriage in Anne of the Island also shifts from narrative end to driving
narrative force. In the summer before her fourth year at Redmond, two summers
after Ruby’s death, Anne returns to Green Gables to help Diana prepare for her
wedding. At the wedding, Anne and Gilbert are paired together in their respective
functions as maid of honor and best man, and afterwards the two “ ‘take a ramble up
Lovers’ Lane,’ ” but it will be another year before Gilbert dare propose to Anne
again.118 After her graduation from Redmond, Anne serves her second time as
bridesmaid, this time for Philippa Gordon, who marries her Reverend Jonas. When
Anne returns to Avonlea after the wedding, she finds out Diana has given birth to a
son, and notices that “[i]t gave her a queer and desolate feeling that she herself
somehow belonged only in those past years and had no business in the present at
all.”119 Anne, however, is about to be proposed to by Gilbert again, and this time she
will accept. Their engagement is set for a term of three years, during which Gilbert
will attend medical school, and Anne will teach.
Where the novel began with a parting of friends followed by the meeting of
new friends in the home of the dead, the novel ends with a parting of these same
friends in marriage and childbirth. For Anne, death has been a beginning and a
progression, marriage an ending and a progression, and now her engagement is both
a beginning and a progression, leading inevitably to an ending, in either marriage or
death, and in a later novel. The novel ends in the progression of the newly engaged
lovers in a moment of beginnings and endings as “they walked home together in the
dusk, crowned king and queen in the bridal realm of love...over haunted meadows
where winds of hope and memory blew.”120
117
Farrell, James J. Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830 -1920. American Civilization. Ed. Allen F.
Davis. Philadelphia: Temple U.P., 1980. 159.
118
AIs 181
119
Ibid. 231
120
Ibid. 243
49
4
Ends, ends and Ending
~ Anne of Windy Poplars (1936) ~
“I came up today, bag and baggage. Of course I hated to leave Green Gables. No matter how often and long I’m
away from it, the minute a vacation comes I’m part of it again as if I had never been away, and my heart is torn
over leaving it. But I know I’ll like it here. And it likes me. I always know whether a house likes me or not.
“The views from my windows are lovely...even the old graveyard, which is surrounded by a row of dark fir trees
and reached by a winding, dyke-bordered lane.”121
After accepting Gilbert’s proposal of marriage, Anne departs for Summerside, where
she will serve as the principal of Summerside High School for the three years it will
take Gilbert to study medicine at Redmond College.122 Anne boards with ‘the
widows,’ Aunt Chatty and Aunt Kate, and their old maid housekeeper Rebecca Dew
at Windy Poplars, the old house in Spook’s Lane which faces the graveyard and an
old orchard. As Anne settles into her life as high school principal and engaged
woman, she regularly visits the orchard and the graveyard for walks and letterwriting.
On a November evening after a difficult day at the school, Anne, wanting to
wander the graveyard and read the epitaphs, finds Miss Valentine Courtaloe
walking amongst the graves. Miss Valentine offers to give Anne a tour of the
graveyard, in the understanding that “ ‘you have to know the ins and outs of the
corpses to find a graveyard real enjoyable.’ ”123 It is during this tour of the graveyard,
and in the novel as a whole, that the important narrative device of the conflation of
weddings and funerals is given its most direct treatment yet. Miss Valentine, herself
an old maid, points out the grave of her “ ‘poor young sister Harriet [...] She was
engaged when she died.’ ” She shares with Anne that “ ‘I never much wanted to be
married, but I think it would have been nice to be engaged,’ ” thereby favoring
121
Montgomery, L[ucy] M[aud]. Anne of Windy Poplars. 1936. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. 12.
* Note: I will hereafter refer to this novel by the abbreviation AWP.
122
This novel, chronologically the fourth in the series, was written after Anne of Ingleside (1922), the fifth novel
chronologically. After writing about Anne’s first few years of marriage to Gilbert, Montgomery returned to the
three years of their engagement to fill in Anne’s last years of living an alternative. It is perhaps for this reason
that Anne of Windy Poplars emphasizes the alternatives to marriage and the painful process necessary to bring
about marriage.
123
AWP 45
50
progress while foregoing an end.124 Next Miss Valentine points out the grave of her
former suitor Frank Digby and his wife Georgina Troop, who “ ‘was buried in such a
pretty blue dress ... I made it for her to wear to a wedding but in the end she wore it
to her own funeral.’ ”125 As twilight turns to night, the two women part ways at the
gates of the graveyard, and Anne returns to Windy Poplars thinking that “the
graveyard wasn’t a sad place after all. Really, the people in it seemed alive after Miss
Valentine’s tales.’ ”126
The conflation of weddings and funerals develops further on the occasion of
Sally Nelson’s wedding, to which Anne has been invited as one of Sally’s
bridesmaids. As Anne duly notes in her letter to Gilbert, after Sally’s wedding
“ ‘Nora Nelson will be the only one of Dr. Nelson’s six girls left unmarried’ ” and
even though “ ‘Jim Wilcox has been going with her for many years [...] it never seems
to come to anything and nobody thinks it will now.’ ” 127 When Anne arrives the
night before the wedding, she is introduced to Sally’s Aunt Mouser, the widow Mrs.
James Kennedy, who has a penchant for saying the wrong thing at all the wrong
times. She criticizes Nora for not yet being married, and tells Sally that she hopes her
friend Vera, invited to play the wedding march “ ‘won’t make a mistake and play the
Dead March like Mrs. Tom Scott did at Dora Best’s wedding. Such a bad omen.’ ”128
Confiding in Anne the next day, Sally’s sister Nora concedes that “ ‘ I mustn’t be the
death’s head at the feast, I suppose. I have to play the wedding-march after all ...
Vera’s got a terrible headache. I feel more like playing the Dead March, as Aunt
Mouser foreboded.’ ”129 Aunt Mouser completes the less than happy moment by
telling Sally and her mother that all she hopes “is nobody’ll drop dead like old Uncle
Cromwell at Roberta Pringle’s wedding, right in the middle of the ceremony.’ ”130
With this rather unhappy send-off, the bride and groom walk down the stairs to the
“somewhat stormily played” wedding march and are married without anyone
124
Ibid. 46
Ibid. 46
126
Ibid. 50
127
Ibid. 85
128
Ibid. 104
129
Ibid. 111
130
Ibid. 111
125
51
falling dead during the ceremony.131 Sally Nelson is married, and Nora is left alone
with Anne to clean up the mess in the house which “ ‘after a wedding is over does
seem a rather forsaken place.’ ”132 Sally’s wedding is the funeral of Nora’s hopes of
marriage.133
The conflation of weddings and funerals is a motif which is already
introduced in early Greek tragedy. Initially, according to Rush Rehm, the pairing of
weddings and funerals “may reflect nothing more than a poetic attraction of
opposites and the lure of the oxymoron,” but in some cases, “the juxtaposition
proves so forceful that one ritual seems to engender the other...weddings and
funerals intermingle to such an extent that the two rites become inseparable,” and the
wedding and funeral are conflated.134 As Rehm continues, referring to the work of
early twentieth-century anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, the initial reasoning
behind the conflation of weddings and funerals points to a functional explanation,
since both weddings and funerals mark an important rite of passage “from one social
and biological circumstance to another.”135 The rite of passage marked by weddings
and funerals is made up of three phases: the separation from the old phase of being
(being single or living), the transition through a liminal period (the wedding
ceremony or the funeral rites), and the incorporation into the new phase of being
(being married or being dead).
The liminal period is most interesting from a
narrative perspective, since it emphasizes action and transition, progress from a
beginning left behind and towards an ending not yet there; the liminal period is the
basis of the novelistic plot, and the site of the conflation of weddings and funerals.
131
Ibid. 112
Ibid. 112
133
In her journal, Montgomery recounts the wedding of her childhood bosom friend and second cousin, Amanda
Macneill in equally morbid fashion. Note the resemblance of the bride to a corpse: “I was at the wedding and it
was a weird performance. Amanda was deucedly cranky and mysterious. She was a ghastly-looking bride for
when she stood up in the parlor to be married she turned – not pale but the most gruesome livid green. I never
saw such a color in a face in my life before. As for George, he looked as much like a monkey, short of the tail, as
any supposedly human creature could. But they were married and Amanda went to live in at Mayfield, about
three miles from here. [...] It is impossible to realize that she is the same Amanda Macneill I loved in childhood
and young girlhood. [...] That Amanda does not now exist. I think of her as of a dead and buried friend of
youth.” In: Journals 2: 2-3.
134
Rehm, Rush. Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. 4.
135
Ibid. 5
132
52
Moving away from van Gennep and towards a more modern interpretation of
rites of passage, Rehm continues with a discussion of modern anthropologist Victor
Turner, who
has emphasized the liminal stage in these rites of passage, giving rise to transitional
qualities of ‘betwixt and between’ that reveal the interrelationship between high and
low, between in and out, on which communitas (‘community,’ ‘fellowship’)
paradoxically depends. For Turner, liminality is a period and space of ambiguity
(‘going two ways at once’) that exists within specific social and mental structures, a
place of danger and vulnerability for those making the transition, but also one of
freedom, providing an opportunity for disordered play that serves as ‘the seedbeds of
cultural creativity.136
The liminal period in the wedding or funeral, the actual moment at which the bride
and groom are standing before the officiant prior to their being pronounced husband
and wife, or the moment at which the officiant speaks the funeral rites over the
corpse before it is buried, is the moment at which creativity is given free reign in the
absence of a defined mode of being. The wedding or funeral, far from being a
narrative end or anchor, is in fact the site of action, of movement without progress, a
site of “narrative and social chaos” which seems to grant participants “some kind of
transitivity: the ability to be both black and white, for instance, both male and female,
both child and adult; the desire to go somewhere else in place or time; the desire to
extend beyond one’s own bodily or psychic contours.”137 The wedding and the
funeral are the site of narrative movement, of narrative action, which is amplified
when the wedding and funeral are conflated, confusing the direction of action from
progress to any combination of progress, regression and stasis, so that narrative
chaos ensues. Sally’s wedding is Nora’s funeral and vice-versa: there is a liminal
moment in which Nora is on the verge of being married, and Sally on the verge of
attending her own funeral. The moment at which Nora sets in the wedding march
instead of the Death March, the moment at which someone could have died but
didn’t, the possibility of alternatives given a chance during the liminal act of the
136
Ibid. 5
Freeman, Elizabeth. The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture. Durham, NC:
Duke UP, 2002. xiv.
137
53
wedding ceremony, are the sites of narrative choice, of narrative alternative, and of
narrative decision and non-decision simultaneously. Following the principle of
différance, Nora plays the Death March even as she plays the wedding march, and a
wedding guest dies during the ceremony even as the guests sit in rapt attention. It is
quite literally a moment in which there is an arrêt de mort.
It is not the opposition of the wedding and the funeral which produces the
différance representing the various (narrative) alternatives captured at the liminal
moment. The wedding and funeral are not opposed, but conflated: they are
produced simultaneously by the liminal moment. This is the result of the narrative,
the previously authoritarian agency, submitting itself to the traditional end (wedding
or funeral), the previously secondary or dependent agency. When the narrative
submits itself to the end it can no longer hold off (marriage, in the Anne series), there
is no longer any difference between narrative movement and the end:
It is the same différant, in différance with itself. But the structure of différance then can
open onto an alterity that is even more irreducible than the alterity attributed to
opposition. Because the [narrative] [...] enters into a contract only with itself, reckons
and speculates only with itself or with its own metastasis, because it sends itself
everything it wants, and in sum encounters no opposition, it unleashes in itself the
absolute other.138
The narrative produces its own end, and, since this end is also a différance, it
produces a conflation of traditional ends, a conflation of wedding and funeral. If the
narrative produces its own end, it does so all along, as it produces itself; an
avoidance of the end is no longer an adequate analytical tool, since the end is part of
the narrative itself, is in fact produced by it as it produces the narrative. It is time to
re-evaluate the arguments.
Before the arguments can be re-evaluated, however, it is necessary to briefly
discuss the remainder of Anne of Windy Poplars. After Sally Nelson’s wedding, Anne
reconciles Nora and her on-off suitor Jim Wilcox, who immediately proposes to
Nora, whom accepts. After a summer in Avonlea spent with Gilbert, Anne returns to
138
Derrida 283
54
Summerside and Windy Poplars for her second year as principal of the high school.
Anne spends much of her time at the house with the widows and Rebecca Dew, and
it is there that she meets Cousin Ernestine Bugle, a far relation of Aunt Kate’s. Cousin
Ernestine is a gossipy woman and, like Sally’s Aunt Mouser, full of unhappy tales of
weddings and funerals. Criticizing a relation of hers, she tells of the shock she
experienced to find the bride eating an egg on the morning of her wedding, when
“ ‘[m]y poor dead sister never et a thing for three days afore she was married. And
after her husband died we was all afraid she was never going to eat again.’ ”139 When
Aunt Kate asks Cousin Ernestine whether it is true that Jean Young is going to be
married again, the latter expresses her concern for Jean’s happiness, as she says
because “ ‘Fred Young is supposed to be dead, but I’m dreadful afraid he’ll turn up
yet.’ ”140 Finally, Cousin Ernestine expresses her fear, or perhaps even joy, that since
there have been an awful lot of weddings in Lowvale during the winter, “ ‘there’ll be
funerals all summer to make up for it.’ ”141 To Cousin Ernestine, weddings and
funerals are an equal and interchangeable equation, not fort:da, but fort=da, not a
conflation, but an equation of established opposites. For Cousin Ernestine, there is no
narrative action beyond moving linearly from beginning to end, but her gossip
emphasizes rather the opposite: a narrative chaos moving in several directions at
once, a conflation of ends and means resulting in a conflation of weddings and
funerals, of beginning, middle and end.
A few months after Cousin Ernestine’s visit, Anne is approached by one of her
students to help her break an unwanted engagement. Hazel Marr tells Anne she
doesn’t want to get married, but all her alternatives point to marriage in the
inevitable différance which they suggest:
“I don’t want to marry anybody. I’m ambitious...I want a career. Sometimes I think I’d
like to be a nun. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be the bride of heaven? I think the
Catholic church is so picturesque, don’t you? But of course I’m not a Catholic...and
anyway, I suppose you could hardly call it a career. I’ve always felt I’d love to be a
nurse. It’s such a romantic profession, don’t you think? Smoothing fevered brows and
139
AWP 169
Ibid. 169
141
Ibid. 169
140
55
all that...and some handsome millionaire patient falling in love with you and carrying
you off to spend a honeymoon in a villa on the Riviera, facing the morning sun and
the blue Meditteranean.”142
Hazel adds that she hasn’t yet accepted an engagement ring from Terry Garland,
since “ ‘it would seem like a fetter...so irrevocable’ ” and asks Anne to talk to Terry for
her.143 Anne initially refuses, but finally concedes to the persuasive Hazel, only to be
reprimanded by the same when Terry actually concedes to breaking the engagement
with Hazel. When Anne asks Hazel what has become of her ambition, Hazel
dramatically replies that her “ ‘highest ambition was to be a happy wife and make a
happy home for my husband. Was...was! To think it should be in the past tense!’ ”144
Anne later receives a letter from Hazel informing her that she and Terry are to be
married, and so she has learns a bitter lesson about trusting her friends.
After the unsuccessful episode with Hazel Marr, Anne is again drawn into an
engagement not her own. During her third year at Windy Poplars, Anne is
approached by Dovie Westcott, who wants to marry Jarvis Morrow after a seemingly
stagnant engagement. Dovie’s father, a widower, has forbidden his daughter to see
Jarvis, and the only way the two will be able to marry is if they elope or wed secretly,
to which end Anne is recruited. Anne manages to persuade the indecisive Dovie to
agree to Jarvis’s plans for their secret wedding, and when Dovie fails to show up to
her own wedding, it is Anne who goes to claim her. Dovie, whimpering, tells Anne
she can’t go through with the wedding for lack of presents, a white wedding dress
and veil, a trousseau, and other material trappings. Anne forces Dovie to come with
her, and “Dovie was quite all right as soon as she found herself irrevocably married
to Jarvis [...] ‘the honeymoon look’ was already on her face.”145
With Anne’s own wedding approaching, the reluctance of her acquaintances
to get married emphasizes the choice or, rather, inevitability of marriage in female
narrative. The main distinction is Anne’s willingness to be married, although she
would be quite willing, since the threat of marriage as an end is still somewhat
142
Ibid. 179
Ibid. 180
144
Ibid. 187
145
Ibid. 222
143
56
removed. But then, to reconsider the argument, if the end is always already
contained within the narrative, produced by it as well as producer of it, the narrative
need not fear the end, or marriage. Anne’s acceptance of her own impending
wedding, and her desire to help Hazel and Dovie can also be interpreted as the
acceptance of ends in narrative, the recognition of ends which are as much an end as
the rest of the narrative, and therefore no more conclusive. Cousin Ernestine’s
unconscious conflation of weddings and funerals already demonstrates this nonconclusiveness of traditional ends: the bride who does or does not eat, but
nevertheless gets married, and the dead husband who may still return to claim his
wife.
But why should we reconsider the status of ends in narrative? Why contradict
the previous argumentation? Or is this reconsideration not a contradiction?
Returning to the guiding principle of différance and the concepts of fort:da and arrêt de
mort, the reconsideration of the arguments suggested in the previous three chapters
does not overturn these arguments, but merely casts them in a new light. It has
already been mentioned in Chapter Three that the end is a perceived threat which
fuels cycles of narrative repetition, and that the end is nevertheless inevitable because
only by progressing towards an end can the cycles of repetition and narrative
deadlock be broken. It is a linear movement towards the end which guarantees
narrative movement, which imposes structure on the novels. But it is time to
reconsider this movement in light of the conflation of weddings and funerals.
If, as we have established, the conflation of weddings and funerals is a
product (différant) of the différance of the différance of narrative, then the end, which is
no more than the différant of narrative, is not necessarily an end in the linear sense,
but may be any form of Other (différant), an End as Other.146 The (traditional) End,
then, is not limited to the end, but may play the role of Other at any point in the
narrative progression. The cycle of repetitions in Anne of the Island revolve around the
End, but are never the end, since the end can only be reached by abandoning
146
The term Other here designates différant in its clearly defined form as the différant produced by narrative
turning upon itself. I choose to use the term Other rather than différant in order to distinguish this particular,
specific différant produced by the narrative différance from the other usages to which I have put the term
différant, especially in its general or conceptual form.
57
repetition of the End. Additionally, both Anne of the Island and Anne of Windy Poplars
feature an End at the beginning in the form of a graveyard, and Anne of Windy Poplars
ends with Anne’s farewell to the old Summerside graveyard before her return to
Avonlea for her wedding. Since the End is present throughout the narrative, is, in
fact, the Other of the narrative, the end must also be re-evaluated.
If the traditional end has been replaced by the End, then what is the new end,
or can such a distinction no longer be made? If we turn back to Freud’s Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, the source of this analysis’ original narrative line of argumentation,
we come across the following passage, continuing the argument of repetition and
return discussed in Chapter Three of this paper:
Let us suppose, then, that all the organic instincts are conservative, are acquired
historically and tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things. [...] The
elementary living entity would from the very beginning have had no wish to change;
if conditions remained the same, it would do no more than constantly repeat the same
course of life. [...] Every modification which is thus imposed upon the course of the
organism’s life is accepted by the conservative organic instincts and stored up for
further repetition. Those instincts are therefore bound to give a deceptive appearance
of being forces tending towards change and progress, whilst in fact they are merely
seeking to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new. Moreover it is possible to
specify this final goal of all organic striving. It would be in contradiction to the
conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were a state of things which had
never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial
state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is
striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are
to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal
reasons – becomes inorganic once again – then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the
aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living
ones.’147
The end, then, is not limited to the linear end in the form of a conclusion, but present
at either ‘end’ of the spectrum. The end is also beginning, the beginning end, so that
the linearity imposed on the traditional novel or Bildungsroman is only an arbitrary
147
Freud BPP 45
58
selection of a movement or action which shows movement only in one direction, as a
progression. Following Freud’s reasoning, however, the movement towards the end,
via various Ends, is a movement in two directions simultaneously, both progressive
and regressive, regressive in being progressive, da in being fort. Not only is narrative
fort:da, it is also da:fort, “an overlap without equivalence” which produces movement
in two opposite yet similar directions.148
The narrative, the occurrence of several and varied Ends, is the detour of the
différant, the detour of Ends towards ends, towards beginning and end, which are
both end. As Derrida explains,
The detour thereby ‘would be’ the common, which is as much as to say the différant,
root of two principles, the root uprooted from itself, necessarily impure, and
structurally given over to compromise, to the speculative transaction. The three terms
– two principles plus or minus différance – are but one, the same divided, since the
second (reality) principle and the différance are only the ‘effects’ of the modifiable
pleasure principle.149
The Ends moving toward the end at either extremity of the spectrum of narrative and
the narrative itself are “but one, the same divided,” since the end and the Ends are
only the effects of narrative, the différance and Other of narrative. The conflation of
weddings and funerals (Ends) and the beginning and conclusion (ends) of Anne’s
story are one with the narrative; the Ends and ends are a product of a narrative
which seeks to escape all ends. The Ends and ends, however, are a result of the very
act of trying to avoid them, are produced in the attempt to exclude, are ubiquitously
present in their attempted absence. The ends are at both ends, the length in between
scattered with Ends. While the Ends are a conflation of weddings and funerals, the
ends, according to Derrida, are death, which “is not opposable, does not differ, in the
sense of opposition, from the two principles and their différance.”150 Narrative, end,
and End do not differ from death, nor are they death as such, they are only not
148
Derrida 321
Ibid. 284
150
Ibid. 285
149
59
opposites of death. Narrative, end and End cannot avoid death, even if they are not
death, since death is the différance of all three.
Derrida’s use of the term ‘death’ is relevant to his discussion of Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, but it is irrelevant to the analysis of narrative; by replacing the term
‘death’ with the narrative term ‘ending’ while leaving the concept intact, the analysis
becomes clearer. Narrative, end and End are all forms which are not opposable or
different from ending, but contain some element of it, while not being ending itself.
Ending implies a conclusion, a sense of which defines narrative, End and ends, but
which none of theses necessarily are. The choice of the term ‘ending’ also retains the
double nature of the term ‘death,’ which is both a state of being and a state of
becoming.
Narrative, then, while containing various Ends and ends, also contains the
promise of ending at a certain time. This ending can be achieved by narrative moving
in any direction, whether linear or non-linear, in the case of Ends, or progressive or
regressive, as in the case of ends. As the narrative moves forward, so it also moves
backwards, towards the same point, towards the end. The movement of narrative
towards ending recalls the situation of Ends, since both contain a liminal element.
The narrative of the Anne novels therefore retains the possibility of alternatives, of
multiple ends, until the very end, and beyond there until the ending, in which they
remain possibilities, suspended by ending. This is further increased by the fact that
the novels form a series, a continuum of narrative, contained within separate
narrative entities, separate novels with separate ends. Each successive installment of
the series “highlights the fact that finality is never truly final since the series as a
genre invites almost endless additions.”151 The movement of the series narrative,
therefore, is even more prolific than might be expected of free-standing novel, as the
number of ends increases with each novel added, and with the possibility of further
additions.
With its focus on weddings and funerals, and the conflation thereof, Anne of
Windy Poplars is a pivotal novel in the series. The prominence and prevalence of
weddings and Anne’s central role in each emphasizes the non-linear, non151
Gubar 64
60
progressive nature of a narrative moving towards traditional Ends. The wedding is
an event of “doubled temporality – the self-conscious alignment of the present with
prior moments on the model of allegory” and simultaneously represents “an
unbroken chain of causal events continuing into an unchanged future.”152 Sally’s
wedding is Nora’s perceived funeral, but it is also the site of Nora’s engagement and
future wedding: there is a movement in two directions as Sally’s wedding moves
from present to past, and Nora’s funeral is pushed from the present to the future by
her present engagement, which pushes forward into her future wedding. There is an
end in either direction and a suspension and condemnation of ending as Sally and
Nora are abandoned by the narrative as Anne progresses towards her own wedding.
The novel is bounded by ends and has a distinct sense of (an) ending in the form of
Anne’s impending marriage. The series, however, continues ending toward either
end of the chronological spectrum: as Anne leaves Windy Poplars and Summerside
behind her, she progresses towards her wedding even as she returns to her
childhood home of Green Gables.
152
Freeman 34
61
5
Life, Death and Narrative Time
~ Anne’s House of Dreams (1922) ~
That evening Green Gables hummed with preparations for the following day; but in the twilight Anne slipped
away. She had a little pilgrimage to make on this last day of her girlhood and she must make it alone. She went to
Matthew’s grave, in the little poplar-shaded Avonlea graveyard, and there kept a silent tryst with old memories
and immortal loves.
“How glad Matthew would be tomorrow if he were here,” she whispered. “But I believe he does know and is glad
of it – somewhere else. I’ve read somewhere that ‘our dead are never dead until we have forgotten them.’
Matthew will never be dead to me, for I can never forget him.” 153
This fifth novel of the series finds Anne back at Green Gables, busy with the
preparations for her wedding. Diana Wright, married four years, comes to help Anne
pack away the vestiges of her teaching years in the Green Gables garret, and the
reader is again reminded of “the long-ago days when she and Anne Shirley had
vowed eternal friendship in the garden at Orchard Slope.”154 Jane Andrews returns
to Avonlea for the wedding, and Philippa Blake and the Reverend Jo come to
represent the Redmond group at the ceremony. Miss Lavendar and Mr. Irving come
with their children and the newly-married Charlotta the Fourth, and the old maids of
Patty’s Place send Anne the china dogs who guarded over the fireplace during
Anne’s Redmond days. The wedding, held at high noon, is a small and simple affair,
where “[a]ll the old jests and quips that must have done duty at weddings since Eden
were served up, and seemed as new and brilliant and mirth-provoking as if they had
never been uttered before,” and where the newlyweds are driven to the train in a
shower of rice and old shoes.155 As Anne and Gilbert depart for their new home in a
new hometown, the past and girlhood close and “the chapter of wifehood” opens.156
Mr. And Mrs. Blythe immediately move into their new “House of Dreams” at
Four Winds Harbour, foregoing a honeymoon in favor of creating a new home
together. The first night in their little cottage, Anne and Gilbert are joined by
Gilbert’s uncle, the Four Winds doctor whom he is to replace, and his wife, and the
Montgomery, L[ucy] M[aud]. Anne’s House of Dreams. 1922. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. 19.
* Note: I will hereafter refer to the novel by the abbreviation AHD.
154
Ibid. 1
155
Ibid. 21
156
Ibid. 19
153
62
keeper of the nearby lighthouse, Captain Jim. Sitting around the fire, Captain Jim and
the doctor tell the Blythes about their new neighbors, Miss Cornelia Bryant in
particular. Miss Cornelia is an old maid, an “ ‘inveterate man-hater’ ” who “ ‘could
have had her pick when she was young’ ” and “ ‘[e]ven yet she’s only to say the
word to see the old widowers jump.’ ”157 Like the old maids in the earlier novels of
the series, Miss Cornelia is nothing like the embittered old maid of novelistic
tradition. An outspoken, gossipy and confident woman, Miss Cornelia immediately
impresses Anne as a kindred spirit “in spite of certain oddities of opinion, and
certain oddities of attire,” and when Miss Cornelia comes to pay her first visit, the
two women immediately sit down to an extensive gossip.158 It is Miss Cornelia who
brings talk of weddings and funerals to the small house, and who denounces all of
the local men, with the exception of Captain Jim, with her favorite phrase, “ ‘Wasn’t
that like a man?’ ”159 Miss Cornelia becomes a frequent visitor at the Blythe
household, and regales Anne with tales of funerals, unhappy marriages and criticism
of men, as well as her favorite form of recreation, the reading of obituaries. It is all
the more of a surprise, then, when Miss Cornelia comes to visit Anne two years after
her arrival in Four Winds Harbour with the rather unexpected announcement of her
engagement. Miss Cornelia gives as her motivation the fact that she is tired of hired
men who “ ‘would drive anyone to getting married’ ” and announces she expects
nothing much will change, since Marshall Elliott will come to live at her house.160
Like Miss Lavendar, Miss Cornelia retains her own name for her friends even after
she is married.
The close proximity of the old maid Miss Cornelia to the newlywed Anne
highlights Anne’s new status as wife, and the contrast between Miss Cornelia’s
retained name and Anne’s designation as Mrs. Blythe or Mrs. Doctor serves to
further emphasize the difference between the two women. Anne, reluctant as she has
been to accept marriage as a future, once married becomes the traditional wife. The
liminal status of her engagement replaced by the permanent status as Gilbert’s wife,
157
Ibid. 30
Ibid. 43
159
Ibid. 46
160
Ibid. 209
158
63
Anne is thrust into her own future, unable to return to her girlhood. Miss Cornelia,
unmarried and quite as outspoken as Anne, becomes Anne’s narrative différant, a
relationship which is confirmed by their respective names:
“I wish you would call me Anne,” exclaimed Anne impulsively. “It would seem more
homey. Everyone in Four Winds, except my husband, calls me Mrs. Blythe, and it
makes me feel like a stranger. Do you know that your name is very near being the one
I yearned for when I was a child. I hated ‘Anne’ and I called myself ‘Cordelia’ in
imagination.”
“I like Anne. It was my mother’s name. Old fashioned names are the best and sweetest
in my opinion.”161
Anne and Miss Cornelia are the two alternatives which have been available to Anne.
Having given in to the alternative of marriage, the différant nevertheless persists, in
the form of Miss Cornelia, and confronts Anne with that which she has given up in
accepting Gilbert for a husband.
What to make, then, of Miss Cornelia’s eventual marriage to Marshall Elliott, a
marriage which seems like “an unconvincing sequel to a long, happy life lived alone
or in the company of women”?162 This also follows the path of the narrative différant
as Derrida has laid it out. As the narrative spins out towards its ends, the différant
also spins outs towards its ends. In the case of the traditional female Bildungsroman,
these ends are marriage or death, and so the différant spins out towards marriage and
death. Anne must be married, but so must her différant; the narrative is always
ending and the old maid is always in the process of becoming married before she
truly marries. Miss Cornelia’s denouncement of men is only the (thinly-veiled)
becoming of a wife, since, as even she concedes, “ ‘an odd man here or there, if he’s
caught young and trained up proper, and if his mother has spanked him well
beforehand, may turn out a decent being,’ ” and her denouncement of men is a
proper instruction of how (not to) act as husband. 163 Miss Cornelia’s denouncement
of men is the ending of narrative as it moves towards the ends; Anne’s wedding and
161
Ibid. 50
Gubar 49
163
AHD 47
162
64
Miss Cornelia’s change of opinion are the Ends which mark the movement towards
the ends. These acts of ending are “enigmatic because [ending] appears disappears
while telling many stories and making many scenes, causing or permitting them to
be told.”164 Miss Cornelia’s announcement of her impending marriage allows the
telling of the narrative function of différance and the narrative path of the différants.
Miss Cornelia is not Anne’s only différant. During their first year in the House
of Dreams, Anne and Gilbert are pleasantly surprised to find that their family will be
growing, as Anne is pregnant. In early June, almost a year after Anne and Gilbert
first arrived in Four Winds Harbour, Marilla comes to the cottage with a large trunk,
and meets Susan Baker, the housekeeper and new inhabitant of the House of
Dreams. One evening as the sun is setting, Anne goes into labor and, after a night of
agony for all the house’s inhabitants, dawn finds Anne with a small newborn in her
arms. They name the baby Joyce, “ ‘we can call her Joy for short – Joy – it suits so
well,’ ” but all joy soon steals from the house as the little girl dies around sunset.165
Anne is heartbroken, and when Marilla suggests that it has been God’s will and that
little Joy is better off in heaven, Anne sobbingly retaliates that she doesn’t “ ‘believe it
is better for a child to die at birth than to live its life out – and love and be loved –
and enjoy and suffer – and do its work – and develop a character that would give it a
personality in eternity.’ ”166 Anne is unconvinced that Joyce has died a natural death
at a natural time, and thinks that Joy’s return to her previous state of (non)being has
been precipitated too quickly. For the purposes of narrative, however, Joy’s death
comes at a natural point in the trajectory towards the ends.
The End which is Joy’s death mirrors the earlier End which is Anne’s
wedding, and the later End which is Miss Cornelia’s marriage announcement. Joy, as
Anne’s différant, is already dying as she is born, her narrative trajectory is already
ending as it is beginning. Death, as the other acceptable narrative alternative to
marriage, is represented by Joy, and it is therefore that Joy is Anne’s différant. Anne,
who came to Green Gables at the age of eleven, has no discernable past before that
point; Anne is an orphan without a clearly defined history. Joy, born into a loving
164
Derrida 262
AHD 115
166
Ibid. 117
165
65
family, is Anne’s différant from the moment she is born: her mother lives, her father
lives, she has a family by whom she will be raised. Joyce, “a young girl, still a virgin,
dies to be replaced by the woman, mourning forever the white thing she once was”;
Joy, the différant of Anne’s own childhood, presents only what the alternative might
have been, and quickly takes it away again.167 Would Joyce have been allowed to
grow up and grow old, as Anne has been allowed to do, she could, like Anne and
Miss Cornelia, never escape marriage. As Susan Baker hopefully states, “ ‘[a] woman
cannot ever be sure of not being married till she is buried.’ ”168 The only alternative
to marriage, then, is death, but death without marriage can never possibly be
achieved, since Joy, like Ruby Gillis, though never married is nevertheless defined by
it, in life and in death. Joyce, the ultimate différant, must die in infancy because
“[t]here lies before the [Joyces] of the world no course of action which would not
sully them [...] wife, mother, or widow, tinged no matter how slightly with the stain
of sexuality, suffered perhaps rather than sought, but, in any case, there!”169 Joy’s
death, however, precludes any further narrative activity on her part, and this
seemingly ideal différant, the best possible alternative to the blemish of marriage, is
shown to be the one which is unattainable, since (if enacted on the part of the
heroine) it would preclude the narrative altogether. Joy’s death must be only an End
in ending Anne’s narrative, since Joy’s death in Joy’s narrative is automatically an
end. With Joy’s death comes the death of the différant of death escaping the
alternative of marriage, leaving only the différant of old maidenhood, which, even
then, cannot escape marriage.
While Joy’s death precludes the suspension of marriage, another character’s
marriage is the result of death, is initiated, sustained, and characterized by it. Leslie,
or Mrs. Dick Moore, is the third and rather elusive neighbor at the House of Dreams.
Miss Cornelia, having Anne and Gilbert to tea, relates Leslie’s tragic history at
Anne’s request. Leslie, daughter of a local farmer, lived a relatively pleasant life until
she was twelve, when her younger brother Kenneth was killed in an accident. After
the death of his son, Leslie’s father was no longer able work the farm, and only two
167
Fiedler 265
AHD 129
169
Fiedler 266
168
66
years later, he hangs himself in the parlor, where Leslie finds him. The farm was
mortgaged to Abner Moore, and when Leslie and her mother could no longer afford
to pay the interest, Abner’s son Dick, who had an eye on Leslie, told Leslie’s mother
his father would foreclose the mortgage unless Leslie agreed to marry him. Leslie,
who couldn’t let her mother lose her bridal home, accepted Dick Moore’s proposal;
as Miss Cornelia, present at the small marriage ceremony, later recalls: “ ‘I’d seen
Leslie’s face at her brother’s funeral and at her father’s funeral – and now it seemed
to me I was seeing it at her own funeral.’ ”170 Leslie’s mother died half a year after the
wedding, and Dick soon went out to sea, leaving Leslie alone. When Dick failed to
return from his voyage, “ ‘people began to talk of [him] as one that was dead.’ ” Dick
was discovered a year later by Captain Jim, working in a boarding house in Havana,
and was returned to Leslie. Dick had lost his memory, couldn’t remember his own
name, and returned more a child than a man. Leslie, trapped in marriage to a man
who is both an emotional and economic burden, is cast as a “tragic appealing figure
of thwarted womanhood,” in stark contrast to Anne’s role as happy wife. 171
The summer of Joy’s death, Leslie is able to take in a boarder for a little extra
money. Owen Ford, a journalist from Vancouver, comes to the harbor to recover
from typhoid fever, and immediately falls in love with Leslie. Owen confesses his
feelings for Leslie to Anne, who tells him he cannot tell Leslie, whose life is difficult
enough. Owen is upset about his impending departure, and “ ‘to think of her living
death’ ” is unbearable.172 Owen Ford leaves Four Winds Harbor thinking he will
never see Leslie Moore again. When Owen has left, Gilbert decides to tell Leslie
about an operation which may restore Dick’s memory, and Leslie decides she must
let Dick have the operation. In May of the year after Owen’s stay, Anne receives a
letter from Leslie, who is at the hospital with Dick. As she tells Gilbert, “ ‘There is no
Dick!’ ”173 The man presumed to be Dick Moore is actually his cousin, George Moore;
Dick Moore passed away of yellow fever in Cuba, thirteen years earlier. Miss
Cornelia immediately suggests Anne write to Owen Ford, and admits that “[a]s for
170
AHD 73
Ibid. 77
172
Ibid. 150
173
Ibid. 180
171
67
this George Moore, who’s gone and come back to life when everyone thought he was
dead and done for, just like a man, I’m real sorry for him.”174 George Moore returns
home to Nova Scotia, and, finding his fiancée of thirteen years unmarried, marries
her. Anne, hearing the story, reprimands herself “ ‘that if I had had my way George
Moore would never have come up from the grave in which his identity was buried.’
”175 After George Moore’s resurrection, Leslie finds herself alone with the newlyreturned Owen Ford, whose proposal she can now accept.
The living death of Leslie and Dick Moore, as well as the resurrection or return
from the dead of George Moore, each deconstruct the order of traditional narrative,
and the telos of life. Living death or coming back to life are contrary to linear
narrative, but the events through which they are precipitated are teleological,
temporal, linear. This combination of states of being (living and death) and events
(living death and coming back to life) gives rise to a form of narrative time which
Frank Kermode defines as aevum:
The concept of aevum provides a way of talking about this unusual variety of duration
– neither temporal nor eternal, but, as Aquinas said, participating in both the temporal
and the eternal. It does not abolish time or spatialize it; it co-exists with time, and is a
mode in which things can be perpetual without being eternal.
[...] Aevum, you might say, is the time-order of novels. Characters in novels are
independent of time and succession, but may and usually do seem to operate in time
and succession; the aevum co-exists with temporal events at the moment of occurrence,
being, it was said, like a stick in a river.176
Marriage and death are markers in the Anne series, markers which temporalize and
perpetuate the aevum. Originally developed to provide a duration for angels, aevum
as a concept also provides for the duration of narrative, which corresponds directly
to ending.177 If narrative is always ending, but it also moves towards ends, and
creates Ends, then narrative is neither temporal nor eternal, but nevertheless
participates in both the temporal (Ends and the movement towards ends) and the
174
Ibid. 184
Ibid. 202
176
Kermode 72
177
Ibid. 73
175
68
eternal (ending). Aevum is the reintegration of the various différants of the narrative,
the différants and différance returned to a whole in an act of the re-construction of a
de-construction of the narrative.178
The aevum or narrative ensures that temporal events are placed alongside
eternal forms to create something which is perpetual, but nevertheless faces an
inevitable ending, if only conceptually. Ending is perpetual, but the ending may only
be conceptual, though certainly inevitable, in the narrative of the Anne series. The
movement which the narrative takes thus has a particular form, a form which
Derrida identifies as a rhythm:
The very idea of rhythm, which has no ‘objective’ meaning, is to coordinate itself with
that which must be guarded here. For example, the organism defends its rhythm
against that very thing which might prevent it from reaching its proper aim by
‘shortened paths’ (auf kurzem Wege), and ‘by short-circuit, so to speak’ (durch
Kurzschluss sozusagen). What counts is less the telos than the rhythm of différance and
the speed of the step.179
It is the Ends which are met on the way towards the ends which make up the rhythm
of the narrative, the occurrence of events in aevum. The rhythm which guards life also
guards death, guards life to guard death. This rhythm is thwarted by the narrative of
Anne’s House of Dreams, which allows the dead to live and allows the living to be
dead. The dead Dick Moore is allowed to live in the body of the memory-deprived
George Moore, and Leslie Moore is forced to live a suspended death. While Joyce
Blythe and Captain Jim die deaths which are natural and inherent to narrative,
Dick/George and Leslie are caught somewhere between living and death.
The rhythm of the narrative is explored self-reflexively in Anne’s House of
Dreams. Captain Jim, whom the newlyweds often go to visit at the lighthouse, is
178
Åhmansson also examines the narrative and temporal chaos of this fifth novel in the series, but concludes that
this is the result of “an attempt on the part of Montgomery to tell two stories at the same time.” This results in a
“duality [which] is part and parcel of Montgomery’s reluctance to challenge conventions as well as her wish to
please her young readers and her publisher.” The final result is, according to Åhmansson, a novel which is
“uneven and contains passages of nauseatingly sentimental vocabulary” (151). Åhmansson identifies the two
stories told as ‘the comedy mode,’ which presents all realistic and every-day encounters, and centers on Miss
Cornelia and Susan Baker as characters, and ‘the romantic code,’ which deals with the universals of romantic
literature, and focuses on the marriages (Anne/Gilbert and Leslie/Dick, Leslie/Owen) in the novel (153).
179
Derrida 361
69
conducting research on a serial novel in the local paper, a romance entitled A Mad
Love. Captain Jim admits to Anne that “ ‘’[t]isn’t my favourite brand of fiction, but
I’m reading it jest to see how long she can spin it out. It’s at the sixty-second chapter
now, and the wedding ain’t any nearer than when it begun, far’s I can see.’ ”180 When
the serial finally ends, Captain Jim touches upon the nature of the romantic narrative:
“ ‘It run to one hundred and three chapters. When they got married the book
stopped right off, so I reckon their troubles were all over.’ ”181 Captain Jim’s
comment attracts attention to the narrative of which he himself is a part; instead of
ending in the heroine’s wedding, Anne’s House of Dreams opens with Anne’s
wedding. The problem with A Mad Love, Captain Jim tells Anne, is its length, a result
of the fact that it was written by a woman: “ ‘A woman wrote that and jest look at it –
one hundred and three chapters when it could all have been told in ten. A writing
woman never knows when to stop; that’s the trouble. The p’int of good writing is to
know when to stop.’ ”182 The prolific number of Ends in the Anne series seem to
demonstrate that Montgomery doesn’t know when to stop, but it also questions the
relevance of Ends and the definition of Ends as ends which the traditional romance
propagates.183
Captain Jim also becomes the subject of a narrative of his own, which is also
presented as a self-reflexive examination of narrative in the novel. Anne, after
hearing many of the ‘yarns’ spun by Captain Jim, suggests he write them all down in
a book for others to read. When Owen Ford arrives at Four Winds Harbour, Anne
immediately suggests he be the one to compile and write Captain Jim’s stories. The
resulting novel is entitled simply The Life-Book of Captain Jim, “a book that would
live,” according to Owen Ford.184 When Captain Jim receives the published copy of
his life-book, he sets to reading it immediately, and Leslie wonders “ ‘how he will
like the ending – the ending I suggested.’ ”185 What this ending is, the reader never
180
AHD 56
Ibid. 111
182
Ibid. 142
183
Despite Montgomery’s wish to distance herself from the Anne series, she conceded to writing a fourth
instalment (now fourth in the chronology) about Anne’s new life as wife and mother. Surprisingly, considering
its relative sentimentality and its morbidity, she considered it the best book she had ever written, and was content
to have it remain the last in the series. In: Journals 2:222.
184
Ibid. 148
185
Ibid. 218
181
70
finds out, nor what Captain Jim thinks of it; Captain Jim is found dead in the
lighthouse, the book lying on his chest, opened to the final page. The end of the
narrative of Captain Jim is the end of Captain Jim in life, the narrative which creates
him also uncreates him, takes him with it in the end. Captain Jim’s life is ending as
the stories he wants to pass on are recorded by the pen of Owen Ford, and with the
end of his stories comes an end to his voice, and to his presence in the greater
narrative of Anne’s House of Dreams. Captain Jim’s life-book acts as a self-reflexive
comment on narrative within the narrative of the novel; it acts as an example of and a
commentary on ends, Ends and ending. This self-reflexive novel within the novel,
the narrative within the narrative, is a good example of aevum. Captain Jim’s
narrative signals the ending inherent in narrative, the ends towards which it moves
in either direction (reunion with a lost beloved in death), and the Ends which mark the
progress towards the ends. The Life-Book of Captain Jim continues living after Captain
Jim’s death and becomes a best-seller; the narrative of Anne’s House of Dreams
continues after the death of Captain Jim, and the ending of the life-book remains
unknown. Captain Jim’s novel remains always still in the process of ending,
suspended in ending as it has condemned him to it. At the same time, the end of the
larger novel also emphasizes the process of ending by ending on an End, with Anne
saying goodbye to her “ ‘dear little house of dreams’ ” as she kisses “the worn old
step which she had crossed as a bride.’ ”186
186
Ibid. 227
71
6
Repetition, Différance and Narrative Construction
~ Anne of Ingleside (1939) ~
The Anne-who-used-to-be was waiting there for her. Deep, dear old gladness stirred in her heart. The gable room
was putting its arms around her...enclosing her...enveloping her. She looked lovingly at her old bed with the
apple-leaf spread Mrs. Lynde had knitted and the spotless pillows trimmed with deep lace Mrs. Lynde had
crocheted...at Marilla’s braided rugs on the floor...at the mirror that had reflected the face of the little orphan
with her unwritten child’s forehead, who had cried herself to sleep there that first night so long ago. Anne forgot
that she was the joyful mother of five children...with Susan Baker again knitting mysterious bootees at Ingleside.
She was Anne of Green Gables once more.187
The sixth episode of Anne’s life, like four of the previous five installments, opens at
Green Gables. Anne Blythe, mother of five and pregnant with the sixth, has returned
to Avonlea for the funeral of Gilbert’s father, and stays a week with Marilla and Mrs.
Lynde before returning home to Glen St. Mary and her home of Ingleside. During her
extended stay at Green Gables, Anne proposes to her childhood friend Diana Wright
that they “ ‘stop feeling parental and responsible and be as giddy as Mrs. Lynde
really thinks me still in her heart of hearts’ ” and spend a day visiting all their old
haunts.188 Sitting down with their picnic basket in Hester Gray’s garden, Anne and
Diana talk about their families and their separate lives, and recall their childhood
vows of friendship which they have always kept, and will keep still. Packing up their
things and walking back towards Green Gables, Anne expresses a longing “ ‘to meet
our old selves running along Lover’s Lane,’ ” a longing which Diana quickly dispels
for fear of ghosts.189 The two women go “quietly, silently, lovingly home together
with [...] their old unforgotten love burning in their hearts,” two matrons together reenacting their girlhood.190
Anne’s desire to repeat her childhood, to reverse time and escape the adult
world of responsibility and parenthood introduces a novel about reversal, repetition
and return. Anne reprimands Diana for talking “ ‘as if ‘our day’ has ended’ ” and
187
Montgomery, L[ucy] M[aud]. Anne of Ingleside. 1939. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. 1.
* Note: I will hereafter refer to the novel by the abbreviation AIng.
188
Ibid. 5
189
Ibid. 13
190
Ibid. 13
72
reminds her friend that “ ‘[w]e’re only fifteen years old and kindred spirits.’ ” 191 The
age to which Anne wishes to return is an age before engagements, before lovers and
before marriage, an age at which she and Diana had only each other, an age at which
Anne and Gilbert were still trapped in their haughty quarrel. Anne’s proposed
reversal of time divorces her from Gilbert, from her children, from Ingleside, and
from her current pregnancy. Anne must disappear from her life as mother and wife
at Ingleside in order to reappear as fifteen year old inhabitant of Green Gables;
absence is a necessary precondition to return. To open the narrative of Anne of
Ingleside with Anne’s deliberate removal from her life at Ingleside and her
subsequent journey into the past orders the narrative as one of return, of repetition:
“Revenance, that is, returning, orders the entire teleology.”192
The sixth novel of the series is a novel which seeks to repeat, to return to, the
first novel of the series, Anne of Green Gables.193 It is this repetition, this return, which
defines the narrative of Anne of Ingleside, where the adult Anne, inhabitant of a
different home, continually recalls the child Anne, inhabitant of Green Gables. The
child Anne is recalled not only through memory and re-enactment, but also through
the adventures of Anne’s six children. Anne’s new home of Ingleside recalls Green
Gables, is, in fact, the différant of Green Gables, as Anne’s children are the child
Anne’s différants. Growing up with two parents and several siblings, Anne’s children
experience that which Anne has been denied for a large part of her childhood, but
their various adventures are largely imitative of their mother’s, albeit with ‘a twist,’ a
différance. Anne’s daughter Di (short for Diana), for example, experiences two
friendships which closely resemble her mother’s childhood friendship with Diana
Barry, but which end quite differently.
Di first falls in love with Jenny Penny, an orphan with a habit of exaggeration.
Jenny accepts Di as her best friend, and “they became inseparable at recesses; they
wrote notes to each other over the weekends; they gave and received ‘chews’ of gum:
191
Ibid. 8
Derrida 317
193
Montgomery notes that this installment in the Anne series is to be the last, which makes its return to the
original Anne novel all the more interesting. Montgomery states in her journal that: “That will end Anne – and
properly. For she belongs to the green, untroubled pastures and still waters of the world before the [First World]
war.” In: Journals 2: 309.
192
73
they traded buttons and cooperated in dust piles,” but Anne is unconvinced by
Jenny, and hopes that “ ‘Di will [...] soon get over this “crush.” ’ ”194 When Anne
forbids Di to spend the night at Jenny’s house, Jenny tells Di they will have to “ ‘part
forever,’ ” and Di, deciding she cannot bear to be parted forever from Jenny, decides
to disobey her mother on the night her parents are out of town. Di, after arriving at
the Penny house, is shocked to find that Jenny has been telling her nothing but
falsehoods, and she finds herself utterly mistreated by Jenny and her cousins. Falling
off the bed, Di is temporarily knocked unconscious, and when she comes to, she
hears the Penny children arguing about whether she is dead, and what they should
do now. The Penny children decide to carry Di’s supposedly unconscious body to
Ingleside, and leave her there for her family to find; “[w]hat happened after that
would be no concern of theirs.”195 When Di is returned to the Ingleside porch, she
“dared not come back to life too soon,” but on opening her eyes, finds her parents
returning home early, and she immediately confesses her transgression and
apologizes.
The différance of Di’s friendship with Jenny Penny and Anne’s friendship with
Diana culminates in Di’s “death.” Whereas Anne has been granted a close friendship
with Diana, Di’s attempt at bosom friendship fails miserably, almost to the point of
her own disappearance. Where Anne could have lived childhood as Jenny Penny
does, and could have become as wild and disloyal, she was able to follow a different
path, one resulting in her intimate friendship with Diana. The différance between
Anne of Ingleside and Anne of Green Gables has been established, but this incident alone
is not enough. Montgomery underlines the similarity between the two novels by
giving Di a second opportunity at bosom friendship, which is again the différant of
Anne’s friendship with Diana. Di now befriends Delilah, a girl who blames her
stepmother for a life of suffering and pain, and the girls make vows which echo those
made in the garden of Orchard Slope years earlier:
“You’ll love me forever, won’t you?” asked Delilah passionately.
“Forever,” vowed Diana with equal passion.
194
195
AIng 163
Ibid. 176
74
Delilah slipped her arms around Diana’s waist and they walked down to the brook
together. The rest of the class understood that an alliance had been concluded. [...]
“I’m so glad you’re going to let me love you,” Delilah was saying. “I’m so very
affectionate...I just can’t help loving people. Please be kind to me, Diana. I am a child of
sorrow. I was put under a curse at birth. Nobody...nobody loves me.”
Delilah somehow contrived to put ages of loneliness and loveliness into that
“nobody.” Diana tightened her clasp.
“You’ll never have to say that after this, Delilah. I will always love you.”
“World without end?”
“World without end,” answered Diana. They kissed each other, as in a rite.196
Di approaches Anne about Delilah’s plight, and is told of Anne’s years at the
orphanage before she her adoption by Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert. Hoping her
mother will therefore understand Delilah’s problem, Di is disappointed when Anne
remains skeptical, especially since “Mother had been a girl...Mother had loved Aunt
Diana...Mother had such a tender heart.”197 Di’s friendship with Delilah soon
dissolves, however, when Delilah steals Di’s ring only to pretend it was a gift from a
boy. The différance in this case emphasizes the possible dissolution of Anne and
Diana’s friendship in the face of courtship and marriage. The différance (the two
friendships) of the différance (marriage and female friendship) underlines the
narrative function of différance: différance upholds the narrative of the Anne series.
While the two novels are set in a different temporal space, Anne of Ingleside
nevertheless represents the différant of Anne of Green Gables.
Following the logic of aevum, Anne of Ingleside can be both part of the linear
and teleological progression of Anne’s life, and the différant of the Anne of Green
Gables. The sixth novel both continues with the themes introduced in the previous
five novels, and returns to question the themes introduced in the first novel of the
series. Anne of Ingleside thus questions the developments of the narrative as it
develops the narrative further; the questioning of narrative development coincides
with the progression along the path of development. Progress and return therefore
form the most important movement of the narrative of Anne of Ingleside, and again
196
197
Ibid. 243
Ibid. 246
75
the conflation of weddings and funerals forms the site for the self-conscious
presentation of this movement.
At Ingleside, as at the House of Dreams, Miss Cornelia is a frequent guest,
bringing with her the gossip which Anne and housekeeper Susan Baker so enjoy, and
it is therefore often Miss Cornelia who provides the opportunity for the conflation of
weddings and funerals. On one occasion, Miss Cornelia, long since Mrs. Marshall
Elliott, reminisces about Elsie Taylor’s wedding, where the bride’s best friend
“played the Dead March in Saul in place of [the wedding march].”198 On a different
occasion, Anne hosts the Ladies’ Aid quilting at Ingleside, an opportunity for the
women of Glen St. Mary to have “a good dish of gossip.”199 The company, made up
of matrons, old maids, newlyweds and widows alike, set to gossiping as soon as their
needles have been threaded, and the gossip moves between weddings and funerals.
After discussing several notorious funerals, the women begin to discuss recent and
more legendary weddings, including those which didn’t happen for jilting. When
Caroline Cromwell quarrels with her fiancé Ronny Drew, he gets so angry that he
marries Edna Stone instead, and Caroline comes to the wedding “ ‘her head high but
her face [...] like death.’ ”200 Mrs. Millison, wanting to steer the conversation back to
“a more cheerful line” after it has veered again towards funerals, tells the company
that Lem Anderson will be marrying Dorothy Clark that day, “ ‘[a]nd it isn’t a year
since he swore he would blow out his brains if Jane Elliott wouldn’t marry him.’ ”201
The gossip continues to alternate weddings and funerals as topic of the conversation,
forming a rhythm reminiscent of the movement of Freudian instincts, so that “one
[topic] rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of [narrative] as swiftly as possible,
but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other [topic] jerks
back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey.”202 The
narrative is kept moving by virtue of its progressing and being recalled to an earlier
point, by virtue of the alternating topics. Weddings and funerals work together to
198
Ibid. 158
Ibid. 195
200
Ibid. 203
201
Ibid. 205
202
Freud BPP 49
199
76
keep the narrative in constant movement, progressing while delaying the inevitable
end of the conversation, the end of the quilting party.
While the conflation of weddings and funerals serves as the site for the selfconscious presentation of the dual movement of progress and return in the narrative
as a whole, as in the narrative of the quilting circle, this narrative movement is more
closely examined in the high incidence of deaths in the novel. The majority of these
deaths are incomplete deaths, incidences of ‘coming back to life,’ missing one’s own
funeral, misinterpreted death and being buried alive. It is the incompletion of these
deaths (or Ends) which forms the most interesting point of their presence in the
narrative, a narrative which is already ending (death), already moving toward the
end (restoration to an inorganic state) but which has no ending (being dead). Again,
it is Miss Cornelia who introduces incomplete deaths to the narrative. Coming up to
Ingleside to clear up a mistake, Miss Cornelia informs Anne that “ ‘Cousin Sarah isn’t
dead, after all,’ ” since the information passed to Dr. Blythe seemed to concern
another Sarah Chase.203 Miss Cornelia continues, “ ‘Sarah warned us when she went
to the hospital that we were not to bury her unless we were sure she was dead [...]
You see, we were always a little afraid her husband was buried alive...he looked so
life-like.’ ”204 On another occasion, Gilbert tells Anne and Miss Cornelia he has no
patience with Walter Cooper, who should have died long ago. Miss Cornelia replies,
“ ‘Don’t you know his grandfather came back to life after they’d dug the grave and
got the coffin? [...] However, I understand Walter Cooper is having lots of fun
rehearsing his own funeral...just like a man.’ ”205 At the Ladies’ Aid quilting, Celia
Reese tells the women about Stanton Lane, whose body was sent home from out
West, but whose casket was not opened on advice of the undertaker: “ ‘The funeral
had just got off to a good start when in walked Stanton Lane himself, hale and
hearty. It was never found out who the corpse really was.’ ”206 Emma Pollock
responds by sharing the story of Abner Cromwell’s funeral, where a funeral notice
was mistakenly printed with the wrong first name, and people showed up for the
203
AIng 81
Ibid. 82
205
Ibid. 159
206
Ibid. 198
204
77
funeral while Abner Cromwell was out of town. Mrs. Cromwell “ ‘was just about
crazy trying to make them believe her husband wasn’t dead’ ” and when the funeral
guests finally choose to believe her, “ ‘they acted as though Abner ought to be dead.’
”207 In repeating (retelling) the repetition of life (incomplete death), the narrative
emphasizes the repetition of repetition itself, the repetition which arises from itself as
its own différant. The différance in repetition creates différants which move in either
direction, forward and backward, towards the ends, simultaneously.
While these incomplete deaths exist only in the telling, the narrative also
enacts the incomplete deaths of the heroine, Anne. During Anne’s pregnancy, all
precautions are taken to ensure her survival, and the ignorance of her children. As
the date of delivery approaches, the children are sent away from Ingleside to spend a
few days with friends or relatives, and Walter suspects something is wrong. Walter
concludes that Anne is dying of an illness, and is determined to make his way back
to Ingleside. Upon returning to a dark house, Walter is convinced his mother has
died, and that she is being buried while he is expected to be away. When Walter is
discovered by Susan the next morning, he is told by Anne that she has “ ‘no notion of
dying,’ ” and that the night has brought him a little sister, Rilla.208 When Anne takes
pneumonia a few years later, it is Nan who worries most about her mother dying,
though this time the shadow of death clearly hangs over Ingleside. On the decisive
night of the illness, Nan makes a bargain with God: “ ‘Dear God [...] if you make
Mother get well I’ll walk through the graveyard after night.’ ”209 It is death which is
proposed as the alternative to death, but “[i]t was life, not death, that came at the
ghostliest hour of the night to Ingleside.”210 Anne recovers and Nan, failing to keep
her end of the bargain with God, confesses all to Anne, who promises to accompany
her to the graveyard one night to assuage her conscience, but assures Nan she is in
no danger of dying because God doesn’t make bargains.
Moving forwards toward death, moving backwards to death (an inorganic
state), moving towards death in moving away from it (coming back to life), being
207
Ibid. 200
Ibid. 52
209
Ibid. 144
210
Ibid. 144
208
78
always in movement defined in relation to death, the narrative of Anne of Ingleside
appears rather static. The repetition of deaths, at times even of the same character, is
what Freud refers to as “the expression of the inertia inherent to organic life.”211 A
narrative which seeks movement turns in upon itself, produces various différants
(incomplete deaths) which, acting together, produce a simultaneous narrative stasis
and narrative progress, which together uphold the narrative. The narrative, held
together by aevum, progresses as it regresses as it remains inert, and it is this
movement which creates narrative, as it does with the cycles of repetition in Anne of
the Island. Narrative is the product of the various movements and non-movements
which it creates through différance; narrative is the différant which upholds the
différance which creates narrative. Nowhere is this more clearly articulated than in the
request of Anne to write an obituary for Anthony Mitchell.
Mrs. Anthony Mitchell arrives at Ingleside on a fine April day, but she is
dressed from head to foot in black, draped in crape and a widow’s veil, as “[o]ne
wore mourning in those days with a vengeance.”212 Mrs. Anthony Mitchell is a
woman defined by death, the personification of narrative itself. The recent widow
tells Anne about her daughter, Seraphine, whose name came “ ‘off a gravestone,’ “
then proceeds to tell Anne about her courtship and marriage to Anthony Mitchell.213
Wiping her eyes with “a handkerchief, black-bordered a full two inches,” Mrs.
Mitchell tells Anne she collects coffin-plates, and that she “ ‘didn’t seem to have
much luck but [has] got a full mantelpiece at last,’ ” thanks to her husband’s death. 214
As she gets up to leave, Mrs. Mitchell tells Anne that she plans to sell her house and
move out of town, once she decides what “ ‘would be the best place to be a widow
in.’ ”215 The result of Mrs. Mitchell’s request is a poem which Anne entitles “The Old
Man’s Grave,” a poem which portrays the dead as “slumbering” in his “resting
place” in an abstract sense.216 When Mrs. Mitchell comes to pick up the obituary, she
does not seem particularly pleased, except when Anne tells her she will not hear of
211
Freud BPP 43
AIng 115
213
Ibid. 116
214
Ibid. 119
215
Ibid. 120
216
Ibid. 122
212
79
receiving anything for the poem. As she expounds on the expenses of funerals, and
the fact that her “ ‘blacks’ ” haven’t been paid for yet, Mrs. Mitchell remarks to Anne
that “ ‘[i]t’s kind of fortunate black becomes me, ain’t it?’ ” 217 When the obituary
appears in the paper, it has an additional verse tacked on to the end, written by Mrs.
Mitchell’s nephew, in praise of a more clearly deceased, more past-tense Anthony
Mitchell.
Mrs. Anthony Mitchell, the personification of narrative, underscores the role
of death and ending in creating narrative. The obituary which she asks Anne to write
is dependent on death for its creation, and is composed according to it, and upheld
by it. The movement towards death is captured in a poem which emphasizes both
movement and inertia. The poem, being an obituary, is inert: once written, it is the
final and unchanging memory of the dead it recalls. At the same time, the poem
requests that the addressee or God “make” the grave while also implying a more
general making of graves in which no action is required.218 The addition of a fifth
verse to the completed version presented by Anne calls into question the finality of
narrative, which, in capturing an End, moves past the intended end and towards an
ending which it never finds, even in the meeting of death and print, when it is
published as Anthony Mitchell’s obituary. The obituary is its own différant; as
narrative, the obituary produces the différance which creates it, which creates
narrative. The end which the obituary firstly and secondly receives is arbitrary; the
obituary is an End which seeks to define the end which it claims to have reached, but
it is only ever ending without reaching the ending. As Mrs. Anthony Mitchell proves
by adding on an additional final verse, ends are the site for narrative creation,
narrative revision and addition; ending is the motor for the movement of a narrative
which is always ending. Ending is the process of beginning: progress, return and
inertia are all movements produced by the same différance, and together, temporally
and eternally, they create a narrative. Anne of Ingleside, the temporal continuation and
the non-temporal différant of Anne of Green Gables, ends where it begins, ends where
Anne of Green Gables ends and begins, with Anne, who “[i]n her white gown, with her
217
218
Ibid. 124
Ibid. 122
80
hair in its two long braids, [...] looked like the Anne of Green Gables days...of
Redmond days...of the House of Dreams days.”219
219
Ibid. 274
81
7
The Self-Reflexive Narrative
~ Rainbow Valley (1919) ~
~ Rilla of Ingleside (1921) ~
“The Piper is coming nearer,”[Walter] said, “he is nearer than he was that evening I saw him before. His long,
shadowy cloak is blowing around him. He pipes – he pipes – and we must follow – Jem and Carl and Jerry and I
– round and round the world. Listen – listen – can’t you hear his wild music?”
The girls shivered.
“You know you’re only pretending,” protested Mary Vance, “and I wish you wouldn’t. You make it too real. I
hate that old Piper of yours.”
But Jem sprang up with a gay laugh. He stood up on a little hillock, tall and splendid, with his open brow and
his fearless eyes. There were thousands like him all over the land of the maple.
“Let the Piper come and welcome,” he cried, waving his hand. “I’ll follow him gladly round and round the
world.”220
The novels following Anne of Ingleside in the series shift the focus away from Anne
and onto her children: Jem, Walter, Nan, Di, Shirley and Rilla. Rainbow Valley and
Rilla of Ingleside are listed chronologically as the seventh and eighth books in the
Anne series, and are considered by most critics as a continuation of Anne’s life story.
These final two novels are included in this analysis because they narrate the further
progress of Anne, even though Anne becomes a secondary character in the narration
of the adventures of the younger generation.
Rainbow Valley is the first of the novels in the series not to include Anne in the
title, or in the majority of the narrative. Despite this authorial choice, or perhaps
rather because of it, Rainbow Valley is the least original novel of the series, relying on
the earlier novels for its plot. The novel takes its title from the small valley behind
Ingleside where the Blythe children spend most of their spare time, often joined by
the children of the new Glen St. Mary minister, Mr. Meredith. The main action of the
narrative concerns the adventures of the Meredith children and the widowed Mr.
Meredith’s confused and complicated courtship of the old maid Rosemary West. The
graveyard returns as a major site of narrative action, in the form of the old Methodist
graveyard bordering the manse where the Merediths live, and where the Meredith
220
Montgomery, L[ucy] M[aud]. Rainbow Valley. 1919. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. 225.
* Note: I will hereafter refer to the novel by the abbreviation RV.
82
children spend as much time as the Blythe children do in Rainbow Valley. Where the
adventures of the Blythe children form a significant part of the narrative of Anne of
Ingleside, in Rainbow Valley their adventures are conspicuously absent, and the major
action of the narrative focuses instead on the Meredith children. As if recalling
Avonlea’s opinion of the orphan Anne’s knack for getting into trouble, the Glen St.
Mary community “shook their heads” at the Meredith children’s habit of playing in
the graveyard, of running about without shoes, and of getting into trouble.221 Faith
Meredith is “ ‘always getting into scrapes [...] so heedless and impulsive,’ ” and Anne
immediately identifies the girl as “ ‘[j]ust like me.’ ”222 The connection to Anne and
the plot of Anne of Green Gables is further underscored by the arrival of Mary Vance,
an orphan whom is first taken in by the Meredith children and later adopted by Miss
Cornelia, the married old maid, recalling the unusual relationship between Anne and
Marilla. The plot of Rainbow Valley also recalls the examination of old maids and old
maidenhood in Anne of Avonlea, and Rosemary West is a second Lavendar Lewis, a
“sweet woman” whose childhood sweetheart and fiancé left for sea never to
return.223 The novel is also the site of the expanding conflation of weddings and
funerals, almost all of which are variations on the burial in wedding dress and ‘Dead
March’ motifs, most notably Mr. Meredith’s attempt to marry a couple by reading
the funeral service, to which the groom responds: “ ‘Please, sir, I think you’re
burying us instead of marrying us.’ ”224
Rainbow Valley, as a novel which merely repeats the plot and themes of the
earlier novels, is not particularly interesting from an analytical perspective, other
than to underscore the role of repetition in the narrative. Like most of the preceding
novels in the series, Rainbow Valley begins with a return and a repetition: Anne and
Gilbert have just returned to Ingleside from their second honeymoon. It is not the
repetition itself which is most interesting, but the repetition of returning, and the
return of the repetition of returning:
221
Ibid. 28
Ibid. 8
223
Ibid. 87
224
Ibid. 94
222
83
One must make return the repetition of that which returns, and must do so on the
basis of its returning. Which, therefore, is no longer simply this or that, such and such
an object which must depart/return, or which departs-in-order-to-return, but is
departure-returning itself, in other words the presentation of itself of re-presentation,
the return to-itself of returning.225
The repetition of repetition itself, the return of returning to return is the most
important analytical point this seventh novel offers. A novel which repeats the
repetition of earlier novels, which self-consciously produces itself as a repetition of
earlier repetitions, emphasizes the central role of repetition in upholding the
narrative. As discussed in Chapter Three, cycles of repetition ensure narrative
progress, maintain the narrative so that it may approach the ending in its own
‘natural’ time. The simultaneous movement towards the ends and the relative inertia
of the narrative, discussed in Chapters Five and Six, the concept of aevum, is
dependent on repetition, and the repetition of repetition, on the return of returning.
The series progresses through Anne’s life while returning to earlier novels and
events, returning Anne to Green Gables again and again to ensure its own continued
existence as narrative. The narrative which is already ending seeks to suspend the
ending by repeating Ends, thereby pushing further outward the ends, and the
inevitable ending. Rainbow Valley as the repetition of repetition itself, the “return toitself of returning,” produces and is the différance of the différants of the novels. Each
repetition is a différant as well as repetition, repetition itself not only produces but is
différance, so that the repetition of repetition itself can be nothing but différant and
différance, that which both is and creates différance, that which identifies différance as
the source and motor for narrative. Whereas Anne’s House of Dreams contains a selfreflexive narrative in the form of Captain Jim’s life-book, and Anne of Ingleside
contains a self-reflexive narrative in the form of Anthony Mitchell’s obituary,
Rainbow Valley is self-reflexive narrative in its entirety, a self-reflexive narrative
which encompasses all the preceding installments of the series because of their
repetition or return in the narrative of the seventh novel. Rainbow Valley, for all its
225
Derrida 318
84
repetitive and rather uninteresting content, is the site for the self-reflexive
examination of narrative in the series as a whole.
Whereas the content of Rainbow Valley is an uninteresting collection of
occurrences repeated from the earlier novels in the series, Rilla of Ingleside breaks
with the tradition of repetition and introduces new and interesting elements to a new
and interesting plot. As the title indicates, Anne’s youngest daughter Rilla takes the
place of her mother as heroine of the novel. This is the first of the novels to refer to
the former Anne Shirley only by her married name, as Mrs. Blythe or Mrs. Doctor, or
by her ‘job title,’ Mother.226 Rilla, nearly fifteen at the start of the novel, is the only
one of the Blythe children without ambition; Rilla, according to her mother, “ ‘has no
serious ideals at all – her sole aspiration seems to be to have a good time.’ ”227 Quite
the opposite of the young Anne Shirley, Rilla seems an unlikely choice of heroine for
the novel which is to end the Anne series, at least at first. Rilla is concerned with
growing up, with going to her first dance, and with finding her first real beau, but all
this changes when war breaks out in Europe and her brothers and male friends rush
off to the fight. The war is the cause of chaos in Rilla’s quiet life and the site of the
narrative chaos which defines this final novel of the series.
Rilla of Ingleside is a narrative defined by chaos, a narrative written by chaotic
events in a chaotic disordering of time and progress. This final novel, like its
predecessors, concerns itself with the past, but, unlike the other novels in the series,
the past is only recollected, rather than returned to. When Rilla’s oldest brother, Jem,
announces that he wants to enlist for the army, Anne and Gilbert both think “of that
other time – the day years ago in the House of Dreams when little Joyce had died,”
recalling the first time death entered their little family.228 As Anne and Susan pack
Jem’s trunk, they reminisce about Jem’s first word, “mo’er,” and Anne admits to
Susan, “ ‘if I hadn’t gone that night, twenty-one years ago, and taken up my baby
This choice is a deliberate attempt on Montgomery’s part to finally end the Anne novels, to which she had
been unsuccessful for the duration of several instalments. As she records in her journal on August 24, 1920: “Today I wrote the last chapter of ‘Rilla of Ingleside.’ I don’t like the title. It is the choice of my publishers. I wanted
to call it ‘Rilla-My-Rilla’ or at least ‘Rilla Blythe.’ The book is fairly good. It is the last of the Anne series. I am
done with Anne forever – I swear it as a dark and deadly vow.” In: Journals 2:390.
227
Montgomery, L[ucy] M[aud]. Rilla of Ingleside. 1921. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. 7.
* Note: I will hereafter refer to this novel by the abbreviation RI.
228
Ibid. 42
226
85
when he cried for me I couldn’t face tomorrow,’ ” the day of Jem’s departure.229 When
Kenneth Ford comes to bid Rilla goodbye before he, too, leaves for the war, Susan
recalls “ ‘the old days in the House of Dreams when Kenneth’s mother and father
were courting and Jem was a little baby and you were not born or thought of,’ ” but
does not recall how the knowledge of Dick Moore’s death had made it possible.230
The past is recollected, but not repeated or returned to; the past is a closed chapter to
be examined from a distance. When Rilla organizes a war wedding for Miranda
Pryor and Joe Milgrave, Anne recalls the “ ‘twenty-four years since I was a bride at
old Green Gables – the happiest bride that ever was’ ” as she hands her old veil to
Miranda to wear.231 It is not one of Anne’s own daughters being married, and the
reference to her former home as “old Green Gables” emphasizes the distance
between the past and the present, the non-repetition of the event of Anne’s wedding.
The past is something which is thought of, dreamed of, recollected, recalled, but not
repeated, relived, re-experienced or re-turned. When Rilla’s war-baby Jims asks her
why yesterdays can’t come back, Rilla simply replies that “ ‘yesterdays never come
back, little Jims – and the todays are dark with clouds – and we dare not think about
the tomorrows.’ ”232
It is the tomorrows, however, which send the narrative into a temporal chaos.
Rilla of Ingleside is the only novel in the series to be preoccupied with the future, as
opposed to the present or past, and the novel in which the progress towards ends is
most clearly defined. It is the character of Miss Gertrude Oliver, the teacher who
boards at Ingleside, who first brings the future into the present, upsetting the
temporality of the narrative, when she has an “odd” dream:
“I was standing on the veranda steps, here at Ingleside, looking down over the fields
of the Glen. All at once, far in the distance, I saw a long, silvery, glistening wave
breaking over them. It came nearer and nearer – just a succession of little white waves
like those that break on the sandshore sometimes. The Glen was being swallowed up.
I thought, ‘Surely the waves will not come near Ingleside’ – but they came nearer and
229
Ibid. 54
Ibid. 139
231
Ibid. 158
232
Ibid. 227
230
86
nearer – so rapidly – before I could move or call they were breaking right at my feet –
and everything was gone – there was nothing but a waste of stormy water where the
Glen had been. I tried to draw back – and I saw that the edge of my dress was wet
with blood – and I woke – shivering.”233
Miss Oliver’s dream is, of course, a prediction of the war which is to come even to
Ingleside, but it is also an examination of the movement of narrative in ending. The
movement suggests destruction, the future encroaching upon the present, the present
which is always becoming the future. Death and destruction approach Ingleside, as
the ending seems to approach the narrative which is already ending. It is the
narrative which is moving, Ingleside which moves into the future, not the future
which comes to it, the ending which comes from the future into the present, and Miss
Oliver’s uncanny prediction of the future is the first sign of a narrative becoming
aware of its own ending. For the first time in the Anne series, ending is
acknowledged as a non-temporal and perpetual activity of narrative, ending is
identified as aevum. The act of speculation confuses the temporality of the novel, the
future intruding on the present confuses the natural order of events traditional to the
female Bildungsroman, which Rilla of Ingleside could be identified as.
The future intrudes on Rilla’s present to upset her life when, on a donation
canvassing trip for the Junior Red Cross, she walks into the Anderson house and
finds a dead mother, a drunken relative and a wailing, dirty newborn. Rilla, despite
her dislike of children, is unable to leave the baby behind for the orphanage to take
charge of until its father returns (if ever) from the war, and impulsively takes it home
with her in a soup tureen. Fifteen years old and unmarried, yet far from being an old
maid, Rilla becomes a mother to the first Glen St. Mary victim of the war. When Rilla
returns home with the baby, Susan is “for once in her life so completely floored that
she had not a word to say.”234 Rilla, deciding to keep the baby and learning to love it,
becomes an adult in a reversal of the traditional process of adulthood and
motherhood. When Rilla, almost a year later, asks Susan to make a wedding-cake,
the latter confusedly wonders whether Rilla, who “without any warning [...] brought
233
234
Ibid. 19
Ibid. 64
87
her a war-baby” is “now, with equal suddenness, going to produce a husband.” 235 By
this point in the narrative, the disorder of events is taken for granted, and only the
suddenness of their occurrence is experienced as strange.
As the future in the present is accepted by the characters, the non-linearity of
the narrative, the distortion of temporality, comes to constitute the natural movement
of the narrative, the natural movement towards the ends. As the unusual movement
of the narrative begins to form the accepted detour to the traditional path, the
narrative indicates that there is “[n]o Weg without Umweg: the detour does not
overtake the road, but constitutes it, breaks open the path.”236 The future does not
overtake the present, but constitutes it, breaks open the traditional narrative path.
The narrative, driven by the future, moves towards the future; the narrative, driven
by ending, moves towards the ending. It is Walter, the Blythe child most poetic in
nature, who recognizes this movement for what it is and how it functions. Walter,
talking with Rilla about Jem’s departure, admits that it is not death of which he is
afraid, but of “ ‘the pain that might come before death – it wouldn’t be so bad to die
and have it over – but to keep on dying!’ ”237 It is ending which hurts; the ending is
much to be preferred to the action of ending.
Before continuing with a further analysis of Walter’s awareness of Ends, ends
and ending, it is necessary to look at what happens to the Ends in Rilla of Ingleside.
The conflation of weddings and funerals which has been the site of narrative
interpretation in the previous seven novels is absent from the last, since there is no
longer any need for them. Already in Anne of Ingleside the conflation of weddings and
funerals is being replaced by death alone, and, specifically, the repetition of death.
While Rainbow Valley repeats the conflation of weddings and funerals, Rilla of
Ingleside is concerned only with death, and the repetition thereof. Walter’s admission
that “ ‘to keep on dying’ ” is his greatest fear underscores the fact that war is about
dying, not about death itself. In narrative, also, death-becoming is more significant
than being-dead; ending is more significant than the ending. The Ends represented by
the conflation of weddings and funerals in the first seven novels of the Anne series
235
Ibid. 157
Derrida 284
237
RI 46
236
88
are merely markers for the process of ending, markers which, rather than focusing
attention on ending, obscure ending as narrative process, ending as narrative itself.
The war wedding which Rilla organizes is the only distraction from the self-reflexive
examination of ending in the novel, an End which is “ludicrous” with “Miranda and
Joe so lachrymose and commonplace.”238 The only End the novel produces is cast off
as disappointing, a “diversionary tactic” which only serves to underline that the
narrative is (about) ending.239
As a self-reflexive examination of ending, the narrative of Rilla of Ingleside
devotes many of its pages to Walter Blythe, Rilla’s favorite brother and the family
poet, the child who takes most clearly after Anne. Despite his fear of pain and
ugliness, Walter enlists for the army, and is soon sent to the front. When Gilbert tells
Rilla that Walter has been killed in action, Rilla “crumple[s] up in a pitiful little heap
of merciful unconsciousness in his arms.”240 Some weeks after Walter’s death, a letter
comes from the dead, written the night before the charge during which he was shot.
Realizing that “[i]t is a strange thing to read a letter after the writer is dead,” Rilla
takes the letter with her to Rainbow Valley, where she feels “that Walter, of the
glorious gift and the splendid ideals, still lived, with just the same gift and just the
same ideals.”241 Walter writes that he isn’t planning to write that night, but that, “
‘somehow I feel as if I must write you tonight.’ ”242 In his letter, Walter retells the
story of his vision of the Pied Piper in Rainbow Valley, and how, last night, he saw
the Piper once again: “ ‘I had seen him – and I knew what it meant – I knew that I was
among those who followed him.’ ”243 In one of the most interesting passages of the
novel, Walter continues,
“Rilla, the Piper will pipe me ‘west’ tomorrow. I feel sure of this. And Rilla, I’m not
afraid. When you hear the news, remember that. I’ve won my freedom here – freedom
from all fear. I shall never be afraid of anything again – not of death – nor of life, if,
after all, I am to go on living. And life, I think, would be the harder of the two to face –
238
Ibid. 161
Charlesley 140
240
RI 188
241
Ibid. 190
242
Ibid. 190
243
Ibid. 191
239
89
for it could never be beautiful for me again. [...]Yes, I’m glad I came, Rilla. [...] It’s the
fate of mankind. That is what we’re fighting for. And we shall win – never for a
moment doubt that, Rilla. For it isn’t only the living who are fighting – the dead are
fighting too. Such an army cannot be defeated.”244
Walter, knowing he will die, is writing from the past in the present tense, addressed
to the future. The letter, because of the event which happens between the writing and
the reading, situates narrative in the aevum, that which can be both temporal and
eternal. The generally strong and confident language which Walter uses contrasts
with the parts in which he discusses the opposition life-death. Farrell explains that
since “the living have yet to experience death, their language necessarily describes
the event in tentative and speculative terms.”245 But it is not death which is described
in tentative terms, since Walter expresses confidence in his impending death (“I feel
sure of this”) and in his acceptance of it (“I’m not afraid”); it is life which is tentative,
speculative, to be feared. Death is certain, narrative ending is certain; it is life and
progress which are the unstable elements, that which we cannot control, that which
is controlled by death and ending. Life and progress are the différants of the différance
inherent in dying and ending, the différants are the Umweg on the Weg.
Walter’s letter identifies the proper différance and différants of narrative, in
narrative form. This self-reflexive narrative (the letter), contained in a self-reflexive
narrative (the novel), contained in the larger narrative (the series) examines the
workings of narrative from the point of creation, the point of writing. The
speculation which Walter highlights amongst the speculations of the narrative of
Rilla of Ingleside is not only the conception of speculation,
but also the operation of his writing, the scene (of that) which he makes by writing
what he writes here, that which makes him do it, and that which he makes to do, that
which makes him write and that which he makes – or lets – to write. To make to do, to
make write, to let do, or to let write: the syntax of these operations is not given. 246
244
Ibid. 191
Farrell 12
246
Derrida 284
245
90
The narrative which analyzes narrative also constructs itself, constructs narrative, by
analyzing. The acceptance of temporal order-disorder in the letter, in the narrative,
further complicates the analysis-construction of the narrative, which analyzesconstructs not only itself, but the narrative of the novel as a whole, the narrative of all
the other novels in the series. If a narrative is simultaneously analyzing and
constructing (itself), it is always undoing (itself), always ending so that it can begin
again. “ ‘It isn’t only the living who are fighting – the dead are fighting, too’ ”: it isn’t
only the narrative constructing-deconstructing itself – the narrative also constructsdeconstructs all the others. By recognizing aevum, by allowing various temporalities
and eternity to occur self-consciously, the narrative is not only ending, it is the ending.
Not only Rilla of Ingleside is the ending, the entire series is the ending, both ending
and the ending, already the ending as it is ending. Ending is its own ending, “[i]t
constructs-deconstructs itself according to an interminable detour (Umweg): that it
describes ‘itself,’ writes and unwrites.”247
Rilla of Ingleside ends at Ingleside, the war having ended, Jem and Shirley
returned, Walter in an unmarked grave in Flanders, and little Jims back with his
father and his new bride. Susan, happy the war is over, announces she will take a
‘honeymoon’ to celebrate the peace: “ ‘Yes, Mrs. Doctor, dear, a honeymoon. [...] I
shall never be able to get a husband but I am not going to be cheated out of
everything and a honeymoon I intend to have.’ ”248 In a repetition of Anne and
Gilbert, Jem and Faith will be married after Jem completes his course in medicine,
while Faith teaches. Rilla finds herself without future prospects, until Kenneth Ford
returns to visit her at Ingleside, and asks her if she is his “ ‘Rilla-my-Rilla,’ ” to which
Rilla replies, with a sudden return of her childhood lisp, “ ‘Yeth.’ ”249 These various
endings in the novel lead to an ending, an ending which has always been there in
ending. The narrative, always ending, always the ending, “advances without
advancing, without advancing itself, without ever advancing anything that it does
not immediately take back, for the time of a detour, without ever positing anything
247
Ibid. 269
RI 271
249
Ibid. 277
248
91
which remains in its position.”250 Narrative ending, the ending, “repeats itself, it
illustrates only the repetition of that very thing [...] which finally will not let anything
be done without it, except repetition itself.”251 It is thus that Rilla repeats her
childhood lisp at the ending of the narrative which repeats itself again, repeats the
series again, repeats ending the ending again. The narrative, the series folds back
onto itself again, the ending in ending, the ending in beginning.
250
251
Derrida 294
Ibid. 294
92
Conclusion
At the beginning of this research, I asked the broad question: How does the
narrative of the Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery function? In the past
seven chapters, I have sought to answer this question, and the additional questions
of how this narrative relates to the traditional female romance novel and what role
the wedding plays in this narrative. Throughout this analysis, I have treated the texts
as both narrative construct and the producers of narrative, as analytical object and as
theory. The results are remarkable and entirely new to the field of ‘Anne’
scholarship.
By treating this analysis as an inquiry which reflects on itself as it develops,
some interesting points come to the surface of the texts which have been hidden or at
least ignored by scholarship. In order to examine the functioning of narrative in the
series, it was necessary to depart from the forms of analysis most often applied to the
Anne of Green Gables series, and to adopt the manner of interacting with a text
proposed by Jacques Derrida in his study of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The
texts now appear to be much more interesting from a non-feminist analytical point of
view. The narrative of Anne series is upheld by what Derrida identifies as différance,
which serves several purposes in the text. Firstly, the text produces différance in the
adoption of several alternatives simultaneously, which together uphold the narrative
of the novels. Each moment of apparent stasis or return is also a moment of
movement or development, thus making possible an escape from narrative deadlock
in the cycles of repetition to which Montgomery resorts in order to prevent her
heroine being married off, as in Anne of the Island. The différants produced through
différance in the narrative spin out towards the traditional happy (marriage) or
unhappy (death) ending, as, for example, Anne’s différants in the form of old maids
Miss Lavendar and Miss Cornelia and baby Joy prevent their différant Anne from her
end, thereby keeping the narrative which centers on Anne moving.
In order to keep the narrative moving and developing, the actions of Anne’s
narrative différants produce a situation which Derrida designates as the arrêt de mort,
93
a simultaneous condemnation to and suspension of death or something similar. In
the case of the Anne novels, this condemnation and suspension relate to the
traditional happy and unhappy endings, marriage and death, as well as the ending
of narrative itself, which threatens to stop the development of the heroine and her
story. This condemnation to and suspension of ending gives movement and direction
to the narrative, and is largely responsible for how the narrative functions in the
Anne of Green Gables series. The traditional happy and unhappy endings are in
Montgomery’s narrative reclassified as Ends, marriage and death which most often
occur at the beginning or in the middle of the novels, and in the middle of the series
narrative as a whole. The narrative derives its movement from the ends towards
which it moves, the ends beyond the Ends which mark the overall development of
Anne’s story, the ends, necessarily plural because of différance, which will replace the
traditional endings in Anne’s development or Bildung. This narrative movement,
which is driven by ends simultaneously produces the Ends it encounters along the
way, and the ends by which it is driven. This narrative movement, designated as
ending, is finally responsible for both creating and upholding the narrative which in
turn creates it as a prerequisite to narrative. Narrative can only move or develop
when it is ending; without ending, there is no narrative, but without narrative, there
is also no ending. It is a complex interdependence on which the narrative of the Anne
series depends for its existence.
This interdependence of narrative and ending, mediated by difference, is
further complicated by the concept of narrative time which becomes increasingly
sophisticated as the series progresses. By the fifth novel of the series, Anne’s House of
Dreams, it becomes clear that the movement of narrative has a more complicated
element of time than the traditional telos of the Bildungsroman. The narrative time of
the latter novels of the series, and also, in effect, the novels which precede them, can
be designated aevum, a term suggested by Frank Kermode in his work on endings,
The Sense of an Ending. Aevum, encompassing both temporal and eternal time, gives
support to a narrative which is always already ending. The temporal element of
aevum encompasses the Ends and the movement towards the ends, while the eternal
element accounts for ending. As aevum comes to be identified in and by the narrative,
94
the narrative becomes more conscious of itself and how it functions. The novel in
which aevum is first directly encountered is also the novel in which The Life-Book of
Captain Jim examines the construction and movement of narrative. This selfconscious examination of narrative is expanded in Anne of Ingleside in Anthony
Mitchell’s obituary, but it is not until the final installment of the series, Rilla of
Ingleside, that this self-conscious examination of narrative also becomes self-reflexive.
The self-conscious, self-reflexive narrative that is Rilla of Ingleside finally turns
narrative back in on itself in ending the process of ending by closing the narrative of
the series. Ending is its own ending, it “constructs-deconstructs itself according to an
interminable detour,” the narrative with all its Ends.252
The narrative which is always ending, which is self-conscious and selfreflexive and finally folds back into itself cannot be considered a Bildungsroman in
any case. The relation of the Anne of Green Gables series to the traditional female
romance or Bildungsroman is at best superficial; once the narrative is analyzed as has
been done in this thesis, it is impossible to consolidate the text to the limiting
confines of the category Bildungsroman. There are most certainly elements of Bildung
represented in the texts, and some characters, such as Diana Barry and Leslie Moore,
do indeed conform to the expectations of Bildung, but the series as a whole cannot be
considered a Bildungsroman, nor can any one installment of the series.
Now to answer the final question posed at the outset of this research, and the
reason for the conception of this thesis: What role does the wedding play in the
narrative of the Anne of Green Gables series? The wedding, as suggested in the
introduction to this analysis, forms the site of many of the most interesting narrative
developments in the novels. The wedding is performed at instances where
alternatives to marriage are presented, such as Anne and Diana’s friendship and
Miss Lavendar’s old maid tea-party, and as such becomes the site for the selfconscious production of différance. The wedding, that traditional happy ending, also
conflates with funerals, the traditional unhappy ending, most notably in Anne of
Windy Poplars, in order to keep an otherwise static narrative moving. Weddings also
function as Ends, especially for Anne’s différants, and (temporarily) dispose of
252
Derrida 269
95
marriage as an option for Anne as she moves towards ends other than marriage.
Weddings form part of the “interminable detour” which is ending, a role which is all
the more appropriate for their liminal status as transitional period between marriage
and consummation. What is interesting for the purposes of this research, and what I
did not realize before conducting it, is that funerals play an equally important, if not
more important, narrative role in the novels. In addition to serving as Ends and sites
for différance, death and funerals are also the site for the self-reflexive, self-conscious
examination of narrative. Death is more important than marriage, the funeral more
interesting than the wedding from a narrative perspective, yet another reason why
the Anne of Green Gables series cannot be classified as a Bildungsroman.
With this thesis, I hope to have given a new impulse to the study of the novels
of L.M. Montgomery, as well as other novels which have traditionally been classified
as the female Bildungsroman. While the current feminist and historicist critiques of
these texts are interesting and certainly overdue, I believe that they uncover only the
smallest points of interest in these texts which have been traditionally neglected or
underappreciated. What I hope readers of this thesis will come away with is a new or
reinvigorated interest in the works of L.M. Montgomery, and a sense of the
importance of the study of the workings of narrative. While I have chosen the Anne of
Green Gables series as the object and partner of my analysis, I believe that this method
of treating texts as both object and interactive partner is one which can be applied to
all literary (and many non-literary) texts with surprising and interesting effect. I hope
that, at the very least, readers of this thesis will come away with a sense of
appreciation for the method which Derrida already suggested in the 1980s, and with
the intention to try it sometime, if only for themselves.
As for myself, I am mostly looking forward to my own wedding, despite all
the talk of funerals and ending.
96
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