Monica

Emily Byrd Starr! Although I have (for the most part) enjoyed my wander through L. M. Montgomery's bibliography, a little part of me has been waiting impatiently to get to Emily of New Moon, and I have at last arrived.

Emily of New Moon is L. M. Montgomery's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl. Emily is a proud, sensitive child, stubborn and intense and impelled by a passionate need to write her strange fancies. Until the age of eleven, she lives in near-seclusion with her dreamy consumptive father.

But after he dies, she goes to live with her long-dead mother's much-older sisters - plus Cousin Jimmy, who is considered not all there, in part because he composes poetry. Doesn't write it down, mind, just keeps it in his head, and recites it in the fall when he is boiling the pigs' potatoes, turning them round and round in a vast cauldron under the stars.

This is perhaps Montgomery's most gothic novel, or rather her most gothic trilogy. There is a vein of darkness under the bright and sparkling surface of her books (and sometimes not too far under the surface), and I think that contrast is part of the reason why they have endured when so many other books have faded. This is the book where it breaks closest to the surface.

Some of this is sheer aesthetic: this is a book with a lot of night scenes, Emily running with the Wind Woman in the gloaming, her first glimpse of the shadowy New Moon kitchen, the candles that are the only light allowed at tradition-bound New Moon. But it's also there in the scene where Emily's relatives draw lots to see who has to take her, because none of them want her - except Aunt Laura and Cousin Jimmy, who don't count, because Aunt Elizabeth is boss at New Moon and everyone knows it. In Aunt Elizabeth's none too subtle domestic tyranny; in the fact that Cousin Jimmy is not all there because years before, when they were children, Aunt Elizabeth pushed him down the well.

It's there in the story of Ilse Burnley, too, Emily's best friend, similarly imaginative but imbued with a fearful temper: fire to Emily's ice. Although Ilse is not at all a pattern young lady, she's allowed to play with Emily because everyone knows that the reason she's like that is that her father neglects her disgracefully. Ilse's father can't be bothered with her, because when she was a baby, her mother ran away with another man.

Or so, at least, everyone thinks. When Emily learns the story, she's tormented by the idea that Ilse's mother could have abandoned her baby. Desperately ill with a fever, she has a vision: Ilse's mother fell down an old well! In her delirium, she insists that the well be searched, and to calm her Aunt Elizabeth promises to have it done - whereupon the searchers find Mrs. Burnley's skeleton.

Emily's second sight will be a running theme in these books, and it fascinates me because these are otherwise perfectly realistic novels. I grew more interested still when littlerhymes and I read Mary Grant Bruce's Billabong books (published between 1910 and 1943; almost exactly contemporary to L. M. Montgomery's own career), another set of realistic novels in which the heroine (Norah) sometimes saves the day with her second sight. Now it's clear in both cases that this ability is a little uncanny, and does push at the bounds of realism - but not so much that it actually breaks them and pushes the books into another genre, which I think it would do today.

Another thing that I find striking, in terms of cultural shifts, is that Ilse is such a spitfire. In college I did my thesis project about American girls' literature between 1890 and 1915 (Emily is of course a bit later, but still close enough for government work), and a lot of the secondary literature makes a big to-do about how so many of these books are anti-feministly focused on teaching girls to rein in their tempers, but I've always found it more striking just how much temper these characters are allowed to display in the first place, and how generally sympathetic the books are toward their characters' fury. We love Anne Shirley not despite but because she breaks a slate over Gilbert Blythe's head. Ilse Burnley is lovable in part because she jumps up and down shrieking that Emily is a "proud, stuck-up, conceited, top-lofty biped."

This is the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideal: a temper that flares up hot and dies away to nothing. This is not the ideal today, when you are either supposed to have no temper at all (which is how we are actually supposed to act most of the time) or to be enraged exclusively by injustice (an internet ideal which would probably still get you 500 years of detention if you acted on it at school by breaking a slate over Gilbert Blythe's head).

To be honest, I'm not sure that these critics have really, actually thought through what they are saying. Do they truly in their heart of hearts think that the world would be a better place if Anne Shirley never learned to control her temper, and at age thirty-one was still breaking slates over Gilbert Blythe's head? Is it bad that Amy March learns her lesson after burning Jo's book, and never again vents her rage by burning other people's prized possessions? It's all very well to wax starry-eyed about "women's rage," but at the end of the day I suspect that anyone who claims to be unequivocally in favor must also believe, at the bottom of their heart, that the poor little dears can't do any lasting damage in their anger.

This is not a mistake L. M. Montgomery ever makes. She knows very well what damage was wrought when Aunt Elizabeth in a fit of temper pushed Cousin Jimmy down the well.