L. M. Montgomery's Rainbow Valleys by Rita Bode & Lesley D. Clement

Author:Rita Bode & Lesley D. Clement
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2015-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

9

(Re)Locating Montgomery: Prince Edward Island Romance to Southern Ontario Gothic

NATALIE FOREST

On 31 January 1920, in Leaskdale, Ontario, L.M. Montgomery writes in her journal that she is having a “damnable day.” With “bitter cold – 20 below zero weather – and a sharp east wind blowing; a grey wintery world; chilly house,” Montgomery suffers from a headache that “prevent[s] her from indulging in [her] usual solace of imaginary adventures.” Incapable of evoking her usual “power” that allows her to “escape from ‘intolerable reality,’” she decides to work out philosophical questions in fictional conversations with such fore-writers as John Ruskin and Charlotte Brontë. “Taste . . . is the only morality,” Montgomery’s Ruskin declares. “The first and last and closest trial question to any living creature is ‘What do you like?’ Tell me what you like . . . and I’ll tell you what you are.”

Following her list of likes, which are predominantly domestic in nature, Montgomery challenges her imaginary Ruskin to “tell me what I am.” Her words here are enigmatic. Statements such as “I like to be kissed by the right kind of a man” suggest a challenge to the principles that a restrictive domestic environment imposes, but others, such as “I like housecleaning – I do!” carry an unapologetic tone for enjoying her domestic role. Her musings align her with the domestic romance genre with which she has been associated, most prominently, through the series of Anne novels, but her ironic tone and the “numbing greyness and monotonous discomfort” that instigate her philosophical search suggest her sense of a gothic presence in her real rural Leaskdale environment.1 Her need to find herself and her aesthetic interest in nature are indicative of her being influenced by Romanticism, but the “discomfort” that pushes her to examine her individuality tilts her Romantic notions towards what Timothy Findley would later call “Southern Ontario Gothic.”2

“Gothic” is a transient literary term that habitually attaches itself to other genres – Romanticism, Victorianism, horror, erotica, science fiction – as its qualities evolve into what is contemporarily considered “disturbing.” In Gothic, Fred Botting explains that in the nineteenth century, the “clichéd” eighteenth-century gothic conventions of “castles, villains and ghosts . . . continued more as signs of internal states and concepts than of external threats . . . [and] became part of an internalised world of guilt, anxiety, despair, a world of individual transgression interrogating the uncertain bounds of imaginative freedom and human knowledge.”3 Montgomery utilizes elements of both the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic in several of her works, adjusting their inclusion according to her aesthetic intents. When she moved to Leaskdale in 1911, her style was identified with romantic, pastoral environments. Elizabeth Epperly addresses the difficulty in discussing “romance” and Montgomery, seeing her style as a combination of both the popular “romantic” and the literary eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “Romantic,” what she refers to as Montgomery’s “romanticized realism.”4 In “(Re)Producing Canadian Literature,” Holly Pike maintains that “in the 1920s debate over the relative merits of modernist and realist-idealist fiction .

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