Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  When Maud arrived home from Malpeque, Miss Izzie Robinson was still the local teacher, but she was boarding elsewhere. Maud was not allowed to return to school. Her grandmother, desperate for things to occupy Maud, and obviously wanting her granddaughter to develop the skills of an accomplished young woman, arranged for her to take organ lessons. (Home organs were the rage: newspaper ads promoted them as something every cultured woman should learn to play.) Lucy Macneill somehow nudged Hugh John, who finally had a well-paying patronage job out west, to pay a portion of the cost of the organ and help with the cost of music lessons for his daughter. As gifted as Maud was, music was not among her artistic talents, but for the summer and fall of 1888, music lessons kept her occupied—no small feat, given her restless energy and her friction with her grandfather.

  Maud suffered from being kept out of school. School was the métier of her success, and she missed the fellowship of her peers. She was embarrassed by community gossip that turned against her grandparents (mostly her grandfather). She had been caught in the crossfire following the year-long feud between her sharp-tongued grandfather and Miss Robinson, and was left feeling helpless and vulnerable and confused. In that crucial period when children should be learning their strengths, Maud was battered by these family tensions and felt humiliated within the community.

  Quite early in her life, Maud developed an ability to abstract herself. This was a coping mechanism as well as a defence against her grandfather’s criticisms. Those who remembered her as a child said she could be somewhat “uncanny” or “otherworldly.” In local legend, and by her own account, she was remembered as “different” from the other children—sensitive, sometimes remote, often moody, but also capable of “stirring things up.” Like so many children who are buffeted between intermittent approval and unpredictable criticism, she did not learn to be at ease with herself at this crucial stage of life. Self-doubts would plague her all her life.

  Izzie Robinson was not the only source of tension within Maud’s family in 1888. In her mid-thirties Maud recorded her memories of her Uncle John F. (John Franklin Macneill):

  His manner to me, and indeed to most children, except those of whose parents he had a salutary awe, was brutal, domineering and insulting.… He had a remarkably harsh voice and on calm summer evenings when he raged at some of his children he could be heard all over the settlement to the amusement of the dwellers therein.… Yet uncle John was … intelligent, sober, and industrious. But his traits of selfishness, bad temper and tyranny overrode everything else.… Had Uncle John married a woman with a bit of temper too I believe he would have been a much better and more agreeable man because he could control his temper when he had to. Like all bullies he was a coward at heart and never attempted to domineer over a person who could and did confront him boldly.… But Aunt Ann Maria was a placid, smiling, good tempered animal.… She fostered all the worst elements in Uncle John’s nature by truckling to him to his face and then taking her own way by guile and deceit behind his back and bringing her family to do the same. (January 28, 1912)

  That same summer, Grandfather Macneill had a terrible altercation with his son. The trouble likely arose from dynamics between father and son. Both could be very charming in company, but each took offence easily, and both could be explosive. Maud recounts that Alexander Macneill and John F. did not speak to each other all through the summer and into the fall of 1888, in spite of attending the same church and being active in its management structure. The distance between the two houses was so small that the anger between father and son made the air palpable with tension.

  The entry about her Uncle John F., written in 1912 after Maud had left the village of Cavendish, is one of the most powerful condemnations of her relatives in Maud’s ten journals. Maud and her Uncle John’s children had often played together. But around this time, the relationship between Maud and her next-door cousin, Lucy (Uncle John F.’s daughter), began to corrode, probably as a result of what each family was saying about the other family behind closed doors. Finally, Maud had a falling out with Lucy, writing in her journals that she found Lucy to be a “false friend.” Yet Lucy Macneill (later Simpson) was remembered with great affection for her wit and merriment by people who knew her over her lifetime. This was not the only time that family tensions poisoned Maud’s recollection of her early life.31

  These passages highlight an important feature of Maud’s temperament: people who did not meet her high standards were condemned and discarded. And once she turned against someone, she was without charity forever. In rural, nineteenth-century Canada (and many other places), a rigid perspective was the norm, with “Good” and “Evil” polarized. The nineteenth century did not generally cultivate an “open mind,” one ready to consider all sides of a topic. The judgmental mind of her era accentuated her emotional temperament, and a person who felt as deeply as Maud did not soon forget having been hurt, nor did she forgive.32

  Maud’s feeling for the place where she was raised was one of the most enduring loves of her life. It was the site of intense pains and pleasures. Although her adolescent years held tension, her childhood was vibrant and adventuresome. She would immortalize Cavendish in her fiction, making it an idyllic setting for her heroines. As previously mentioned, the picturesque “Green Gables” was based on the home of her elderly cousins, David Macneill and his sister Margaret, a house which Maud often visited by walking through her beloved Lovers’ Lane. However, the spiritual centre of the fictional “Green Gables” came from her grandparents’ home. “Anne,” like Maud, wanted to be valued in spite of the fact she was a girl.

  Maud was beginning to see herself hobbled at every turn by gender, as well as by the general restrictions of nineteenth-century attitudes that devalued girls and women. Her anger was expressed in rebellion. Although Maud always disliked open confrontation, adversity toughened her determination; by puberty, she was already developing the steel will that would propel her to success.

  Feminine role models for Maud

  Maud’s grandmother was one role model for her, and soon a teacher would appear who would become both model and mentor. In September 1889, the Cavendish trustees hired another female teacher, Miss Hattie Gordon. Miss Gordon had probably heard about the trouble Izzie Robinson had suffered with Alexander Macneill and she wisely boarded elsewhere. And, equally wisely, she started out by making fast friends with bright, young Maud Montgomery. Maud, now age fourteen, thrived under her tutelage.

  Miss Gordon was from the same branch of the Scottish Gordons (from Perthshire) as the Reverend Charles W. Gordon, also known by his pen name “Ralph Connor,” who would become a best-selling Canadian author with the publication in 1902 of Glengarry School Days. The departure of Hattie’s ancestors (her grandmother was Christina MacLaren) from Scotland is mentioned by Sir Walter Scott in a footnote to Rob Roy, and Christina’s great-grandfather figures as the original of “Pate-in-Peril” in Scott’s Redgauntlet. Hattie’s brother was the internationally famous American archaeologist Dr. George Byron Gordon, F.R.G.S., of the University of Pennsylvania. Maud does not mention these connections in her journals, and it is not clear if she was aware of all of them (beyond Dr. George Byron Gordon, who appears in her scrapbooks), but she does describe in detail her great affection for the gifted Miss Gordon.

  Miss Gordon brought fun back into the schoolroom—and normality into Maud’s life. Maud’s confidence would develop throughout the year as Miss Gordon praised her elocutionary and writing abilities. Energized by Miss Gordon’s praise of her writing assignments at school, Maud began again to keep a genuine private diary of her life. She burned the derivative and affected “Dere Diry” that she had been keeping since age nine. When she began her new diary at age fourteen, she had little thought of it as a shaped document she would keep all her life. However, as Maud recorded school events and developing relationships, the diary began to take on a life of its own.

  In Victorian times, keeping a diary was a trend among many middle- and upper-cl
ass women (and girls), who were normally confined to a life of narrow domesticity. It gave them an outlet in a culture that largely denied females a public voice and public life. Maud began using her diary as a way of hearing her own voice, as a “listening friend.” It could take her into a world where she could create out of herself, around herself, and for herself. Later, when fictional “Emily of New Moon” is told that she is a little girl of no importance to anyone, she makes the assertion—certainly startling for the time—that she is important to herself. Beginning a new journal at age fourteen, using her real voice instead of the fake persona of a “bad boy,” is a sign of Maud’s increasing confidence, that she was important enough to have literary aspirations, even if she was a girl.

  Writing about a life is many steps removed from actually living it. The act of writing entails the shaping of raw experience. A diary puts the “self” at the core, and the raw experience of life is shaped around this self. Maud’s extended family, her religion, and her community’s social attitudes all fed into the inner person who lay at the core of her diary. And Maud’s reading helped her shape the ways she described her experience.

  There was lots of time for Maud to read and think, for winters were long and cold. Given the cost of fuel (for both lamps and heating), it was normal practice to keep warm by going to bed after supper, when the fire was dying down. Lying in the dark in the icy farmhouse, warm under her blankets and comforter, Maud could imagine herself as part of the stories she read. Soon her diary began to reflect this reading and dreaming experience, supplementing the reports of the day’s doings at school.

  As she entered adolescence, Maud developed an insatiable habit of reading, and she found models for womanhood in what she read. The book that imprinted itself most deeply on her adolescent style and imagination was Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s mystical novel Zanoni (1842). It is a secularized and richly romanticized allegory, with a very different focus and style from Pilgrim’s Progress, the book she read so many times as a child. In Zanoni, the principal characters are looking for mystical purity, truth, goodness, and learning (rather than for Bunyan’s straightforward salvation and entry into Heaven). The “ideal” life in Zanoni is something that only men have the strength to achieve; women would have balked before the “Dweller on the Threshold” and the “Terror.”

  Zanoni’s narrative focuses on a passionate love story—not of man for God, but of man for woman. The beautiful Viola has an extraordinary power of evoking emotion through her musical gifts. These gifts attract Zanoni, a handsome and mysterious wanderer, a member of the ancient Rosicrucians, and a mystical figure able to move in and out of human time. He gives up his immortality in order to marry Viola, whose haunting songs he loves. But in the end, misguided and weak Viola betrays him—after all, she is both human and woman. Both die, and their baby is left untended in a hostile world. (An orphaned baby was a tragedy that Maud responded to with passion and pity.) Typical of Victorian fiction and art, Zanoni associates men with the spiritual realm and women with the physical one.

  And the notion of a world “beyond the veil,” a mystic world of spirituality, was fascinating to Maud. Zanoni gave her a lush and ornate poetic language for expressing her own imaginative interest in an alternate world, shrouded in mystery. Echoes of Zanoni appear constantly throughout her adult writing, both in phrasing and in images.

  As with much nineteenth-century fiction, Zanoni contains conflicting messages about women: although weak and easily led, they can also be unusually talented, like Viola. They are vulnerable to male exploitation, but one character has a significant line: “Heaven did not make the one sex to be the victim of the other” (Zanoni, Chapter 6, p. 353). In the nineteenth-century world, with increasing debate over women’s roles, this was a powerful statement. This book helped Maud formulate her idea of female selfhood.

  Maud fantasized herself as Zanoni’s dream-lover, not failing him, as weak Viola does. Rather, in her dreams, she would have the strength to be the first woman to pass the “Ordeal”; she would be admitted to that select group of men living purely in the mind. She determined to choose the life of the mind over a life devoted to earthly pleasures. (These ideals were compatible with the teachings of austere Scottish Presbyterianism and other puritanical Protestant religions.)

  But there was a dark side to her fascination with Zanoni. Maud shivered over Viola’s fear of being “marked out for some strange and preternatural doom; as if I were singled out from my kind.” Maud identified with this fear— she had sensed from an early age that she was somehow set apart from other children by her intelligence, her greater power of imagining and of expressing herself, and by her passionate, volatile nature. (Later in life, this motif of being “marked”—not unlike the Presbyterian concept of Predestination—would increasingly haunt her in destructive ways.)

  Around her fourteenth year, Maud encountered another book that fed her adolescent fantasies: Friedrich Heinrich Karl La Motte Fouqué’s Undine (written in 1811, translated into English in 1818). Undine is a “mer-child” exchanged at birth and raised by a human fisherman and his wife. (The idea of non-human and sexually alluring females emerging from the sea was prevalent in the oral tradition of many countries, and fed into the written literature. These beings, called “kelpies,” “mermaids,” and so on, reinforced the idea that females tempted males.) The little female changeling in Undine is a child of extraordinary beauty and charm, but she lacks, as children from the world of faerie do, a human soul. As a result, Undine is without the ability to feel emotion, which makes her capricious, unpredictable, and self-absorbed. Human men are drawn to her, not realizing that she comes from the sea. Her form is completely human (unlike Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid, who is part fish). Undine entices a knight to marry her in order to gain a soul. It is a magic and happy transformation, achieved through love. Maud loved this book, with its romanticized ending (much happier than Zanoni’s).

  The dualistic worlds of Pilgrim’s Progress and Zanoni reappear in Undine, and again the protagonists must combat a perilous landscape of evil to progress into a world of good (this, of course, is a very common literary structure). All three books reinforce the idea that there are two kinds of time (eternal time and human time) and two modes of human existence (spiritual and material). In different ways, they all depict the world as a struggle between Good and Evil. And in each, women are the weaker sex. But in Undine there is more potential for women: given the chance to acquire a soul, a female can become powerful and good. Maud liked this message.

  Her imagination was greatly inspired by these stories, with their mystic worlds, ethereal creatures, and dream visions. This imaginative realm, reinforced no doubt by the otherworldly look of her native landscape in a rolling fog, could feel as real as the world she actually lived in. Later, in Anne of Green Gables, she would depict in comic mode the interplay between the book world and the real one. Romance is destroyed by sober reality when Anne, playing Tennyson’s fair lily-maid Elaine, sinks into muddy water and nearly drowns when her “bark” springs a leak.

  Early flirtations and gossip

  Between the ages of twelve and sixteen, Maud began to be interested in real flesh-and-blood males. She began to imagine the pleasures of love that she read about in Zanoni and Undine. She was attracted to Nate Lockhart, the Baptist minister’s stepson, and the cleverest boy in the school. They competed in school and writing competitions. He had an added allure: his uncle, who went by the nom de plume of “Pastor Felix,” was a real author who published sentimental verse and essays in the American periodical press. Notes passed between Maud and Nate, schoolyard tongues wagged in jealousy, and Maud kept people guessing about the state of her heart—a lifelong trait. She had learned quite early in life that it was much safer to hide her emotions, which often fluctuated to extremes.

  In childhood Maud had been free to associate with friends in Cavendish, a safe, close-knit, rural community. But as she approached puberty, her grandmother could see that a b
udding young woman with such an impulsive temperament might make mistakes. When young girls were candidates for scandal by virtue of family history, temperament, or class, the entire community watched them carefully. A girl who got herself “talked about” compromised her chances of a decent marriage. Her misbehaviour could also lower a family’s standing in the community, and the Macneills had great pride of family. Maud was lively and witty, with an attractive sparkle. And although she had a petite and girlish figure, rather than the full, voluptuous one that was desirable at the time, her flirtatiousness and spunky wit drew male attention. The Macneills watched closely, prepared to clamp down if too much “hot” Montgomery blood began to appear. She had hitherto enjoyed unsupervised walks in the woods, along Lovers’ Lane, and down to the shore, but as she grew older, her grandmother began to restrict her freedom of movement. A spirited young girl, Maud resisted and rebelled.

  Perhaps Maud’s cousin Lucy told some tales at home about Maud’s behaviour with boys, but whatever Lucy may or may not have said, Maud’s stubbornness, rebelliousness, and flirtations were much discussed within her clan. Her journals do not tell her grandparents’ side of this story, although she admits her aunts and uncles talked about her. Some tales lingered in PEI nearly a century later suggesting that Maud had been somewhat “boy-crazy” and “high-spirited” as a young girl. Adolescents often have a difficult time controlling their impulses and emotions. Naturally, as a high-spirited girl wanting freedom to manage little flirtations, she rebelled against any restriction of her activities.