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By Gabrielle Ceraldi

Source: The Avonlea Traditions Chronicle, Issue No. 27, Spring 1999.

Was L. M. Montgomery a rebel at heart? Certainly-one good look at The Blue Castle should be enough to convince us of that. The Blue Castle focusses on the long overdue rebellion of twenty-nine-year-old spinster Valancy Stirling.

The vast and interfering Stirling clan controls all aspects of Valancy's life, from her outdated pompadour hairstyle (which she mustn't change for fear of offending her rich Aunt Wellington) to her daily breakfast of oatmeal porridge. Early in the novel, a life-threatening heart condition sets Valancy free from the petty tyranny of her relations, and many rich and satisfying scenes emerge from her newly independent attitude.

Surely L. M. Montgomery often longed to break away from the restricting conventions of her society, as Valancy did. She must have gleaned enormous vicarious enjoyment from the way Valancy flouts social norms, racing around town like a "shameless hussy" in her green-and-crimson dress. But unlike her more daring heroine, L. M. Montgomery herself never completely cast off the shackles of respectability. Was she trapped in a community even more repressive than the Stirling clan? Or is it possible that she was her own worst critic?

In her journals she alludes to the conflict between her "passionate Montgomery blood and the Puritan Macneill conscience" (SELECTED JOURNALS OF L. M. MONTGOMERY I:213). The most significant conflict in her life was not between her rebellious self and an external society, but rather within her own personality. She had passionate longings for truth and love and friendship, yet she was also driven by an extreme sense of duty and fear of public censure.

This fear of criticism is rooted in L. M. Montgomery's early childhood. All her life, she cherished anger and resentment for the countless pinpricks and barbs she endured. As a motherless child, little L. M. Montgomery was fair game for public criticism: "My childish faults and short comings-of which I had plenty-were all detailed to the Macneill uncles and aunts whenever they came to the house...[T]hese aforesaid uncles and aunts arrogated the right to reprove and scold me at their own will and pleasure, as they would never have dared to do had I had parents to resent it." (SJI:301)

Even when such guests departed L. M. Montgomery was not safe from criticism; her grandfather, whom she described as a "stern, domineering, irritable man," was ill-equipped to handle such a sensitive child: "He bruised my childish feelings in every possible way and inflicted on my girlish pride humiliations whose scars are branded into my very soul." (SJI:301)

These early experiences served to form L. M. Montgomery's adult personality: as she had once struggled to please an army of critical relations, she would later strive to live up to the highest standards of duty in order to avoid becoming the subject of public comment.

L. M. Montgomery's sense of duty is in many ways an admirable thing, but unfortunately it seemed to cause her much unhappiness. Although she derived evident enjoyment from her position as a newspaper woman in Halifax, she was willing to give up that job to come home and live with her grandmother. She postponed her marriage and spent more than a decade living a life of petty vexations in a confined social sphere, enduring awful winters of nervous prostration as a result of the emotional and social isolation she experienced.

L. M. Montgomery stood by her grandmother through it all because of her internalized sense of duty: "I try to bear patiently with her in all things," she wrote in 1905, "because I acknowledge the debt of care and shelter she bestowed on me in childhood. But she makes my life hard in a score of petty ways." (SJI:302)

This sense of duty cannot be dismissed as an obligation imposed upon her by the post-Victorian society in which she lived, for L. M. Montgomery was clearly the most dutiful and convention-bound of the Macneill side of her family: "Grandmother has five living children," she observed, "and not one of them makes, or ever has made, any attempt to share the responsibility of her care." (SJI:341) Even in her own day, L. M. Montgomery was unusually conscientious about her obligations and responsibilities.

L. M. Montgomery was bound by convention in less significant matters as well. Like Anne, she often longed to escape the tedium of formal church services in order to worship God by communing with nature, but she knew that she would never actually do such a thing, for fear of wagging tongues. She daydreamed about her ideal wedding, but never supposed that such dreams could come true, resignedly accepting the fact that "supposing I should ever marry I should have to conform to the conventionalities." (SJ 1:312)

Later, as a minister's wife, L. M. Montgomery continued to be tireless in her efforts to "conform to the conventionalities". She characterized the life of a country minister's wife as "a synonym for respectable slavery." (SJ1:321)

Perhaps for her the respectability made the slavery more palatable. Certainly she was nothing if not diligent in her attentiveness to the many social obligations her position placed upon her: she went to countless pie socials and missionary benefits, both to support her husband and to live up to others' expectations of her.

L. M. Montgomery was under no illusions about her own mixed motives: "I am a coward" she confessed in a 1913 journal entry; "I am a slave to old customs and old conventions and old rules." (SJII:121)

Undoubtedly her desire for respectability and high social standing played an enormous role in L. M. Montgomery's support and care for her husband Ewan. Eight years into their marriage, Ewan succumbed to an attack of what was then called religious melancholia, a form of clinical depression characterized by an intense fear of eternal damnation.

Although L. M. Montgomery believed that divorce should be permitted in cases of incurable insanity, it is unlikely that she would ever have sought a divorce herself. Not only would she have hated the scandal, but her compassionate nature would have forbidden it. Although she may never have felt love for Ewan in a romantic sense, their lives were inextricably intertwined. In the journals we find symptoms, if not of love, then of fierce loyalty.

L. M. Montgomery defended Ewan staunchly from the Unionists in the Presbyterian church, as well as from the Pickerings and their frivolous lawsuits. She may have complained about him bitterly in the privacy of her journals, but against any outside attack they presented a united front.

Readers of her journals inevitably feel some frustration at the way L. M. Montgomery became trapped in an unhappy marriage, but it must be remembered that Ewan's most significant shortcoming was an illness over which he had no control. He was not an ideal husband by any means-he felt threatened by his wife's literary success and never bothered to read any of her novels-but their marriage was a contented one until the time of his illness.

In 1914 L. M. Montgomery wrote, "Ewan came back tonight. How glad I was!"SJII:155). A tiny remark, yet it suggests a warmth and companionship within their marriage.

Ten years later, she described how Ewan's illness utterly changed his personality: "I looked at Ewan as he sat at the table tonight eating his supper-a fine looking man, with a clear healthy skin, cheerful, rational, talking interestedly of domestic things-and contrasted him with that livid, shaking, terrified, haunted creature of exactly a week ago. It seemed impossible that they could be one and the same" (SJIII:180).

Ewan's condition was a source of great agony and suffering for L. M. Montgomery, yet she continued to care for and protect him, reaching out only in her journals to an audience of future readers who would understand and sympathize with her plight. Her journals were a necessary outlet for the passionate inner self that could find no expression within the confines of her role as a dutiful minister's wife.

As L. M. Montgomery grew older, her adherence to convention became even more rigid, to the point that she became a strict enforcer of social obligations, both real and imagined. She was almost morbidly sensitive to public opinion, and consequently, put great pressure on her sons, Chester and Stuart, to live up to her ideas of social success. L. M. Montgomery felt it would be a horrible mortification that either of her sons might fall short in any way.

When Chester was in danger of failing his first year of engineering studies at the University of Toronto, L. M. Montgomery's first thought was of the "abject humiliation of having him come home because he had not made good, before our congregation" (SJ IV:104). It is disconcerting to find such fear of what the neighbours will think, in the woman who had once written so sympathetically of Anne's skirmishes with Mrs. Lynde and Mrs. Harmon Andrews.

The boys' romantic entanglements were also a source of concern; L. M. Montgomery admitted to feeling "worried because [Chester] seemed to be hanging about a girl in Union congregation who belonged to a family very low in the social scale." Eventually she "spoke about it seriously" to Chester and "he gave up having anything to do with her" (SJIV:238). One wonders how she might have reacted had one of her sons chosen to marry an orphan girl from who-knows-where!

No one suffered more from this sensitivity to public opinion than L. M. Montgomery herself. All her worst fears began to come true in 1933 when Chester announced that he had been secretly married for over a year to a young woman from the congregation who was now expecting their child.

"I shrink as from a scorching flame from all the gossip that will roll like a torrent over the countryside," L. M. Montgomery wrote in her journal; "I shrink from the torment and ugliness of it all" (SJIV:242). As the minister's wife, L. M. Montgomery was forced to continue attending missionary society meetings and other church events, knowing all the while that she was the subject of many a whispered conversation and the target of many a sympathetic or malicious glance.

She described church services as "a hideous ordeal" from which death seemed like a welcome escape (SJIV:245). In her youth L. M. Montgomery had often lamented the loss of the various innocent joys and pleasures that respectability forbids; in old age that hankering for respectability became a source of positive pain in her life.

Unflinching in her dedication to duty, L. M. Montgomery was also a victim to the tyranny of social convention. No wonder she fled to nature for solace and comfort; only among the hills and pines could she escape from prying eyes and experience some measure of freedom.

As her social context became increasingly oppressive L. M. Montgomery found strength and courage in the small pleasures of life: her books, her cats, and the few close friends with whom she could really be herself.

Perhaps it is significant that the happy ending she bestows on Valancy in The Blue Castle is not a life of rebellion against social norms, but rather a total escape to an island in Muskoka where she could spend her days wandering in the bracken and ferns, accompanied only by a congenial companion and a loyal cat.

As much as L. M. Montgomery must have longed sometimes to fly in the face of social convention, she knew herself well enough to realize she was incapable of flouting social norms-her own high standards forbade it. Only in her novels and her journals do we catch a glimpse of the passionate and rebellious self that she had long since learned to tame.

The adult L. M. Montgomery-mother, Sunday school teacher, and minister's wife-was very much a product of the Puritan Macneill conscience. But the Montgomery blood still flamed out occasionally, whether in Valancy's red dress or in Anne's auburn hair-and for that millions of readers are still grateful.

Gabrielle Ceraldi is a Ph.D. student specializing in Victorian literature at the University of Western Ontario. A contributor to THE LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY ALBUM, Gabrielle presented a paper on L. M. Montgomery's EMILY trilogy and the aftermath of the Great War at the 1998 conference on the literature of small islands in Charlottetown, PEI.

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