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by Edith Katherine Smith

Source: The Avonlea Traditions Chronicle, No. 28, Summer 1999.

"A bride of course-a bride all in white with a lovely misty veil. I've never seen one, but I can imagine what she would look like. I don't ever expect to be a bride myself." The voice is Anne Shirley's, chattering to Matthew about her impressions of Avonlea in blossom time. Victorian culture, the epoch of L. M. Montgomer's youth, assumed that a woman's purpose both culminated in and began with her marriage vows. Even in the late twentieth century, noted anthropologist David W. Murray of Brandeis University wrote: "Cultures differ in many ways, but all societies that survive are built on marriage."

Marriage forms an enduring theme in literature. In Shakespeare's comedies, marriage is called "the comic resolution"-the successful pairing off in Act 5, Scene 5 of young lovers. A strategic marriage could unite families and kingdoms, resolve wars, and consolidate fortunes in the fabled world of wealth and pedigree. But what of the woman who stood outside the cultural assimilation of maiden into matron? What status remained for her? Surprisingly, although L. M. Montgomery's heroines usually embrace marriage, a subtext in her fiction is narrated by the self-empowered single women who stage their own theatrics and win loyal readers too.

In L. M. Montgomer's journals, the "old maids" get short shrift from her pen, while by contrast, her novels show empathy and admiration for old maids who are strong enough to stand alone in the teeth of their culture. There's Miss Cornelia, who alleges to Anne Blythe, "I have had a real, placid, comfortable life, dearie, and it's just because I never cared a cent what the men thought." The old maids in L. M. Montgomery's life draw a more ambivalent, but often caustic response. There's Stella Campbell who plays a starring role throughout L. M. Montgomery's journals as everyone's neurotic cousin.

On Stella's marriage to Lowry Keller, L. M. Montgomery commented smugly, "Escape from old maidenhood, a home, support, companionship may work a change for the better in her neurasthenic outlook. But one thing is certain-she will always find plenty in life to grumble about."

In 1921, just back from a soul-restoring trip to PEI, L. M. Montgomery sat alone in the Leaskdale manse writing savagely, "In this village I never really saw such a collection of stupid, uninteresting people. They know nothing but gossip and malicious gossip at that. They are all...old maids or retired farmers and farmeresses." Did L. M. Montgomery miss the irony that the society she depicted was not really very different from the milieu she'd just left 1100 miles behind her in Cavendish? Had she forgotten that in any farming settlement in the early years of the century, a collection of spinsters and bachelors existed, who enjoyed a bit of news quite as much as their married brethren?

In Leaskdale, "the old Oxtoby girls" functioned as the Presbyterian gurus of the village-"two old maids who would have delighted Dickens. No pen but his could do them justice. And oh-they are queer-at least it was only their queerness I saw that first night." Misses Mary and Lizzie Oxtoby nevertheless had the grace to feed and house these two travellers-Rev. and Mrs. Macdonald-newly stranded on the shoals of matrimony.

Later, however, L. M. Montgomery softened her stance to defend Mary and Lizzie from Cam MacFarlane's idiotic parley which addressed the old maids as "young ladies," who, being single, could decide for themselves at what hour they wished to go to bed. In her journal, L. M. Montgomery commented grimly, "'The young ladies,' who are well over sixty, must have liked this."

The old maid phenomenon, like a travelling sideshow, followed the Macdonalds to Norval. On September 21, 1934, "A silly, fussy old maid came to see Ewan and had a bad effect on him." Stuart's "trouble" at Knox College was conveniently traced to the "exaggerations of an officious old maid."

Then there were the five MacPherson sisters just around the corner-musically adept though not quite the Spice Girls of 1926. Charlotte was Presbyterian church organist for many years, her sisters sitting in the choir. They were Kate, Florence, Margaret and also Mary who had passed on at the age of twenty-one. With the four unmarried sisters who kept house with two bachelor brothers, L. M. Montgomery conducted a guarded friendship.

Kate in fact, had been a nurse on the battlefields of the Far East in the Great War, in a career far more exotic than any of L. M. Montgomery's heroines could have hoped for. But do we hear any of this information from L. M. Montgomery's pen? Not a syllable.

Ageist assumptions filter unexamined through L. M. Montgomery's journals: on January 2, 1930, she opened her entry, "The century is getting to be quite an old maid." The icestorm a few days later on January 8th evoked this ironic image: "The pines along the road looked exactly like a lot of disgruntled old spinsters who had indignantly turned their backs on a derisive world."

L. M. Montgomery's 45th birthday had her repeating the nonsense old wives tales had engrained in generations of women before her: "I don't feel 45...but I am 45 and life must be on the downgrade henceforth. One may as well look the fact in the face, distasteful as it is, and make the best of it." But L. M. Montgomery had sprung from a line of ancestors of whom many remained vigorous well into old age. Great-aunt Elizabeth Campbell, the sister of L. M. Montgomery's Grandfather Montgomery, was every day of seventy when she confessed to Aunt Annie that, after bearing and raising seventeen children, she "had a strange feeling. I never felt it before. I think it must be what you call 'tired.'"

Grandmother Macneill in old age, according to grandson Kenneth, carried heavy pails of water from the well at her Cavendish home. L. M. Montgomery's ancestor, Margaret Macneill, ventured into a second marriage, daring the wrath of her twelve children. At eighty-five, Grandfather Montgomery was an active and vigorous member of the Canadian Senate who had travelled by rail from PEI to Vancouver at the age of eighty-four.

L. M. Montgomery's ageist assumptions were perhaps bolstered by the prurient expressions and idioms addressing the single state: "A woman of a certain age"; "on the shelf"; "in her day"; "over the hill"; "high time she was married"; "not overly young"; "her colour and bloom had faded"-her bloomers too, it is to be presumed.

In chapter eleven of The Blue Castle, Uncle Benjamin tries to confound Valancy with his riddle: "What's the difference between a young girl and an old maid? Answer: A young girl is happy and careless and an old maid is cappy and hairless." He also explains away Valancy's craziness to the Stirling clan: "Old maids are apt to fly off at a tangent like that. If she had been married when she should have been she wouldn't have got like this-clean dippy."

Marriage was viewed as a cure-all for maiden crazies, the state of de-men-tia brought on by protracted old maidenhood. If singleness were perceived as the result of misfiring in the brain, communities and clans in fiction conspired to offer old maids a leg-up-the-ladder to matrimony.

Even scandalous old Aunt Nancy would have outraged "the indignant virgins of New Moon" by avowing, "If Elizabeth and Laura had run off with someone in their running days, it would have been better for both of them."

But if old maidenhood spunkily showed the most natural desire in the world for a husband and children, the culture, often in the form of an elder sister, nipped that in the bud. In Rainbow Valley, Ellen West rebukes her sister Rosemary, "You're all romantic and worked up. Tomorrow you'll be more sensible. Look at the time! Go to bed."

Miss Lavendar of the stone cottage wails (in Anne of Avonlea), "When I was seventeen, Anne, I didn't think that forty-five would find me a little white-haired old maid with nothing but dreams to fill my life." Miss Lavendar was determined not to play out the pattern of the typical old maid. Who then was the stereotyped spinster of fiction?

For starters, she was viewed as a second-class citizen who, along with all women of L. M. Montgomery's youth, couldn't vote. She spent her life in dependency, or working after other people's comforts and needs. Take Edith Bailey, the Glen dressmaker at the quilting party at Ingleside of whom it's said, "Edith was still rather pretty and not entirely out of the running." Edith Bailey would probably have been all of twenty-seven years old!

The physical image of the spinster in popular fiction featured her as grim, angular, ancient, pragmatic, bespectacled, ethical, rigid, austere and like Marilla Cuthbert, "as fond of morals as the Duchess in Wonderland." She was viewed as gossipy, vinegary, a sour-grapes personality, a meddler, a shrewish-tongued harridan lambasting the hussies and hoydens of the younger generation. She had attributes of leanness, gauntness, she was withered and shrivelled-to snatch a simile from Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God, she was "as thin as a thighbone."

This was literature's portrait of the single woman who bore the condemnation of her culture. One recalls, with L. M. Montgomery, the old maids in Dickens: the religious fanatic Miss Miggs in Barnaby Rudge, and the ageing and ghostly Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, eternally disappointed by her vanished bridegroom.

Even children sensed the reproach of society's judgment on the single woman. Sara Ray in The Golden Road, all of eleven years old, confides to Cecily, "If I'm homely, no one will ever want to marry me and I don't want to be an old maid."

When Peg Bowen predicts a family wedding, Felicity King indignantly protests, "Oh, but Aunt Olivia will never be married now. Why, she'll be twenty-nine next January." Felicity too, given a worst case scenario of a girl proposing to a man, flashes, "I'd rather die an old maid ten times over."

Peg Bowen, Carlisle's local eccentric, comes to church, sits in the King children's pew and offers a running commentary on the hapless spinsters of the congregation, hanging her judgments on the text of marriage.

"Doug Nicholson's wife-all rigged out in silk. Yez wouldn't think to look at her she was married in cotton and mighty thankful to get married in anything, it's my opinion." And, "Look at Caroline Marr, will yez? That's a woman who'd like pretty well to get married." And on and on. No woman in the pews, single or married, is spared the tongue of judgment. Was Peg's truly L. M. Montgomery's own tongue, transferred to pen, as her critical eyes darted over her husband's congregation?

Pairs of sisters often spring middle-aged from L. M. Montgomery's ink-pot. Usually, one's the boss, the other's obedient. There are Elizabeth and Laura Murray in Emily of New Moon; Ellen and Rosemary West in Rainbow Valley, who had "drifted out of youth and bellehood without any seeming regret"; the two "old Copp girls" on the Tory Road; Sarah and Martha, custodians of the blue willow platter that Anne is searching for. There are the "Andrews girls," Eliza and Catherine, left and right-brain personified-one sews patchwork with a frown, the other knits lace with a smile.

There are the Titus sisters on Queen's Shore, Justina and Violet, who adopt Jody, Jane Stuart's orphan friend in Jane of Lantern Hill. The pairs of sisters often play out the Martha/Mary dichotomy of the active/contemplative life. Gratifyingly, however, several of these old maids manage to break out of the stereotype, defy the culture, and spring to freedom whether or not marriage be the goal. For such as these, L. M. Montgomery's writing hand provides an amanuensis for their lawful passions and desires.

In Chronicles of Avonlea, Prissy Strong, her shelf-life about to expire, leaves old maidenhood behind in her plunge into matrimony, out of an attic window (you had to be there!). In Rilla of Ingleside, Gertrude Oliver at twenty-five, "past her first youth" manages to teach school and perform useful war work (It's believed this character may have been based on L. M. Montgomery's cousin and best friend, Frederica Campbell).

Margaret Penhallow in A Tangled Web, after fifty snubbed, drab and dowdy years, and scorned by her community for her determination to love rather than to be loved, surprises her clan by adopting a little boy, her dream-child Brian. Old Lady Lloyd, deprived, pathetic, heart-hungry, nonetheless lavishes her love on Sylvia Gray, the music teacher who comes to view her as a fairy godmother. In "The Materializing of Cecil," a prim, repressed spinster is pressured into fibbing when the sewing circle girls quiz her about her love affairs-in the past, of course. She invents a phantom lover, names him Cecil, and in a marvellous twist of the Pygmalion myth, he appears on her doorstep. Susan Baker at Ingleside celebrates the Armistice of 1918 by taking 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."

Rewinding the tape back to 1837, we realize that even with so famous an author as Charlotte Brontë, one of L. M. Montgomery's favourites, the culture denied women the right to flourish outside the protection of marriage. Charlotte had boldly written to the poet-laureate Robert Southey for his opinion of her Glass Town poetry, confiding her aspirations for successful authorship. "Literature," he wrote excoriatingly in return, "cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be." Granted, the Brontë sisters were spinsters of thirty, half the multiple of sixty, when their masterpieces were published, and who reads Southey now anyway? But he too parroted the prevailing mandate that marriage, not manuscripts, should be the business of a woman's life.

L. M. Montgomery, born a late Victorian, perceived herself as well into old maidenhood when, at thirty-four, her critically acclaimed novel Anne of Green Gables was published. How droll it is to read with hindsight, the acidulated judgment of her professor Archibald McMeachen when he muddies The Headwaters of Canadian Literature: "The book just misses the kind of success which convinces the critic while it captivates the unreflecting general reader. The story is pervaded with a sense of reality...but the 'little more' in truth of representation, or deftness of touch, is lacking and that makes the difference between a clever book and a masterpiece."

"Little more," indeed! More than ninety years later, L. M. Montgomery's classic continues to be proclaimed a masterpiece as it is reprinted and dramatized over and over in various forms.

As a young single woman in Cavendish, L. M. Montgomery was an astute eyewitness to many marriages, portraits of which she encoded in her novels. Peering over the shoulders of her fictional husbands and wives, however, the discerning reader may perceive the folkloric faces of L. M. Montgomery's picturesque old maids-sensible, shrewd and "well over sixty."

Dr. Edith Katherine Smith is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at McMaster University as well as resident curator at the Lucy Maud Montgomery Heritage Museum in Park Corner, PEI each summer.

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