Description

Rilla of Ingleside is a less simple work. In it, Anne Shirley Blythe's daughter Rilla is the central figure. She loses her innocent view of life when she chooses to rescue a baby doomed to die from neglect and raises it as her own. Her actions, like those in Rainbow Valley, are a metaphor for those of the naive Canadians who go off to rescue England and Europe and discover how brutal the job is ([Epperly] 119). Montgomery managed, however, to structure the novel so that the war allegory is simultaneously a female bildungsroman. The female bildungsroman, which some sexist critics might dismiss as trivial, gains resonance and significance by being a parallel to the war story. The men do their part for the war and they mature; the women do their part and they too mature. In order to emphasize how Rilla's actions stand for those of all women, Montgomery laces Rilla of Ingleside with stories of other women's actions in support of the war and in support of the human values that will be necessary in the world that survives the war (Epperly 114). These stories together project Montgomery's by - then typical sense of community. The stories gain resonance and significance because the novel's structure has already insisted on the parallelism between the men's heroic acts abroad and the women's heroic acts at home. Through structure, then, Montgomery celebrated and elevated what her female community was and did (Epperly 112 - 114). If Montgomery had stopped her novel with Rilla's coming of age, she would have written a noteworthy feminist novel -- noteworthy in its theme and in its structure. However, she yielded again to the formal expectations or demands of her readers. If Montgomery had stopped, she would have succeeded in deconstructing the standard war story by bringing the submerged different war story to the surface and investing it with equal (if not superior) status. However, she turned Rilla of Ingleside into a formula romance: Rilla's man returns home safe from the fields of Flanders and he marries the patiently waiting, always loyal Rilla (Epperly 124). Again, L.M. Montgomery retreated from radical content and form; again, she conformed. L.M. Montgomery would continue searching for her form, but not right away. She had not wanted to write Anne of Avonlea (1909), and she talked in her journals about struggling to complete it. The novel shows Montgomery's lack of desire. Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910) is a reworking of a piece she had published earlier in an American magazine and shows its earlier composition date. These two works are, however, more than just artistic failures; they represent retreats to structuring patterns that not only are not female but actually privilege the patriarchy. Anne of Avonlea gradually sets up a bipolar opposition between Anne and Gilbert, which, as Epperly points out, associates Anne with "domesticity, pleasure, feeling, effortlessness, complacency, self - indulgence, weakness, reaction" and Gilbert with "the world, work, knowledge, struggle, advancement, honour, strength, action," thereby privileging Gilbert and the male. Other structures also privilege the male: the way Anne's ambitions seem to decline as the novel progresses; the way Anne's redefinition of formula romance to include friendship and mutuality is re - redefined in the end by Gilbert in traditional chivalric terms (Epperly 54); the way the alluded - to texts, in this case passages from the Bible, approve Anne's submission (Epperly 43); the way descriptions are highly analytical lists of attributes, not the ornate, complex sentences of Anne of Green Gables (Epperly 46); the way the fairy tale promise of living "happily ever after" for women who patiently wait is reinforced in plot and subplot (Epperly 46). Kilmeny of the Orchard similarly reinforces formula romance and fairy tale patterns that encourage female passivity. As Epperly has noted, Kilmeny only needs to be beautiful. Her "Prince Charming" will then appear, kiss her, and transform her on the spot (229 - 230)., Source type: scholarlyjournals; Object type: Article; Copyright: Copyright Association for Canadian Studies in the U.S. Winter 1993; DOCID: 441706271; PCID: 6685961; PMID: 54848; ProvJournalCode: ARCS; PublisherXID: CBCAARCS3172293, Source type: Electronic(1), http://search.proquest.com/docview/213981637?accountid=14670