This Is September

For L.M. Montgomery, her characters, and me, September means new beginnings: new school year, new events, new projects, and new content.

Contents

Preamble
Montgomery in the Classroom
Bibliography
Image Credit

Preamble

“Harvest is ended and summer is gone,” Anne Shirley declares at the start of Anne of the Island (1915)—a statement that, as Rea Wilmshurst notes in her 1989 article “L.M. Montgomery’s Use of Quotations and Allusions in the ‘Anne’ Books,” is a misquotation of Jeremiah 8:20 (“The harvest is past, the summer is ended”) from the King James Bible (22). For most academics, September marks the start of a school year after a summer busy with research and writing projects. This year—the 150th anniversary of Montgomery’s birth—fall also means new initiatives, new projects, new events, and new content to share.

Although Montgomery and her books are often associated with spring, the opening chapters of Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, and Anne of Windy Poplars all focus on the beginning of a school year—with Anne as schoolteacher, as undergraduate student, or as high school principal. Moreover, September 1889 marked a new beginning for fourteen-year-old Maud Montgomery, who on this day 135 years ago burned the diary she’d kept since the age of nine (an act she would later regret) in order to start anew.

I am going to begin a new kind of diary. . . . Life is beginning to get interesting for me—I will soon be fifteen—the last day of November. And in this journal I am never going to tell what kind of a day it is—unless the weather has something to do worth while. And—last but not least—I am going to keep this book locked up!! (The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889–1900, 3)

Montgomery in the Classroom

Texts

This fall, I’ve returned to the classroom after a three-year break to teach a third-year undergraduate course called Gender and Sexuality in Canadian Literature. This subject matter of the course consists of what I specialized in during my academic training, so I’ve really enjoyed returning to it. And so, when I put together my reading list, I wanted to assign a mix of older and recent work as well as a wide range of texts, including novels, short fiction, poetry, essays, and creative non-fiction.

Not surprisingly, I also wanted to assign some work by Montgomery.

Even though I’ve taught Anne of Green Gables in a few courses in children’s literature, I’ve found that there’s far more to talk about in Montgomery’s work if it’s discussed outside of that genre. For that reason, I’ve included one of her books in several first-year courses in literary studies over the years: Rilla of Ingleside in Laughter and Tears: Comedy and Tragedy, Anne of Green Gables in Literature Across Borders, and Anne’s House of Dreams in Literature and Love.

This time, I decided to assign Anne of Windy Poplars.

First, I wanted to explore with my students the concept of gender and work. Anne is a high school principal at the age of twenty-two, sometime in the 1890s, but the novel doesn’t depict this as particularly groundbreaking in terms of gender and power. Second, I’ve wanted to take a closer look at how Montgomery in her work critiques—and reinforces—what’s now widely called toxic masculinity, and the many episodes featuring domineering and/or difficult male figures seemed to be a great way to do so. And third, in many ways it’s a really good book!

Contexts

Beyond telling my students that Montgomery had written Windy Poplars out of chronological order, I encouraged them to approach the book as best they could, whether or not they had any prior knowledge of the books or the character.

Then I asked them to read the chapter on Anne of Green Gables in C.E. Gatchalian’s book Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty, and the Making of a Brown Queer Man, precisely so that they could contrast his perspective with their own as they begin reading Windy Poplars.

I wanted my students to understand Gatchalian’s experience as a boy of reading his school library’s copy of that “book for girls” but hiding that from his classmates. And because I try to encourage my students to privilege their individual perspectives when responding to texts, rather than generalize about some kind of generic “the reader,” I wanted them to appreciate how Gatchalian’s perspective as a racialized Canadian queer man of Filipinx ancestry informs his insights about Montgomery’s novel:

There are the obvious reasons why a little brown queer boy would fall in love with Anne Shirley. Anne is an orphan and, consequently, like virtually every queer child, an outsider in every family she ends up with. With her red hair and freckles, she is, in her own way, racialized, given the still-present stigma against redheads in white society. She is a girl in a world that vastly prefers boys, shipped by mistake to a family expecting and wanting a boy. In the face of these challenges she strives, Herculean, towards unadulterated poetry, beauty, transcendence. This she achieves with her most unassailable attribute, her imagination, constructing a divine counterworld to the colonial conservatism of early-twentieth-century Prince Edward Island. (23–24)

My students and I begin our discussion of Anne of Windy Poplars on Monday, so we’ll see how this goes!

Bibliography

Gatchalian, C.E. Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty, and the Making of a Brown Queer Man. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019.

Montgomery, L.M. Anne of the Island. Boston: The Page Company, 1915.

—. The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889–1900. Edited by Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2013.

—. “[Seasons in the Woods].” In The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1: A Life in Print, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre, 73–97. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.

—. The Watchman and Other Poems. Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild, and Stewart, 1916.

Wilmshurst, Rea. “L.M. Montgomery’s Use of Quotations and Allusions in the ‘Anne’ Books.” Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 56 (1989): 15–45.

Online: https://ccl-lcj.ca/index.php/ccl-lcj/article/view/2413.

Image Credit

Detail from the cover of Anne of the Island, by L.M. Montgomery, published by Bantam Books (New York) in 1976 and by Seal Books (Toronto) in 1981. Cover artist unidentified. This image is a scan of one of my personal copies of this edition.