Hello dear readers, here is a kind of Pilgrim in Narnia crossover moment: a panel on L.M. Montgomery and the Fantastic. Drs. Heidi Lawrence, Abigail Heiniger, Trinna Frever, and I are gathering in deep cyberspace to approach this topic from a few different angles. Here is the programme description:
Cinderella Anne, Paranormal Emily, and Astral Heroines Everywhere: L.M. Montgomery and the Fantastic (Conference Panel)
This panel seeks to remedy a significant omission in fantasy fiction studies and L.M. Montgomery studies by exploring Montgomery’s works in a fantastical context. Anticipated topics include Montgomery’s invocation and adaptation of fairy tales, use of the paranormal and otherworldly, depictions of magic and the magical world, and astronomical/cosmological themes in her work.
Session will include short, informal presentations from each scholar discussing their work in this field, moderator questions and panel discussion designed to illuminate the topic(s), and at least thirty minutes of audience Q & A to conclude the session. We hope you can attend!
Register here: https://iaftfita.wildapricot.org/event-6255095
All of this is part of the Virtual Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts (VICFA). To attend the panel, you need to register for the conference, but the entry bar is low: $10 for students/unfunded scholars and $30-$40 for funded scholars and those who can afford it.
To celebrate the occasion, I played a bit on Canva … and got carried away. Here are two variations of the poster, so feel free to share the one you love best!
I see you require your attendees to have bowed to the current societal requirement to use a cell phone. I think L. M. Montgomery would have been about as likely to do that as she would have been to put her heroines in space ships – and that’s not very likely. She was not a writer of fantasy, but a writer who believed in the reality of things some strange modern minds consider fantastic. It’s like the difference between Charles Dickens and George MacDonald; MacDonald wrote some fantasy novels, setting his truths in a fantastic landscape, while Dickens wrote realistic novels but still portrayed his belief in realities the cynics consider fantastic. (I expect Christmas Carol could be considered fantasy, although I doubt that the author would have so considered it.)
No matter. Consider this a mild protest against wearing the Sign of the Beast.
Mild or strong, protests are welcome, and yours is quite articulate. This is a session you could attend from a public library, if you wanted–but I suspect it isn’t the one for you.
Montgomery is not a writer of post-Tolkien and Lewis modern fantasy–though she has fantastic elements, including phantasms. Our concern here is to look indirectly to see what we see. It is like faerie … the peripheral vision is often helpful. I do this sometimes writing about or teaching, say, as a Canadian rather than a general audience, or specifically asking questions about ecology or education, and so on.
Montgomery, though, was a Romantic, in her own way, and she wrote her own kind of romances and fairy tales.
Would Montgomery have put Anne is space? I doubt that kind of fiction would have interested her. But personally, she liked electricity, the telephone, indoor plumbing, globalized journalism and post, the radio, and film. She took to photography and would have loved more access to astronomical tools. Sometimes she was an early adopter; sometimes she felt like Anne and Diana, who find it funny that little ole Avonlea has phones.
I don’t know what LMM would think, honestly? But I’m not trying to bend anything into moulds wherein they are ill-fitted. If the experiment fails, fair enough.
Prof. Dickieson,
The example I’m about offer for consideration probably doesn’t count as an valid case of Hints of the Fantastic in the author’s writings. However, for better or worse, it is possible to claim that some fans of Montgomery’s works were willing to let Avonlea be the kind of place that has its own, local, town Witch!
This is something that can be found on an episode of an old TV series adaptation of the “Avonlea” series of books that LMM wrote. This is a product that dates all the way back to the end of the 80s and the onset of the 90s era. I only watched a handful of episodes, yet the ones I did see have stuck in my mind (such as Doc Brown from “Back to the Future” playing a washed up actor who becomes a very effective school teacher in the community). The one I’m thinking of now features Sarah Stanley and her friends as they encounter an old hermit lady that everyone calls a witch, and hence shun. That is until one of the Avonlea children comes down with a bad illness, and only her remedies can be of help. I suppose that’s not much to go on, and even in a bare outline, you can kind of figure out the cliches at play in the script. It’s a typical trope of never judging books by their covers, and that’s about it. Still doesn’t mean that’s not a valuable lesson, even in this day and age. The point is that at least someone else out there felt that it was possible for elements of the Fantastic to have their place in Montgomery’s secondary world.
You know what, now that I think back on it, I do remember there were at least two moments during that Christopher Lloyd episode I mentioned above that have features that might fit into the rubric you’ve outlined in your article. One of them is a scene where Lloyd pretends to be a murder victim, and then (please bear in mind, I am going by sheer memory here) he proceeds to follow that bit of crazy up by delivering what I think might have been a lecture on the nature of the Fair Folk. Like I say, nothing but the “Persistence of Memory”, melted clocks and all. Yet that’s what the import of the actor’s words seemed to hint. The other time is when Lloyd character has one of his students dress up as a mummy as part of a school lesson on Ancient Egypt. Aside from the “lets-face-it” style fact that of course its easy to imagine Doc Brown as either a Van Helsing style hero or diabolic villain in a Mummy centric Horror film, the real point is that now we have two examples where Montgomery’s later fans have seen fit to introduce at least a knowledge of the Fantastic into her otherwise Realist seeming creations. On the more Enchanted Historic side of things, Lloyd also accidentally invokes one of Tolkien’s interests when he has his class dress up as the opposing sides of the Battle of Maldon. One scene stands out to me.
He’s giving stage directions to one of his students, an unlucky, fresh-faced lad chosen to play none other than Aethelred the Unready. The stage direction that Doc gives is that the Battle is about to commence, then directs the school kid over to underneath a tree, where his character is supposed to be napping. When the student asks if it wouldn’t be wiser for Aethelred to start preparing his troops for combat, Lloyd responds, “Of course not! Why do you think you are called “the Unready”! So, for better or worse, those count as not just two Fantastical pieces that have been grafted onto Avonlea, but one of them also has a connection with the Inklings. It’s all from a TV series with the simple title of “Avonlea”, or at least that was how it was broadcast here in the States back in the 90s (another time, and another world).
Hi Chris, yes, “Road to Avonlea” was an adaptation of The Story Girl and its sequel, The Golden Road. I loved it as a kind and remember the witch figure (Peg?), and that was also in the books. I don’t remember the Doc character! Who knew?
There is not an on/off answer about witches in LMM’s novels. It appears that Wise, Wandering Women have some powers—or at least Providence supports the idea that they do. There are a few ghost stories across her many pages. However, the most “normal” supernaturalistic realities are in the Emily series, where the Second Sight and a kind of transatlantic telepathy—as well as all kinds of “sympathy.”
And miracles—are they “fantastic”? For Montgomery, it’s not a distinction she could have made without a longer conversation. But if we are a post religious culture,don’t miracles—and miraculously unlikely happenings—need a new character.
Prof. Dickieson,
Re: the Miraculous as the same as the Fantastic. It looks like apologies are in order on my part. If that was the impression given by the comment, then let me assure that was never the angle the words were coming from.
As far as that subject is concerned, I tend to follow the clear line in the sand that Lewis draws in the “Problem of Pain”. You may attribute the Miraculous to the Divine, but not nonsense. With this distinction in mind, I’d argue that it is easy to differentiate between the Supernatural as Miraculous, and as make-believe Fantastic.
It seems to me that it’s possible to identify an underlying logic to a Miracle, whereas one of the ironies of the Fantastic as its applied in modern fiction is that while it can be entertaining, a moment’s thought reveals how the magical happenings in an E. Nesbit story just begs all sorts of questions as to the point of why should things like dragons even exist? Indeed, I think Lewis once even wrote somewhere that even he couldn’t see the point of such things being real. One of the reasons he gave was that it would shatter the sense of wonder and enchantment that has always been attached to the magic of the Wyrm.
Compare this with how most of us would treat Dinosaurs as merely large animals if they still existed. If that were true, once the initial shock wore off, then all that would happen is hoards of nature documentary crews would fly in just to capture their lives in the same way that is done for, say, the wildlife of Ontario, or Yellowstone National Park. In which case, we’d have to make a further distinction between Nature as Reality, and “nature” as Monstrous. This distinction is further helpful in allowing the reader to keep a clear picture of the differing categories between Fact and fiction. Speaking of the Monstrous as a literary category.
It seems I’ve been lucky enough to stumble upon yet another connection between Edmund Spenser and the Horror genre. Since the October Country is just around the corner, I thought it fitting to bring it to your attention.
It’s called “Monsters and the Poetic Imagination in the Faerie Queene”, by Maik Goth. If the name of the author sounds too on the nose, all I can say is I’m making none of this up. According to an article from “The Spenser Review”, “Maik Goth’s stated aim is “a comprehensive reading of monsters and monstrous beings” throughout the whole of The Faerie Queene. Parts I and II of this ambitious, innovative contribution to Spenser studies place The Faerie Queene’s monsters in the context of teratological, historical, and literary perspectives on the monstrous, and offer a valuable taxonomic account under six headings: dragons, four-footed beasts, human-animal composites, giants, monstrous humans, and automata. Part III analyzes their relevance to Early Modern discourse on poetic creation and advances Goth’s illuminating theory of Spenser as Prometheus. The volume is rounded off with a brief conclusion (Part IV), substantial bibliographies of primary and secondary sources, and a scholarly index”.
The key part of the review is one that reads as follows: “A great strength of Goth’s study is its multiple appeal. This weighty contribution to literary studies will interest historians of fantasy, horror and the grotesque, of disability and of teratology, as well as specialists in Spenser, the literary debates of his time, or monsters in fiction”. The review of Goth’s study can be read in full at this link:
https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/item/46.1.6/index.html
One of the unintentional benefits of Goth’s efforts is that it is now possible to claim that there is a clearer connection to be made between the practice of literary Mythopoeia, and the work of Horror. By focusing on the poet’s use of the Monstrous, both as inheritor and pioneer in terms of application and conception of the trope, it now becomes possible to posit an academic view of Spenser as a trailblazer in the construction of what could be considered the Early Modern Gothic; what is now known as our contemporary Horror genre.
What Goth has done is little more than to illuminate an aspect of Elizabethan thought which could potentially grant both scholars, students, and casual readers an idea of how writers and audiences in the Middle and Renaissance Ages viewed the more terrifying aspects of the legends, myths, and folklore that they shared with one another. Goth’s efforts might also be a stepping stone in helping to gain an understanding of how, even that far back, there might have been semi-conscious efforts underway within the larger Medieval “fandom” (for lack of a better word) at constructing a separate literary space which would function as an emergent generic container for all the terrifying aspects of storytelling. As Roger Lancelyn Green, pointed out, such stories had already been around since the days of Ancient Greece.
Perhaps the real service of Goth’s book then is not just that it connects Spenser to Horror fiction, but also that it might give us subtle hints at his part in helping to birth the genre that gave us works like “The Turn of the Screw”, “The Raven”, and “Salem’s Lot”. In that sense, recent works by Stephen King, such as “Fairy Tale” and “Hansel and Gretel” are less a case of a literary talent breaking new ground, and more a case of the genre finding its way back to its own roots. I just hope this proves of some help for your own efforts in establishing literary links, Professor.
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