Right now, I am prepping for a conference panel tomorrow that I announced last week: “Cinderella Anne, Paranormal Emily, and Astral Heroines Everywhere: L.M. Montgomery and the Fantastic.” I’m working with with three fantastic scholars (see what I did there?): Heidi Lawrence and Trinna Frever (past MaudCast guests–watch for Heidi in season 3), and Abigail Heiniger (whom I’m meeting for the first time). You can see more about that below, including how to register for the VICFA online conference.

Meanwhile, I want to use a bit of pushback I received to talk about what I’m doing in my larger project of reading Prince Edward Island‘s beloved Lucy Maud Montgomery. While most of the feedback is positive and curious, I have received two kinds of resistance from this panel announcement and in previous online classes in Signum University’s SPACE program.

First, since Montgomery is presented to us as a solidly realistic imaginative writer, there is a focused concern about genre. Second, there is a more intuitive concern about whether these kinds of enterprises honour Montgomery’s gift to us.

I confess that playing with the iconography of Anne of Green Gables has some risks–whether in a lightly steampunk space capsule or on the edge of fairyland (or so I meant to evoke). I don’t know how to respond to this kind of argument, exactly, but I hope, in answering the first challenge, I can show the degree to which I seek to honour Montgomery’s life work.

First things first: am I bending genre definitions too far to think about the fantastic when I’m reading Montgomery?

I’ll start with a question: Where do you find Montgomery at your local independent bookstore? Here in PEI, she gets her own section, but I doubt that is the case in many places beyond our magical island. Often enough, I find some of her novels in Children’s Books, or there may be a ragtag collection of her works in Canadian Literature. Increasingly, though, I find Montgomery in the “Classics” section–and not without reason. Anne of Green Gables is undoubtedly a classic.

When it comes to classification by age group, region, or status (what else is a Classics section?), it gets a little awkward. She is a children’s writer, but what about The Blue Castle, a decidedly adult book with adult themes? Most of the long-form fiction is set in PEI, but Montgomery published writings from and about Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, and Ontario–including Jane of Lantern Hill, a brilliant but late and less-recognized work that begins and ends in Toronto. Jane is a classic to me, but not to the general public. What about The Watchman, and Other Poems, one of the few collections of her relatively unknown poetry? Or what about Montgomery’s journals–nearly 50 years of life writing in print and available? Or her 500+ published short stories?

As a follower of Ursula K. Le Guin, I am perhaps too quick to be dismissive of genre. After all, Montgomery was a very intelligent businesswoman and selected her markets carefully. Still, Montgomery, like Le Guin, had her work narrowed and dismissed because of genre categories. In both cases, some of that dismissiveness was gender-based, with Le Guin being panned as “soft SciFi” and Montgomery as “just a girl’s writer.” The times moved on during Le Guin’s career, but a generation of Montgomery scholarship was lost to the literary gatekeeping of the label makers in the industry and academy.

Plus, you may have noticed, I’m not Montgomery’s primary reader. Should I only shop in women’s fiction now because I like Emily of New Moon?

Elizabeth R. Epperly has written one of my favourite works of literary criticism, The Fragrance of Sweet-grass. Part of what Epperly is doing is reading Montgomery as a romantic writer. It is a slippery definition, “romantic,” but in Montgomery’s time, it had a broad set of categories.

Much later, in the early 1930s, C.S. Lewis provides seven potential definitions without coming to stories of falling in love (see the Preface to the 3rd edition of Pilgrim’s Regress). When Lewis began writing science fiction and fantasy on the eve of WWII, he was writing “interplanetary romances.” There is some kinship in the worlds of romance–and behind all of them are George MacDonald, the Arthuriad, and the fairy tale traditions.

Beyond this, though, scholars and artists have been colouring outside the lines that are drawn around Montgomery’s writings, which limit as much as they help. Here is Epperly’s proposal:

“perhaps we can separate Montgomery’s confinements by genre and expectations from her liberations of imagination and perception to see how romance is, ultimately, the power we give to the visions we endorse” (Elizabeth R. Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-grass, 250).

When we push against genre boundaries and read the text, there are some intriguing aspects of Montgomery’s storytelling that go beyond strict realism. Besides miracles in various stories and an abiding sense of Providence in certain of the novels–is God fantastic or realistic in our world today?–there are little elements of the fantastic. Some of my favourite tales have hints of enchantment, bewitchery, faërie, dreams and visions, ghosts and the supernatural, the prophetic, other ways of seeing and knowing (like second sight), and moments of the deeply improbable, if not impossible.

The fantastic plays along the edges of the imaginative worlds Montgomery builds–and sometimes much closer to the centre.

Moreover, within the frame of the story itself, the characters (and sometimes the audience) have emotional experiences bound up with the uncertainty about what is true–or even something like hope or stubborn belief in the fantastic. We know as readers that Anne and Diana have peopled their woods with imaginary ghosts, but the uncanny elements cannot be so easily dismissed in the Emily stories. In the Story Girl’s world, we do not know if wanderers and wise women can really be witches. If we simply dismiss the possibility as readers, we narrow the scope of Montgomery’s imaginative vision.

I agree that Montgomery is not a writer of genre fantasy as we see it developed in the 20th century in the vein of Tolkien, Lewis, or Le Guin. I’m not trying to make a claim about the books themselves–at least not initially.

Rather, by considering fantastic elements in Montgomery’s realistic fiction–by sort of switching the bookshelf tags around a little bit–I’m adapting a certain line of sight into the books. I am the kind of lit scholar and critic who does not just have a single way of reading a story or poem. Instead, I use all the tools in my reading toolkit to live within the world of the story as see what I can see. Sometimes I ask about boys and girls and gender or reflect on power or write as a theologian of culture. In this particular reading, I am doing things like this:

• I study the fictional worlds (speculative universes) that Montgomery built to find what meaning is contained in the fabric of the worlds themselves.
• I play with Fantasy Mapping, particularly with effects of time and space in Avonlea.
• I glance into Montgomery’s pictures of Faërie to see what it means artistically, relationally, and spiritually.
• I wonder about Farah Mendlesohn’s 4 types of fantasy–portal/quest, immersive, intrusive, and liminal–and use her framework to ask questions about certain writing choices Montgomery made.
• I think about what it means that my geographical space in Prince Edward Island is largely defined by a world that is not–as the skeptics say–“real.”
• I ask readers the simple question, “What makes Anne magical?” It’s a wonder what people tell me.

Would Montgomery have put Anne is space? I doubt that kind of fiction would have interested her–though she was curious about modern inventions and spent a part of her time considering the heavens. But, coincidentally, I am reading Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, and I can’t help wondering if a dreamy eleven-year-old Anne in 1969 would have looked up to the sky when she heard about the moon landing on the radio.

I am simply conducting a personal reading experiment. Experiments may fail, after all. Not every glimpse of phantasmes and fairies in her stories is otherworldly. Still, when I follow the Horns of Elfland in Montgomery’s work, I tend to see something new.

And even then–even if the experiment fails–the results can be worth the time. For me, rereading Montgomery is always worth the risk. And that is the best way I know that I can honour Montgomery’s literary gift to the world: to read and reread what she wrote.

Cinderella Anne, Paranormal Emily, and Astral Heroines Everywhere: L.M. Montgomery and the Fantastic (Conference Panel Abstract)

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.