THE TREND OF ECOFEMINISM IN L.M. MONTGOMERY’S

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES

STUDENT MINI PROJECT SUBMITTED TO

TAMILNADU STATE COUNCIL FOR HIGHER EDUCATION

by

D.POORNIMA (II M.A. ENGLISH LITERATURE)

(16 PEN 1064)

Under the guidance of

Mrs. SHEILA DANIEL M.A., M.Phil., B.Ed.,

Associate Professor, Department of English

Government Arts College for Women

Salem – 636008

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

GOVERNMENT ARTS COLLEGE FOR WOMEN

SALEM – 636008

FEBRAUARY 2018

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I wish to record my gratitude to the TAMILNADU STATE COUNCIL FOR HIGHER

EDUCATION for sanctioning and funding this project.

I express my sincere thanks to our revered Mrs. C. Parvathy, Principal, Government Arts

College for Women, Salem-8, for having encouraged me to carry out this project. I express my sesnse of gratitude to Mrs. K. PUNGOTHAI M.A., M.Phil Head, Department of English,

Government Arts College for Women, Salem-8, for her guidance and motivation.

My thanks are due, in no small measure, to Mrs. SHEILA DANIEL M.A., M.Phil., B.Ed.,

Associate Professor, Department of English, Government Arts College for Women, Salem-8, under whose insightful and constructive supervision this study was completed. Her innovative ideas, sustained interest and enthusiastic support have always been a source of inspiration and encouragement for me. But for her guidance and motivation, I could not have completed this dissertation. At every stage of the project, she led me to understand what research is and steered me in the direction of engaging research, opening up new avenues of understanding for me.

I extend my heartfelt thanks to faculty members of English Department and to my dear parents for their moral support and encouragement.

Above all, I thank God, the Almighty for his blessings in this endeavour.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

S.NO CHAPTERS PAGE NO

I INTRODUCTION 1

II ECOSPIRITUALITY 18

III MATERNAL FEMINISM 32

IV CULTURAL ECOFEMINISM 48

V CONCLUSION 61

WORKS CITED 69

CHAPTER-I

1

INTRODUCTION

Canadian literature is literature originated from Canada. Before European contact and the confederation of Canada, indigenous people in North America occupied the land and maintained a rich and diverse history of culture, identity, language art and literature. Indigenous literature was a problematic term, as every cultural group had its own distinct oral tradition, language, and cultural practices. Therefore, Indigenous literatures in Canada were a more inclusive term for understanding the variety of languages and traditions across different communities.

The literature of Canada has been strongly influenced by international immigration, particularly in recent decades. Since the 1980’s Canada’s ethnic and cultural diversity have been openly reflected in its literature, with many of its most prominent writers focusing on ethnic minority identity, duality and cultural differences. However, Canadians have been less willing to acknowledge the diverse languages of Canada, besides English and French.

The creative compendium of Canada had its culmination in what was being composed in

Great Britain with the progressive features of literature. In a sense Canadian literature was an act of faith, the Canadian art inseparably linked with human life and its tragic situations. There are transparent associations in them that Canadian literature got vitalized by virtue of multifarious ideas, based on new combinations of things and experiences in life, true artistic voices resounded through Canada. Both the English and Canadian writers have responded to the ecological relationship between Man and Nature around them differently. The early period of Canadian world with its varied patterns of landscape, historical development, modified British social, political customized the problems confronted by the people, the creation of administrative units

2 boundary issues, changing circumstances, whims and fancies of the politicians all these got subsumed into what is called Canadian literature. Thus Canadian literature gained its significance with its incessant publications and impressive contemporary accomplishments.

Canada, in recent times, has witnessed immigration of people belonging to many diverse countries and cultures resulted in establishing a multicultural ethnic mosaic. The Canadians are in the process of forming a new identity, an identity that would be a composite of many diverse cultures. In the New land, these people experienced a sense of wonder at the newness of their environment and nostalgia for the land they left behind. Then, they went through the phase of hard work and then once they are settled they become involved with the society in which they live and took part in all the activities of the majority community. This was the stage when these immigrants express their protest and anger at the discrimination and injustice meted out to them by the Canadian white establishment. The American establishment continued to remain a threat to the Canadian identity for the Canadians.

Carol Ann Howells in Private and Fictional Words: Canadian Women Novelists of the

1970s and 1980s finds common points between women’s situation and Canada’s as a nation, and reaffirming the connections, she stated that:

. . . women’s experience of the power politics of gender and their problematic

relation to patriarchal traditions of authority have affinities with Canada’s attitude

to the cultural imperialism of the United States as well as its ambivalence

towards its European inheritance. (2)

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Feminist literary criticism in Canada applies the insights of second and third-wave feminist thought to discussions of literature. Most of the Canadian writers and critics had quite often grappled with the problem and strove to answer the question who we are and invariably felt concerned about the vulnerable issue pertaining to the Canadian identity. Canada, on the other hand, subscribed to the doctrine of multi-cultural ethos that protected the rights of ethnic cultures to maintain distinctive identities within the Canadian culture. The archetypal analysis of the native Canadian literary tradition would unveil the mystery shrouding it and rendered richer meanings to its rich tradition. Because Canada only officially became a country on July 1, 1867, it has been argued that literature written before this time was colonial. The term literature in

Canada posed a problem: Canadian literature was not bounded by citizenship; there were writers before there was a Canada and there have been immigrants and long-term visitors since, for whom Canada has been home, it is not restricted to Canadian settings.

Canadian literature enjoyed an international prestige today with its history that started with the inhabitancy of aboriginal people for thousands of years, evolved from a group of French and British colonies into bilingual, multi-cultural federation. Both ethnic and cultural diversity are reflected in its literature, including the position of Canada in the world and the Canadian perspective a nature frontier life. Canada’s position in the world profoundly affected many

Canadian writers as English Canadians are frequently being surrounded by the people and the culture of the United States. In seventies and eighties, Canadian writing was stimulated by renaissance of interest in literature and culture with a definition of Canadian identity that became a national obsession.

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The famous Canadian authors are Margaret Atwood, Kathleen Margaret Pearson, Yann

Martel, L.M. Montgomery, Rohinton Mistry, Alice Munro, Miriam Toews, Joseph Boyden,

Emma Donoghue, Thomas King, Stephen Leacock, Mordecai Richler, Sinclair Ross, Eden

Robinson, Margaret Laurence, Susan Juby, Carolyn Arnold, Robert Munsch, Malcolm Gladwell,

Dionne Brand and so on. The novels of Prix Goncourt winner Antonine Maillet and Roch

Carrier brought the Canadian literature to limelight after the Second World War. Stephen

Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town depicted the small town of the country. Nicole

Brossard whose works conformed to the formalism school of literature was a great poet of the post-world war era. More recently, Alice Munro won the Noble Prize for the Literature and the

Man Booker International Prize. Canadian author Farley Mowat was best known for his work

Never Cry Wolf and was Governor General’s Award-winning children’s book Lost in the

Barrens. Following World War II, writers such as Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler, Norman

Levine, Margaret Laurence and Irving Layton added to the Modernist influenced to Canadian literature previously introduced by F.R.Scott, A.J.M.Smith and others associated with the McGill

Fortnightly.

Arguably the best known living Canadian writer internationally was Margaret Atwood, a prolific novelist, poet, and literary critic. Some great twentieth century Canadian authors included Margaret Lawrence, Lucy Maud Montgomery and Gabrielle Roy. Throughout history, there had been many Canadian women novelists who have made significant contribution to the field. The list included many familiar and great Canadian female novelists such as Lucy Maud

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Montgomery, Margaret Atwood, Adrienne Clarkson, Louise Penny, Nellie McClung etc.,

Canadian themes played a large part in Canadian women’s literature. Frances Brooke wrote the first Canadian novel, The History of Emily Montague. She described the connection between land and women: Both areas are open for male colonization.

Canada was a home to people of diverse ethnicity and origin. As a vast and expansive country of spectacular and dramatic landscapes, nature has always played a significant role in

Canadian writing. Ecological and environmental concerns have become a particularly prominent hallmark of twenty-first century Canadian literature. Karla Armbruster proposes that a critical and integrative literary theory and practice of ecofeminism and environmental justice potentially offer alternative

models of human identity and human relationships with nonhuman nature that can

disrupt and challenge dominant ideologies, both through literary interpretations

and through the politicized perceptions and actions that texts and interpretation

can inspire. (Gaard and Murphy 116)

The natural world has always been viewed as an intrinsic part of the Canadian experience, and while most contemporary Canadian authors are centring their stories on interpersonal, social, and political subjects, nature continues to be a foundational aspect of the

Canadian identity. Ecofeminist theologies hold rich resources for spirituality in reference to embodiment and the inter-relationship of prayer and ecological praxis in a pane theistic perspective. Canadian suffragist movements, linked with ideas of nationalistic sentiments, entwined with maternal feminism emerged as dominant force not only to enfranchised women,

6 but served as a force to marginalize immigrants and minorities. Maternal feminism is a form of first-wave feminism infused with the language of domesticity, which called upon women to define a public role for themselves as women, sisters and mothers to improve society, and particularly to alleviate the suffering of women and children. Feminist literary scholars analyse and consider the representation of gender in literary and cultural work that is related to a cultural ecofeminism.

Canadian literature witnessed these issues through its famous novels, short stories, drama, poem etc., for example the narrator of the novel Surfacing embraced one of the major elements of eco-feminism in her novel – that of the

recognition that although the nature-culture dualism is a product of culture, we

can nonetheless consciously choose not to server the woman-nature connection by

joining male culture. Rather, we can use it as a vantage point for creating a

different kind of culture and politics that would integrate intuitive, spiritual and

rational forms of knowledge, embracing science and magic insofar as they enable

us to transform the nature-culture distinction and to envision and create a free

ecology society. (Atwood 23)

The narrator sees the natural world as her equal and that human beings are not radically separated from nature. In the following century, Anna Brownell Jameson published winter studies and summer Ramblasin Canada. Later, Canada at large struggled with imperialism versus emancipation. Sara Jeannette Duncan, in her novel, The Imperialist, highlighted the relationship between men and women. Margaret Laurence’s novels echoed Canada’s new stage

7 of independence by placing women’s experiences at the forefront. L.M. Montgomery made a huge contribution to the world of Children’s books. Lucy’s novels combine history and innocence together to create a believable story, which enable children and adults get good knowledge. Children’s books not only help kids learn to read but they also teach them a whole lot about themselves and the world around them. Great children’s stories resonate with readers of all ages and have a lasting and profound impact.

Children’s literature in English is the literature for children up to early adolescence had been written since the mid-nineteenth century. It was originally a literature in which portrayals of life in the new country- Confrontations with and adaptations to the landscape and the native people, colonized the territories and then created and developed a nation-were in search of appropriate vehicles of expression. At the turn of the century the animal story, the first distinctively Canadian genre, appeared. In the last half of the twentieth century, authors and illustrators have used a variety of genres to reflect the geographical and cultural diversity of

Canadian life.

Of nineteenth century stories, one of the most interesting is Catharine Parr Traill’sThe

Canadian Crusoes, which combined a knowledge of the Wilderness north of lake Ontario with elements of the Survival story made popular by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The popularity of the traditional adventure stories such as Seton’s Two Little Savages, Alan

Sullivan’s Brother Eskimo and Brother Blackfoot during the early twentieth century may account for the appearance of many of its traits in such novels as Haig-Brown’s Starbuck Valley Winter,

Mowats’s Lost in the Barrens and James Houston’s Frozen Fire. Certain periods of Canadian

8 history seemed to be favorites in novels. Some of the most distinguished historical fiction for

Children was found in books dealing with the native people.

Domestic and school stories and problem novels had not been as popular in Canada as in

Britain and the US, but there are important works in this area. Ralph Connor in Glengarry

School Day and Nellie McClung in Sowing Seeds in Danny described the lives of young people growing up in small Canadian towns. Now criticized for their sentimentality and excessive moral earnestness, these books nonetheless reflected the daily activities, culture climate and reading tastes of the period. L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, considered by many critics to be the only classic of Canadian Children’s Literature, appeared in 1908. It was focused upon survival not from the perspective of conventional masculine adventures, but from that of women and non-human nature, oft figured as feminine. Although it too had been criticized for its sentimentality, in the lively presentation of an ebullient heroine and the difficult process of her socialization it remained one of the most widely read Canadian children’s book. The blossoming of Canadian children’s publishing in the 1970’s produced works that continue, expand, and diversify the legacy of early Canadian children’s literature by such authors as

Catharine Parr Traill and L.M. Montgomery, who brought national and international attention to

Canadian children’s literature.

Lucy Maud Montgomery loved poetry of Tennyson, Scott, Shakespeare, Byron and Long fellow even from her childhood. When she was nine she began to write her own poems. She was a Canadian author best known for a series of novels beginning in 1908 with Anne of Green

Gables. The book was an immediate success. The first novel was followed by a series of

9 sequels with Anne as the central character. Montgomery went on to publish twenty novels, as well as five thirty short stories, five hundred poems, and thirty essays. Most of the novels were set in Prince Edward Island, and locations within Canada’s smallest province became a literary landmark and a popular tourist site-namely Green Gables farm, the genesis of Prince Edward

Island national park. She published her first paid story in 1895. Then, with Anne of green gables, her first and most famous novel, she earned royalties which were beyond her wildest imaginings. From that point on, she produced a series of sequels to Anne and she developed a second heroine, Emily of New Moon, who was modeled closely on her herself.

Men rarely occupied strategic positions in Montgomery’s novels-they are there as backdrops and the stories advanced primarily through the women’s talking, networking, and gossiping. Montgomery’s strategies of writing became clearer if one re-reads her books after studying her journals. These journals used the materials of her own life to impose narrative shape on her thoughts and on her interaction with the world around her. Montgomery grew up her lively, impetuous, but bookish child, and her framing of her down ideals of womanhood were as much influenced by the heroines she read about in fiction as by the people around her. In her stories, novels, and journals, one found a woman with keenness of insight and a formidable power for expressing human emotion.

A Compelling writer found ways to involve the reader in the text, and L.M. Montgomery is no exception. Her books had such a strong hold on readers because she created a tone of intimacy which admitted the reader into an inner circle of kindred spirits. In fact, Montgomery had several strategies for reaching her readers. The reader felt comfortable with the narrator’s

10 tone; it converted the reader into a listener who felt a part of the fellowship of the selected group for whom the storyteller performed. This narrator, who is usually omniscient, was the shaping force in many of the stories and novels. The story moved where ever the narrator’s mind goes, rather than proceeding along carefully crafted and rigid plot lines. The narrator often sounded much like Montgomery herself and her focus in the fiction was never on what happens; instead, she lets the narrating consciousness recounted the dynamics of why things happen, and she revealed in the telling. In fact, Montgomery’s books provided good sociological case studies of the social controls and dynamics in small isolated communities.

Montgomery had an acute and innate understanding of human needs: the need for roots, the need for love and emotional support and the need for wider social acceptance. Her books depicted people who lack such essential needs and struggle to satisfy them. For instance, the

Emily series probed deeper into the child’s conflict with an authoritarian social structure which fails to fulfill a child’s psychological needs. The Emily trio-logy has much substances; artistically, however, it suffers from total disjunction when Montgomery moved from the realistic mode of the first two books to the slapstick closure of marriage in the last Emily book.

The same disjunction occurs in The Blue Castle, where an oppressed old maid of twenty-nine breaks loose from her family, upsets them by associating with social outcasts, and then married a scandalous man who turns out to be a wealthy and successful writer working incognito. One of

Montgomery’s underrated books is Rilla of Ingleside. It was one of Canada’s few compelling fictional treatments of the impact of the First World War on the home front. Rilla was also of interest of realism and sentimentality. Her tricks for manipulating the reader’s emotions are obvious to sophisticated readers, but they are undeniably effective. As noted earlier,

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Montgomery herself was widely read, and she embedded quotations and plot motifs from other authors in her own books. In most cases, this was a strategy to engage the reader in a shared pleasure when the reader recognizes and loves the same quotations.

Montgomery wrote for an early twentieth-century audience at a time when there was much memory work in schools and literary people took pride in being able to recite poetry on social occasions. Montgomery also cited other authors-including much Shakespeare-to lend authority, resonance, and prestige to her own work. In some cases, as with the references to

Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Oliver Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, there was a specific inter textual commentary between Montgomery’s own novel and the other writer’s works-if the reader knows them. Montgomery’s A Tangled Web was designed for an adult audience, and in it she showed the side of her creativity which dealt sharp satiric treatment to human greed and self- aggrandizement. There was always a vitalizing tension under all of Montgomery’s shared catharsis of laughter.

Before Montgomery’s novels, women were certainly not encouraged to tell their own life stories of pain and suffering. Indeed, a woman who drew attention to her pain and suffering or complained about her lot in life violated traditional feminine codes of conduct. But as women were forced to suppress their life histories, they became victims of a capitalist society, which, in upholding traditional womanhood, denied them full participation in the marketplace.

Montgomery’s novels, however, constructs female histories of pain and suffering as a qualification for professional employment and, in doing so, transform victimization itself into a valuable commodity.

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L.M. Montgomery claimed her place in Canadian literature on many grounds. As a strongly regional writer, she had demonstrated to her successors the ways in a small, picturesque

Canadian landscape can provide a compelling atmosphere for fiction. As a close observer of human nature, she saw the satiric possibilities in sexual politics, in modes of social interaction, and in narrow-minded religion. As a social historian, she wrote novels and journals which conveyed the texture of the daily lives and activities of the female sex. As a woman who believed-like Virginia Woolf that some of the most important matters in human life happened inside the walls of ordinary homes, she embroidered unpretentious tales around the lives of women and children in a complexly layered society. She kept personal journals from 1889 to

1942 which recorded her own turbulent life as a creative and gifted woman. In 1923,

Montgomery became the first Canadian woman to be made an Art, and in 1924 she was named one of the Twelve Greatest Women in Canada by the Toronto Star. Canada post issued stamps in honor of Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables in 1975 again in 2008, in commemoration of the novel’s centennial. In 2016, the Bank of Canada includes Montgomery in a long list of twelve candidates to become the first Canadian Woman to be featured alone on Canadian currency. Her books have reached both sophisticated and ordinary readers, and she has affected both literary and popular writers around the world.

Anne of Green Gables is a 1908 novel by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Written for all ages, it had been considered a children’s novel since the mid-twentieth century. It recounted the adventures of Anne Shirley, an eleven year old orphan girl who was mistakenly sent to Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a middle-aged brother and sister who had intended to adopt a boy to help them on their farm in the fictional town of Avonlea on Prince Edward Island.

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The novel recounted how Anne makes her way with the Cuthberts, in school, and within the town. Anne of Green Gables was structured first around Anne’s efforts to get Marilla to accept and keep her, secondly around her efforts to get important community members to accept and approve of her, and thirdly around her efforts to in acceptance in the wider world. Anne had more consciously worked-out imagery than many of Montgomery’s later books, and this imagery was related to various aspects of social order. Just as the headlong brook straightened itself before Mrs.Lynde’s door, most of the other images supported Montgomery’s concern: they showed how individuals achieve the fulfillment of their psychological needs within the prevailing social order.

Anne of Green Gables presented three unique, distinct and incredibly important narratives that had implications for today’s society. First, Anne acted as a proto-essentialist feminist. Anne was able to create space for herself and other young females to grow and learn.

Secondly Anne’s relationship with Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert demonstrated a need for society to give legitimacy to children and the genuine experiences they face. By doing so, the township of Avonlea was culturally transformed into one with greater compassion, empathy, and richness, and transforms ideas of childhood, the feminine, and family. Finally, Anne of Green

Gables transforms the classic Canadian literature narrative of survival into a story about how to thrive in a community, against all odds.

The legitimacy of the childhood experiences is often undermined by the actions of adults.

In the case of Anne, her adoptive mother, Marilla, possessed strong protestant ideals surrounding child rearing. This was supplemented by external actors within a small community to contribute

14 to the overall environment of the township of Avonlea. Yet, Anne’s experience as an orphan forced Anne to explore and discover identity in a way that other children during her time were unable to do. Thus Anne had a strong, although feisty, identity that was rooted in self-agency and self-determination. The contact zone between the protestant ideals of Marilla and other adults in Avonlea and Anne’s rejection of these ideals created a societal dialogue on childhood.

By the end of the novel, most of the adults of Avonlea are reminded of the intrinsic value of childhood: imagination, exploration of self, and honesty.

Anne, while possessing a multitude of identity markers such as intelligence, competiveness, and empathy, possessed a strong sense of what it meant to be woman in nineteenth century, conservative/protestant Canada. While nineteenth century women occupied completely different categories than men, Anne utilized her unique identity to redefine her and other girls’ roles in relation to the other young boys. The instilled sense of individuality created both scenarios Anne finds herself experiencing. First, Anne was reduced to her physical characteristics (namely by other young boy’s psychological attitudes towards girls and women).

By the same coin, Anne was able to utilize her individualism to define herself and reject external challenges to her identity: in this case what it means to be a girl.

The nature of the land, especially on the east coast of Canada made life hard for early explorers. Unlike Americans who travelled to escape religious persecution, the Canadian experience had always been about natural resources. The dialogue between mankind and the land established the Canadian myth: survival. While the story of survival may apply to Anne due to her jumps from foster home to foster home on Canada’s rugged east coast, it was the

15 cultural shift that Anne created in Avonlea that expands the Canadian story. More specifically,

Anne’s actions all took place within the pre-existing constructs of protestant society, such as church and school. But it is how Anne functions within these institutions that change the story from the physical dialogue into the social dialogue of what it means to thrive rather than merely survive.

Anne’s subsequent adventures, awkward scrapes, aesthetic sense and temper tantrums are both touching and amusing, as she grows from ugly-duckling waif to talented and beautiful swan, having dye her hair temporarily green in the meantime. The book was an instant success when it first appeared-Anne was the dearest and most loveable child in fiction since the immortal

Alice, growled crusty, cynical Mark Twain-and it’s been going strong ever since. Anne of Green

Gables was first translated by a Japanese author who was very well known and well-loved already. Anne was an orphan and there were a lot of orphans in Japan right after the Second

World War, so many readers identified with her. Anne had no fear of hard work: she was forgetful because dreamy, but she was not a shirker. She displayed a proper attitude when she puts others before herself, and even more praiseworthy was that these others are elders. She had an appreciation of poetry, and although she showed signs of materialism-her longing for puffed sleeves was legendary-in her deepest essence, she’s spiritual.

Montgomery’s novels represent beloved classics in the world of young girls. Anne of

Green Gables reveals significant and multi-faceted relationships between the heroines and the natural world. On the basis of Val Plumwood’s suggestions in Feminism and the Mastery of

Nature, Karla Armbruster says

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there is a tendency within ecofeminist theory to emphasize the connections or

continuity between women and nature at the expense of recognizing important

differences between the two groups. Other tendencies within current ecofeminist

theory . . . and emphasize difference based on aspects of identity suchas gender,

race, or species in ways that can isolate people from each other and from

nonhuman nature. (98)

Anne’s growth indicates the authoress Ecofeminist ideology which is beyond her age.

Montgomery’s own vision of the natural world inevitably affected the creation of her heroine and their connection to the earth. Montgomery lived with nature and was transported by it. She focused on nature as a way to understand and to illustrate the human heart and as a way to understand and to illustrate the human heart and as a way to commune with those who also were inspired by natural beauty.

The first trend is based in a fundamental belief in the sacredness of nature, Earth and the universe. Ecospirituality understands the positions of human beings to be inextricably related to all other life forms within an interrelated, interconnected web that is part of the Divine’s dance of life. It teaches that divine life extends to all reality.

The second trend is about Maternal feminism which was a progressive social reform movement that stressed the importance of family and the distinctive role of women as mothers and wives. Because of this, many feminists do not see maternal feminism as feminist. The field of moral and social reform is the true sphere for woman and the active participation of women in the field of moral and educational reform marks an epoch in the history of the race.

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The final trend is cultural feminism. It refers to a philosophy that men and women have different approaches to the world around them, and that greater value should be placed on the way women approach the world. It is about finding ways to make the female essence a more appreciated part of society and the belief includes the idea that women in leadership positions would be more likely than men to cultivate a more peaceful, less war-torn world. Women also have been encouraged by cultural feminism to feel that their care giving responsibilities have made an important contribution to the world.

Thus, Montgomery’s novel Anne of Green Gables deals with an Ecofeminist perspective which is quiet familiar and popular among readers. It will point out how there are certain characteristics, characters and events in the book that can be seen as examples of feminist perspective, how valuing the girlishness and sentimentality of the novel is important to privilege their own feminity. It especially deals with the new emerging trends of Ecofeminism which includes Ecotheology, maternal feminism, and cultural feminism which prevails in the story.

CHAPTER-II

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ECOSPIRITUALITY

Ecofeminism also called ecological feminism, branch of feminism that examines the connection between women and nature. Its name was coined by French feminist Francoise d’Eaubonne in 1974. Ecofeminism is a term that links feminism with ecology. It relates the oppression and domination of all subordinate group such as women, people of colour, children, the poor to the oppression and domination of nature such as animals, land, water, air, etc. All of these subordinate groups have been subjected to oppression, domination, and exploitation.

Ecofeminists believe that these connections are illustrated through traditionally feminine values such as reciprocity, nurturing, and cooperation, which are present both among women and in nature. Ecofeminist philosophers Karen J. Warren and Jim Cheney state that

Children can provide insights into their own constructions and interpretations of

reality which are not readily accessible to adults. Inclusion of children’s voice is

a moral imperative because they offer protection from theory building concerning

childhood that is arrogant or harmful. (205)

The relationship between nature and children are the basic content in the research of

Ecofeminism. The first person who discussed the relationship between nature and women is

Sherry B.Ortner. In her Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture? she points out that nature and women are always associated with some cultural symbols. Ecofeminist literary critics examine literature from all cultures and throughout history to explore female perspectives on nature, nineteenth century English and American literature were seen as a particularly rich area

19 of study. As ecofeminist literary critics have shown, nature writing by women in both England and the United States flourished in the nineteenth century.

Ecofeminism has become an increasingly important field in both contemporary feminist and environmental studies. The first trend discussed here is about Ecospirituality or Ecotheology which is a form of constructive theology that focuses on the inter-relationships of religion and nature, particularly in the light of environmental concerns. It is important to keep in mind that

Ecotheology explores not only the relationship between religion and nature, but also in terms of ecosystem management in general.

The intersection of pagan and Christian allusions in Montgomery’s depiction of her heroines love of nature, contextualising these within the renewed interest in paganism in early twentieth-century literature and concentrating particularly on discussions of trees and woods in the Anne and Emily series. It suggests that the attitude towards nature and God displayed in these works anticipate themes in current Ecotheological discourse.

Real or fantastic, the spaces that child characters inhabit in literature, and the ways in which they came to know and inhabit them, affect them profoundly and in many different ways.

Their stories in turn, help situate and shape the children who read them. Both characters and readers are, instead, living on contradictory terrain: all at the same time settler and indigenous, modern and post-modern, local and global, and perhaps in this moment transforming into something else. Likewise, in coming to know their places, the critics included here are participating in the complex and never-ending process of mapping that terrain.

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Even more interesting, the link between young girls and living beings in nature was an example of Montgomery’s resistance to common figurations of nature as woman that many contemporary ecofeminists have identified and problematized. Carolyn Merchant, in her famous book, Death of Nature, argues that, indeed, nature is figured nearly always as female but, in western literature, the two dominant modes of representing nature are nurturing mother or wild and uncontrollable femaleness. In fact, when Montgomery described landscapes and views, she actually resorted to the routine figures of Victorian nature poetry. She piles on cathedral images and spiritual diction in Anne’s series.

Montgomery’s novels represent beloved classics in the world of children’s literature, particularly within the realm of fiction that appeals to young girls. Anne of Green Gables (1908),

Emily of New Moon (1923), and the lesser known Magic for Marigold (1929) reveal significant and multi-faceted relationships between the heroines and the natural world. Certainly,

Montgomery constructs these heroines’ identities as intersecting with the space of the natural world, resulting in the expression of their unique spirituality. This intersection provides an opportunity to investigate the links between these Canadians heroines’ spirituality and their aesthetic engagement with the earth, which could allow educators and parents to facilitate discussion with young readers of Montgomery’s novels about the environment. These conversations might focus on issues relating to care and appreciation for the earth as well as young readers’ spirituality and their perceptions of the natural world. In Ecofeminism: Women,

Culture, Nature Carol B. Christ explains that “Spirituality is not something one reads about or something one gets at a certain place at a certain day of the week. It is living one’s life with the

21 understanding that one is intimately connected to all of creation, all forces seen and unseen”. (31)

Over more than ninety years since its publication, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green

Gables has acquired the status of a Canadian cultural icon. In Anne’s world, nature plays an important role which is another character in the novel. Anne’s world can teach much about forming or reforming one’s own perspectives, and those of future generations. One can learn a multitude of lessons in Anne of Green Gable. Anne has a different view of the nature around her, one in which she recognizes her connection to the landscape and satisfied with everything the natural world has to offer. Anne of Green Gables breathes light and freedom, warmth and adventure, wrapped in the exquisite detail of the simple beauty of Prince Edward Island. A close reading of the narrative unveils a significant and repeated interaction between the heroines and the natural world.

Before discussing Montgomery’s treatment of spirituality through her heroines, it is helpful to define the concept. One way of understanding spirituality is reaching beyond the self to connect with something or someone. Schneider provides a useful definition: spirituality is a project of life-integration which means that it is holistic, involving body and spirit, emotions, and thought, activity and passivity, social and individual aspects of life. In her book, The Spirit of the Child, Rebecca Nye has identified “relational consciousness” (116) as a key component of children’s spirituality, and one dimension of this consciousness is the child-world relationship.

She discovered that some children’s spirituality manifested through their connection to the natural world. Nye also discusses “child-God, child-people, and child-self-consciousness” (114).

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These connections form a framework for understanding spirituality, and some expressions of children’s spirituality may feature more than one of these awarenesses.

One conception of spirituality relates these links to a supernatural aspect. Divine source

Scottish Presbyterianism, Montgomery’s denomination, would normally conceive of spirituality in this way. Montgomery’s characters maintaining an awareness of and connection with God, though it is not always the kind of connection found within a religious structure such as the church. Montgomery’s protagonists exhibit a refreshing, child-like response to a natural world.

Additionally, Anne, Emily, and Marigold dialogue about God with others in all of the novels, thereby spreading their own conceptions of the Divine. Another aspect of spirituality includes the child-people consciousness. Anne Shirley was an excellent example of this, as seen through her deep friendship with those she recognizes as kindred spirits.

These encounters in the natural world represent one aspect of a category of spiritual sensitivity in children. Nye discusses various types of spiritual sensitivity in children, one of which is “awareness-sensing” (65). Montgomery’s heroines Anne, Emily, and Marigold all possess a remarkable spiritual sensitivity that enables them to engage in investigate this realm of awareness-sensing in children. In Nature, Culture and Gender, P. Mary Vidhya Porselvi notes that:

The indigenous people’s belief in the sacredness of life contributes to the

understanding of Mother Earth ‘spirituality’. The ecofeminist belief in earth-

based spirituality throws light on the communication process between nature and

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human beings. The union of the sacred with nature and culture constitutes

ecofeminist spirituality. (37)

Tuning, a kind of heightened awareness, is activated when a child is observing a beautiful landscape, an act of nature, or listening to a piece of music. In this way, tuning can be directly related to a child’s aesthetic appreciation for and connection with the natural world. Nye’s research reveals that these moments of tuning are intimately connected with religious and spiritual experience, which Hay finds significant in relation to the appreciation of the natural world: More than this, spirituality is the bedrock on which rests the welfare not only of the individual but also of society, and indeed the health of our entire planetary environment. In other words, engaging aesthetically with the earth as a dimension of spirituality can help fuel the desire to protect that earth.

An aesthetic appreciation of the natural world as a manifestation of spirituality sometimes emerges in literary texts. Trousdale explores a handful of books for children that feature characters that engage with the natural world in remarkable ways. She surveys texts that evoke a sense of wonder, of awe, of transcendence, of the healing, and restorative powers of nature. A heightened awareness and perception of nature’s beauty can potentially open up the reader to a heightened awareness of the creator of that beauty, whom some may recognise as God or a source of ultimate goodness. Some suggest that God as a source of goodness is responsible for the beauty in the natural world, based on reference to the creation of the world in the Biblical book of Genesis. Therefore, one perspective is that what the creator designed is both good and beautiful. Countless works of literature portray striking moments in which protagonists

24 experience profound natural beauty. Such an experience can broaden characters perspective on their lives in the context of the larger world depicted in the novels.

Montgomery’s own vision of the natural world inevitably affected the creation of her heroines and their connection to the earth. Though many of Montgomery’s heroines’ experiences in the natural world occur when they are alone, they frequently recount aspects of these moments later, through their dialogue with others. At the same time, sometimes the girls expressions of spirituality work to open the eyes of those around them to a more refreshing way of relating to God. For example, Marilla develops more openness to the imagination and wonder through Anne living with her. Works about Montgomery engage with the idea that she entertained a vision of the world similar to those of her heroines. Because of this deep connection, she writes about girls in nature, and because Montgomery herself was raised as a

Presbyterian and was married to a minister, it might be appropriate to consider how some concepts of ecofeminist theology may illuminate significant aspects of Montgomery’s novels.

Furthermore, it might be appropriate to ask whether Montgomery considered how theology might intersect with thinking about the natural world. Though Montgomery does not explicitly engage her characters with the protection of the earth, her novels provide a starting point for the ideals of ecofeminist theology. Though some perceive Christianity as opposed to the protection of the natural world, Montgomery would surely not agree with this perspective.

She might have supported the idea that those professing faith in a higher being would want to take care of the earth entrusted to them. Montgomery’s perspective also suggested that rather than only a resource for humans, the natural world represented an important point of connection

25 to the spiritual realm of life and to the Divine. Particularly through an exploration of her novels for children, readers can surmise Montgomery’s awareness of the important role of the natural world in the lives of people.

Montgomery’s much beloved work Anne of Green Gables clearly reflected

Montgomery’s love for the earth and it started the journey of eleven-year-old Anne Shirley, who is intensely aware of the natural world. Her appreciation for the earth represents a vital dimension of spirituality, and textual evidence suggested that communion with nature can lead to connection with God and a greater awareness of the spiritual dimension of life. Additionally, throughout the novel Anne develops a greater sense of confidence and connection to herself as well as other people; including those she calls kindred spirits. A close reading of the narrative unearths a significant and repeated interaction between the heroine and the natural world.

Anne’s appreciation for nature is established from the beginning of the novel when she expresses that if Mathew had not arrived,

I had made up my mind that if you didn’t come for me tonight I’d go down the

track to that big wild cherry-tree at the bend, and climb up into it to stay at all

night. I wouldn’t be a bit afraid, and it would be lovely to sleep in a wild Cherry-

tree all white with bloom in the moonshine. (Montgomery 17)

Montgomery positions Anne as one who views contact with the ideas about spirituality, specifically the notion that deep engagement with the natural world through wonder and the imagination can lead to a deeper engagement with God. Throughout the novel, Anne expresses

26 that she is affected, even in a physical way, by manifestations of natural beauty and these moments are spiritual in nature.

The religious and spiritual connotations in the narrator’s diction highlight the significance of the connection between the individual and the earth and suggest a clear link between spirituality and appreciating nature. Montgomery depicts it very clearly in the series which get more responses from the critics. A mystical quality often pervades Anne’s regard for the environment, especially when she is described that “she came out of her reverie with a deep sigh and looked at him with the dreamy gaze of a soul that had been wandering afar, star-led” (25).

Similar to Nye’s notion of awareness-sensing in children, Anne becomes overwhelmed in moments of awe at the beauty of the world, reinforcing the idea of communing with nature as a mystical experience: “Anne’s beauty-loving eyes lingered on it all, taking everything greedily in…she knelt there, lost to everything but the loveliness around her…” (43). When Marilla insists that Anne learn how to say her prayers, Anne responds by suggesting a deeper spirituality of engagement with the creator of the natural world:

Why must people kneel down to pray? If I really wanted to Pray I’ll tell you what

I’d do. I’d go out into a great big field all alone or into the deep, deep woods, and

I’d look up into the sky-up-up-up-into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there

was no end to its blueness. (71)

This passage points to the notion of spirituality in Montgomery’s novel as situated within a connection to a Divine source. Additionally, this is another point of reference for the eco feminist theology, as the passage engages with an experience of prayer, God, and the natural

27 world related to feelings and intuitions, rather than situated within a structured and formal context. Anne always seeks deeply felt experience, and her imaginative identification of herself with nature only increases the intensity of her relation to God. Marilla expressed horror that

Anne was unfamiliar with the formal religious practices that those in Avonlea promote. From the beginning of the novel, however, Anne’s passionate engagement with the world reveals a spirituality grounded in as deep a faith as that which the Scottish Presbyterians of Avonlea possess, as reflected by their fulfilment of church obligations. Though some of the church-goers attest to their spirituality based on their commitment to attending church services and completing other obligations, Anne reflects spirituality situated in aesthetic experiences rather than social obligations. She recognized the connection between the natural world and the sacred, and her wonder at this beauty encouraged her own spiritual identity:

I said a little prayer myself, though. There was a long row of white birches

hanging over the lake and the sunshine fell down through them, ‘way, ‘way down,

deep into the water. oh, Marilla, it was like a beautiful dream! It gave me a thrill,

and I just said ‘Thank you for it God,’ two or three times (112)

This passage is particularly relevant for those viewing the novel through an eco-feminist lens, as it presents Anne’s perspective as a more appealing one in the context of an individual’s relationship to God and the natural world. Montgomery effectively demonstrate through Anne a very real link between a child-like capacity for wonder at the surrounding world and one’s spiritual identity.

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Anne wonders at the joyless seriousness of religion and criticizes a painting titled Christ

Blessing Little Children: “I wish the artist hadn’t painted Him so sorrowful looking. All His pictures are like that, if you’ve noticed. But I don’t believe He could really have looked so sad or the children would have been afraid of Him”. (78)

Mariall replied to Anne: “you shouldn’t talk that way. It’s irreverent- positively irreverent” (79). But Anne felt just as reverent as could be that she didn’t mean to be irreverent.

She also comments on the way the superintendent prays: “he had such a cracked voice and he prayed it so mournfully. I really felt sure he thought praying was a disagreeable duty” (79). To her surprise, Marilla finds herself agreeing with a lot of the things Anne says, though she feels that the child should be scolded. Marilla understands the spiritual ignorance on the part of Anne:

Poor Marilla was only preserved from complete collapse by remembering that it

was not irreverence, but simply spiritual ignorance on the part of Anne that was

responsible for this extraordinary petition. She tucked the child up in bed,

mentally vowing that she should be taught a prayer the very next day. (72-73)

Anne’s outlook on life gradually softens Marilla’s perspective. One example can be found in the scene in which Anne and Marilla discuss the apple tree outside the window at Green

Gables. Anne sees the apple tree as radiantly lovely while Marilla points out that, it blooms great but the fruit don’t amount to much never-small and wormy. Anne then continues extolling the beauty of the natural world as seen out the window. Though Marilla does not reflect a complete change of heart at this point, she eventually does alter her perspective due to both

Anne’s influence and Anne’s security in being herself and sharing her point of view. Because,

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Anne called the Barry’s pond as the Lake of Shinning Waters, Barry’s pond is painted with “the most spiritual shadings of crocus and rose” as well as “ethereal green” and “other elusive tintings for which no name has ever been found” (27). This passage reinforces the spiritual rhetoric of

Anne’s interaction with the natural world, implying wondrous and ineffable qualities. At one point, Anne walks through Violet Vale with reverent steps and worshipping eyes, as if she treads on holy ground.

The reader becomes acquainted with Anne’s fresh perspective on the natural world again in chapter two. During the ride to Green Gables, Anne personifies elements, such as the trees, in her surroundings, and this activity continues throughout the rest of the story. This reveals another facet of Montgomery’s treatment of the relationship between the individual and the earth. Anne wants the nature to express their sorrows so she views trees, flowers, and brooks as if they are friends. For example, she talks about the trees surrounding the asylum as if they were people and expresses sorrow that they are not in a more spacious location.

I used to say to them, “oh, you poor little things! If you were out in a great big

wood with other trees all around you and little mosses and Junebells growing over

your roots and a brook not far away and birds singing in, your branches you could

grow, couldn’t you? But you can’t where you are. I know just exactly how you

feel, little trees. (22)

Anne possesses an ability to connect in very interesting ways to elements in the natural world around her. Here Montgomery depicts that girls spirituality can be affected by their awe

30 and wonder at the natural world and by their openness to the spiritual dimension of life as revealed in the outdoors.

Another important ecological scene to examine is the cutting down of Idlewind in Anne of

Green Gables and this scene is an early version of a motif Montgomery often employs: girl loves woods, woods are cut down or are threatened with desecration.

Anne and Diana had spent most of their playtime that summer on and about the

pond. Idlewind was a thing of the past, Mr Bell having ruthlessly cut down the

little circle of trees in his back pasture in the spring. Anne had sat among the

stumps and wept, not without an eye to romantic of it. (306)

The chopping down of trees, the destruction of woodlands, is a dominant ecological concern in her work. The Idlewind version of this motif occurs in the chapter called “An

Unfortunate Lily Maid”. There is a visual parallel between the description of the chopping down of the Idlewind trees and the pulling down of Anne from the wooden post in the pond since the association between girls and trees is almost overwhelming in the book. Both Anne’s weeping over Idlewind, then her sullenly being pulled off a post by Gilbert show Montgomery’s subliminal uneasiness about the relationship between virginal girls and the natural world that is ruthlessly chopped down all around them.

Anne reflects a deep respect and appreciation for the natural world. Such respect often acts as a precursor to protecting and caring for the environment. It shows the importance of engaging with the natural world and increasing awareness of how one can treat it respectively.

Anne’s spiritual well-being is connected to their time communing with the Divine in the natural

31 world, and their awareness of the beauty of the earth positively affects their own lives and the lives of those around them. The novel emerges from the early twentieth century; her concerns are just as relevant for today’s child reader. In fact, her portrayals of the impact of the natural world on people’s spirituality provide significant material for consideration. It definitely reflects how the natural world can impact people’s perceptions of the spiritual, and this vision of the world is significant for today’s young readers.

CHAPTER-III

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MATERNAL FEMINISM

Maternal feminism is the belief of many early feminists that women as mothers and caregivers had an important but distinctive role to play in society and in politics. Maternal feminism combines the concepts of maternalism and feminism. Maternalism appealed to bourgeois women interested in reformed the lower orders, and provided the excuse for intrusive surveillance of working class women and girls. Maternal feminism bases its claims for women’s full social and political participation in public life on their roles as mothers. Because of this, many feminists do not see maternal feminism as feminist.

Like other specialized areas of feminism, maternal feminism is not static, but changes with time. Early maternal feminism came from the twentieth century’s first women’s rights movement. First wave feminists argued that women should be granted voting rights not because they were human beings who should have those rights automatically, but so they could be better wives and mothers. Today, contemporary versions of maternal feminism view motherhood as a unifying force that empowers women not only to achieve their individual goals, but also to effect social change. The first wave of feminism in Canada occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This early iteration of Canadian feminism was largely based on maternal feminism.

The ideology of maternal feminism incorporates ideas from social feminism and domestic feminism. Combining the two gives the concept that women’s special role as mother gives her the duty and the right to participate in the public sphere. Maternal feminists did not see maternalism as being limited to biological maternity. They extended it to social or spiritual

33 motherhood, and saw no reason why a woman should not remain single and devote herself to a professional career to social causes. Ecomaternalism’s assumption that core characteristics of womanhood parallel the core characteristics of nature is really a long-standing tenet of eco- feminism. Thus heavily invested in the enduring cultural-feminist notion of an ethic of care, the critical wisdom of eco-feminism and ecomaternalism is that women are continually psychologically conditioned to care, as girls, as wives, and, most of all, as mothers; this is what makes them more environmentally conscientious. In her article Gender and society Barrie

Thorne clarifies,

Both feminist and traditional knowledge remain deeply and unreflectively

centered around the experiences of adults. Our understanding of children tends to

be filtered through adult perspectives and interests . . . their full lives, experience,

and agency obscured by adult standpoints. (86)

The word ecomaternalism appropriately describes the rhetoric that makes explicit links between women’s mothering and caring disposition and their unique propensity to care for nature. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were strong ties between maternal feminism and the suffrage and temperance movements, both of which aimed to improve the conditions of women and children at home and at work. There was also a natural link between pacifism and maternal feminism. Maternal feminism was a progressive social reform movement that stressed the importance of family and the distinctive role of women as mothers and wives.

Maternal feminists believed that the application of female, maternal virtue to issues of social welfare, would improve Canadian society and the lot of the disadvantaged, especially

34 impoverished women and children. They advocated the legal equality of men and women but they did not seek to obliterate traditional gender roles. The female roles were defined by motherhood, childrearing, and ensuring a happy home life. Thus, in Karen J. Warren’s

Ecofeminism: Women, Culture and Nature, Deane Curtin explains that

Patriarchal cultures tend to locate women’s practices on the border between

nature and culture. These involve caring for others . . . women’s work is the

everyday work of translation between the needs of the environment and the needs

of the human community. (87)

Maternal feminists were progressive in a number of ways, but many of their views on race were not. In 1915, when Nellie McClung wrote to advance the cause of suffrage, she did so from the perspective of a maternal feminist, explaining every normal woman desires children.

Similarly, Henrietta Edwards described motherhood as God’s greatest gift and saw a mother as a co-worker with God in a way that no man can ever be. Irene parlby, too, believed that women had a political role to play in securing better conditions for children, better education, and better public health, but that when a woman was deciding whether to desert her home for politics, one’s children should always come first. In 1902, Henrietta Muir Edwards had described the dilemma facing the Canadian woman: Though she reigned as a queen in her home, unfortunately the laws she makes reach no further than her domain. The maternal feminists believed women were innately different from men, but believed women possessed a divine feminine nature that had great potential to shape the world. They saw women’s involvement in society as a natural and important extension of a woman’s innate capacity for nurturing and motherhood. According to

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McClung, women had two roles: to have children and to use their motherly qualities to create a world where they would want their children to grow up.

Christina Hoff Sommers, a critic of late twentieth century feminism, has defined maternal feminism as recognition that the sexes are equal but different. The conservative English authors

Frances Trollope (1779-1863) and Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65) both thought that women should be better educated so they would be less dependent on men. Ellen Ley (1849-1926) of Sweden thought motherhood was women’s highest cultural task, and considered that mothers should not work away from home. In 1893 Lady Aberdeen (1857-1939), head of the National Council of

Women of Canada (NCWC), said mothering was the grand woman’s mission. In her 1915 book

In Times Like These McClung Nellie McClung wrote,

Too long have the gentle ladies sat in their boudoirs looking at life in a mirror like

the lady of shallot, while down below, in the street, the fight rages, and women,

and defenceless children, are getting the worst of it . . . the world needs the work

and help of the women, and the women must work, if the race survive. (66)

According to McClung the woman’s outlook on life is to save, to care for, and to help. It was due to biological differences that women were morally superior to men and should have the vote. Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942), best known as author of Anne of Green Gables, presented maternal feminist views in her books published in the period around World War I

(1914-18). In Anne’s secure world of Avonlea women make most of the decisions. Devereux notes that, although Montgomery and McClung were in many ways polar opposites as far as

36 politics and suffrage were concerned, both authors have heavily implicated in the ideological construction of women as mother of the race.

Mollie Gillen cites an interview in the Boston Republic in 1910, two years after the first publication of Anne of Green Gables, in which Montgomery is described as “distinctively conservative….she has no favour for woman suffrage; she believes in the home-loving woman”

(85). Montgomery shaped the politics of maternal feminism in the years that preceded, encompassed, and followed the First World War. Through her fiction, she actively participated in the sweeping changes that altered the lives and circumstances of women in Canada. By close reading of Montgomery’s texts from a feminist point of view, a line of research which has not been tried on these texts before, this study seeks to find new roads into her fictional world and to uncover those parts Montgomery’s texts that remain muted or un-read when applying traditional methods. In her essay Knitting Up the World: L.M. Montgomery and Maternal Feminism in

Canada, Erika Rothwell notes that

Montgomery was an astute social historian and maternal feminist who kept her

finger upon the pulse of Canadian women’s experiences. She powerfully knit into

her fiction events, circumstances, beliefs, experiences, and realization that were of

moment in the living history of Canadian women. Montgomery knits up her

portrayal of the changing status of the mother, recreating the tapestry of maternal

feminism in Canada. (142)

Montgomery’s first novel, Anne of Green Gables, written years before she became a mother, is generally seen as an affirmation of motherhood, as a depiction, even, of maternal

37 feminism, which employs a discourse of maternalism. Maternity in Anne of Green Gables exits in particular and acute tension with narrativity, presenting a conflict of the kind pervasive in

Victorian women’s writing. The story describes a search or quest for the mother, but an analysis of the novel’s structure of plotting in conjunction with its representations of mother figures reveals that Montgomery’s exploration of the maternal is highly ambivalent.

The plot’s underlying trigger is the death of Anne’s biological mother, Bertha Shirley.

This death results in the exclusion of her maternal discourse from the text. Since Bertha did not

“live . . . long enough for Anne to remember calling her mother”, she is absent from any mother- daughter dialogue and her story remains mostly unspoken and unspeakable (Montgomery 55).

From this near-total erasure of the biological mother’s story- “biological mothers in Montgomery do not fare well” (Bode 58). The text moves to a struggle between the opposing discourses of mother figures and the daughter. Avonlea is insular and relatively untouched by technological innovations. It is predominantly maternal world: strong women knit up the substance of Anne’s domestic, educational, political, and religious experiences.

In fact, Anne of Green Gables is pervasively and didactically maternalist. Thus, in Knitting

Up the World: L.M. Montgomery and Maternal Feminism in Canada, Montgomery depicts the maternal as a strong, positive force rooted in tradition. However,

This influence is then used by rising generations, who gain power, Demand

change and reform, and finally attain suffrage. Eventually, however, the maternal

becomes subject to challenge and inquiry and alters, losing much of its power to

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nurture and effect good, while pointing towards the need for remaking feminine

identity and power. (134)

That is, the novel is concerned primarily with the development of a young girl from prepubescent child to young adult, charting her development in terms of her academic as well as moral and domestic education in maternal womanliness. As Anne tells Marilla, Miss stancy teaches the girls that they “couldn’t be too careful what habits they formed and what ideals they developed in their teens, because by the time they were twenty their characters would be developed” (Montgomery 332-333). However, while the novel is focused on the education of girls to right womanhood, it is also concerned with the promotion of maternalism in a broader sense.

Mrs. Lynde, the most politically inclined character, espouses the ideas of the Liberal

Party, which argued for a decentralized Canadian government that would preserve autonomy in the Canadian provinces. As Margaret Atwood has observed, the novel can be seen to be as much

Marilla’s story of maternal development as it is Anne’s toward responsible womanhood.

Marilla, at the outset of her decisive journey, is said to be a woman of narrow experience and rigid conscience whose sense of humour is still, though barely, traceable around her lips.

She is capable of maternal thinking but in danger of its typical errors of rigidity and conformity.

Marilla’s rigidity as an older woman committed to her preferences for plain, literal speech and living results in her analysis of Anne’s need for preservation when she demands the facts that will enable her to make up her own mind without falling under a spell from Anne’s charm.

When Marilla decides to take Anne home with her again, she does so out of a contemporary and

39 power as well as a conviction of moral responsibility. Marilla, after all, discover her untapped springs of mother-love through Anne’s affection and in the process becomes a better and happier, more mellow person is the implication in the representation of Anne’s mistakes as most often the result of Marilla’s. For instance, Marilla fails to notice the amethyst brooch on her shawl before she puts it away; she forgets that she has put the bottle of raspberry cordial in the cellar; she neglects to tell Anne about the liniment in the vanilla bottle. Her role in Anne’s trials strongly suggests that the older woman is to learn from them, as Anne does. In Feminist

Mothering, Andrea O’Reilly includes Eric Horwitz’s argument that while resistant, empowered mothering is characterised by many themes which include:

The importance of mothers meeting their own needs; being a mother doesn’t fulfil

all of women’s needs; involving others in their childrens upbringing; actively

questioning the expectations that are placed on mothers by society; challenging

mainstream parenting practices . . . and challenging the idea that the only

emotion mothers ever feel towards their children is love. (6)

In involving others in the raising of their children, empowered mothers “look to friends, family, and their partners to assist with childcare and often raise their children with an involved community of what may be termed co-mothers or other mothers” (Montgomery 7). Marilla happily includes several other mothers in Anne’s raising, namely her neighbour Mrs Rachel

Lynde, Anne’s teacher Miss Muriel Stacy and the minister’s wife Mrs Allen. Anne’s adoptive father Matthew, Marilla’s brother also participates in Anne’s upbringing.

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Marilla challenges mainstream parenting practices in refusing Mrs Lynde’s advice to whip Anne as a punishment after Anne has been rude to Mrs Lynde. Lynde’s ability to use the birch switch in childrearing contrasted with Marilla’s hesitation portrays her as a somewhat cruel woman. Such type of punishment is considered to be cruel to Marilla. In fact, Marilla struggles with and also reflects on her mothering quiet a lot throughout the novel. Marilla’s relief, when

Anne decides to apologize to Rachel, when she cannot decide whether Anne should be scolded or not for incisive, but by conventional standards improper assessment of the superintendent’s prayers, the minister’s sermons or the influence of Mrs Lynde’s advice are all examples of

Marilla struggling with her mothering. When she believes Anne has lost her brooch Marilla is shown channelling her emotions into “working fiercely and scrubbing the porch floor and the dairy shelves when she could find nothing else to do. Neither the shelves nor the porch needed it- but Marilla did” (139). The line shows the usual expectations that are placed on mothers by society. Thus, Marilla represents feminist mothering.

Marilla wants to develop Anne’s education level, which comes under Maternal Feminism as mother’s responsibility. Marilla challenges mainstream parenting practices in her strong belief that Anne be educated: When Matthew and I took you to bring up we resolved we would do the best we could for you and give you a good education. I believe in a girl being fitted to earn her own living whether she ever has to or not. (336)

From the very beginning of the novel Marilla is shown to advocate education, as she also meant to educate the boy they initially wanted to adopt, even though his main purpose would have been to help on the farm. Marilla is challenging patriarchal society’s practices at large as

41 well as the practices of the Avonlea community, and especially the beliefs of that community’s power figure, Mrs Lynde. Mrs Lynde’s opinions about women’s education are made clear in

Anne of Green Gables when Anne says: “Mrs Lynde says pride goes before a fall and she doesn’t believe in the higher education of women at all; she says it unfits them for women’s true sphere” (403). Women’s true sphere being the sacred mission of homemaking such as cooking, cleaning, etc., furthermore, even Anne’s good friend Diana is denied higher education. Against these matriarchs, women who have biological children, uphold the community, speak with the authority of married women, Marilla the spinster adoptive mother holds her own.

But Marilla’s lesson is not exactly the same as Anne’s: Anne is innately maternal, knowing apparently instinctively, how to care for children. She learns how to choose the putatively correct path towards womanhood, when there are other options presented to her.

Marilla, conversely, learns how to find the maternity she had missed and how to be a responsible and how to be a responsible example of what would be designated in the early twentieth century as the mother-woman. Feminism by the early 1900s in Canada was characteristically maternal.

While the world of Avonlea appears to be predominantly maternal, it is not motherly in an altogether benign way: aside from other deficiencies in their interactions with Anne such as excessive strictness, for instance, as well as rigidity, impatience, coldness, bluntness, and discourtesy on the parts of Marilla, Mrs Barry, and Rachel Lynde- Avonlea’s women are characterized in particular by their consistent attempts to cut off Anne’s speech. This observation applies especially to Marilla, who begins her upbringing of Anne with the very notion that “Anne’s got too much to say . . . but she might be trained out of that” (58).

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In Anne, maternity’s opposition to speech and writing unsurprisingly ensures the daughter’s misidentification with the mother. In the lead-up to the school concert, for instance, into which Anne “threw herself . . . heart and soul, hampered as she was by Marilla’s disapproval,” the narrative insists on the difference between mother and daughter, and on the mother’s resistance to the daughter’s desire for singularity (266). “Oh, Marilla,” asks Anne, “I know you are not so enthusiastic about [the concert] as I am, but don’t you hope your little Anne will distinguish herself?” “All I hope is that you’ll behave yourself,” replies Marilla. “You are simply good for nothing just now with your head stuffed full of dialogues and groans and tableaus” (268). Anne wants distinction, where Marilla wants only silence and conformity.

Again, the difference between mother and daughter is articulated explicitly in a scene that occurs shortly afterwards, when Anne reflects on the difficulty of settling back into daily routines after the stimulation provided by the concert. “I suppose that is why Marilla disapproves of them

[concerts],” she tells Diana. “Marilla is such a sensible woman. It must be a great deal better to be sensible; but still, I don’t believe I’d really want to be a sensible person, because they are so unromantic” (284). Yet again, the mother’s sensibleness, her conformity, is constructed as being in opposition to art. They drive the daughter’s wish to resist compliance and instead to come into her own by inventing her own story. If Anne’s tales and games make for a marvelous way of connecting with her friends at school, her art-her narrative, her imagination-the mother is centered not in connection but in distance. Arguably, this autonomy is the result of Anne’s fractured genealogy.

An entirely different pole in the spectrum of maternal examples is represented in the character of Miss Josephine Barry. Unlike Marilla, Mrs. Barry, and Mrs. Lynde, Diana’s elderly

43 spinster aunt is interested in Anne’s narrative and even encourages it: “Sit down here,” she commands Anne during their first meeting, “and tell me about yourself.” During the same meeting she asks Anne, “If you will come over and talk to me occasionally,” and then informs the Barry family that she has decided to remain at their farm “simply for the sake of getting better acquainted with that Anne-girl” (220). Yet this positive model is diminished by the character’s portrayal as self-centered. “Miss Barry was a rather selfish old lady, if the truth must be told,” the narrator informs us, as though reluctantly, “and had never cared much for anybody but herself. She valued people only as they were of service to her or amused her” (327). By showing that Miss Barry is less keen on providing a fostering, nurturing presence than on satisfying her own desires, the narrative discredits her interest in Anne’s story and by implication her value as a mother figure, thereby undermining what might have been maternal support of narrative.

Overall, the novel offers a problematic intergenerational model of maternity. The only positive female figures are Miss Stacy, the much loved schoolteacher, and Mrs. Allan, the equally admired minister’s wife. Both of these women are depicted as encouraging Anne’s speech and creativity. Mrs. Allan shares with Anne that she herself “was a dreadful mischief when she was a girl and was always getting into scrapes,” (293) and Miss Stacy, not incidentally, gives Anne advice on her writing and furthermore “lets us choose our own subjects in composition,” as Anne tells the disapproving Marilla (265).

Gammel and Dutton observe in their chapter “disciplining Development: L.M.

Montgomery and Early Schooling” that “The female teacher was incorporated into the female

44 pupils’ imaginary as an object of fantasy and adulation. The female role models became part of an active girls’ culture, shaping their positive identification with women” (116). Both Miss

Stacy and Mrs. Allan are explicitly characterized in the text as young, and presumably, especially in the case of Miss Stacy, are not much older than Anne herself, based on the latter’s youth when she becomes a teacher. In a similar vein, the novel celebrates nurturing relationships among girls and young women; a feature of Montgomery’s writing in general that has been the subject of much critical attention. Mothers are noticeably excluded from this celebration. As

Marianne Hirsch observes in her work , The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis,

Feminism that “the connection between mother and daughter is fraught with potential dangers, intergenerational friendships among women offer only the benefits and not the pitfalls of same- sex bonding” (133).

Anne of Green Gables suggests strongly that female development and subject formation rely heavily not on a mother-daughter bond but on a sisterhood, on intimate relationships between women of approximately the same age. Such fostering is the purpose, for instance, of the story club and it is the reason behind Anne’s intention, “when I am grown up . . . to talk to little girls as if they were, too, and I’ll never laugh when they use big words. I know from sorrowful experience how that hurts one’s feelings” (Montgomery 203). The knowledge and experience to be shared are not the mother’s, who instead remains in a position of conflict with the daughter. But, the reader is not reassured of Marilla’s natural motherly love for Anne until at the end of the novel, when Marilla confesses her love for Anne after the death of Matthew:

45

We’ve got each other Anne. I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t here- if

you’d never come. Oh, Anne, I know I’ve been kind of strict and harsh with you

maybe- but you mustn’t think I didn’t love you as well as Matthew did, for all that

. . . I love you as dear as if you were my own flesh and blood and you’ve been my

joy and comfort ever since you came to Green Gables. (410)

Montgomery features knitting functions as a metaphor for maternal feminism, revealing a decided progression in Montgomery’s progression in Montgomery’s portrayal of the maternal across this historical period. In the beginning, Montgomery depicts the maternal as a strong, positive force rooted in tradition. This influence is then used by rising generations, who gain power, demand change and reform, and finally attain suffrage. In 1917, Nellie McClung achieves an echo of Montgomery’s last words in Anne, as quoted in Our Nell: A Scrapbook

Biography of Nellie L. McClung,

In the quiet old days of peace perhaps there was some excuse in women saying all

was well, the world was going along quite nicely without their help, but in these

days of terrible destruction, of desolation and loss, of pillaged homes, orphaned

children, broken hearted women . . . can sit idly at home comfortable, warm, fed

and clothed and say that all is well. (119)

In her evaluation of the war, Montgomery’s positions converge. The novel opens with

Mrs Lynde’s knitting which suggested the confident control and influence she exercised over the social fabric of the community of Avonlea. Women organize many of the church charities and societies, which essentially constitute the social services of Avonlea. The Sunday school

46 teachers are both female. Anne’s world is a decidedly matriarchal one in which the power of decision making belongs to the women: they are, so to speak, the social housekeepers of

Avonlea.

In portraying this world of female guardians who nurture Anne and Avonlea,

Montgomery identifies herself with maternal feminism, a powerful branch of the women’s movement in turn-of-the-century Canada. Montgomery’s vision of maternal feminism is steeped in realism. Not all the mother figures in Green Gables are ideals. Mrs Hammond and Mrs

Thomas use Anne as a maid-of-all-work, and Mrs Peter Blewett, who has quarrelsome children, consistently wears out successive serving maids. Even positive maternal figures are not paragons: Mrs Lynde is gossipy and overbearing; Marilla is initially dour and repressed; Mrs

Barry lacks insight and is stubborn. Thus, even at this early stage Montgomery gently undermines the political vision of maternal women. Avonlea perpetuates its traditional, maternal nature in accordance with the practice of mother-monopolized child rearing. Anne, for instance, easily slips into the groove of continuing maternal influence an activity in Avonlea and Green

Gables, remaining in the dear old place or on the home front secure in her feminine identity. The last chapter of Green Gables anchors Anne’s maternal commitment.

Anne finds “marilla in the kitchen, sitting by the table with her head leaning on her hand.

Something in her dejected attitude struck a chill to Anne’s heart. She had never seen Marilla sit limply inert like that” (Montgomery 416). Anne’s turn for knitting up the world of Avonlea has come with the threat of Marilla’s blindness. Instead of going to college, Anne becomes a mothering and nurturing figure to Marilla, a role further enhanced by her new responsibility of

47 teaching the Avonlea School and bringing up a new generation of children. As Anne assumes her matriarchal heritage, Green Gables closes with Anne quoting Robert Browning’s Pippa

Passes, “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world” (427). Yet the comfortable and romanticized insularity that characterizes the Anne series is undeniably ruptured and destroyed by the First World War. Montgomery knits up her portrayals of the changing status of the mother, recreating the tapestry of maternal feminism in Canada. The strands of her work tell the story of Canadian women’s lives in relation to the changing social and political circumstances of

Canadian society in the first half of the twentieth century.

Montgomery’s fiction returns again and again to representations and narratives related to questions of motherhood and maternity. Foster care plays an important role in helping children.

Children can learn the skills they need to develop into functional adults, and learn to do so within the normal social boundaries of their culture. Montgomery’s novels and stories repeatedly focus on orphans, children abandoned by parents or separated from them, and children in the care of unloving relations, as well as absent mothers and childless women or spinsters. Much of

Montgomery’s writing, from the first novel, Anne of Green Gables, to such late novels as Magic for Marigold and Jane of Lantern Hill, regards motherhood as crucial work for women and focuses primarily on the education of girls.

CHAPTER-IV

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CULTURAL ECOFEMINISM

In a world where women’s rights continue to rise, feminists are losing their platform.

The fight for gender equality had lost depth with this rise and positive focus on feminism has risen with it. This positive focus on the female mind, body and spirit, is known as cultural feminism. Cultural feminism is developed from radical feminism. It is an ideology of a female nature or female essence that attempts to revalidate what cultural feminists consider undervalued female attributes. In most cases, Canadian studies is leaning towards the study of landscape; the landscape which includes both the natural and the human.

Cultural feminism is the biological theory of essential difference between men and women. Primary focus is on the positive aspects of womanhood- the things that make women wonderful and essential as nature intended. It is not about empowerment nor is it about battling sexes and gender discrimination. In some aspects, cultural feminists believe women to be more evolved than men. The ability to nurture is one of the aspects celebrated by them. The ability to love is also seen as a feminine quality, which isn’t to say that men do not also have this ability, but that women are wired to love. Ecofeminists address cultural issues because they see these relations as intrinsic to our basing of ecological world views. Consider this notion from The

Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism:

relationships are not something extrinsic to who we are, not an “add on” feature

of human nature; they play an essential role in shaping what it is to be human.

Relationships of humans to the nonhuman environment are, in part, constitutive of

what it is to be human. (Warren 335)

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The cultures have seen their perfect representation in contemporary Canadian writing.

The cultural and literary milieu of Canada has curved unique features for literature. Feminisms various forms of post colonialism, eco-criticism, alienation, displacement strategies for survival, indigenous writing, diasporic writing, children’s writing, and many other trends and patterns have created the trajectories of contemporary Canadian literature.

In 1920, women in the United States attained the right to vote with the passage of the nineteenth Amendment. In Britain, women got the vote in 1918, but with severe restrictions that only woman who was over the age of thirty, providing they were householders, married to a householder or if they held a university degree. In Canada, women were granted the right to vote in municipal elections in Ontario in 1884 and the right applied only to widows and unmarried women. In 1991, the right to vote was extended to all women in the Act to confer the Electoral

Franchise upon Women. But, women living on Prince Edward Island, where the fictional village of Avonlea of Anne of Green Gables is situated, did not get the vote until 1922. Thus, Mrs.

Lynde mentions: “if women were allowed to vote we would soon see a blessed change”

(Montgomery193).

It is interesting that Montgomery has chosen to portray a brother and a sister as the main characters of Anne of Green Gables instead of a married couple because the husband and wife relationship is male dominated and an oppressive one. Michele stairs discusses the reasons behind Marilla and Matthew’s singleness in Matthews and Marillas Bachelors and Spinsters in

Prince Edward Island in 1881:

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Montgomery implies rather than states the reason behind the Cuthbert’s

unmarried state. Matthew appears far too shy to court a woman, and his sister

capably runs the farm household, successfully eliminating the need to marry for

survival. On the other hand Marilla seems too sour and unpleasant to ever hope to

entice a husband. (256)

Significant numbers lived with siblings as did Matthew and Marilla and some, like them, also chose to raise children. For most of the men and women who never married, did not mean a rejection of family or life on the margins. Few were disconnected from the bonds of family.

Josephine Donovan mentions in Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions that

“Magaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) initiated the Cultural Feminist tradition” (48). Cultural feminists emphasized the transformative capacity of women’s uniqueness for humanity as a whole. It is not necessary to equate cultural feminism with an objectivist stance. The debate among cultural feminists over women, gender, and essentialism corresponds to the dual historical roots of this strain of thought, in both the nineteenth and twentieth century.

For although cultural feminism can be located among the essentialist feminist thought of the 1800s, it has also been characterized as growing out of the radical feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which advocated that women control the construction of their own identities as women. The suffrage movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Canada gave rise to extant literary ambitions of women to have female literary tradition. The movement aimed at liberating women from the restrictions and inhibitions of the restricted socio-

51 cultural norms of the nation and intended to provide economic independence. It began to assert confidently the authority of the feminine sensibility and to have a strong feminine sensibility.

And as a result, gender politics constituted a major thrust and an overriding preoccupation in

Canadian novels. M.H. Abrams defines cultural studies in A Glossary of Literary Terms as follows:

It explores the cultural significance of all types of institutions, and practices.

Literature is accounted as merely one of many forms of cultural signifying

practices. A chief concern is to specify the functioning of the social, economic

and political forces and power structures that produces all forms of cultural

phenomenon and endow them with their social meaning. (53)

Human actions take place in institutions such as the institution of family, workplace, education, worship and others. It can be viewed that the study of culture is connected with the human relationship to nature. Liberal, cultural, social and socialist feminism have all been concerned with improving the relationship between humans and nature, and each has contributed to an eco-feminist perspective in different ways.

Cultural eco-feminists see an essential relationship between women and nature and employ spiritual or poetic modes to explore oppression on a personal and larger scale.

Nevertheless, Carlassare (1994) finds that one should not dismiss cultural eco-feminism as unconditionally bad without examining the specific ways and situations its proponents are using essentialism. Those that dismiss cultural ecofeminism straight, could be called guilty of restoring to an essentialist notion of essentialism. One can in fact read constructivism within the

52 essentialism of cultural ecofeminism, and as well observe essentialism within the constructionist position of social ecofeminism.

Cultural ecofeminists are asserting women’s essentialist gender characteristics but at the same time acknowledging the construction of women’s essence within a particular social context. Ecofeminist literary criticism is a hybrid criticism, a combination of eco-logical or environmental criticism and feminist literary criticism. It offers a unique combination of literary and philosophical perspectives that gives literary and cultural critics a special lens through which they can investigate the ways nature is represented in literature and the ways representations of nature are linked with representations of gender, race, and class.

Montgomery was clearly conservative with respect to many issues affecting women; nevertheless, it is also clear that gendered power relations were at the centre of her novels.

While this analysis may sound essentialist and it reifies socially constructed gender roles for women. Despite the enormous popularity of her books, particularly Anne of Green Gables, L.M.

Montgomery’s role in the development of Canada’s national culture is not often discussed by literary historians. This is curious as some of Canada’s leading writers, including Margaret

Atwood, Alice Munro, and Jane Urquhart, have acknowledged their indebtedness to

Montgomery’s fiction. That scholars have not mined the Canadianness of Montgomery’s writing is redressed by this collection.

It is the first systematic effort to investigate and explore Montgomery’s active engagement with Canadian nationalism and identity, including regionalism, canon formation, and Canadian-American cultural relations. It examines her work in relation to the many

53 dramatic changes of her day, such as the women’s movement and the advent of new technologies; and it looks at the national and international consumption of Anne of Green

Gables, in the form of both high culture and cultural tourism.

The wide range of contributors represent views from across disciplines and boundaries, including feminist, biographical, psychoanalytical, historical, and cultural approaches. This ground breaking collection will appeal to all fans of Montgomery’s work and to students of

Canadian letters. It places Montgomery and her work firmly in the mainstream of Canadian literary history, affirming her importance in Canada’s cultural development. According to Irene

Gammel in Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture

Montgomery. . . has been able to create and sustain an industry that has supported

an entire provincial economy for decades through tourism, consumer items,

musicals, and films. No other author had Montgomery’s sustained power to

export Canadian Literature and culture around the world. No other author has

come to associated so forcefully and emotionally with the nation’s cultural

heritage. (3)

Those who have thought of Montgomery as a superficial writer of romances for little girls may be startled to learn that Montgomery’s books have had a wide-ranging political and social influence, both in Canada and internationally. Her works reached far beyond specific age and national borders, although it is commonly associated with Canadian children’s fiction. When one considers feminist writings, children’s literature is not often the considered as the first application that comes to mind; in spite of the recent increase in critical readings of readings of

54 children’s literature, and dismisses a genre that can and does influence generations of young girls.

The influence can be particularly felt in the Anne of Green Gables series by L.M.

Montgomery. The world-wide popularity of the novel has allowed Montgomery’s theme of cultural ecofeminism to enrich the lives of girls and women in many diverse cultures. Mavis

Reimer, in her introduction to a collection of essays on Anne of Green Gables (Such a Simple

Tale: Critical Responses to L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables), indicates that

explicated in terms of its appeal to audiences widely separated in time and

place, Anne loses its circumscribed national and historical personality: critics

considering Montgomery’s novel as popular fiction argue either that the

novel displays mythic archetype or entrenched cultural stereotypes (5).

For orphan hood and feelings of orphan hood, whether caused by separation, migration, family conflict, parental death, or rapid social change, are conditions that cultures repeatedly create, despite, and because of changing material circumstances. The protagonists of the novel,

Anne of Green Gables, wants to prove her worth as a girl in her society, where male offspring are considered more valuable than female children.

The most important reference to Canadian identity occurs at the beginning of Anne of

Green Gables when Marilla tells her neighbour Rachel Lynde that she and Matthew want to adopt a Canadian child, not one from England or other States.

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They may be all right – I’m not saying they’re not – but no London street arabs

for me, I said. Give me a native born at Least. There’ll be a risk, no matter who

we get. But I’ll feel easier in my mind and sleep sounder at nights if we get a

born Canadian. (Montgomery 8)

This tells the reader that there is something distinctive, and evidently desirable, about being Canadian. One of the novel’s ironies is that Marilla thinks that by adopting a Canadian child, she and her brother will be getting someone who resembles themselves. When Mrs.Lynde warns Marilla that an adopted child might burn down the house, Marilla answers that

. . . there’s risks in pretty near everything a body does in this world. There’s risks

in people’s having children of their own if it comes to that – they don’t always

turn out well. And then Nova Scotia is right close to the island. It isn’t as if were

getting him from England or the States. He can’t be much different from

ourselves. (10)

Mrs Rachel accepts Marilla’s confidence over her orphan child. Soon after arriving in

Avonlea, Anne discovers that the cuthberts originally intended to adopt a boy and that she was sent to them in error. From the conversation between Marilla and Matthew, Anne comes to know that she was an unwanted child:

You don’t want me! She cried. You don’t want me because I’m not a boy! I

might have expected it. Nobody ever did want me. I might have known it was all

too beautiful to last. I might have known nobody really did want me. Oh, what

shall I do? I’m going to burst into tears! (33)

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This scene poses the issue of a woman’s value. Is she to be useful only as domestic labour - a kind of labour of which Marilla has no need – or can she be useful at productive labour outside the home? This question is returned to at numerous points within the narrative, with the argument that women are at best only of domestic use usually associated with Rachel Lynde, and the argument that a girl can be fitted to earn her own living associated with the pragmatic

Marilla. Anne herself decides to substitute for a boy, which in itself assumes that boys and girls are interchangeable and not divided by inherent, essentialized differences. O’Reilly writes in

Feminist Mothering: “In the context of children, feminist mothering means dismantling traditional gender socialization practices that privilege boys as preferable and superior to girls and in which boys are socialized to be masculine and girls feminine.” (9)

Feminist mothering thus seeks to transform both the patriarchal role of motherhood and that of childrearing. Anne after being treated as nothing more than a housemaid and babysitter by her prior foster parents before being taken in by Cuthberts. Anne’s feminism is initially through her stubborn character, hot temper, impulsiveness, and wickedness as a plucky girl.

Anne’s outspokenness transcends both time and place especially in a world that marginalizes the voices of women, and girls in particular, as unimportant and insignificant. Gender transgression in Avonlea is not simple failures to fulfil a role; they are viewed as moral derelictions that are punishable. Anne’s failure to succeed at feminine tasks such as baking a cake or entertaining a friend at tea needs Marilla’s corrective intervention. Anne is held accountable to standards of femininity even when she does not fulfil them. In Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature Karen

J.Warren suggests that

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In many instances, the struggles in which environmental justice groups are

engaged are about survival. The language is about survival because it tells about

life and death struggles. Consequently the language of gender equality is

embedded in the language of survival. (64)

The stories that Anne tells and those to which she listens often counteract the idea that the ability to care for others is innate or determined by gender. The community of Avonlea divides its daily responsibilities according to conventional gender roles, with the duty of caring others falling largely to women. A good example of Anne’s different approaches to issues of national identity occurs when she participate in an event centred on the national flag – Anne as a fundraiser to buy a school flag. For Anne, the fundraising performance is basically an agreeable excuse for good fun. “It’s just filling your heads up with nonsense and taking time that ought to be put on your lessons” (Montgomery 266). Marilla grumbles

but think of the worthy object, pleaded Anne. A flag will cultivate a spirit of

patriotism, Marilla. Fudge! There’s precious little patriotism in the thoughts of

any of you. All you want is a good time. Well, when you can combine patriotism

and fun, isn’t it all right? (266-267)

And that’s the last one hear of the flag or of Canadian patriotism in Anne. The actual performances in the recital have nothing to do with either. Anne is the bright particular star of the occasion but the tableau she participates in is not one of Ottawa and the provinces, but of

Faith, Hope and Charity, while the dialogues she plays in are "The Society for the Suppression of

Gossip" and "The Fairy Queen" (267).

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The one bit of overt political symbolism in Anne of Green Gables occurs when Anne and

Diana name an island in a nearby stream after Queen Victoria because, as Anne explains, they are very loyal. Here home-grown Canadians take over the colonial role of the English and continue the process of colonizing their land and themselves. The political virtues expressed by this are subordination and loyalty. Anne romanticizes nature, friendship and love, but when it comes to national identity, the Canadian parts ways with the American. Anne is too Canadian to make a cult of her nationality. It is ironic that Anne herself should have become a Canadian cultural icon.

Throughout the novel, Anne not only negotiate the difficult position of being children in an adult world but, through her rebellious transgression of gender expectations such as female passivity, dependence, weakness, impracticality, and domesticity, also resist patriarchal and matriarchal authorities who attempt dictate the place of young girls in society. In Canada, women’s and church groups led the needed reform movement for the treatment of children.

Concern for education was evident from the beginning of British settlement in Prince

Edward Island. Lucy Maud Montgomery and her character Anne both benefited from the Public

School Act, 1877, which put non-sectarian government in charge of public education and thus removed public education from church control. This notion of a limited school year was designed to accommodate parents and employers who needed children’s labour on farms.

Anne’s academic skill leads to a recommendation for her to join a class to prepare for the entrance examination to Queen’s in order to become a teacher. It considers that the teaching was the only occupation that gave women and men the same level of opportunity.

59

As an emblem of modernity, femininity, and empowerment, fashion is a structuring narrative device in the novel. The imagery of the puffed sleeves proceeds throughout the novel.

Anne desires the ultimate feminine puffed sleeves on her dresses, but the Marilla does not yield.

Marilla considers it as a sinful act even to think of pretty clothes. According to her, clothes should be neat, clean and serviceable. It is shy Matthew who realizes that Marilla has made

Anne’s clothes too plain and so he insists on puffed sleeves.

If Matthew knew there was such a thing as fashion in dress it is as much as he did;

but he was quiet sure that Anne’s sleeves did not look at all like the sleeves the

other girls wore. He recalled the cluster of little girls he had seen around her that

evening. (271)

Matthew wants Anne to mingle with the cultural practices. Later, Anne receives a dress with puffed sleeves as a Christmas gift from Matthew. Fashion theorists pointed out that fashion allows for individual expression of identity while simultaneously providing access to wider community codes and conventions that are shared. By getting the puffed sleeves, Anne becomes part of the Avonlea community and shares important feminine attributes with the women and girls in the society.

Mrs. Lynde was a red-hot politician, who helped to run the Sunday school and was the strongest prop of the Church Aid Society and Foreign Missions Auxiliary. Mrs. Lynde was resisting the changes in the society toward the dependent child. Her resistance towards women as teachers, as Anne mentions to Marilla that Mrs. Lynde says they’ve never had a female teacher in Avonlea before and she thinks it is a dangerous innovation. She not only oppose

60 innovative female teacher and women’s education, but thereby also women’s economic independence. Therefore, Mrs. Lynde is a firm believer in the Victorian society’s prevailing ideas of separate spheres for men and women.

The cultural feminists consider women as individuals not a class or race. They study their experiences as the experiences of individuals. Women have their own rights and free will.

Thus, the primary aim of cultural feminism is to destroy this sex class system. They also believe in equal partnership of men and women who have separate existence and difference basic functions.

CHAPTER-V

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CONCLUSION

Ecofeminists believed that women and nature share certain traits and are innately attuned.

Ecofeminism builds upon this understanding and gives a new emerging trend. The new trends consist of eco-spirituality, maternal feminism, and cultural Eco-feminism. This critical study of new trends promotes the readers to understand the importance of spirituality, motherhood, and culture. Women can be closer to nature because of their positions as mothers, homemakers and carers. It assumes women have a particular relationship with nature, and by virtue of their biology and their proximity to nature, are qualified to speak more eloquently on nature’s behalf.

This type of analysis produced a framework for social action in the community development.

The first chapter deals with the Children’s literature where one can recognize the importance of the relationship of children with nature. Children’s literature shows how the nature plays a vital role in children’s life. Of all the writers, Montgomery is considered as an important author because her work reflects her love on nature.

The second chapter deals with ecospirituality which is an important component of ecofeminism. It surely provides a wonderful resource for those who are new to ecological theology as well as for those who have been long involved. For humans, rootedness in place is the result of both the erotic attachment to place and its re-enforcement and celebration by story and ritual. Filling the chasm between nature and spirituality, and environmentalism and

Christianity is the fast-emerging field of eco-theology. It reveals important information about the relation of Christian and other environmentalism. The role of spirituality in human development from

62 several vantage are all based on a concern for the lack of consideration of the spiritual in existing developmental theory particularly in the lives of children and youth. One’s understanding of spirituality is rooted in one’s cultural, religious/non-religious, social and personal locations, traditions, and experiences.

Ecospirituality is an educational ideology that promotes reflexivity, discernment, service and vocation that leads to self-transcendence, responsibility, and authenticity. It also provides an interpretative map for a reading of children’s literature as demonstrating spiritual experience.

Different ecological factors, particularly family and peer influences were found to influence spirituality. The aim of this trend is to encourage readers and the society to engage in active reflection and positive action. Moreover, it helps to change their lifestyle and practice. Christian belief could never be divorced from practices that were in tune with the land. It helps to interpret more traditional doctrines in ecologically friendly ways. The work of creating a thriving world and future for our descendants is a goal that all the world’s religions, countries and cultures can agree on. This basic awareness would enable the development of new convictions, attitudes and forms of life.

The third chapter is all about Maternal feminism, one of the trends of eco-feminism.

Maternal feminism advocated goals that included a radical critique of both the family and the state. Maternal feminism was a progressive social reform movement that stressed the importance of family and the distinctive role of women as mothers and wives. Maternal feminists believed that the application of female, maternal virtue to issues of social welfare would improve

Canadian society and the lot of the disadvantages, especially impoverished women and children.

63

They advocate the legal equality of men and women but they did not seek to obliterate traditional gender roles. The female role was defined by motherhood, childbearing, and ensuring a happy home life.

The fourth chapter discussed here is about Cultural feminism. Maintaining a high profile of gender inequality and its wider implications remains the core principle of cultural Feminist movements. Gender discrimination in socialization within the family and elsewhere traditionally operated to the disadvantages of female gender. Gender inequalities are still substantial.

Cultural feminist movement attempts to respond to the backlash of second-wave radical feminism of the 1960s and 1970s by reclaiming symbols of feminine identity such as make-up, suggestive clothing etc., as valid and empowering personal choices. There is an attempt to recover lost or marginalized women’s works and traditions and create a culture that nurtures and supports women’s experiences.

The conclusion deals with the summation of all the chapters and the findings of the research are stated here. Scope for further research is also presented.

Anne of Green Gables is most plausibly aimed at a female audience: at first children, and later on, perhaps at the adults, too. Anne Shirley sets a fine example for an average woman of the times the books were written in. The novel highlights the institutional context for Anne’s religious and spiritual maturation. Montgomery demonstrates that Anne’s spiritual life is intimately linked to her intellectual and emotional development. Montgomery’s representation of a changing church and of a personal spirituality that is an essential component of maturation which is the depiction of spiritual identity in young people’s literature. The novel’s emphasis on

64 a personal spirituality characterized by authenticity, questioning, and femininity means that its representation of religion does not only describe a once-dominant institution, but also creates a pleasurable narrative movement reaching forward to readers beyond Montgomery’s own time.

Thus, Ecospirituality is the missing dimension in today’s world. Extreme impoverishment has led to a radical disconnection of humans from nature, and many young people fear the future, believing themselves to be powerless to change direction. Prayer is our lifeline to God. In the novel, Marilla tries to cultivate the habit of praying in Anne’s day to day life. Anne’s gradual understanding of spirituality is as same as today’s younger generation. It’s very important to cultivate the habit of praying to God among children in today’s world. The quality of prayer life determines the quality of our relationship with God and nature. Through prayer also, one can communicate with nature and its progress. It’s a manifestation of the spiritual connection between human beings and the environment. Montgomery does not want to make the novel’s moral too obvious, but by having Anne grow up in front of the reader’s eyes; they ultimately learn the same lessons as Anne does.

Anne is encouraged in developing some of these skills like household chores and cooking. Marilla does seem concerned about Anne’s upbringing takes full responsibility for it herself. Anne is well educated even though she is not the boy to whom the Cuthberts wants to give a good home and schooling. Through Mrs. Lynde, Montgomery seems to demand that parents understand their children’s individuality and choose parenting methods to suit each child.

In the novel, the characters mainly responsible for Anne’s upbringing are Marilla,

Matthew, Mrs. Allan and Miss Stacy. In fact, Anne’s adoptive parents are better than what could

65 be expected in the Victorian era. Montgomery seems to stress the importance of finding a balance between the strict and soft parenting approaches. Because of foster parenting all children would be loved and nurtured and live in a comfortable home with a stable family.

Therefore, maternal bond may also develop in cases where the child is unrelated, such as adaptation.

The novel breaks new ground in gender studies and popular culture studies. The cultural landscape of Montgomery’s Cavendish is neither pristine nor static. The novel reveals the early twentieth century assumptions about the role of females in society and, in doing so, presents the limited number of choices available to them. It has a very conservative social structure in which women are confined to stereotypical gender roles. Montgomery’s exploration of environment, particularly in terms of gender, has provided rich scholarly grounds for ecofeminism.

When Avonlea searches for a new minister upon the retirement of Mr. Bentley, it is Mrs.

Lynde who comes through as the most informed critic of the applicants, and she is apparently

Avonlea’s authority on doctrine as it is she who tests Mr. Allan in order to gage his level of qualification. While she is against the idea of ministry as an occupational field for women, Mrs.

Lynde is illustrated as a highly qualified individual for the position, creating ironic tension that serves to challenge the occupational limitations of women. Rachel Lynde, although a Liberal, is

Montgomery’s main tool in pointing out how conservative beliefs do not necessarily have a place anymore in the society. Cultural feminists are more concerned to fight for gender equality and social rights for women. Doody Jones in Education on P.E.I mentions that “Anne has been a model for several generations of women because she expresses the twentieth-century woman’s desire for education, for a fair salary, and for professional status” (434).

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Ultimately, Montgomery’s novel is about an unwanted person finding her place in the world; a feat which Montgomery herself did not find easy. Anne has faced hardships but they do not consume her. Her novel is not only a part of Canadian popular literature and culture of the early twentieth century, but also has affected culture since the twentieth century. Ecofeminists such as Shiva argue that women are by nature more nurturing and therefore more equipped to manage the environment. Shiva believes that women are in essence more nurturing, peaceful, co-operative and closer to nature than men.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the trends of ecofeminism are portrayed in the novel. The hardships before her success were discussed in the trends of ecofeminism. In the novel, Montgomery seems to stress the importance of ecospirituality, which is the first trend of ecofeminism discussed in the study. The world becomes worst without spirituality and ecological connection with the nature. In a pioneering work, The Ecology of Human

Development, Urie Bronfenbrenner makes explicit the multiple experiential settings which create for each child a unique development context.

Home, school, place of worship, extended family, peer group, Parents place of

employment, school board, political institutions, service agencies, and the quality

of the relationships among these- all impinge on children’s lives. Within the

context of many diverse and mutually supportive social relationships, child

development is motivated and sustained. (Warren 202)

Anne’s development is motivated by her surroundings and peers. Anne is a character who depicts today’s younger generation attitude.

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Next trend is maternal feminism which depicts Marilla’s mothering of Anne characterised empowered mothering, depicting several themes of feminist mothering. Through her mothering, Marilla initiates subtle social changes in the fictional village of Avonlea and through her writing the novel’s creator L.M. Montgomery does the same in the real world.

Montgomery clearly promotes the woman as a mother in the novel. Privileging conventional foster parenting is exceedingly important in empowering young orphans. Thus, Marilla serves as

Anne’s mentor as well as model of how a woman should go about her duties.

Cultural feminism seeks to understand women’s social locations in society by concentrating on gender differences between women and men. Women’s rights are human rights. Equality rights are of particular importance for women. At the beginning of the twentieth century, women were denied the right to vote in provincial and federal elections. During that time, the novel was written. In the novel, Mrs. Lynde wants women to have the right to vote.

Next, it’s Fashion which was an important topic for females during the Victorian era. Characters in the story worry about the clothes they wear and want to appear fashionable. The portrayal of the fictional character of Anne illustrates that some traditional rules and customs should be challenged and not simply accepted.

Apart from the dealings of the trends of ecofeminism, one can also conduct researches on topics such as friendship, imagination, kindness, forgiveness, sacrifice, etc., Although it is the force of Anne’s personality that holds the book together and thrusts the plot forward,

Montgomery explores a number of themes, giving the book an ongoing vitality and complexity

68 that the sequels lack. Anne was way ahead of her time. She was wholly original, with her own brands of feminism, religion and success. Examining the variety of themes in the novel makes one to understand the story from different points of view.

Anne of Green Gables is not the kind that shouts and screams and waves a sword but the sort in which an everyday girl uses her everyday abilities and intellect to exceed the limits placed on her. Children’s literature is a microcosm of the aims and values of a society. Anne breaks the boundaries of traditional male and female roles. All of these traits reveal that Anne Shirley is a timeless role model. Weaving together the main trends of ecofeminism in the novel, one can easily learn to come out of her/his struggles with the help of nature. In this sense there is perhaps more unity than diversity in women’s common goal of restoring the natural environment and quality of life for people and other living and nonliving inhabitants of the planet.

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