Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, and Romantic Friendship Between Girls

Okay, so the other day I promised to say more. Here goes.

Friendship is one of the main themes of Anne of Green Gables and this is not surprising, given that its heroine is an orphan and must therefore make herself a family out of friends. What is perhaps surprising, to a modern reader at least, is the romantic intensity of the main friendship, between Anne and Diana, in the book. L. M. Montgomery, although not technically an orphan (when she was young, her widowed father moved out west, leaving her with her strict and emotionally detached maternal grandparents), similarly focused her romantic affections on her friends, mostly on a series of girl friends. This didn't change even when Maud began to be courted by boys as a teenager. And, according to her journals, while she went on to have a number of love affairs with men, she generally disliked the physical aspect of such relationships (with the exception of one very passionate love affair, "almost consummated," with a young farmer called Herman Leard). She said, for example, that kissing was "nauseating." Yet this is the sort of note (quoted in Irene Gammel's Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic) that Maud wrote to her girl friends, in this case to one called Penzie Macneill:

Oh don't I wish that instead of writing to you I could go to you and get my arms around you and kiss you.

After much equivocation, Maud finally did marry, in her late 30s, and went on to have two sons with her husband Ewan Macdonald, a minister. But the relationship was a not a particularly close or happy one. Maud wrote that when she sat down next to Ewan at her wedding supper she felt "a sudden horrible inrush of rebellion and despair. I wanted to be free!" Much later she wrote in her journal that she had accepted Ewan's proposal only because she wanted a home and children. Throughout her marriage, Maud turned most often to her best friend Fredericka Campbell for solace. Irene Gammel suggests that Maud's relationship with Frede was likely the most important one of her life -- when Frede died during the influenza epidemic of 1919, Gammel says Maud "mourned the loss of a life partner, wishing that Frede had left a child for her to raise."

Maud had traded vows of eternal friendship with Frede, just as she had with a number of other girl friends, and just as Anne Shirley does with Diana Barry in Anne of Green Gables. These sorts of romantic declarations were common at the time. From Looking for Anne:

When Maud was growing up during the 1880s and 1890s, romantic female friendships, often largely platonic effusions and crushes among girls and women, were tolerated by nineteenth century society precisely because they were believed to be "innocent." ...The nineteenth century had a rich history of girls longing to hold each other in their arms, swearing everlasting devotion to each other, and mourning their physical isolation and separation. These romantic female friendships were characterized by emotional intensity as well as as sensual and physical explicitness. Such bonds often lasted a lifetime and were frequently integrated into women's marriages. Anne of Green Gables captures these rituals of love and longing that were a central part of Maud's romantic life.

"Romantic friends courted each other, flirted, were anxious about the beloved's  responses and about reciprocity," writes Lillian Faderman in Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. Faderman admits that the term "friendship" does not appear entirely appropriate given the passion and obvious love binding women together, often over several decades. The women believed their relationship to be eternal, and in fact the faithfulness of one often extended beyond the death of the other. "The fondest dream of many romantic friends, which was not often realized, was to establish a home with the beloved." [ed, i.e. Steph: Montgomery actually published a story called "The Promise of Lucy Ellen" about such a relationship, which was referred to as a "Boston marriage."] The reason for the ubiquity of this erotically charged female network is found in the rigid gender segregation of the era. Biological and social realities bound girls and women together in physical and emotional intimacy, while severe restrictions were placed on intimacy between men and women. The extent to which these relationships were platonic or physical is debated by scholars. Today many of them of the same behaviours would be classified under the rubric of "lesbian," yet eighteenth or nineteenth-century society would not have classified them as such, for the category did not exist; in fact such relationships were frequent enough to constitute a norm and society generally tolerated them, although there is also evidence of hostility.

A tolerance for "Sapphic" values was ironically also promoted by Grandmother Macneill's Godey's Lady's Book, the magazine avidly read by young Maud. Illustrations of the Grecian poet Sappho appeared in Godey's, along with stories and poetry with tributes to Lesbia or Sappho. Millington Miller's 1895 essay "Sappho -- The Woman and the Time" celebrated the female poet as a woman of art and intellect. Although Sappho was not unusually beautiful, she was brilliant. A "joint foster-child of Venus, Cupid, and the Graces," writes Miller, Sappho combined in her person "the twin characters of Muse and Venus." She may not have felt any great love for her husband," who was generally known only as "the husband of Sappho," but "it does not follow that we should regard such a woman as at all immoral." The article was illustrated with artwork by German painter Wilhelm Amberg featuring Sappho posing like a distressed mermaid against the rock high above the sea, as if before the final leap. Such regular tributes to Sappho in a magazine dubbed the "Victorian Bible of the Parlor" may seem strange or out of place today.

Apparently there was a bit of a kerfuffle about Maud's sexuality (and therefore, by extension's, Anne's -- or maybe it was vice versa) back in 2000, when a scholarly paper on this topic appeared at a conference devoted to L. M. Montgomery's work. A number of scholars were asked to comment publicly on it -- this CBC radio interview is an example.  And nowhere in Looking for Anne does Gammel assert outright that L. M. Montgomery -- or again, by extension, Anne -- may have been a lesbian or a bisexual. She does, however, stress that intensely romantic female friendships were of central importance to Montgomery:

Just months before writing Anne of Green Gables, twenty-nine-year old Maud visited twenty-four-year old Nora [ed, i.e. Steph: one of a series of women with whom she had such friendships]. "I enjoyed every minute of the time and just lived to my fullest capacity," she confided... "It makes me feel blue now just to think of those delightful companionable days." Two photos accompany this text. The first is a photo of Nora's room, the setting for their overnights. The second is a staged portrait of the couple entitled Secrets. In it, they are standing in front of the house. Maud looks relaxed, facing the camera and laughing with her mouth open, while Nora snuggles up, her cheek touching Maud's. Their playful intimacy provides us with a visible emblem of Maud's effusive treatment of "bosom friends" and "kindred spirits" in Anne of Green Gables. Intimate girlfriendship, far from being a passing phase that ended when she grew up, was at the core of Maud's emotional and mental makeup -- a lifeline essential to her well-being. There is an earthiness and comfort in these photos that we do not see in the photos with her later husband, Ewan Macdonald.

At the same time that lonely Maud was relying on her romantic friendships with women for both companionship and creative inspiration, the pendulum in the popular press seemed to swing backward. The modern periodicals were increasingly negative about passionate female friendships. The Ladies Home Journal, for instance, encouraged girls to uphold their ideals and reams in the tradition of Emerson and Dickens but came down hard on girl crushes, which were targeted as "unwholesome." A January 1904 column entitled "Crushes Among Girls" warned of the dire consequences of girls' "mushroom affection" and "flashlight friendships." The author Emma E. Walker, M.D., cautioned that "healthy feelings will soon become spent and the capacity for them stunted."

...The implication that holding on to girl love would thwart a woman's healthy development may explain Maud's increased caution. She put a great deal of trust in advice columns, in some cases, blindly accepting the experts' arbitrary rules. Her love for her cousin Frede (pronounced Fred) began to intensify in 1902, yet she expressed it with understatement, siging her 1907 letter to her, "truly and lovingly and good-comradely."

It's interesting to learn more about what has been accepted historically as "normal" and "healthy" in relationships between women and how those notions have changed over time and continue to change. And of course there's now no way to know the details of Montgomery's sexual orientation. (I can just imagine proper Maud turning over in her grave at the very idea of such a subject ever being openly discussed). But I was intrigued -- and if I had to guess, I'd say she probably didn't  allow herself to think too much about it. I can't help speculating, though,  about how she would live if she were alive today -- and what kind of modern heroine she would invent.

Comments

[Perfectly Disgraceful]

"longing to hold each other in their arms, swearing everlasting devotion to each other, and mourning their physical isolation and separation"

My older girl, who recently turned 10, had a friendship like this when she was eight. Although I can't really say how much longing to hold each other there was. But they were REALLY into each other and called each other all the time. When the other girl went on vacation there were nightly phonecalls (oh, the joy of cell phones) and great anguish if a call was missed. It seemed rather over-the-top to me, especially for eight-year-olds, even though I had a very intense and fraught best-friendship when I was the same age.

My daughter is still very into her friends and wants to spend every possible minute with them, which is difficult in these days of arranged playdates that involve driving across town. It was so much easier when my best friend lived the next house over.

I'm interested to see if my daughter continues on the LMM route (her favorite books are the Betsy Tacy series which feature an almost equally intense friendship). I was too boy crazy to continue having bosom girlfriends in my teenage years, but my daughter doesn't seem at all boy crazy. I do have a number of close girlfriends now, which is delicious, although I find it difficult to balance my desire to spend time with them vs. those people who live in my house-- whom I also like a great deal.

[Steph]

You know, I don't think I've ever read those Betsy Tacy books. Must add them to the list!

[Suzy Lux]

Great article. How times have changed...

I lament on that period and how things were truly innocent in a way that I feel almost can't be imagined today. Just reading what you said about classification and the non-existence of a word like 'lesbian' (and obviously 'gay' meaning something different then) makes me a little sad for our current society because you cannot backpedal back to that; you just have to put up with what we have today. And love--true romantic, sexless love between people regardless of gender, has gotten a bit lost. It can't just 'be'; it has to be defined and then either celebrated, tolerated or hated.

I had friendships slightly similar to Lucy when I was growing up. But they sort of faded in intensity after 16,17 years old. But I miss them greatly. I miss the 24/7 spiritual-consciousness-connection that me and my best friend had, and how *close* we were in mind and heart.

Btw this article made me think of Pauline and Juliet from 'Heavenly Creatures' (a true story if you're not familiar) and also the current 'Gossip Girl' and the relationship between Serena and Blair. While the latter is not quite as intense, I think it's undeniably romantic in nature.