How To Be A Heroine

by Samantha Ellis

  Anne does much more with her imagination than just write. By imagining how other people feel, she can love them, and sometimes help them. A case in point is when she and Diana startle Diana’s aunt by jumping on her bed in the middle of the night, having no idea the fierce old lady is in it. Bravely Anne goes to apologise (Diana is too scared) and Aunt Josephine severely tells her she has no idea what it is like to be jumped on. ‘I don’t know, but I can imagine,’ Anne exclaims. But having empathised with Aunt Josephine, she wants her to follow suit.

  ‘Have you any imagination, Miss Barry? If you have, just put yourself in our place. We didn’t know there was anybody in that bed and you nearly scared us to death. It was simply awful the way we felt. And then we couldn’t sleep in the spare room after being promised. I suppose you are used to sleeping in spare rooms. But just imagine what you would feel like if you were a little orphan girl who had never had such an honour.’

  Aunt Josephine melts. She forgives the girls and admits that her imagination has got rusty from lack of use. As their unlikely friendship blossoms, Anne helps her get it back in working order.

  She changes Marilla too. At the start of the novel Marilla is stern, tart and repressed, her body all angles, her hair all pins, her experience narrow, her conscience rigid, her every move dictated by duty. She has been in love, long ago, but she has long since closed off her heart. It is hard for Anne to understand a woman who seems her polar opposite, but she keeps trying. She makes her laugh (so heartily that Matthew is amazed), shows her the beauty around her and keeps loving her, even when she’s met by embarrassed, brusque responses. Eventually Marilla becomes ‘mellow’. She starts to appreciate Anne’s imagination; when she finds herself overwhelmed by love for her, she wishes she had more of an imagination too because although she can hug her, she ‘would have given much . . . to have possessed Anne’s power of putting her feelings into words’. Now, I find this so moving that I could almost argue that Marilla is the novel’s heroine. She shows it’s never too late to learn to love again. She shows her brother she loves him before (sob!) he dies. And now she’s learned to love, she can’t stop. She invites her widowed best friend to move in with her (to avoid arguments, they each have their own kitchen!) and she even adopts two more orphans.

  When Montgomery wrote this, she had left her teaching job to come back home and look after her widowed grandmother. Her grandparents had brought her up, but they never mellowed. Anne sacrifices a scholarship to look after Marilla too, but only for a year. Montgomery stayed on, and after she got engaged to a minister, at the grand old age of 32, she kept the engagement secret and didn’t marry until her grandmother had died and she was no longer needed. So Anne of Green Gables is wish-fulfilment. But knowing that doesn’t dent the power of Montgomery’s argument about the power of imagination. And if this was fiction, I would fulfil some wishes too. I would rewrite the past so that my grandfather found comfort and consolation. I might even cast myself as the heroine who found the right thing to do or say to make him feel better. I wouldn’t, if this were fiction, admit he didn’t, and I didn’t. (Later, much later, I did write a play about a girl who asks why her mother – to distance it enough to free me up to write, I made it her mother – is so sad and is told she left her heart in Baghdad. Being very brave and very young, she takes this literally, and flies to Baghdad on a magic carpet to find her mother’s heart and make her smile again. The play, Operation Magic Carpet, has a happy ending.)

  Montgomery’s diary records that she wanted to write optimistically, to keep the shadows of her life out of her work, but in fact the Anne books take in mean-spiritedness, sickness, death, financial collapse, blindness, grief, unrequited love, thwarted passion, hatred, cruelty and much, much more, and they are better for it; the darkness makes the happiness seem earned. Even now I cry my eyes out when Anne gets puffed sleeves. And I can’t contain myself when she gets together with Gilbert Blythe.

  Oh, Gilbert. He was the first fictional boy I truly fell for. Three years older, he’s in the same class as Anne because he’s been off school looking after his sick father. Diana warns that ‘he’s aw’fly handsome . . . And he teases the girls something terrible. He just torments our lives out.’ Oh to be tormented by Gilbert!

  He has roguish hazel eyes and a teasing smile and he likes pinning girls’ braids to their chairs. But when he calls Anne ‘carrots’ (not knowing that red hair is her greatest affliction; as great an affliction as my failure to go blonde), she cracks a slate over his gorgeous head. No amount of apologies will melt her heart. She takes a whole book to forgive him, and two more to consent to becoming more than his friend. But they do eventually marry. For me, growing up among a lot of arranged marriages, it was a revelation that you could marry a man who was also a friend – and that a man might want a woman who was his intellectual equal; in the years when they are enemies, rivalry with Gilbert spurs Anne on to work harder than ever at school, and they’re always battling to be top of their class. I was already starting to feel that boys were supposed to be clever and girls were supposed to be pretty, so I found this deeply reassuring. And I liked the way that while some of their other schoolfriends thought Anne was odd, with her head always in the clouds and her funny way of expressing herself, Gilbert seemed to really understand her. So dreamy misfits could find people to understand them.

  I was less happy about how long it took for Anne to realise Gilbert was The One. This is another bit of wrong imagination that she has to grow out of. Her dream man is dark, inscrutable and called something like Bertram de Vere or Perceval Dalrymple. Men like this are thin on the ground in rural Canada. She gets five proposals of marriage, each more ludicrous and disillusioning than the last. Then Gilbert proposes – and Anne says no! He goes white, and Anne shudders at the pain in his eyes. But she doesn’t realise she’s made a mistake. Instead she blames reality for failing to live up to her imagination: ‘There was nothing romantic about this. Must proposals be either grotesque or – horrible?’

  Then she meets him. The hero she’s dreamed of. Even as a child I was dubious about Royal Gardner. Anne can call him ‘Roy’ all she likes, but his name is Royal, and that’s only one of the reasons he’s wrong. But for pages and pages, she thinks he’s Mr Right. They go out for two whole years, until at last he proposes, spouting stock phrases, and finally Anne realises he’s a vacant clothes horse. After that, she is glad to have her damaging illusions stripped away. And when Gilbert tells her he dreams ‘of a home with a hearth-fire in it, a cat and a dog, the footsteps of friends – and YOU!’, she finally knows this is true romance, and says yes.

  After this deliciously frustrating delay – and a prolonged engagement – it’s a let-down when they become what Bridget Jones would rightly call ‘smug marrieds’. They’re too perfect to be believable. This confused me then, and now it massively disappoints me. Anne and Gilbert are so winning when they’re young, yet they grow up bland and unsympathetic. I’m sad to find out that Montgomery couldn’t write a convincing happy marriage because she didn’t have one. Having waited five years to be able to marry, she became a celebrity author, so the idea of becoming a minister’s wife was not so enticing. Especially as her husband resented her success. Duty made her go through with it, and made her stay when she found that her husband suffered from debilitating bouts of ‘religious melancholia’; for months at a time he would be convinced he was going to hell. What with that, three difficult pregnancies, the death of one child, her eldest son’s hooliganism, and the endless unpaid pastoral duties required of a minister’s wife, it’s astonishing that Montgomery managed to lock her door every morning for two hours to write. When her husband was really unwell, she put up a screen in a corner of their bedroom and wrote behind that. Whatever happened, she never stopped writing.

  But Anne does. Why?

  It’s wounding to see Montgomery become almost snide about Anne’s writing in the sequels. I cringe when Diana enters one of Anne’s stories in a competition sponsored by a baki
ng powder company: to make it eligible, she blithely inserts some lines about Rollings Reliable baking powder. Anne is mortified to see her baby mutilated but, being a good friend, she forgives Diana and even manages to thank her. Then, I took from this the message that a writer shouldn’t be too precious about her writing, but now it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Montgomery makes it clear that Anne’s story, ‘Averil’s Atonement’, is the worst kind of teenage writing – romantic, untruthful and ill-informed. It seems unfair to damn her juvenilia. Anne is learning her craft, and working hard at it. And while Gilbert cheers her up by saying the prize money will come in handy, I wish he had a little sympathy for her. He doesn’t seem to understand why she’s upset, nor does he seem very supportive of her writing.

  Once they’re married, Anne turns her back on writing. She meets an old sailor full of fantastic yarns just waiting to be turned into a novel, and instead of writing it herself, she passes the material on. To a male writer. She says her writing is ‘fanciful . . . fairylike . . . pretty’, and that the sailor needs a writer who is ‘a master of vigorous yet subtle style, a keen psychologist, a born humourist and a born tragedian’. Because Montgomery is all these things, this feels like heavy irony. If it’s a joke, it’s a joke at the expense of her readers. And it demeans Anne.

  It gets worse; when an old rival asks if she’s still writing, Anne replies, ‘I’m writing living epistles now’, by which she means her children. This line is frequently and admiringly quoted on biblical motherhood blogs which advocate women’s giving up work to bring up their children. Montgomery, who was managing to write while being a mother and much more, seems to lose interest in her heroine in the later books. In Anne’s House of Dreams, sullen beauty Leslie Moore steals the limelight. Like Montgomery, she is chained in marriage to a man who has lost his mind, and she is so torn up with envy and bitterness that she can’t be happy until she goes through the brave, painful process of admitting her feelings and learning to love. Compared to her, the older Anne just seems drab. She’s barely there in the last novel, Rilla of Ingleside – her lisping, unambitious daughter has become the central heroine, while Anne is referred to, in the narration, as ‘Mrs Blythe’. As if that was where she was going all along. As if all eight books have been charting her journey from waif to wife.

  It’s the same story with Little Women.

  Having found Anne, I was thrilled to find another writer-heroine. Jo March was fabulously rebellious too, and she had such flair. But I was confused by the end of Good Wives, where Jo marries a portly, bearded German professor nearly twice her age, and gives up her literary dreams to run a school.

  What a betrayal! Even now when I think about writing, I think of Jo holed up in her attic, in her ‘scribbling suit’, her hair tucked into a special hat she could wipe her leaky pen on, ready to ‘fall into a vortex’. When she’s writing, Jo doesn’t care about anything or want anything; she’s happy with her characters, who are as real to her as friends. Louisa May Alcott made writing sound fun. She gave me words to describe the feeling of getting utterly absorbed in an imaginary world, really feeling I was travelling in time and space, and making something on the page.

  Jo is a misfit too, not because she’s too dreamy but because she wants to be a boy. I liked Jo’s style. She’s not pretty but she’s dashing. When the sisters put on plays, she takes the male roles, in old boots and a slashed doublet, and wielding a foil. Inspired by Jo, I would sometimes borrow my brother’s clothes. And Jo taught me that whatever I later heard to the contrary from When Harry Met Sally, men and women can be friends. I wanted to have male friends too, and especially I wanted one like the Marches’ handsome, musical neighbour, Laurie, who calls Jo a ‘good fellow’ and never treats her like a girl. And why should he, when she’s so plucky? What other heroine would raise money for her sick father by selling her hair? (Her radical haircut, of course, makes her even more of a tomboy icon.)

  From Jo I learned how to read a good book: in a garret, armed with ‘half a dozen russets’ ready to ‘weep a little weep’. So when I come to read Little Women now, I stock up on chocolate and hot milk, and I am mostly reading through hot tears. But I don’t like it.

  It’s unbelievably preachy. Every page is rammed with endless, intrusive moralising. I never loved Marmee droning on about The Pilgrim’s Progress but I honestly had no idea that Little Women was so clogged up with homilies. It’s like a lightly fictionalised Victorian ladies’ conduct book – perhaps not surprising as it was written in 1868, but I am surprised. Because I never realised before that in Little Women, each March sister is tamed, one by one, apart from Beth, who doesn’t need taming because she is a personality-free doormat. Which apparently is the ideal.

  It makes me angry. I start simmering just a few pages in when the March girls get a letter from their father, who is away serving as an army chaplain in the Civil War, saying he hopes they will ‘conquer themselves so beautifully, that when I come back to them I may be fonder and prouder than ever of my little women’. His daughters set out to fight their faults. Meg is a tiny bit vain. She lets her friends doll her up for a ball, and is punished when she overhears gossip about herself. No more pretty dresses for Meg. It’s pretty harsh – even Anne Shirley gets puffed sleeves! – and poor Meg wasn’t interested in much except dresses, so that’s her spirit quenched.

  Jo’s problem is temper. When her youngest sister Amy spitefully burns the manuscript she’s been writing for years, Amy, who is a charmed child, gets a mild telling-off. The next day, Jo goes skating with lovely Laurie and Amy tags along. Jo is still so angry that she doesn’t look after her properly, and Amy falls through thin ice and nearly dies. She doesn’t die. Amy always lands on her feet. But Jo is destroyed. Amy could have died, and it would have been Jo’s punishment for temper. Because in Little Women’s skewed moral universe, burning your sister’s life’s work is bad, but being angry about it is tantamount to murder.

  Then comes the most annoying bit. Marmee tells Jo she has a temper too, but she’s learned to hide it. Her husband trained her to suppress her anger by putting his finger to his lips every time she flared up. One day, she hopes to control her temper so much that she won’t even feel it. Jo ends this heart-to-heart hoping she too can learn ‘the sweetness of self-denial and self-control’; I end it thinking if I ever marry a man who stops me expressing myself, I’ll be out the door. When Mr March finally returns, he nauseatingly praises Jo for being ‘a young lady who pins her collar straight, laces her boots neatly, and neither whistles, talks slang, nor lies on the rug as she used to do. Her face is rather thin and pale just now, with watching and anxiety; but . . . it has grown gentler, and her voice is lower; she doesn’t bounce, but moves quietly . . . I rather miss my wild girl; but if I get a strong, helpful, tender-hearted woman in her place, I shall feel quite satisfied.’

  This is particularly repellent because Jo has changed only because she’s been through hell, nursing Beth through scarlet fever while her parents are both away. That’s why Jo looks thin, pale and anxious. Mr March prefers his daughter when she’s traumatised than when she’s healthy, whistling, bouncing and wild.

  The perfect ‘little woman’ is Beth. She is pathologically shy. She finds school too alarming so she’s educated at home. She’s even scared of birthdays. What a wet blanket. And Alcott signals early, a bit wildly, that Beth is doomed: ‘There are many Beths in the world,’ she writes, ‘shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.’ Beth likes playing the piano (so long as no one is listening), but everything else she likes is tinged with sacrifice – like sewing for other people, and setting up a ‘hospital for infirm dolls’, her sister’s ugly, broken cast-offs.

  When Beth does have fun, it goes horribly wrong. The girls are forever slogging their guts out doing chores, studying, earning money to contrib
ute to the family finances and constant charity work, so they jump at the chance of a week off. Little do they know that Marmee is actually trying to teach them the consequences of all play and no work. To really ram the message home, she retires to bed and gives their servant the day off too, without telling them. Beth finds her canary ‘dead in the cage with his little claws pathetically extended, as if imploring the food for want of which he had died’. It’s very troubling and Victorian. Beth must surely have assumed that their servant would feed the canary, or Marmee would, as she’s sanctioned this holiday. She has no way of knowing that both are out of action. It seems a very harsh punishment for such a tiny lapse from duty. And Marmee does not come out of it well. Why doesn’t she feed the bird? Why is teaching her daughter a lesson more important than saving the life of the canary?

  There are questions to be asked about Beth’s death too. It’s never clear why she dies – scarlet fever makes her weak, but then years go by before her slow death. And why is she so resigned? Why does she say to Jo, ‘it never was intended I should live long’ and ‘I couldn’t seem to imagine myself anything but stupid little Beth, trotting about at home, of no use anywhere but there.’ Why ‘stupid’? Why ‘of no use’? Beth has worked harder than any of them, always helping in the kitchen or sewing for the poor, until, poignantly, her needle gets too heavy.

  In their vast, iconoclastic tome, The Madwoman in the Attic, feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (they wrote together – so sisterly!) call Beth’s death a ‘prolonged suicide’ that illustrates ‘the terrible cost of feminine submission’. This may be overwrought, but I see what they mean; when she’s ill, Beth is ‘cherished like a household saint in its shrine’ and afterwards, the Marches preserve her empty chair, her work basket and her beatific picture; and she talked so little anyway that she’s as present as she ever was. They probably imagine her happy in some heaven of zither-playing angels and misshapen dolls.