Abstract
Although widely recognized for the idyllic depictions of nature in her fiction, L.M. Montgomery’s portrayal of the non-human world is more ambivalent than what is primarily suggested in the existing scholarship on her work. This article explores the ways in which Montgomery’s representation of nature and its relation to the child in Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside resists a reading of the two novels as exclusively pastoral. Particularly, I suggest that the disparity between certain characters’ emotional state and nature’s indifference precludes an overidentification with the landscape, resisting what Val Plumwood refers to as idealized fusion with nature. I will draw on Gerald Prince’s concept of metanarration along with Plumwood’s concept of hyperseparation to examine the ways in which Montgomery’s texts do not erode the difference between the child and nature. Building on the interconnection between ecofeminism and affect theory, I will additionally propose an alternative approach to particular instances of nature personification in Montgomery’s work that potentially resists an anthropocentric discourse of sameness in the last two novels in the Anne series.
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Notes
Montgomery’s The Blythes Are Quoted was posthumously published in 2009. As it chronologically follows the events unfolded in Rilla, I hesitate to call Rilla the final book in the Anne series.
St. George’s character can be contrasted to Dog Monday, who refuses to leave the train station after Jem leaves for the war and gives out a long, grievous howl on the night of Walter’s death. Another pet apparently in tune with the tidings of the human-world is the capricious cat Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, who, in Susan’s indignant words, “the more victories Germany wins the Hyder he becomes” (Rilla 272 emph. original). See Noomé (2018) for a detailed discussion of pets and people in Montgomery’s work.
As the wife of Dr. Gilbert Blythe, Anne is called Mrs. Dr. dear by Susan.
As Sopory notes, “a common property of affective experience, in its mood or emotion forms, is its valence, that is, the perceived degree of positivity and negativity of the feeling states” (438). The dominance of either the positivity or negativity of valence attributed to an entity can only been determined through discourse context (445 Foot Note).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr. Kenneth Kidd for reviewing an earlier draft of this paper and providing invaluable insights. I am also grateful for the encouraging comments and thoughtful suggestions of my two anonymous reviewers.
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Maryam Khorasani is a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Florida. She earned her BA and MA at the University of Tehran. Her research focuses on the intersection of children’s literature, philosophy, and narrative theory. For her dissertation, Maryam will apply theories about non-human narratives to contemporary children’s literature. Her work has appeared in International Research in Children’s Literature and she has forthcoming articles in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly and Mosaic. In recent years, Maryam has presented at ChLA and IRSCL on topics related to ecocritical approaches to the works of Lemony Snicket and L.M. Montgomery.
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Khorasani, M. “A Fairy Realm of Romance”: Revising the Pastoral in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside. Child Lit Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-024-09577-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-024-09577-9