There’s a sort of cheerful, self-satisfied superiority about Presbyterianism that runs through the oeuvre of L. M. Montgomery. Her main characters, by and large, are matter-of-fact in their allegiance to the old Scottish denomination. The comic side characters, however, are allowed to get downright judgmental about it. The most notable is probably Miss Cornelia Bryant, who comes to meet Anne and Gilbert when they move to Glen St. Mary in Anne’s House of Dreams, “seeing you’re Presbyterians. If you were Methodists she wouldn’t come at all. Cornelia has a holy horror of Methodists.” (She’s also “a most inveterate man-hater” and remains a dear friend to the Blythes and their children for years to come.) The best compliment Miss Cornelia can think of for Leslie, who is young, beautiful, troubled, and only an occasional (Methodist) church-goer, is that “she’s a real strong Presbyterian at heart.”
Montgomery herself seems to have been broad in her theology and skeptical of some of the values of Scots-Presbyterian culture. In “L.M. Montgomery: Scottish-Presbyterian Agency in Canadian Culture,” Mary Henley Rubio reveals this subversion: “She grows up in a [very Presbyterian] society that values reason and the intellect above all, but she uses her fiction to show that the intellect is often driven by the emotions.” The seriousness and clannishness that characterized her P.E.I. Presbyterian community show up throughout her novels as more morally complicated values, and she “laces her morality with humour, rather than thundering away like [founder of the Presbyterian church] John Knox.”
But like Miss Cornelia, Montgomery believed fervently that the Presbyterian people were the salt of the earth—they may not be perfect, but at least they weren’t Methodists. In 1906, already in her thirties, she agreed to marry a Presbyterian minister she didn’t particularly love. There were certainly other factors at play in her decision: he was kind and easy-going; she considered him more socially acceptable than the farmer she had loved ardently and briefly in her youth; and, as she wrote in her journal, “I wanted a home and companionship; and more than all, to be perfectly candid, I wanted children” (12 Oct. 1906). Montgomery (“Maud” to her friends) and Ewan Macdonald were wed after a secret five-year engagement—he had gone to Scotland for further education, and she waited for her grandmother to die. For the rest of her life, she would balance her career as one of Canada’s most popular and enduring novelists with the expectations of the minister’s wife.
Further complicating their relationship was the enormity of Ewan’s secret, religion-fueled depression. He believed fervently in the doctrine of predestination, once a cornerstone of the Calvinist denominations. In a nutshell, no one deserves to go to heaven, but God has picked some people who will; Jesus died for them and only for them; and there’s nothing you can do to switch lists. For some believers, this is reassuring. To Ewan Macdonald, it was terrifying.
Now, Presbyterian seminaries had stopped teaching the doctrine of predestination by the time Ewan went through. No matter. Montgomery’s journals tell of her husband’s “constitutional recurrent melancholia” (13 Sept. 1919), rooted in his conviction that he was among the damned; that he had no way out of hell; and that his position at the head of a church was cruel and unfair to his congregants.
The damnation and hellfire niggling at Ewan’s mind often kept him out of the day-to-day work of parenting and running a household. On the worst days, he couldn’t get out of bed. His wife’s offhand complaints bubble up, year after year, in her journals. In 1916, Maud wrote of her disappointment with Ewan’s attempts to take care of their first child, Chester.
Five years later, she continued to bear sole responsibility for raising and disciplining their two sons, while “Ewan has never, since the boys were born, attempted to teach or train them in any respect, not even in the truths of his religion. […] It was a bitter moment in my life when I was forced to accept the fact that all the responsibility for the teaching and training of my children was to fall on me” (17 Jan. 1921). Occasionally, Maud succeeded in bringing Ewan into disciplinary conversations, but he participated unwillingly and she felt that he shirked his share of the work. After one such episode, she wrote, “There is nothing I miss more in my life than the aid of a wise and competent father in the bringing up of my children. It is absolutely lacking” (8 June 1922). Even as Chester entered adulthood, Montgomery noted that he and Ewan “don’t pull well. For one thing they are too much alike. For another Ewan has no understanding of youth and young men whatever” (16 June 1930).
From what we know of Montgomery’s own life, it seems that she, too, suffered from persistent depression—but that her own illness took a definite backseat to her husband’s incessant suffering. Her journals have their moments of rapturous joy, as when Chester was born in 1912 and she exclaimed, “Oh, my darling little son, you make up for everything I have suffered and missed in life. Everything led to you—and therefore I feel that all has been for the best” (22 Sept. 1912). A few years later, when her younger son, Stuart, was still a toddler, she wrote that “my two little sons—they fill life and heart and soul. […] I miss nothing, I lack nothing of bliss” (18 March 1917).
After all, she had married in order to have children to love and adore. (I should note that there was a middle son, Hugh, who was stillborn.) Maud herself had been raised by her elderly grandparents, who she felt didn’t understand her youthful dreams and ambitions. This makes it all the more heartwrenching when she writes that “I do regret one thing keenly, and that is that almost all the years of my boys’ childhood which should have been my happiest years I have been so unhappy and worried over Ewan’s malady” (10 Feb. 1925).
As the boys grew up, their own choices frequently disappointed their mother; they plunged her into “the darkest hours,” where she “cannot believe anything good will ever again come to me or anyone I love” (30 Oct. 1937). Where Ewan seemed obsessively devoted to his visions of sin and damnation, Maud’s growing depression roamed free of theological restrictions. She tossed around the language of predestination side-by-side with the contradictory ideas of free will and divine punishment, but the sentiment was always the same:
“This is a terrible life—but it seems to be my predestined lot—I must bear it for the sake of my children” (10 Oct. 1934).
“To think that I was once so happy in and proud of my two little boys. Too happy—I loved them too much and God has punished me for it” (27 Aug. 1936).
That note of onetime happiness calls to mind an entry from 15 years earlier, when the boys were still young and their every decision not yet a deeply-felt disappointment to a depressed mother whose suicide would become a long-guarded family secret (Some Montgomery scholars have contested this revelation; I choose to go with the family). While Ewan was again abed, stricken with fear of a future without salvation, his wife was reflecting on a kind comment from a friend, who noted that she “always seem[ed] so bright and happy”:
“Happy! With my heart wrung as it is! With a constant ache of loneliness in my being. With no one to help me guide and train and control my sons! With my husband at that very moment lying on his bed, gazing at the ceiling and worrying over having committed the unpardonable sin! Well, I must be a good actress. I wonder how many other women I know, who seem ‘bright and happy,’ have likewise a closet full of skeletons. Plenty of them, I daresay” (18 Aug. 1921).
Further Reading:
L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture, edited by Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
[Picture of Billy Sunday via]
Tags: anything’s better than methodists, christianity, kate west, predestination, presbyterians, religion
YES oh my GOD this is EXCELLENT. Let’s please discuss LM Montgomery all day, every day, all the time.
Also, it’s fascinating to see in the later Anne books the way Montgomery writes about motherhood and its intense joy and pain. Her life experiences colour it deeply and beautifully. Her understanding of the emotional bonds of family (including what we would today call nontraditional and extended families) is truly outstanding.
Yes, absolutely! The research that went into this piece was initially for a paper about women in LMM’s books who adopt, foster, and otherwise gain children through nontraditional methods. (Let us talk forever about Marilla and Rachel and the twins, among so many others.)
That is so excellent! Because LMM’s books really do cover a range of ways that families can be created, close bonds within extended families, and even issues of divorce and estrangement that are really not covered in other contemporary books. Families be complicated! Even in rural Canada in the early part of the century! It’s so fascinating to see the way families have tumultuous and difficult relationships contrasted with a sort of idyllic-farm-rural beauty-worship.
And Lavendar Lewis of my beloved Echo Lodge! Oh man, I would totally read that paper.
Yeah, the Anne books are really full of them–Marilla & Matthew and Anne, Marilla & Rachel and the twins, Miss Lavender and Stephen, Rilla and Jims, and kind of Rosemary and the Meredith kids, since I think she was their piano teacher or something before she married their dad.
But my personal favourite is the sister in A Tangled Web who, while everyone else is fighting over the inheritance, really just wants enough money to buy a house and adopt the one left-behind kid that no one else wants. It’s practically Matilda and Miss Honey.
Ooh, I haven’t read that last one. I’ll have to check it out.
“A Tangled Web,” is excellent–except for its last line, which is wincingly racist.
Oh, good God in heaven, I’d forgotten that was the last line. I remembered the argument over the statue and that it got painted, but somehow I blocked out that it was the actual concluding sentence. ::horror face::
Margaret! Oh, I love A Tangled Web so much, and sweet Margaret, who almost married round, foolish Penny just to get that little house and…Brian or something, isn’t he? The boy whose uncle killed the sad little kitten he loved. Ohh, I think it’s time for a re-read. After The Blue Castle, A Tangled Web is my favorite LMM. So many of its lines are burned into my brain.
(Immediately upon saying that I feel a pang, like all the other LMMs are wailing piteously, so maybe I should clarify that Anne and Emily have hallowed places in my heart and that I love all the LMMs so much, except Kilmeny of the Orchard, which weirds me out a little.)
I just got Kilmeny of the Orchard from Amazon – went on a LMM used-book spree to try to fill in some of the gaps in my collection. Looking forward to getting weirded out.
It’s been so long since I read it that I have only vague (spoiler-y and so unsaid) impressions of why it weirds me out. Come back and let’s talk about it after you’ve read it!
Oh! Oh! I want in on the Kilmeny discussion. I finished the book with a “well, ok…but…hmm…huh…” and still feel that way about it.
YES! Let’s talk! After Bittersweet finishes! (I have no idea how to tag people in these comments, so hopefully everyone is seeing them.)
I also want in on the Kilmeny discussion– I loved it to death when I was sixteen, and the last time I read it, I gave it a HUGE sideeye for a lot of reasons…
The Blue Castle, I will maintain, is perfection
I was just wondering where I came by the persistent idea that Presbyterians and Methodists are supposed to be rivals (this came up in a recent conversation for some reason?), but of COURSE it was the Anne of Green Gables books.
This was great!
In rural Pennsylvania, my grandmother was raised in a Presbyterian family that had split from Methodism because the Methodist church in town didn’t like how they were running the family business (aka on Sundays). The practical Presbyterians, always looking for entrepreneurs, invited them over. MORTAL ENEMIES.
I am super into the amount of Anne related writing on this site.
Brief note of historical context to the first few paragraphs: Presbyterians and Methodists in Canada actually merged their churches in the 1920s (along with Congregationalists) into the United Church, but some Presbyterians were SO UPSET by the idea of being tarred with the same brush as METHODISTS that they sort of schismed off the official Presbyterian organization in Canada and made their own Presbyterian Church that remained separate from the United Church.
Yup, and Montgomery was opposed to the union, as it caused bitter schisms in the Presbyterian community, and small town life.
My favourite undergrad paper that I wrote was on the impact of the church union on Canadian literature.
Basically all I want to do is read about weird rivalries of history.
I still remember being faintly confused all through my readings of the Anne books because I didn’t have the first idea what a Presbyterian or a Methodist was. (Did I ever ask my parents? I don’t think so.)
And man, poor Lucy Maud. <3
I remember not long after reading the Anne series, some elderly family member asking me, in my mother’s hearing, what religion I was. I told her that I was Presbyterian, because to my childish mind I MUST be, since I loved all things Anne and Anne was clearly a Presbyterian.
My mother gently corrected me, explaining that we were (at that time – she has since converted to being a Baha’i’ and I converted to nothing-at-all) Congregational Christian and she had no idea where I even learned the word “Presbyterian”.
So, um…. what’s the difference between Presbyterian and Methodist? They’re both Protestant, right? After that I got nothing.
Presbyterians come from the Calvinist/Reform tradition, whence we get the Calvinist work ethic, TULIP, and other nose-to-the-grindstone type things. Presbyterians have a very committee-based hierarchy.
Methodists are a low-church, evangelical offspring of the Anglican church, so they come from a different part of the non-Catholic tradition. They have a bishop-based hierarchy and used to run lots of revivals, have traveling preachers, etc.
In US/Canadian history, at least in certain times/places, there is also the implication that Presbyterian = educated, staid, and higher-class and Methodist = uneducated, more emotional about God, and lower-class. ginkgotree is also correct about Presbyterians coming from a predestination-based theology and Methodists being very Arminian/free-will.
Can we have an article explaining all of the different denoms & stereotypes of Christianity as a cheat sheet? As a Jew, there are a lot of parts of classic literature that confuse me. I mean, I get confused as a person too, but a lot as a Jew.
Even as a former Methodist, it’s pretty confusing! The Methodist church I was raised in in the Pacific Northwest was pretty liberal and welcoming (mostly white, but the area immediately around the church is too, although that’s changing some). My parents’ church has always been welcoming to lesbians, gays, and bisexual people (I couldn’t really say for sure how they’d react to someone transgender, though I think it would be positive. It’s hard to know until it happens.) Now contrast this mostly-open mindset with the southern Methodist church, who are basically Baptists. How to handle non-heterosexual/cisgender people is a huge issue in the Methodist church right now, with the more liberal areas fighting to get a change made in the Book of Discipline (the major book of specific doctrine for the United Methodist church) establishing homosexuality as okay, and allowing ministers to perform gay marriages. It’s complicated and nuts!
I learned from Jacob Have I Loved that Methodists don’t drink alcohol! I think?
I grew up catholic in the south so idek really except for some Pentecostal stuff bc my grandparents were Church of God.
Ah, Methodist history lesson time!
The Methodist church played a large role in the temperance movement, seeing drunkenness and alcoholism as a major cause of many social ills. As a general rule, alcohol is never consumed on church premises even today. For example, where many Protestant denominations use wine in Communion, Methodists use grape juice. In fact, Welch’s grape juice was founded by a Methodist teetotaler and originally marketed their juice as “unfermented wine.” Now, Methodists are allowed to drink and in fact, I would say that most (at least in the Pacific Northwest, which is the area of the church that I’m most familiar with) do drink in moderation. Certainly some don’t drink, but it’s not a Methodist thing specifically.
I thought Mallory had written something about this a while back, but I can’t find it. Maybe I just dreamt she wrote it. That would be cool…and a little frightening.
Methodists are just Baptists who have learned to read.
Denominational jokes forever and ever, amen.
I think one of the most important differences for Montgomery was that most protestant Scottish-Canadians were Presbyterian (“her people”). Pure tribalism, really!
I knew that Toasties would have the answer! Thanks everyone.
One could argue that Montgomery recanted slightly on Methodism in her later novels: namely when Valency in the The Blue Castle “goes Free Methodist.”
Although, that’s really just “Blue Castle,” in all its wonderful, epic glory of rebellion.
BLUE CASTLE FOREVER. Valancy is the reason that I always feel like a plain, simple “Piffle” is the perfect retort to people who say stupid things.
YES. Oh, God, I’m so glad someone else says this regularly.
The Blue Castle is still my favorite LMM, even above Anne (gasp shock horror I know!) and so much about this article explains aspects of Valancy’s life, feelings, and decisions. It even has the despair over predestination that drove Abel Gay to alcoholism. It’s really quite fascinating and illuminating.
The Blue Castle was actually conceived/partly written during the Church Union debate. I think the “Free” in “Free Methodist” is important, i.e., unaffiliated with the Methodists looking to swallow up her Presbyterians. And also, Valancy’s family is Anglican, so to go from High Church Anglican to gospel-in-the-backwoods (especially for Montgomery, who was always comparing forests to cathedrals and rose windows, etc.) illustrates Valancy’s rebellion better than joining a Presbyterian church would. And LMM couldn’t have Valancy attend revival meetings, because she thought those were terribly laughable.
Oh, yes, I agree! I was making a slight joke at the expense of the Free Methodists, and the horror her family feels when they hear she’s going there (“By a Free Methodist!” groaned Mrs. Frederick–as if to have been married by an imprisoned Methodist would have been a shade less disgraceful.)
There’s still a strong Presbyterian vein running through the novel (one of her initial rebellions is to threaten to go to the Presbyterian church instead of the Anglican), and the Anglicans really don’t come across looking well (Dr. Stalling?).
I think my favourite send up in the book is when Roaring Abel is disapproving of Valancy’s Methodist turn because he is a “staunch Presbyterian” seeing as the Presbyterian Church was also strongly associated with the temperance movement around that time and Roaring Abel is the town drunk.
So she was definitely unafraid to poke fun at her own. See also: Anne, Diana and the currant wine episode in which the temperance ladies do not come off so well in their narrow mindedness.
I was reading an entry in LMM’s journals yesterday where she lists all the things she likes, and along with the expected cats, sunsets, etc., she also says ” I like—or liked in pre-prohibitions days—Miss Oxtoby’s dandelion wine” —and this from a minister’s wife (granted, with a seldom-indulged hedonistic streak she attributed to her Montgomery blood).
I really enjoy Roaring Abel. LMM will send up hypocrisy wherever she sees it, but Roaring Abel’s hypocrisy is treated differently because ultimately, his hypocrisy is about behaving in a more Christian-like way than his society or official church would have him behave.
“The Blue Castle” was, in all truth, part of what allowed me to move out of my parents’ house.
I was raised to believe that women living alone, without the authority of a man, were in sin.
My mother told me she regretted my college education (at a private, conservative, Christian college, mind).
Valancy’s rebellion and happiness gave me *hope*.
I only read The Blue Castle for the first time around… shit, only three months ago.
I may possibly have read it three times since then.
When I was a kid, I fell in love with the Anne series. (And I still love them – every few months when I’m feeling down I’ll devour one of them in one sitting and feel restored.) The editions I read didn’t have a lot of information on LMM in them so I just assumed that her life was like adult Anne’s – that she had a loving marriage and a house full of children in an especially lovely part of Prince Edward Island.
A few years ago when I found out her journals had been published, I read them and was so dismayed to find out how wrong I had been. It just seems fundamentally *wrong* in a way that a woman whose books have brought so much pleasure and happiness to readers for over 100 years was so miserable for so much of her life.
I remember first reading about Montgomery’s depression and the almost visceral shock it occasioned, because I think in my head I’d conflated her with Anne. I loved reading this.
P.S. For those who had not heard, here is the article where Kate Macdonald Butler talks about her grandmother’s suicide. It was part of a running Globe & Mail thing about mental health and talks more about the dual depressions of Maud & Ewan.
Oh goodness, how terribly sad.
The reason I am inclined to give Rubio’s analysis of Montgomery’s death a really strong consideration is because Butler does not seem to rate Montgomery’s terrible, terrible drug addiction as key to her death. Not that Montgomery might not have eventually reached the point of suicide, but when you consider the barbiturates, bromides, and sometimes chloral that Montgomery was often combining, no wonder she eventually never emerged from what was usually periodic, seasonal depressions. That is the really sad thing. Montgomery was doing what passed for help in those days: reading Freud and other psychiatric books, taking what passed for psychiatric drugs, but all that did was spiral her deeper and deeper into addiction and despair. But I still think her death was accidental.
But… her granddaughter said she left a suicide note, am I correct? That seems to rate this as something other than accidental.
Mary Rubio argues in A Gift of Wings that, though LMM probably would have welcomed death, the “note” is not conclusively a suicide note. The Globe and Mail published a follow-up article after Kate Macdonald Butler’s column, it is worth a read and covers most of what Rubio writes in AGoW.
http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM…
Yeah, I think this is totally fair–I struggled with how to talk about this in the essay and ended up with the language of what “I choose” to go with because, to me in this context, the understanding her children and grandchildren had of her life and death was the most important thing. But I’m still paying attention to this conversation.
And in one book a kid (Jem?) insults another kid by calling him a transubstantiationist! I did NOT get that as a young reader. Even though I was, and am one.
As a soon-to-be professional religion researcher, I love that amateur ones exist, and love this entire post.
Haha, thanks! I am glad that my existence delights you. I would go back and get a Ph.D. in American/Canadian religious history in a heartbeat if I believed I had any shot at permanent employment that way. Instead I just read a lot and write a little.
Never enough LMM for me here. And it thrills me to my heart in fully Anne-ish fashion that there is a battalion of commenters who write wonderful responses to every LMM piece. Totally race-of-Josephy.
Despite reading almost everything in sight as a child, I never read these books. I’m thinking I might pick them up for the tired sleepy days when kids’ books just seem perfect.
I hope you love them!
I love most of Montgomery’s books because they grow with you as you grow older. She actually tackles important and difficult problems with greater courage and kindness than most writers of “important”, “grown-up” novels, and I love her for it.
I just heard an interview with the author Ann Patchett, and the story of her real marriage is right out of The Blue Castle.
I’d love to read an article about the view of pacifism in Rilla of Ingleside (don’t have my copy with me or I would write it).
Also, the intro to my edition of The Story Girl and The Golden Road (my two absolute favorite LMM books, with The Blue Castle next, and the first two Emily books and all Anne books close behind) talked a bit about the “witch” character and how she was vilified for defying social conventions. I’m trying to remember if there are similar characters in the other books? The Emily books have some supernatural elements, but they don’t signify an alternative lifestyle for Emily– they’re plot devices? Or perhaps symbols of something?
Anyways, HERE for all and any discussion of LMM books, as they formed a large part of my adolescence and gave me, among other things, a longing to see PEI and terribly inaccurate ideas about romance.
Mine too! (Adolescence I mean). I also immigrated to Canada partly because of them. I still haven’t seen PEI, but I live within walking distance of LMM’s real-life house in Toronto.
There’s a book from the late ’80s by Sylvia DuVernet, called “Theosophic Thoughts Concerning L.M. Montgomery”, in which she writes about Lucy Maude’s interest in Theosophy, which was a faddish New Agey religion of that time. It was popular with the New York artistic and intelligentsia crowd, and the dudes from Group of Seven were all over it. DuVernet also theorizes that because Theosophy bore a slight resemblance to Shinto, this might explain why the book became so huge in Japan later on. The descriptions of nature in the book, and the way Anne assigns personalities to rocks, lakes and trees would have resonated strongly with a Japanese audience, who were already used to perceiving the world that way because they were already steeped in Shinto. (It’s just a theory, but pretty interesting.)
There's a book from the late '80s by Sylvia DuVernet, called "Theosophic Thoughts Concerning L.M. Montgomery", in which she writes about Lucy Maude's interest in Theosophy, which was a faddish New Agey religion of that time. It was popular with the New York artistic and intelligentsia crowd, and the dudes from Group of Seven were all over it. DuVernet also theorizes that because Theosophy bore a slight resemblance to Shinto, this might explain why the book became so huge in Japan later on. The descriptions of nature in the book, and the way Anne assigns personalities to rocks, lakes and trees would have resonated strongly with a Japanese audience, who were already used to perceiving the world that way because they were already steeped in Shinto. (It's just a theory, but pretty interesting.)