If you like your heroines pluck-filled and resourceful, it’s easy to enjoy just about all of L.M. Montgomery’s protagonists. Her most famous character, Anne Shirley, is charming and creative, at least until Anne’s six mediocre children hijack her personality and presumably bury it under some moon-kissed elfin rock in Rainbow Valley, where it remains for the rest of the series. Emily Byrd Starr writes with too many italics, has bursts of psychic power, and defends her self-worth when others attempt to demean her. Valancy Stirling tells off her emotionally abusive family to their shocked faces and begins a new life on her own, entering the workforce in outrageously low-cut dresses. Jane Stuart refuses to be “Janied” by saccharine relatives and arranges the adoption of her orphaned best friend into a nontraditional family. Even Kilmeny Gordon and Marigold Lesley, the Montgomery equivalents of Michael Keaton’s fourth clone in Multiplicity, are more or less inoffensive in their plodding imitations of earlier and better characters.
And then there’s Patricia Gardiner, the protagonist of Pat of Silver Bush (1933) and its sequel, Mistress Pat (1935). Pat occupies her own category. While Montgomery’s other heroines are defined by their imaginations, their talents, and their eager interactions with others, Pat’s defined by what she doesn’t do: just about everything. Unlike the orphaned Anne and Emily, Pat lives with her immediate family, one of the very few Montgomery heroines whose two parents are both alive, together, and consistently present in her life. Pat loves her unchanging place in the Gardiner family’s farmhouse, Silver Bush, to the exclusion of absolutely everything else, spending two books, several hundred pages, and more than thirty years choking on a glut of home comforts.
Readers familiar with Montgomery’s fiction know that homemaking is typically rewarding for her books’ characters. The process of creating and preserving a homespace often generates a sense of emotional intimacy and pleasure. That’s not the case in the Pat series, which implicitly suggests that domesticity can become a self-inflicting weapon. Anne adores Green Gables, Emily worships New Moon, but Pat’s devotion to Silver Bush is a relentless obsession, manifesting in a constant hum of anxiety that shudders throughout both books. The prospect of any change that threatens the unremitting sameness of her home life becomes terrifying.
Pat is Cathy from Flowers in the Attic, if Cathy wanted to stay in the attic for the rest of her life and the sibling incest was only vaguely subtextual. Pat is a compliant Bertha Mason Rochester, putting out fires and begging her husband to lock the door behind him. Pat is the warning story told late at night by Hufflepuff first-year students whispering between their beds.
There’s an endlessly replicating pattern to the Pat books. An event occurs or someone suggests the possibility of an event; Pat responds with horror and denial at the idea of the event, because “change [is] terrible”; Pat resentfully accepts that change is not a filthy fiction invented by modernists while still agonizing over the cruelty of time and physics; repeat several dozen times over the course of thirty years. Birth, marriage, death, and her father’s shaved mustache—he has to promise he’ll regrow it before she’ll stop crying—receive the exact same injured response. Whether happy, sad, or neutral, all incidents either inspire Pat’s change-related anxiety, prompt her to cling to her home, or both, so that the pull of Silver Bush and sameness grow stronger as she ages. Even innocuous comments expose fear: “And here was [a portrait of] Aunt Honor as a baby. Looking like [Pat’s infant sister] Cuddles! Oh, would Cuddles ever look like Aunt Honor? It was unthinkable. How terribly people changed!” A typical Pat moment alchemizes a sentimental observation into despair.
The death of Pat’s blandly virtuous friend, Bets, who contracts a fatal plot device towards the end of the first novel, reaffirms Pat’s total dependence on her life’s sole constant: “Silver Bush was all her comfort now. Her love for it seemed the only solid thing under her feet.” While Pat’s grief is believable and understandable, she responds to death not as other Montgomery characters do, by reevaluating her beliefs, commitments, and goals. Instead she turns inward, both literally and figuratively, into herself and inside her home, so that the house and the person become indistinguishable. Silver Bush, Pat informs her patronizing cousins, would “hate you if you changed it.” Of course, it’s Pat who threatens hate, not the house, but for Pat the two are one and the same.
Often viewed by Montgomery scholars (the few who acknowledge she exists) and readers (ditto) as an unsuccessful heroine, Pat’s qualities typically don’t captivate us in the same way Anne, Emily, Valancy et al. often do. But while Pat’s neuroses and anxieties aren’t particularly easy to like, her likability or lack thereof isn’t what sets her apart from Montgomery’s other heroines: it’s her inability to act. Pat is almost entirely passive. Her interactions with other characters are defined by response rather than initiation.
One of the most appealing aspects of Montgomery’s fiction is that her protagonists are typically active and agential, whether in enjoyable ways or frustrating ones. Anne starts an improvement society, gets her best friend drunk, and non-consensually attempts to inflict figurative language on everyone around her. Emily solves multiple missing persons cases and pursues a disturbing relationship with a man her father’s age. Pat, on the other hand, is completely lacking any desire to act, since doing something, anything, would require her to recognize the inevitability of change. She isn’t active. She’s not strong—not in the sense that we typically understand and apply that term to female characters.
But Pat doesn’t need to be active or strong in order to be compelling. Ultimately, it’s her less appealing qualities that show us why she’s important. Among a crowd of Montgomery protagonists known for their prolixity, Pat’s unsettling and undefined anxiety gestures towards the power of the unspeakable.
Pat’s intense responses are somewhat more understandable in light of her creator’s own experiences with severe emotional pain. In a journal entry written prior to the publication of Silver Bush, Montgomery notes that while Emily and Anne were important to her, “I really put more of myself into Pat than into any of my other heroines” (italics hers). This confession is somewhat surprising, given the wide gap between Pat’s characterization and the optimistic confidence Montgomery’s readers typically associate with her writing. However, as her journals reveal, the latter years of Montgomery’s life were marked by mental illness: persistent clinical depression and anxiety that escalated in response to devastating personal tragedies. In 1942, less than a decade after the publication of Mistress Pat, she committed suicide, leaving behind a heartbreaking note on the bedside table. “May God forgive me and I hope everyone else can forgive me even if they do not understand,” she wrote, the cramped handwriting badly slanted in stuttering ink. “My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it.” Her language here and in other late journal entries mirror Pat’s unremitting despair, expressed in equally vague and imprecise terms: “She simply couldn’t bear it. Everything gone! Who could bear it?”
We’re not given an explanation for Pat’s anxiety, unhappiness, or passivity. We’re never told why Pat hates change so much, or why she needs to cling to Silver Bush to the exclusion of all other life experiences, or why she refuses to act. We’re never provided with an attempt at a solution. Instead, her hopelessness threads through chapters without source or justification, with no tragic backstory or trauma. Pat’s just Pat. The ultimate absence of explanation for her pain may be frustrating, but it accurately mirrors the objectless way depression often manifests, an experience with which Montgomery was deeply acquainted. Pat’s imprecise anguish is a reminder that even in the hands of a gifted writer, the felt experiences of depression and anxiety must escape the restrictive economy of language. Yes, she’s arguably less appealing and engaging than Anne, Emily, or Valancy in a number of ways. Unlike these characters, however, who rely on language to communicate and move in the world, Pat’s defined by the eloquence of her silence: the realistically vague blur of undefined emotional agony.
The Pat novels are thick with this muteness. Like Jane Eyre, like Flowers in the Attic, like many other Gothic domestic novels that portray the home as haunted by the unspeakable, Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat suggest that Silver Bush is haunted, too, a place where something walks that Pat can’t acknowledge or name. The home space in these novels becomes horrifying, something achieved simultaneously through Pat’s uncritical fixation on Silver Bush and our growing understanding as readers that her attachment is not healthy. Nowhere is this clearer than in Pat’s fever delirium towards the end of Silver Bush, a nightmarish segment that herds all of her anxieties into unforgiving imagery:
The cracks in the ceiling wouldn’t stay in place but crawled all over. She was on a lonely road, where the dark was waiting to pounce on her [. . .] She heard [her brother] Joe’s whistle but could never see Joe. Somebody had changed all the furniture in Silver Bush and Pat was vainly trying to get it back in place. [. . .] Faces were looking in at the window…pressed against the pane…or leering in a row along the footboard of the bed like the Bay Shore ghost. Hideous faces, cruel, crafty, terrifying faces. […] Time was running by her like the dark river of the hymn. She couldn’t catch up with it. If we stopped all the clocks couldn’t we stop time, Judy? Please!
This passage, which reads more like Shirley Jackson than Anne Shirley, is flooded with horrifying images. The language brings to life what’s lifeless (“crawling,” “running”), blurs the boundaries between exterior and interior, and suggests the homespace is already breached, intruded, threatened by a terror that Pat can’t wholly identify, except to call it time. Throughout both novels, time is Pat’s primary antagonist, her anointed enemy, the only way she can articulate her terror; and yet time, we know, is inevitably going to defeat Pat’s desire for sameness. Things have to change.
But do they? At the end of the second book, Mistress Pat, Silver Bush burns down, destroyed in a sudden fire of suspiciously vague origins. Given what’s come before, Silver Bush’s total destruction is likely the only way Pat—now in her thirties—would ever leave behind her childhood home. The book’s conclusion, however, is much more ambiguous about the possibilities of real departure or change. In a reunion at the Gardiner family graveyard, Pat’s childhood friend Hilary, now an architect, reveals that he’s built a new house for the two of them, “painted white [with] bottlegreen shutters like Silver Bush.” Pat eagerly accepts his marriage proposal. “In a trance of happiness,” they gaze at the tombstone of Silver Bush’s beloved housekeeper Judy, recently dead. Wind sways “the long hair-like grass growing around the slab on Judy’s grave, giving the curious suggestion of something prisoned under it trying to draw a long breath and float upward.” Montgomery closes the book with a final sentence that personifies the graveyard, which listens to “the low yielding laugh of a girl held prisoner by her lover.”
In some ways, this final chapter aims at providing a happy ending for an unhappy character. Ultimately, though, it’s even more horrifying than what’s come before: we’re reading about a trapped corpse and a passive “girl held prisoner” in the aftermath of the revelation that Hilary’s created Silver Bush 2.0. (I have a theory that Hilary, who “hate[s]” Silver Bush and thinks of it as “the only rival [for Pat] he fear[s],” burns down the house himself because he knows he’ll never comes first with Pat otherwise.) Despite the pretense at a new beginning, reaction, imprisonment, and sameness are still what’s emphasized here. Hilary acts, and Pat accepts, shrouding herself in what’s familiar. If we stopped all the clocks couldn’t we stop time, Judy? Please?
In another one of Montgomery’s series, a dying mentor offers writing advice to his former student, an aspiring author. “Don’t–tell the world–everything,” he falters. “That’s what’s the–matter with our–literature.” No one could accuse Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat of telling the world everything. Instead, Montgomery’s characterization and prose uncomfortably elide what festers between her words: the ideas that resist articulation, the fears that come through the walls, the silent narratives that shape our lives. Here is a girl who will always be home, and a woman who will always be home, and the clocks are stopped, and the cracks are crawling.
Tags: books, heroines, kate slater, lucy maud montgomery, pat gardiner
I haven’t read the Pat books (I’ve only read the first several Anne books), but your writing on them is compelling and evocative. Thank you for sharing it!
This is excellent!
I think you’ve absolutely nailed why the Pat books disturbed me. At first, Pat was simply annoying due to her passivity and “I’m not smart. I’m not anything” attitude, but the second book really reveals just how pathological her attachment to Silver Bush was.
I actually thought you were going to suggest Pat herself set the fire.
I actually believed Pat set the fire herself, the first time I read that book, but I wasn’t sure why. Now, I think I understand a bit better.
This is SO GOOD, thank you! I always took comfort in the end of Mistress Pat, because I interpreted it as her being able to move on and have a “real life” away from Silver Bush. But your version is very thought-provoking…off to re-read.
(Also LOL’d at Pat’s blandly virtuous friend, Bets, who contracts a fatal plot device towards the end of the first novel, so perfect.)
I couldn’t buy the ending when I read it, because I couldn’t reconcile the Pat who could laugh happily and leave with her boyfriend with the Pat that I’d been reading about for two books. Pat would camp out on the ashes of Silver Bush and claw your eyes out if you tried to move her on.
Great essay. The Pat books were always seemingly bland but enjoyable enough to me. This will give me a whole lot more to think about the next time I read them. I also love the theory of Jingle burning down the house.
This is eye-opening–I haven’t read these books and had no idea L.M. Montgomery died of suicide. Thanks for your thoughtful reading.
It’s even sadder when you find out that she died the day she turned in her last book to her publisher. A sort of “my life’s work is done.”
I always enjoyed these books – more than the Emily books, because Emily annoyed me more. I grew up in a series of rental homes – we never owned anywhere we were & often were depending on the charity of others. I actually loved how Pat was attached to Silver Bush (at least in book 1) because I imagined having a Real Home and I could see how one could become so attached, at least when you’re on the outside looking in. The 2nd book I remember thinking, “Whoa, Pat, honey… lighten up a bit? Maybe.. travel? No?”
Mistress Pat always seemed like a thinly veiled rewrite of Emily’s Quest– LMM is so fond of writing highly improbably 11th hour romantic resolutions for depressed characters.
When I was a teenager, I actually liked the Pat books. Recently, as an adult I reread the first few of the Anne books and I tried to reread the Pat books and found them borderline abhorrent. Retrospectively, I think I was drawn to Pat because of my own untreated depression at the time, coupled with a burning desire for permanence, since I grew up in a military family. Now that I’ve come to terms with my depression as an adult and have worked to change certain behaviors of my own that I found upsetting (passivity being cheif among them), it almost terrified me to think that I previously related her character. It’s interesting to see such a strong example of how people can change in such an unlooked for place.
I forgot about these – I should reread them soon. Great article, btw. Love the academic approach to the novel.
This is a great piece. It’s lovely to see all the LMM stuff here!
For a while I had “Mistress Pat” in, on, under or next to my bed (I have that kind of room) and I would just open it to read a few pages in the bath, or while waiting to fall asleep, and would not be able to stop. There is something very compelling about it.
I also have a theory that Pat is some kind of Young Aunt Elizabeth from the Emily Books fanfic- Elizabeth also loves home, hates change and is all, “We’ll use candles. Grandmother used candles.”
I am HERE for the Jane Stuart Fan Club.
One day I will have a house on a hill, and I will call it Lantern Hill.
The Pat books I could never reread, because they depressed me too much. But I love the Shirley Jackson comparison. Maybe that is what LMM would have written more of if she wasn’t living off of Sunday school circulars.
Have you read “Among the Shadows”? There is a LOT of macabre in Montgomery–she is one of the foremothers of the domestic Gothic genre.
Yes! Exactly. She did some very clever, self-aware things with entrapment and passivity motifs.
Unabashed Pat fan here. These books said so much about anxiety and mental turmoil without spelling it out for you–a lot like poor Leslie Ford and hell, even Emily.
Also, that great thread about how much times and manners and social mores were changing (it being the roaring 20s) and how Pat held her own without shaming her forward thinking sister Rae TOO much…that one last fight they had was just heartbreaking.
I read the Pat books after a breakup, when I was all “I’ve got nothing else going on, might as well get my LMM completion badge” and they were appropriately comforting, with their combination of anxiety and the usual But Everyone Ends Up Loved And Happy At The End.
Silver Bush; L. M. Montgomery;;Mansfield Park; Jane Austen?
Pat seems to be living Fanny’s post-marriage passive-aggressive domestic hellscape… I mean, fantasy.
LMM content for Victoria Day, thank you Toast!
Wonderful analysis — I hadn’t thought of the incredible claustrophobia of the Pat books alongside depression, but it makes such sense.
Personally, when I struggle with change (especially beloved places changing), I go back to Pat as a reminder…
LMM content for Victoria Day, thank you Toast!
Wonderful analysis — I hadn't thought of the incredible claustrophobia of the Pat books alongside depression, but it makes such sense.
Personally, when I struggle with change (especially beloved places changing), I go back to Pat as a reminder…
The most horrifying part of the Pat books for me is the moment of her great triumph. At seven. Which would be great, except the narrative explicitly tells us that Pat has peaked at this moment. She will never exceed this in her life again. At SEVEN.
“Readers familiar with Montgomery’s fiction know that homemaking is typically rewarding for her books’ characters. The process of creating and preserving a homespace often generates a sense of emotional intimacy and pleasure.”
This bit has stuck with me. When I just can’t find the motivation to clean the kitchen, or I’ve just moved and the process of unpacking and figuring out where everything goes is… a bit much, I find my brain replaying bits from Anne’s House of Dreams or Jane of Lantern Hill.
On one hand, I feel sort of uncomfortable with how it feels like propaganda designed to enforce certain gender roles. On the other hand, Jane wanting so deeply to get Lantern Hill clean, to be able to care for things, is so infectious that it helps me get shit done.
Yeah, I feel conflicted on this one.
But it’s usually not an enforced domesticity, and when it is, the character is Not Happy about it. Montgomery found safety in known and cared-for spaces, and that shows in her characters. There is always individuality in those sacred spaces–Montgomery would have loved Woolf’s “Room of One’s Own” (maybe she read it?).
Thank you for this beautiful tribute to Pat. Emily is my ultimate favorite but I sympathize deeply with Pat because I have the same fear of small change and love of home (in my case though, devoid of all interest in domestic arts aside from decorating). I always wondered precisely hat was going on in LMM’s life when she wrote these books and especially when she burned down Silver Bush. It seemed like an act of cruelty to her heroine and readers like me. I love the connection you made to clinical depression, particularly the way it can devour with no source or justification. Next time I have the nerve to read Mistress Pat I’m going to view the burning of Silver Bush as a foreshadowing of the author’s suicide, which I believe now has the power to prevent future devastating consequences of mental illness by raising awareness in the name of a beloved writer.
I read “Mistress Pat” before I read “Pat of Silver Bush,” and so have never quite connected with the first book, but have read the second multiple times. Despite my wondering why Pat seemed so disinterested in the rest of the world and so possessive of her siblings, I found some common ground with her. I appreciate that the depression, the anxiety that drives her to cling to the only world she knows, is so unspoken in the text. It is far too often so in real life. I understand why Pat gets overlooked so often–she seems to pale in comparison to her sister for much of the second book, for example–but she provides a more complete picture of Montgomery as both a writer and a person.
I’m not really a fan of Pat of Silver Bush (my favorites are Emily and Valancy, and also Jane when I’m gearing up to KonMari my living space), but a few years ago, when I had the opportunity to take a few books out of storage (which is in a different country from where I currently live), I grabbed Mistress Pat, even though I couldn’t figure out why. It’s ultimately a depressing book to me for all the same reasons outlined here, but having read it again I do love the conversations between Pat, her sister, and the Whimsical Irish Servant of this book (Judy?). It’s nice to read about a group of women living together, having a good time, and often passing the Bechdel Test. I can understand why Pat wouldn’t want to give that up, especially since that wasn’t the norm to strive for at the time.
Yes! Exactly. She did some very clever, self-aware things with entrapment and passivity motifs.
Note: In defence of L M Montgomery: She did not commit suicide
I’m sorry, but I think you’ll find that she did.
I actually read Mistress Pat before I read Pat of Silver Bush, so while I think someone mentioned seeing the second book as Pat amping her “everything must be the same” up to eleven, the first book seemed even more unnecessary and bland to me. Surely, L.M.M. could have just combined them into one book.
I also second the theory that Hilary burned Silver Bush down (I mean, I would have done it if I were him).