Places Where Dreams Grow: Toward an Ecofeminist Analysis of L.M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon

Epekwitk (Prince Edward Island)—where Montgomery was born and set most of her novels—is located in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People. The Epekwitnewaq Mi’kmaq have occupied the Island for over 12,000 years.

Emily Byrd Starr—like the more famous Anne of Green Gables—is an orphan girl deeply connected to the Canadian landscape. When Emily’s eccentric father dies, she moves to the fictional village of Blair Water, Prince Edward Island, where her late mother’s family lives in a house called “New Moon.” The grove of spruce and maple surrounding New Moon, known to all as “Lofty John’s bush,” is a “Fairyland” of feminised nature:

… a wild, dear, little path with lady-ferns beckoning and blowing along it, the shyest of elfin June-bells under the firs, and little whims of loveliness at every curve. She breathed in the tang of fir-balsam and saw the shimmer of gossamers high up in the boughs, and everywhere the frolic of elfin lights and shadows. Here and there the young maple branches interlaced as if to make a screen for dryad faces … and the great sheets of moss under the trees were meet for Titania’s couch.

“This is one of the places where dreams grow,” said Emily happily. (Montgomery 79)

The personification of “beckoning” lady-ferns and “shyest” June-bells reveals the power of Emily’s imagination, while references to elves, dryads, and Queen Titania demonstrate her knowledge of folklore and literature. She and Ilse build a playhouse in the bush, complete with a “china closet,” a moss garden, and a spruce arch connecting the “parlour” to the “living-room” (145). Emily perceives the space through metaphor, explaining in a letter to her late father that “‘[t]he Today Road is by the brook and we call it that because it is lovely now. The Yesterday Road is out in the stumps where Lofty John cut some trees down and we call it that because it used to be lovely. The Tomorrow Road is just a tiny path in the maple clearing and we call it that because it is going to be lovely some day, when the maples grow bigger’” (157). The symbol of the maple trees—an emblem of Canadian national identity even in the 1920s—implies that Emily and Ilse also will “‘be lovely some day’” when they “‘grow bigger.’”

Emily is disappointed to learn the bush has not belonged to New Moon since Archibald Murray sold it to Mike Sullivan fifty years ago. Mike’s son “Lofty John” Sullivan now refuses to sell the land back to Emily’s aunt Elizabeth Murray, whom he has hated since their schooldays together. While the “green-bosomed” (230) bush is a metaphorically feminine space, male pride and capital dictate its legal ownership. Its universal designation as “Lofty John’s bush” emphasises its subjection to masculine control. Emily thus learns that nature, in Lawrence Buell’s words, is “androcentrically constructed as a domain for males … yet at the same time symbolically coded as female” (Buell qtd. in Holmes 380). Although her aunts believe the bush “belong[s] to New Moon morally” because it has “always been there,” they have no say in its fate (Montgomery 225).[2]

When Lofty John threatens to cut down a portion of the bush in retaliation for an argument with Elizabeth, Emily is haunted by the image of “the little playhouse where she and Ilse had such glorious hours destroyed—the whole lovely, ferny, intimate place torn out of her life at one fell swoop” (226). The diminutive terms with which the narrator describes the bush connect the space to Emily’s girlhood and suggest its potential destruction endangers her innocence, exemplifying what Nancy Holmes identifies as a common motif in Montgomery’s novels: “Girl loves woods, woods are cut down or are threatened with ‘desecration’” (374). In this context, “‘desecrate’” connotes both the mistreatment of a sacred space and the violation of its virginal occupants. By bringing household objects into the woods, Emily and Ilse have domesticated a male-owned natural space. Yet because their use of the land “has no weight in the legal and ideological realm of private property” (Holmes 380), the bush is as vulnerable to desecration as their own bodies.

Aware of the bush’s significance to New Moon, Emily’s friend (and future husband) Teddy recommends she ask the local Catholic priest to speak to Lofty John, one of his parishioners. Emily, a devout Presbyterian, is terrified of Father Cassidy, but the thought of the bush as “a desecrated waste of stumps” compels her to visit the parish house (230). There, she is reassured by the priest’s tanned face, love of gardening, and enormous black cat. His allusions to Celtic mythology put her “on her native heath,” emboldening her to ask her favour of him (233). As Kirstie Blair and William V. Thompson observe, Father Cassidy’s Irish Catholic culture relates to Emily’s almost “pagan” early childhood (142). The characters’ shared eco-theological belief in “a connection to God felt through nature and imaged in terms of companionship between all living things” (134) enables them to overcome the relatively trivial differences between Christian denominations.

Knowing Lofty John will not respond to appeals to feminine emotion, Father Cassidy confronts his parishioner with principles of masculinity and patriotism: “‘I’ll put it to him … that no decent Irishman carries on a feud with women’” (236). Ultimately, Lofty John shows mercy to the trees in deference to his priest, not out of respect for his female neighbours. Emily thus relies on male characters inhabiting a sphere of private property girls cannot penetrate to help her rescue the bush. Indeed, one of the only ways Emily can protect natural spaces is by using her physicality to influence the actions of adult men. She does so unwittingly with Father Cassidy, who is mesmerised by her “wildrose hue” and “dark and limpid eyes” (232), and then deliberately subjects herself to Lofty John, who agrees (in a thick Irish accent) to spare the bush only if she promises to visit him regularly:

“And there’s wan more thing. Ye must ask me rale make and polite to do ye the favour av not cutting down the bush. If ye do it pretty enough sure niver a tree will I touch. …”

Emily summoned all her wiles to her aid. She clasped her hands, she looked up through her lashes at Lofty John, she smiled as slowly and seductively as she knew how—and Emily had considerable native knowledge of that sort. “Please, Mr. Lofty John,” she coaxed, “won’t you leave me the dear bush I love?” (246)

While Holmes contends this dialogue makes it “brutally clear that Emily will be firmly pushed into the traditional models of gender relations when they are linked to nature’s subordination to male power” (382), I argue Emily exploits traditional gender roles to counter nature’s subordination. I am thus aligned with Rebecca J. Thompson, who asserts that “although she resists and often rejects patriarchal control, Emily also uses or subverts its power to complete her own purposes” (169). In other words, Emily is not “pushed” into anything. On the contrary, she cunningly employs her feminine “wiles” to save the bush from destruction. As Elizabeth Waterston remarks, “in [Montgomery’s] male-dominated society, the only power a woman had was ultimately her physical presence” (116). But this presence is power, and Emily’s attractiveness is fundamentally a source of self-assurance, not a reflection of her oppression.

Notes

[1] An extended version of this paper was presented at the ChLA 2023 Annual Conference under the title “‘Places Where Dreams Grow’: Emily of New Moon as Environmental Activist.”

[2] Notably, the Murrays recognise use-based land claims only insofar as they benefit white women. If a piece of land “morally” belongs to those who have traditionally occupied the space, as the Murray women seem to believe it does, then all of what they know as Prince Edward Island—including Lofty John’s bush—belongs to the Mi’kmaq, who have “always been there.”

Works Cited

Blair, Kirstie, with William V. Thompson. “The Mood of the Golden Age: Paganism, Ecotheology and the Wild Woods in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne and Emily Series.” Literature and Theology, vol. 30, no. 2, 2016, pp. 131–47.

Holmes, Nancy. “How Green is Green Gables?: An Ecofeminist Perspective on L. M. Montgomery.” Storm and Dissonance: L. M. Montgomery and Conflict, edited by Jean Mitchell, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, pp. 373–90.

Montgomery, L.M. Emily of New Moon. 1923. Tundra, 2014.

Thompson, Rebecca J. “‘That House Belongs to Me’: The Appropriation of Patriarchal Space in L.M. Montgomery’s Emily Trilogy.” L.M. Montgomery and Gender, edited by E. Holly Pike and Laura M. Robinson, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2021, pp. 152–72.

Waterston, Elizabeth. Magic Island: The Fictions of L.M. Montgomery. Oxford UP, 2008.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michaela Wipond (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She has degrees in English from Queen’s University and the University of Prince Edward Island. Her dissertation uses postcolonial ecofeminism to interrogate early twentieth-century girls’ fiction by women writers in Britain, Canada, and the United States. Other research interests include biographical criticism, critical animal studies, and gender and sexuality in children’s literature. Her article “The Deadly Pestilence: Pain and Mourning in L.M. Montgomery’s Pandemic Life Writing” (2022) was published in the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies. With Dr. Brooke Cameron, she co-curated the hybrid exhibition “I Always Speak to Dogs and Cats”: Early Animal Rights Literature for Children (2023) at W.D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections, Queen’s University. Find her on social media @michaelawipond.