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Post about my (insanely busy but very good) weekend later, but for now: random thoughts on the Emily books, which I have just reread.
I'm struck by how much the Emily books are Maud with her gloves off. The books are decidedly darker, eerier, with more of a bite than the Anne books (and a tad bit of the supernatural stirred in). This works. Anne's books are more hopeful and warm and joyous because Anne as a character is more hopeful and warm and joyous. Emily is more reserved, ambitious, and even selfish than Anne is, and so it makes sense that books from her perspective would have more of an edge to them.
Anne's books are not saccharine, despite what people say (well, maybe in spots here and there, but not overall). Anne has real sorrows, mostly in her backstory and then in the death of loved ones (Matthew, obviously, but also her stillborn daughter, Ruby Gillis, Marilla, and even another of her children--though that one we don't see from her perspective but from that of her daughter, so we don't really know what it does to her). Anne and her books know sorrow.
But Emily, I feel, knows darkness, which is a different thing. Emily has more explicit mental health problems than Anne ever does--much of Emily's Quest is about her depression. (I do think we see Anne with post-partum depression in Anne's House of Dreams, but it doesn't last that long.) The only other explicit exploration of mental health issues that I remember offhand in her books are the Pat books, which I will always argue are about a girl with a severe anxiety disorder. Emily, though, knows the dark night of the soul.
And it isn't just Emily. A character like Mrs. Kent or Dean Priest--or even an episode like Ilse's mother's story--wouldn't really fit in the Anne books. But they work within Emily's story, and even though Emily is deeply disturbed by the story of Ilse's mother, by the time we get to Mrs. Kent's backstory, she's been through enough and seen enough of the shadows in the world that she's ready to accept that that kind of toxic pain is part of life.
I also hadn't really paid attention to the role that gossip plays in this trilogy. In Avonlea, people talk a lot and misjudge each other, but they're fundamentally decent people. In Shrewsbury, people can be really mean. We have multiple times that Emily has a beautiful transcendent experience (night swimming in her petticoats in the ocean with Ilse, the night in the Old John house, the night she spends on the haystack), and these things are all tarnished and made ugly by gossip. People don't understand them, they interpret them in the most sordid way possible, and it hurts Emily. And we understand why it does. (Though I do love Aunt Ruth as MVP getting the town to shut up!)
I was really surprised on this read-through by how well I think LMM handles the Dean stuff. She never comes right out and says, "Hey, it's inappropriate as hell that this guy who's old enough to be Emily's father becomes obsessed with her at 14." But I think Emily's perspective on this is so good. She's unaware of it at first (as a kid would be--though LMM is smart enough to let readers know what's going on from the first), and by the time she starts to feel it, it makes her very uncomfortable. She doesn't want this! She just wants friendship!
When, after her horrible illness and the loss of her ability to write, she agrees to marry him, we see this as a result of the terrible place she's in. Several times, she confesses to herself that she feels trapped. Of course she does--as a couple of other characters are able to see, Dean is the kind that wants to possess her totally, that will always be jealous, that will not stand for anything else coming first in her life. For a woman who will always love writing more, for a person as self-possessed as Emily--heck, for a person with the Murray pride--this would make her absolutely miserable if she actually married him. That relationship would have been so messed up.
Emily may have forgiven Dean for lying about her book, but I never, ever will. I find it much easier to forgive Amy in Little Women--Amy, after all, was a child. Dean is a grown man, and he lies like that because he is selfish and can't stand to have Emily care about anything more than she cares about him. It's horrible. He does the decent thing when he leaves and stays away and I am very glad he gave her the Disappointed House, but wow, he's horrible, and the book actually does know this. The fact that Emily will never be able to rewrite A Seller of Dreams haunts me. It really does!
I really feel like the entire Dean storyline is done with a subtlety and surety that would not pass muster these days but that works, though it absolutely would not in the Anne books.
Where Emily and Anne overlap is their love of beauty and the depth of their emotions. Anne shows her deep emotions a lot more than Emily does--Emily's pride makes her bury them inside. But they both feel so deeply, and I think that's one of the reasons I really connected to them both as a kid. Anne is very earnest, which I relate to deeply, and Emily has a touch of cynicism about her that arises from her personality.
Both Emily and Anne worship nature and its beauty. In Emily, it becomes religious, honestly, and I can't help feeling that that attunement to nature is directly responsible for her psychic powers--that the flash and the more obviously mystical moments are related, are coming from the same source.
Speaking of which, I lovelovelove the touch of the supernatural in these books. I love the flash, and I love the times when Emily's psychic power makes an appearance. I even love that she is disturbed by this, even though it leads to good results and never bad ones. It freaks her out, and that feels real. She doesn't try to examine it and there is no explanation in the story (except for a few scattered lines about a Highland Scot ancestor). I love that. I love that it's not explained. Ilse's mom, calling Teddy in the church, finding the lost little boy, saving Teddy from boarding a ship fated to sink...IT'S SO GOOD. The trapped-in-the-church episode in particular is one of the most vivid and singular that LMM ever wrote.
I love that Emily is allowed to be prickly and cool and reserved and arrogant and ambitious. So ambitious! And her family never gets that. Some of them may love her (Jimmy and Laura do, and Elizabeth comes to, too, though she's terrible at showing it), but they will never understand her. Whereas Matthew understands Anne right away, and Marilla comes to. But you get the feeling that Emily's family is going to be judging her till they're all in their graves. Her relationships with them are not as unconditionally loving and warm as Anne's end up being with Matthew and Marilla. Emily, frankly, is not as lovable as Anne. Even though, as with Emma Woodhouse and Jane Eyre, I love her madly and frantically and forever and ever and ever.
Back to ambition: I know a lot of people are really disappointed by the fact that Anne doesn't end up having a writing career. I get that. It would have been nice! But Anne never wanted that in the way that Emily does. Emily without writing is not Emily. What Anne really wants most of all is love and kindred spirits around her. She gets this, not just in Marilla and Matthew and Gilbert and Diana, but later in her college chums and Miss Cornelia and Susan Baker and her children and dozens of others. Anne has a rich, full life, and I'm okay with her not having a career...because Emily has one.
Because Emily has one, I know that LMM's choice to not give one to Anne was intentional. It wasn't because you just don't give careers to female characters back then. Emily is shown hungering for success, working incredibly hard at her writing, seeking out critics who will be honest with her, persisting in the face of failure. While the Emily/Teddy relationship is the skeleton of the last book, Emily/writing is the otp of the trilogy, no doubt.
I do wish that there was a bit more about her writing in the last chapters of the last book. A few more lines about her writing another book or something. I do not doubt that she will continue to write, and continue to have success, and that, honestly, her marriage with Teddy will always be second to her writing. But I do wish it was more explicit because EMILY/WRITING OTP FOREVER!!!!
But we've got to talk about Emily/Teddy. I've said this before and I'll say it a million times more: LMM is actually not good at writing romance. Besides Valancy/Barney, I do not find her romantic pairings all that compelling on their own. They are just another part of the main character's coming of age. I don't feel like I ever really know Teddy or Gilbert or whoever nearly as much as I need to in order to be fully invested in their relationships.
But I just think that LMM isn't that interested in romance as a interaction between two people. (Perhaps because of teh strain of her own marriage?) She's interested in telling coming of age stories about young women, and romance is part of that, but it's really not as compelling to her as the other things that are important to her heroines (family, friendship, nature, and, for Emily, writing). It's fine that that's not her priority, but it does make Emily's Quest weaker than it needed to be. There's so much I love in that book, but the through-line is her love for Teddy and...I don't know Teddy? Really? So I can never be like, "Yes, these characters belong together! I want them to be together!" I want Emily to have Teddy because Emily wants Teddy, and I want her to have what she wants. But I don't care about Teddy himself.
As Jessica and I have talked about before, the extremely background relationship of Ilse/Perry is more compelling because we know both of these characters as individuals. I can imagine what their relationship will be like! (Lots of laughter! Lots of screaming rows! Lots of make-up sex!) With Emily/Teddy, I'm mostly like, "Well, unlike Dean, he won't try to keep her from writing or resent her writing or put her writing down, so I guess it's fine." I mostly picture them both working on their art, maybe in the same room: Emily at her desk, writing, Teddy at his easel, painting. I do like the idea of these artistic and ambitious people understanding each other's drive for art and ambition.
But honestly, I care a million times more about Emily ending up with the Disappointed House (and Lofty John's bush! We should have gotten more about her buying it!!!!) than I do with her ending up with Teddy.
Again, I think I could totally forgive the weakness of Teddy (his mother is a more compelling character!) if only there were a bit more about Emily's writing in the last few chapters of the series! If LMM kind of nudged and us and went, "Well, yeah, she's got this guy she wants, but you know that writing will always come first for her." If she had included just a few lines/paragraphs of that...I think the series would be (for me) just about perfect.
As it is, I love the stuff I love so much that it almost is perfect for me. But it could have been really truly perfect! Maud, you're killing me! I have decided to just blame it on her own life struggles. Like, maybe she was so in the dumps about her husband's horrible mental illness and complete inability to take care of himself that she was imagining how nice it would be to have a beautiful, young, rich husband who didn't need taking care of. And fair enough!!!
Other random things I love: New Moon and the Disappointed House as characters (I am obsessed with houses as characters), Mr. Carpenter, the way LMM writes complicated characters like Aunts Elizabeth and Ruth (she's unflinching about their flaws but also gives them credit for their virtues--they're never villains, even if Emily feels like they are), Emily being offered her big break in New York but deciding to stay home, the descriptions of Emily and Ilse's clothes, the plotline about Emily only being able to write true things while she's at Shrewsbury, Emily's long list of beaus, her love of cats, Cousin Jimmy, Mrs. Kent (yes, really), and did I mention the psychic stuff?
These books are so formative for me. I've read and reread and reread them again. I know everything that's coming--I remember certain lines word for word--but they are just as enjoyable to me on each reread. I can clearly see their flaws, but I just don't care! I love them! They're part of me!
I'm struck by how much the Emily books are Maud with her gloves off. The books are decidedly darker, eerier, with more of a bite than the Anne books (and a tad bit of the supernatural stirred in). This works. Anne's books are more hopeful and warm and joyous because Anne as a character is more hopeful and warm and joyous. Emily is more reserved, ambitious, and even selfish than Anne is, and so it makes sense that books from her perspective would have more of an edge to them.
Anne's books are not saccharine, despite what people say (well, maybe in spots here and there, but not overall). Anne has real sorrows, mostly in her backstory and then in the death of loved ones (Matthew, obviously, but also her stillborn daughter, Ruby Gillis, Marilla, and even another of her children--though that one we don't see from her perspective but from that of her daughter, so we don't really know what it does to her). Anne and her books know sorrow.
But Emily, I feel, knows darkness, which is a different thing. Emily has more explicit mental health problems than Anne ever does--much of Emily's Quest is about her depression. (I do think we see Anne with post-partum depression in Anne's House of Dreams, but it doesn't last that long.) The only other explicit exploration of mental health issues that I remember offhand in her books are the Pat books, which I will always argue are about a girl with a severe anxiety disorder. Emily, though, knows the dark night of the soul.
And it isn't just Emily. A character like Mrs. Kent or Dean Priest--or even an episode like Ilse's mother's story--wouldn't really fit in the Anne books. But they work within Emily's story, and even though Emily is deeply disturbed by the story of Ilse's mother, by the time we get to Mrs. Kent's backstory, she's been through enough and seen enough of the shadows in the world that she's ready to accept that that kind of toxic pain is part of life.
I also hadn't really paid attention to the role that gossip plays in this trilogy. In Avonlea, people talk a lot and misjudge each other, but they're fundamentally decent people. In Shrewsbury, people can be really mean. We have multiple times that Emily has a beautiful transcendent experience (night swimming in her petticoats in the ocean with Ilse, the night in the Old John house, the night she spends on the haystack), and these things are all tarnished and made ugly by gossip. People don't understand them, they interpret them in the most sordid way possible, and it hurts Emily. And we understand why it does. (Though I do love Aunt Ruth as MVP getting the town to shut up!)
I was really surprised on this read-through by how well I think LMM handles the Dean stuff. She never comes right out and says, "Hey, it's inappropriate as hell that this guy who's old enough to be Emily's father becomes obsessed with her at 14." But I think Emily's perspective on this is so good. She's unaware of it at first (as a kid would be--though LMM is smart enough to let readers know what's going on from the first), and by the time she starts to feel it, it makes her very uncomfortable. She doesn't want this! She just wants friendship!
When, after her horrible illness and the loss of her ability to write, she agrees to marry him, we see this as a result of the terrible place she's in. Several times, she confesses to herself that she feels trapped. Of course she does--as a couple of other characters are able to see, Dean is the kind that wants to possess her totally, that will always be jealous, that will not stand for anything else coming first in her life. For a woman who will always love writing more, for a person as self-possessed as Emily--heck, for a person with the Murray pride--this would make her absolutely miserable if she actually married him. That relationship would have been so messed up.
Emily may have forgiven Dean for lying about her book, but I never, ever will. I find it much easier to forgive Amy in Little Women--Amy, after all, was a child. Dean is a grown man, and he lies like that because he is selfish and can't stand to have Emily care about anything more than she cares about him. It's horrible. He does the decent thing when he leaves and stays away and I am very glad he gave her the Disappointed House, but wow, he's horrible, and the book actually does know this. The fact that Emily will never be able to rewrite A Seller of Dreams haunts me. It really does!
I really feel like the entire Dean storyline is done with a subtlety and surety that would not pass muster these days but that works, though it absolutely would not in the Anne books.
Where Emily and Anne overlap is their love of beauty and the depth of their emotions. Anne shows her deep emotions a lot more than Emily does--Emily's pride makes her bury them inside. But they both feel so deeply, and I think that's one of the reasons I really connected to them both as a kid. Anne is very earnest, which I relate to deeply, and Emily has a touch of cynicism about her that arises from her personality.
Both Emily and Anne worship nature and its beauty. In Emily, it becomes religious, honestly, and I can't help feeling that that attunement to nature is directly responsible for her psychic powers--that the flash and the more obviously mystical moments are related, are coming from the same source.
Speaking of which, I lovelovelove the touch of the supernatural in these books. I love the flash, and I love the times when Emily's psychic power makes an appearance. I even love that she is disturbed by this, even though it leads to good results and never bad ones. It freaks her out, and that feels real. She doesn't try to examine it and there is no explanation in the story (except for a few scattered lines about a Highland Scot ancestor). I love that. I love that it's not explained. Ilse's mom, calling Teddy in the church, finding the lost little boy, saving Teddy from boarding a ship fated to sink...IT'S SO GOOD. The trapped-in-the-church episode in particular is one of the most vivid and singular that LMM ever wrote.
I love that Emily is allowed to be prickly and cool and reserved and arrogant and ambitious. So ambitious! And her family never gets that. Some of them may love her (Jimmy and Laura do, and Elizabeth comes to, too, though she's terrible at showing it), but they will never understand her. Whereas Matthew understands Anne right away, and Marilla comes to. But you get the feeling that Emily's family is going to be judging her till they're all in their graves. Her relationships with them are not as unconditionally loving and warm as Anne's end up being with Matthew and Marilla. Emily, frankly, is not as lovable as Anne. Even though, as with Emma Woodhouse and Jane Eyre, I love her madly and frantically and forever and ever and ever.
Back to ambition: I know a lot of people are really disappointed by the fact that Anne doesn't end up having a writing career. I get that. It would have been nice! But Anne never wanted that in the way that Emily does. Emily without writing is not Emily. What Anne really wants most of all is love and kindred spirits around her. She gets this, not just in Marilla and Matthew and Gilbert and Diana, but later in her college chums and Miss Cornelia and Susan Baker and her children and dozens of others. Anne has a rich, full life, and I'm okay with her not having a career...because Emily has one.
Because Emily has one, I know that LMM's choice to not give one to Anne was intentional. It wasn't because you just don't give careers to female characters back then. Emily is shown hungering for success, working incredibly hard at her writing, seeking out critics who will be honest with her, persisting in the face of failure. While the Emily/Teddy relationship is the skeleton of the last book, Emily/writing is the otp of the trilogy, no doubt.
I do wish that there was a bit more about her writing in the last chapters of the last book. A few more lines about her writing another book or something. I do not doubt that she will continue to write, and continue to have success, and that, honestly, her marriage with Teddy will always be second to her writing. But I do wish it was more explicit because EMILY/WRITING OTP FOREVER!!!!
But we've got to talk about Emily/Teddy. I've said this before and I'll say it a million times more: LMM is actually not good at writing romance. Besides Valancy/Barney, I do not find her romantic pairings all that compelling on their own. They are just another part of the main character's coming of age. I don't feel like I ever really know Teddy or Gilbert or whoever nearly as much as I need to in order to be fully invested in their relationships.
But I just think that LMM isn't that interested in romance as a interaction between two people. (Perhaps because of teh strain of her own marriage?) She's interested in telling coming of age stories about young women, and romance is part of that, but it's really not as compelling to her as the other things that are important to her heroines (family, friendship, nature, and, for Emily, writing). It's fine that that's not her priority, but it does make Emily's Quest weaker than it needed to be. There's so much I love in that book, but the through-line is her love for Teddy and...I don't know Teddy? Really? So I can never be like, "Yes, these characters belong together! I want them to be together!" I want Emily to have Teddy because Emily wants Teddy, and I want her to have what she wants. But I don't care about Teddy himself.
As Jessica and I have talked about before, the extremely background relationship of Ilse/Perry is more compelling because we know both of these characters as individuals. I can imagine what their relationship will be like! (Lots of laughter! Lots of screaming rows! Lots of make-up sex!) With Emily/Teddy, I'm mostly like, "Well, unlike Dean, he won't try to keep her from writing or resent her writing or put her writing down, so I guess it's fine." I mostly picture them both working on their art, maybe in the same room: Emily at her desk, writing, Teddy at his easel, painting. I do like the idea of these artistic and ambitious people understanding each other's drive for art and ambition.
But honestly, I care a million times more about Emily ending up with the Disappointed House (and Lofty John's bush! We should have gotten more about her buying it!!!!) than I do with her ending up with Teddy.
Again, I think I could totally forgive the weakness of Teddy (his mother is a more compelling character!) if only there were a bit more about Emily's writing in the last few chapters of the series! If LMM kind of nudged and us and went, "Well, yeah, she's got this guy she wants, but you know that writing will always come first for her." If she had included just a few lines/paragraphs of that...I think the series would be (for me) just about perfect.
As it is, I love the stuff I love so much that it almost is perfect for me. But it could have been really truly perfect! Maud, you're killing me! I have decided to just blame it on her own life struggles. Like, maybe she was so in the dumps about her husband's horrible mental illness and complete inability to take care of himself that she was imagining how nice it would be to have a beautiful, young, rich husband who didn't need taking care of. And fair enough!!!
Other random things I love: New Moon and the Disappointed House as characters (I am obsessed with houses as characters), Mr. Carpenter, the way LMM writes complicated characters like Aunts Elizabeth and Ruth (she's unflinching about their flaws but also gives them credit for their virtues--they're never villains, even if Emily feels like they are), Emily being offered her big break in New York but deciding to stay home, the descriptions of Emily and Ilse's clothes, the plotline about Emily only being able to write true things while she's at Shrewsbury, Emily's long list of beaus, her love of cats, Cousin Jimmy, Mrs. Kent (yes, really), and did I mention the psychic stuff?
These books are so formative for me. I've read and reread and reread them again. I know everything that's coming--I remember certain lines word for word--but they are just as enjoyable to me on each reread. I can clearly see their flaws, but I just don't care! I love them! They're part of me!
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