Book Reviews

Imagination Generated Imagery

L. M. Montgomery (Author)
Imagining Anne: The Island Scrapbooks of L.M. Montgomery. Viking Press
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Holly Blackford (Editor)
100 Years of Anne with an 'E': The Centennial Study of Anne of Green Gables. University of Calgary Press
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Reviewed by Sean Somers

Sonja Arntzen, in a foreword to her translation of Kagerô Diary, affirms a Cixousian sense of écriture feminine.  Arntzen describes the author of this thousand year old diary, known only by the epithet Mother of Michitsuna, as “an ancestress for us all in the writing of the self.”  Today, Michitsuna no haha is regarded as a foundational contributor to the development of Japanese literature.   But, as Arntzen explores, the developmental relationships between female authorship, private genres (such as diaries), and the nationalized canon involve a great deal of speculation as well as suspicion.

 As L. M. Montgomery occupies such a pivotal role in Canadian assessments of a nationalized literary heritage, she has also received much in the way of probing attention to the inner works of her imagination.  E. R. Epperly’s book presents a visually lush, yet connotatively ambiguous, edition of excerpts from Montgomery’s lifelong habit at scrapbooking.  The overall effect is both curious and ambiguous.  While these pages of cutouts and snippets will probably not revise our understanding of Montgomery, the contents do offer an alternatively imagistic portrait as to how Montgomery envisioned her life and environs.

In presenting this facsimile edition of pages from L. M. Montgomery’s Island Scrapbooks, Epperly has avoided academic vocabularies in favor of a more personable, intimate encounter.  Warmly produced, this book is packaged to feel and look something like a Victorian keepsake album.  The bulk of the contents are reproductions—gloriously digitized—from what must be these most private of Montgomery’s personal archives. Rather unlike her journals, which have already appeared sequentially in print, Montgomery’s scrapbooks resist temporal categorization.  We may know the general dates during which a particular scrapbook page was composed, the kinds of memorabilia pasted down vary considerably in time and place of origin.

This invites questions.  What was the reasoning behind Montgomery’s layout methods? Why insert a leaf, or paste a stranger’s marriage announcement from a newspaper?  Why glue down a photograph of Mount Royal?  Viewing these montages and collages of text and image feels strangely voyeuristic, as these assemblages float in an intensely personal space, one that lacks deliberate explanations or correlations.  Epperly tries to overcome this with an editorial presentation that offers the scrapbooks as a kind of museum exhibit:  these self-mounted albums can be thought of as experiments of “fun and nostalgia.”  But these fragments, although stamped and fixed to browning pages, offer only enigmatic suggestions, or perhaps nothing more than labeled moments of whimsy.  A rather haunting schism remains between the annotated reproductions herein presented, and the imaginative moment in which the originals were pieced together.

The need to interpret and analyze, to reconstruct the feelings that constellated these material figments, underscores much of Epperly’s presence. Her commentary often sits on the facing page to the reproductions from Montgomery. Epperly’s notes—particularly in supplying historical detail—are very intriguing indeed.  But sometimes their interpretive character moves towards the speculative:  for example, in regards to a foregrounded postcard, Epperly suggests, “Using an old moon mislabeled a new moon at the centre of the page may be a marker for romance gone awry.”

Aimed at a general readership of Montgomery admirers, Epperly should receive enthusiastic appreciation for the kinds of imagination-generated-imagery she has organized here. Yet what these excised and snipped bits of print and picture tells about Montgomery’s inner-life, as an author, is hard to say.  The Island Scrapbooks do suggest a rather awkward precursor to the Facebook phenomenon:  Montgomery obviously took seriously the task of compiling text and image into an abbreviated mosaic, somehow representative of herself as individual-as-narrative.  But why these particular tokens, icons, images, pictures and features?  The profile evades the contextualizing platform. Adrienne Clarkson’s rather bland political endorsement of Montgomery as the Canadian writer, written as this book’s foreword, mainly serves to remind us how publicly claimable Montgomery’s private domains have problematically become.

Holly Blackford’s edited collection exemplifies how the centennial anniversary of Anne of Green Gables has revitalized scholarly attention to Montgomery.  In many ways, Blackford’s volume stands out for the deftness of her editorial precision, and for the remarkable accessibility of its authors.  For these reasons, this text should also enjoy a wide readership, as it makes historical and theoretical interpretations of Anne available to non-specialists and a popular audience in general.  The collection might offer some kinds of accompanying assessments to the mysteries of the Scrapbooks, including an essay by Epperly. Theoretically dense conceptualizations are almost entirely eschewed amongst these authors.  This in no way, to my mind, limits the scopes of the authors’ ideas. Thematic concepts such as geography, industry, gender, and language receive critical yet accessible treatments that should ensure a wide readership, especially for popular readers who, normally, might avoid academic writing.

The domestic space—sometimes thought of as being a debilitation of quaintness to the novel—receives much critical re-imagining in this collection.  Christiana R. Salah, with an eye on the context of household management, investigates the role of cooking as actually offering an alternative to the angel in the house typification of Victorian women.  Although some may disagree with Salah’s analysis of food as “the spirituality of the everyday” (207), she nonetheless draws intriguing attention to a narrative feature that seems too quotidian to be of interest.

In demonstrating the extent of Anne-with-an-e’s influence over one hundred years of circulation, many of the chapters in this collection highlight intertexuality:  the image and language of Anne as providing a site of transcendence beyond national and cultural boundaries.  Cornelia Rémi’s analysis of how Swedish author Astrid Lindgren lifted “Anne’s play into her own childhood milieu” reveals this reassembling of Anne in varying places.  Yet given the truly global application of this topic—the Japanese example frequently is mentioned, but there are many others—one would have wished for a more intercontinental evaluation than what is presented here.  Perhaps the essay on Confucian systems of gender and age, as inscribed into the Korean translation of Anne of Green Gables, is still waiting to be written. 

This review has not yet appeared in Canadian Literature.

MLA: Somers, Sean. Imagination Generated Imagery. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, n.d. Web. 8 Sept. 2010.

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