🪲 carl meredith 🪲

I’m sooo cracking up and embarrassed right now, because while I do fr believe that... I’m not exactly sure I can wholly defend it. Or even remotely ask anyone else to consider getting onboard with that kind of intense inferring. But I’m going to do my best to have a go at it (🥴) and attempt to explain where my head was at with all that, while also letting it be a lesson to myself to not just be out here saying things sometimes, lol.

Also as a small sidenote: I tried to find the post you might be referencing, and I’m all but certain it must’ve been a very old conversation with @no-where-new-hero, but it must’ve also predated my searchable tagging practices because alas, I cannot find it. So… I’m already sorry-in-advance if I veer off into unrelated areas or miss the ‘ask’ mark completely. But I think you mean that at some point I said Maud “showed her hand” early in the Emily series by having Dean Priest say that he wouldn’t keep a cat. I’ll double check, but I think his exact quote is: “I like cats but I never keep one.”

Which, to a casual reader... doesn’t mean a whole lot. Yet when I look back at this, as a non-casual reader, after many re-reads and a little bit of Maud experience, I do kind of now recognise that as a tell. At least it’s a proper LMM red flag. Especially when we experience and feel the depth of cat symbolism and heavy-handed cat presence in the Emily series. And of Emily. How Emily is repeatedly and often assigned a cat-like nature + appearance in the narrative and by other characters in the book. She’s told at school that she has cat ears, and she’s even nicknamed “puss” by Cousin Jimmy. Emily’s Wind Woman purrs. It’s everywhere in Emily. If we advance even a bit further, into broad and ancient symbolism, we can also reflect on timeless and universal cat symbolism… the cat alignment with femininity. The same way dogs are aligned and representative of masculinity.

So when we consider all of this and juxtapose Dean’s statement against Montgomery’s men that did get their girls, I think it speaks even louder. Teddy had Smoke and Buttercup. Barney had Good Luck and Banjo. Cats are so important to Maud and her stories that she has Gilbert (the son of a cat lady, eventual owner of the First Mate, and saviour of Ingleside housecat the Shrimp) mention them in his finally-accepted proposal to Anne. He says, “I dream of a home with a hearth-fire in it, a cat and dog, the footsteps of friends—and you!” (Which P.S. is even a veeeery interesting order, in my veeeery-stretched opinion. A cat, then a dog. The feminine before the masculine. You before me, Gilbert says.)

Anne of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery

Lol, I shall defer to our resident anne expert gogandmagog for her anne-swer, but my instinct is immediately no. While we do have that hilarious passage from AOGG about Anne desperately hating Diana's husband, the fact is that from age eleven, Anne quite clearly likes a boy even if she won't admit it to herself. That doesn't preclude her being queer, but there's not the same tension to Anne's experience of the world's expectations of her that Walter has.

Also, there are certain fictional characters who I simply cannot fathom dating anyone else than whom they end up with canonically, because the relationship is so intrinsically tied to their character arc and traits. I think I hit this with Anne - I simply can't imagine her being seriously attracted to anyone other than Gilbert. There's a really fun fic waiting in the shadows here of an Anne who never met Gilbert and who is properly dating [insert male character here, maybe Roy], only to meet Gilbert and be like oh dear (if she's even willing to admit it to herself). Anyway, I struggle with picturing Anne in any other relationship, regardless of gender.

In terms of the canon Anne works… for me the notion of Anne being queer is a really hard sell, and I think the easiest way to reduce the ‘why’ into its simplest form comes down to the way that Anne is omnivorous in her romancing of the world around her, and subsequently the way that for her romance ≠ attraction or desire.

You can do a lot of quote-mining with Anne and paint as specific of a picture as you would like, but imo when you take a wide angle lens and examine the whole text thoroughly, you will find that Anne is an equal opportunity romanticiser, and that this tendency is seriously applied to everything – animate or inanimate, a seagull or a best friend, the most mundane chores to the most fanciful events. She’ll imagine she’s a frost fairy while doing Green Gables meal prep and end up with a mouse drowned in plum sauce, if she’s been possibly abandoned at a train station she’ll build up a coping-mechanism fantasy about what it’d be like to sleep in a cherry tree, she’ll spin a dreamy yarn about a lost brooch in order to go to a Sunday school picnic, she’ll dramatise Tennyson’s Elaine and nearly die for it… she even attempted to romanticise Marilla and make her a sort of long lost ‘aunt’.

After so many years spent self-soothing her tragical and loveless life by making friends with her reflection and finding solace in books (her only true example of how loving people behave; no doubt where she’s learned to ask for locks of hair and to sleep with letters under pillows tbh), romance is cultivated in her, it’s who she is as a person, it’s just what she doessss.

Regarding Diana specifically, and as mentioned by OP, the number one thing people like to say, in varying degrees of solemnity, is, “Anne cried over the idea of Diana getting married; there’s no heterosexual explanation for that.” And it’s true, laid out like that, it definitely sounds super gay. But it’s also kind of contextphobic. It leaves out the “why.” It leaves out Anne’s history of desertion, and abuse, and how afraid she is that her new attachments will be taken from her.

Firstly, Diana. Yes, there’s the crying over future wedding scene, but there’s also two separate scenes in which the two swear eternal devotion to each other—scenes that can read like wedding vows. Do they have to? No. But were such schoolgirl intimate friendships often a safe place to explore romantic and sexual attraction? Yes.

Through Anne’s life, we see her progress from hero worship of Mrs. Allan (with whom she “fell promptly and wholeheartedly in love”) and Miss Stacy to more intimate friendships with Stella (with whom she is “infatuated”), Priscilla, Phil, Katherine (who we know was based on a real lesbian Montgomery knew and who she calls “my Katherine”), and Leslie—to being the object of a hero crush herself, said in so many words, in “Anne of Windy Poplars”: “Hazel Marr had a notorious ‘crush’ on Anne.” While this ultimately goes wrong, Anne initially enjoys Hazel’s admiration and sees herself at a younger age in Hazel, including Hazel having a similar hatred of Gilbert go young Anne’s hatred of Diana’s future husband.

Can there be heterosexual explanations for all of this? Can it all be explained away as dramatic expressions of platonic love? Yes. However, I think it is also important to keep in mind that Anne lived in the nineteenth century, the era where lesbian* relationships flourished under the guise of schoolgirl friendship. This was a time when women were able to express their love and live as married couples, with people who didn’t want to know able to dismiss them simply as friends, roommates, living together until they met the right man. Both intimate friendships and hero crushes were important lesbian courtship rituals, a language that was plausibly deniable to the outside world but understood by those in the know.

Why, then, would Anne have been able to fly under the radar but Walter not? For three reasons, off the top of my head. First, because Walter lived in a later era than his mother. In the early twentieth century, queer sexuality was coming more under a microscope, being studied by scientists, in a way it had not been in the nineteenth. Second, because historically, men’s sexuality has always been more closely examined than women’s. For much of history, women were not considered to have sexual desire at all, so their affection with each other could be written off as platonic in a way that men’s could not. Society also, in Anne’s time as now, allowed and expected for women to express their emotions but expected men to repress theirs. This doesn’t necessarily mean that women’s emotions were taken seriously—Anne’s often aren’t—but while hers could be laughed off, Walter’s would be considered a problem.

Which brings me to my third reason: because Anne may love other women, but in all other ways, she is gender-conforming. Despite all the dither over her red hair and freckles, she has a delicate face and figure, a high, clear voice, and long eyelashes that meet societal approval. She likes pretty clothes and knows how to wear them. She likes pretty houses and knows how to decorate them. In the long run, she becomes a good cook. She never denies that she wants to get married or have children, but even if she did, she would be a non-threatening old maid who kept her house clean and always had cookies for her friends’ children—in fact, this is one future she imagines for herself, although that is mostly out of insecurity that no one will want to marry her. On the other hand, consider women in the Anne universe who don’t hit these points: Mrs. Campbell, Katherine Brooke, Judith Marsh, Emmeline Strong, Hester Meredith. Thick eyebrows, large hands, deep voices, unmarried or widowed young—and every one of them a bully whose only hope is to be reformed.

And now consider Walter. He is so very much his mother’s son. He inherited her delicate features, her love of beauty, her poetic aspirations—but where these are commendable in a woman, they are a problem in a man. If he loved men but was otherwise gender-conforming, tough like his brothers and even like Paul Irving can be when the situation calls for it, it would be one thing. But he isn’t. Everyone can see that he is different, and so he is a threat to the social order in a way that his mother never was.

I…do not know how to finish this. But those are my thoughts. Thank you for your time.

I find this interesting, especially the fourth sentence about the guise of schoolgirl love, because this is something that connects to a larger LMM discussion about the way she portrays female friendships both in her novels and her diaries. I would say she pretty consistently presents it with romantic language in her novels, to the point where it's possible to read several of her heroines as queer by these standards. (Anne, Emily, and other side characters like Di). You're right that it has an important place in the Sapphic tradition, generally and specifically, because iirc there were lesbians who literally told LM Montgomery to her face they found themselves in her work. LM Montgomery very much did not like this, but I do think it points to how that reading of the text has been there for a long time.

From an author's intent perspective, LMM definitely didn't intend it, although there are people out there arguing she was a repressed lesbian the entire time. From an in-text perspective, I think it's more than possible to read that way, and I think those interpretations are valid for the very reasons you mention! For me personally, however, I think within the style of LM Montgomery's writing - and the wider context of her other work - Anne doesn't come across as queer. All of this is very much based on personal interpretation (there's no such thing as the LMM police) - I wanted to make clear I'm just spitballing some discussion here, not disagreeing with you lol.

Okay, I’m just scooting in right here for one second, and do not wish to add to any confusion in the reblogs by reblogging too many times withoutttt really adding anything helpful, but I thought this was v interesting because as far as I have seen, the same individuals that argue that Maud was secretly a repressed lesbian (which I’ll be honest, I don’t care for – no one ought to be trying to basically argue with a real person’s own statements on their own sexuality) often make their chief points by highlighting journal entries where the language around Maud’s friendships is very similar to the language she uses in her books between friends. Whatever she is, it’s consistent lol.

But truly, I was trying to cite for you (and it was too big to leave in the comments), regarding your tags:

Journal entry, March 13, 1928: "The other day I noticed two young girls who called themselves 'friends' – and may be. I noticed the way they caressed and kissed each other--with mouths, by the way, which looked as if they had been making a meal of blood. A lip-stick is really a vampirish thing.”

@gogandmagog tags

Anne’s House of Dreams by L.M. Montgomery

This is a very ugly topic, but what do you guys reckon Dick Moore did to/with this girl down at the fishing cove? 😟

Maud pretty much gives us this very purposefully vague and grey statement, which leaves each House of Dreams reader to supply/insert their own guess – but I’m super curious what that explanation is, for other readers here?

hellooooo, thank you!! <3 absolutely, here u go:

Coleoptera. Dr. Sulzers Abgekürtze Geschichte der Insecten. 1776.

[Frogs, iris and waterlilies.] Charles-Louis Houdard. 1898.