reading rilla of ingleside, i sensed that lmm's attitude towards war was that of "submission towards duty", a "Mother england calls, canada must answer". In a way it's really distinct compared to post ww2 attitude towards war which is more like "young men go off to die while the old sit around in rooms arranging wars". i would really like it if you could talk about this and how the great war actually affected in lmm in real life
fun fact! There is an entire book about this!
So forgive me because this essay is not going to do this topic justice. :-)
As you point out, Rilla is pretty jingo-ist in how it beats the drum of fighting for the righteous cause, straight up to imagery comparing Rilla - the Canadian home - to a madonna and child. If you want to look at the tag #rilla of ingleside book club, you'll see a lot of discussion of this very fact.
LM Montgomery had a rather strange relationship with WWI. I don't mean to be tone deaf in saying that, because how are you supposed to respond to something like that, but there are a few reasons I say this:
LM Montgomery repeatedly presented herself as the only person who seemed to understand the depth of the war in her community. In the same way in Rilla you have the locals who just don't care, LM Montgomery seemed to presume that of the people around her - including mothers who actually had sons at the front, unlike LMM herself! Obviously someone who is deeply sensitive is going to experience something like that with great anguish, but her assumption that others didn't do so either just because they weren't as sensitive is revealing. I fully believe that she encountered people who didn't care; however, her language is often that 'she is the only who realizes this war', which implies she stands alone.
LM Montgomery believed she had prophetic dreams about the war. Yes, really. Those dreams from Rilla? Straight from her journals and personal letters. We can tie in the "religiosity vs superstition" theme of her life here. She had more than one dream during the course of WWI which she believed foretold actual events.
This is not strange, but LM Montgomery experienced a series of harrowing personal tragedies during WWI which had to fundamentally change her as a person. To quote Brenton Dickerson:
The first part of the war was also when Montgomery, a late-in-life mother in the age before modern medicineâsuffered a terrible pregnancy with ended in a stillbirth. The sorrows of loss, combined with illness and the pressures of social life as a ministerâs wife, combined with troubles from her American publisher to make 1916 a torturous year for this famous but secluded author. The tensions built throughout the entire period before finally breaking in 1917, as if the passing into a new year was also a renewal of life.
I quote the above to reference the part of your question about how the Great War impacted Maud in real life--I think it's impossible to extricate the two from each other. To experience something like WWI at the same time as the death of a child and professional troubles (her publisher was an infamous male bully!), when we already know WWI itself so profoundly affected Maud, has to leave a mark.
We can get a sense of this mark from Anne's House of Dreams. Maud wrote this book during WWI, and I really believe you get a sense of that as you read it. It has this eerie, gothic undertone that always stands out to me compared to the other Anne books, even Rilla. You have the image of a woman who is like an animal caught in a trap (Leslie), with a husband whom she was forced to marry to support herself whom she is caretaker of; you have the death of Anne's daughter; all set against the backdrop of the sea. As Maud herself wrote:
âToday I finished Anneâs House of Dreams. I never wrote a book in so short a time and amid so much strain of mind and body. Yet I rather enjoyed it and I think it isnât too bad a piece of work. I am glad it is done however. It has taken a lot out of me.â
More than that, AHOD's marks a change in LM Montgomery's work. I would have to compare the book series to get a sense of how demarcated this is, but think of the tone of AOGG vs. AHOD, and you'll understand what I'm getting at. You start getting much more intense (sub)plotlines compared to works like AOGG and the Story Girl.
The change reflects LM Montgomery's growing cynicism with the world, which I think is the main impact of WWI on her life and work. I've blogged about this about a thousand times, but if you read The Blythes are Quoted--the last book LM Montgomery ever wrote--and compare i to Rilla, the difference is stark. Rilla is fairly pro-war, and the Blythes are Quotes is decidedly not so. It ends Anne's series with Anne saying she is glad her son died in WWI, and then the words, "We forget because we must." Not quite the bend in the road imagery we get in Green Gables!
You can trace this growing thread of cynicism throughout all of her work in different dimensions. Dean and Barney appear (what if Dean and Barney were self-portraits the whole time--gunshot), you have the first chapters of the blue castle, and overall a shift towards more weariness--weariness that ends happily, but weariness. Anne of Ingleside fascinates me because of this. I've described it before as a grieving mother's memory, and I think that comparison applies on a watsonian and doylist level. It reads like a grieving Anne remembering her children's childhood as one long summer day, and LM Montgomery remembering the world before WWI. She frequently refers to WWI in this in her work--Emily Climbs has a line about life "before the world turned upside down."
It wasn't just WWI - in general, LM Montgomery lived in a time of great change. Think about what she saw in her lifespan. She was born in the late 1800s and died during WW2. She saw the industrial revolution, the rise of technology, two world wars--she even comments on this in her journals. She has cheeky stories in her journal about little old ladies in horses and carts who run automobiles off the road, and she includes nods to it in her work when Anne laughs about telephones in Avonlea. Maud muses on how her grandmothers lived their entire lives in an unchanged world. She reflects on articles which talk about how the happiest people in history were the generation before her. All of this is done in the sense of recognition of just how fast change's pace has grown in this new world.
She seemed to experience life as someone who had one foot in the old world and one foot in the new one. For example, she writes about Cissy Gay with sympathy, but when her own son got pregnant out of wedlock, it was a hellish experience for her. One person quoted by Rubio, who knew Maud, reflected on how it would have been deeply shameful for her because she grew up in such a different time. You really get a sense of this when you read her writings on women's rights. I am not familiar enough with them to make a statement, only an impression, but that impression is that...well...she tends to be all over the place. One minute she's excoriating misogyny in a way that's practically flaying the skin off its flesh, the next she's talking affably about how really all women want is a family and babies or something of that ilk.
(All of the above was also affected by the fact that LM Montgomery was growing increasingly mentally unwell. She experienced a lot of personal tragedies (ill husband, troublemaking son, financial worries) and her mental health was already not always stable. She began to believe she was destined for unhappiness. The cause of her death is still debated in biographical circles, but the broadly accepted one is suicide.)
TL;DR: it's hard to understate the impact WWI had on LM Montgomery!
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