Love and War: The Civil War Epic

   How do you do, 

   North and South ended just as the Civil War was beginning and that is where Love and War takes up. North and South is basically the first of a three act drama, making Love and War the second act, which thus has the main conflict involved. The third act is where everything is resolved (remember what George Lucas said about that when discussing his Star Wars Trilogy? If not, click here). In someways, also, the first book is just prologue, meant to get everything and everyone into the proper location for the second book. The second book, meanwhile, is the main story, which is why I deem this the Civil War epic as opposed to its prequel and sequel. Jakes stretched the narrative to encompass the four years of war into a thousand page novel, as opposed to the eight hundred pages dealing with nineteen years of peace. Unlike the first book that has a used title (as from Gaskell) this one can easily be seen to come from the phrase "All's fair in love and war."

   The Mains are now in the Confederacy while the Hazards stayed in the Union, with only Billy and Brett as the binding tie. Given the size of the novel, it would be too much to go too deep, especially as the first book revealed that Jakes puts too many incidental events within the confines of 800 pages that summarizing it is a Herculean task. It would have worked if it was done as a chapter by chapter analysis, but the hand is on the plow now and I cannot look back. So, to get back to this, the basic way to summarize it is Orry and Madeline live together at Mont Royal, basically getting Madeline divorced from Justin so they could wed; Billy and Brett are married with the latter living among the Northerners, becoming the symbolic Pro-Union Southerner without the sentiment; Ashton and James Huntoon became part of a web of deceit with one taking on adulterous affairs with another man while James takes part in a secret, and treasonous, conspiracy to undermine President Davis; Charles rides in the Confederate cavalry, even taking part of Gettysburg under J.E.B. Stuart; Cooper becomes part of the operation involving the CSS Hunley, an experimental submarine; Billy also rides in the US cavalry and even winds up in Andersonville prison camp; Bent returns for development and even takes part in Sherman's March to the Sea; George becomes at odds with Stanley again over Washington politics. That's the gist of the story.
   During the course of Jakes' door stopping sequel, the characters witness it all: the opening maneuvers, First Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg, the Emancipation Proclamation, the first draft in American history, the blockade runners, the rise of Generals Lee and Grant, and the climatic surrender of the former at Appomattox. I do no believe the miniseries that was produced on both books has done any of the moments their proper justice.
    Things noteworthy are to be brought up. For one, James Huntoon goes from the bully lawyer that we love to see gotten rid of to a more sympathetic character, as Ashton cheats on him for the sake of power in Richmond society. The narration does it more in making her seemingly unsatisfied with his performance, which includes going to penis sizes. While obesity may be linked to shrinkage lately, it's a fact that size doesn't really matter. Anyone can tell you that. Of course, Jakes goes to where many popular writers, romance novelists, and erotica authors tend to do and make bigger penises the desired item for men. It's something that ads have plagued the internet on for a bunch drugs that are supposed to make one bigger down there and yet it's all a scam (and caused the plastic surgery industry to boom with that, also). So, this makes Ashton more sinister than in the previous book. All she cares about is having a place in Richmond society. Since women can't get that that place on their own, she needs a man to put her there. Since her husband is not the man for the job, she seeks out others and gives them sexual favors. In fact, the narration claims she gives these favors just to get what she wants. In short, to women like Ashton men are nothing but tools for personal gain. I know some women like her exist, and some existed in the 1860s, but that doesn't make them the rule.
   Bent returns to largely plague the heroes, even those who stayed in the Union. However, he becomes less of a cartoon villain than in the first book. He is not really a Bent, as it turns out, but the son of a Starkwether, who fathered him out of wed lock. John Jakes had started his Kent Series with The Bastard where the title character was spawned from the House of Kents, to which he took the name upon coming to America. Though just as black hearted as North and South's characters, Philip Kent is the relatable protagonist in the first two books, seeing the rebellion of the United States against Britain and proves a useful asset. Of course, Jakes later had him become Pro-British in the political field and unfeeling father who only shows up in the early chapters and dies off stage in the third book. Bent is different. He is not really someone to relate to and the "Luke, I am your father" moment doesn't happen here, not to the same degree. Besides, the man doesn't claim him as his son, which is the only thing to make Bent sympathetic as he is resentful. I was born in wedlock, which is why it is beyond me, and since I haven't fathered a child, yet, the whole business novel to me. Bent got the last name from the Bent family, which is said to be farming one from Ohio (and he took pride in the state in the first book) where the husband spent most of the time away from the house while the wife was said to be quite a family woman. She would visit her relatives and drag him along, or lecture him on the scripture reading each day. She even whipped him till he bled just for catching him in the act of masturbation (in this time, people still considered it a grave disorder and they told tales on how it can lead to blindness, baldness, and even effeminism in boys). Bent was also seduced by a homosexual (or bisexual, the text didn't say) man before going to the academy, to which his father secured his appointment, which was about the only good thing he ever did to Bent. And, of course, he overate and got fat in a time when most farmers were thin.
    Such is the history of Bent. During the course of this book, Bent does try to weasel out of the War, which is enough to keep one from sympathizing with him. I will add that not everyone in the US got to fight in Virginia or Tennessee, given how big the armies were. In fact, there were plenty of those boys in blue who got deployed in the West instead, some sent on guard duty at some supply post in the rear, and some put in the forts around Washington. The reason for that is things happened while the Civil War was on going: the Sioux made an uprising that was put down in 1862, another conflict with the Native Americans erupted in Colorado, which included the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864, California was still being settled and order was necessary, Confederate raiders were loose in Kentucky and Missouri, as well as Kansas, and there was a moment where the US almost went to war with Great Britain from the Trent Affair. The US didn't send everyone to fight the main armies of the Confederacy, just like it didn't send everyone to face the Nazis and the Japanese. Common sense is the key. So, Bent might try to apply to have a change in orders and not wind up in Kentucky. This doesn't work out and eventually takes on a moment in Shiloh. Still, even the War doesn't reform the man.
   Bent, Ashton, and Virgilia are three of the villains in Love and War. Virgilia comes in with her radical support of Abolitionism which gives her a black and white morality of her own. She sees all Southerners as evil and must be killed. To a point, she actually lets a wounded soldier die of his wounds in one scene as a nurse. This action is enough to make one want her removed as a nurse, who is expected to tend to any in need. Bent remains evil with his vendetta. Then there is Ashton who, with her husband and a group of lovers, is taking part in an operation to undermine the Confederacy. If there is one problem with such characters as villains in historical fiction it's that it often distracts from the tragedy in the historical sense. Logically, Jakes could have had his fictional villains retire or have both sides settle their differences to fight the War and then it resumes in the third book. Of course, this doesn't happen.
    The reason it would seem that they distract is many points in history brings its own heroes and villains, that often are more developed than anything character of fiction. The Civil War has a legion of such men and women, and it was something Shelby Foote used to his advantage in his narrative. In a way, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were the two protagonists of the drama, along with the generals, none of whom could be considered bad guys but simply men who were doing their jobs (though it is easy to see Sherman, Forrest, Sheridan, and Quantrill in a villainous light, they each were fighting a war and had their ideas on how to win it). Davis and Lincoln wouldn't be the ultimate villains either, being that they were committed men in their causes. They were simply men who were called to duty as president of their respected sides and they answered with reluctance, especially as fate dealt them a situation no one would ever want: a war that tears families and friends asunder. If there were any who could be considered the bad guys in the narrative, it would be the people who either took steps to prolong the War's conclusion or hampered with the war effort. Jakes even points this out in his afterward, Governor Brown and Vance of Georgia and North Carolina opposed President Davis the way the Copperheads did to Lincoln and withheld everything from the Confederate military in the name of States' Rights (ironic that Southerners will spout off States' Rights as the chief cause of the Civil War and yet a group of Southerners undermined the Southern effort in the name of it). The said Copperheads were Northern Democrats who were simply protesting for the sake of liberty even as the man best known to freeing the slaves was curtailing civil liberties in a time of war. In short, history provides a not so black and white issue with heroes and villains, because often the villains might be doing the morally right thing or the heroes are, and vice versa.
     Fiction does provide freedom to use that black and white morality, as long as its not abused. Jakes, sadly, abuses it. He does show the opposition to Davis, and then has his villains take part in a conspiracy to form another Confederacy. There is also a subplot added to attempt to have him assassinated, which is foiled by Orry. For any who feels the Confederacy has no moral ground to stand on, the villains in the book could easily be rooted for as opposed to being what they are: saboteurs. At the same time, if the villains prove to be more evil than the historic characters it kind of downgrades the evil of the latter. This is one of the things that wasn't brought up with Titanic, but having Tim Curry's character as a villain does what the villains of Cameron's blockbuster does and distracts from the tragedy by adding in a villain to it, especially one who doesn't even have a hand in it. The same if there was World War II being done to where you have someone more evil than Hitler in Germany, and suddenly the Holocaust seems tame. With this instance in the Civil War, having opposing sides voiced is okay, but not in the way that Jakes does.
     It's especially note worthy that he doesn't go into details on slavery other than to say it's wrong. I won't do what some liberal blogger would do and claim Jakes' whiteness has something to do with it. Slavery is basically the sun that many other causes orbit around in the solar system model that led to the outbreak of the Civil War, though it doesn't make it the one and only cause any more than a solar system is the sun alone. Either way, the moral debates on slavery, begun some in the first book, doesn't get into detail in book two. There doesn't seem to be a black character involved with relatives he would like to free. Jakes instead focuses on the tragedy with friends and relatives killing each other, which is the tragic event in this war, but it seems freedom and slavery must be side lined. Again, the use of the fictional villains has distracted the reader from this and we don't get to see much of slaves being eyed when the Emancipation Proclamation arrived, the debate of arming slaves being skirted and shot down with one or two words, or Forrest's supposed cold blooded massacre of black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, any one of which he could have had his bad guys take on. Yet, he does not. Instead, the villains are men and women of selfish ends who seek to make the South actually lose, or make it hard for the Union to be restored while committing actions that any with a heart would consider a war crime if they are Northern. The villains Jakes had had their place in book one, but book two is where they should have retired in the wings and allow history to happen on its own, given the way it was planned.
   So, do they get their comeuppance? James Huntoon and his wife are led to Texas in the later stages of the War and basically get lost in the desert. They have basically become their own Lucifers who chose to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. Of course, Huntoon is killed during his time. Ashton, his widow, finds out that because she withheld sex from him he will withhold everything entitled to her after death. Basically, it's a battle of entitled sexes: the man doesn't get have sex with his wife went he wants it, than the woman doesn't get anything of his when he is gone. Now, I am sure she has a right withhold her body and access to it, just as he has the right to remove her from the will. So, it would be tedious to start a debate on sexism from this. Bent disappears after a few attempts to take his revenge on Orry. Virgilia does the surprising move and begins to reform, especially after hearing from Brett of Madeline being one eighth black. At the same time, there is a death among the good guys. Cooper doesn't go down with the submarine, Hunley, which saved his life as it sunk after striking her only victim. Yet, Orry is killed in a scuffle late in the book, leaving Mont Royal and Madeline for all to claim.
    What of Charles? Charles encounters a girl named Augusta and they get married and have a child named Charles Augusta. At the end of the book, Charles vows to raise the boy as an American. In the meantime, the War eventually ends with the events that are recited as legendary to all Americans: Robert E. Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox, President Lincoln is assassinated at Ford's Theater, and Jefferson Davis is captured. With the Civil War ending and the Confederacy falling, it would seem that there is nothing else to look forward to except the Reconstruction. A much better term would be Reconciliation, since now it is the time to reach across and attempt to restore what was lost while enjoying something that is won. That is basically what leads to the third installment in John Jakes' North and South Trilogy: Heaven and Hell.

  One thing that is brought to Jakes' attention in the Afterword for the next installment is the common appearances of horses in the trilogy. The horses stand for chivalry, which comes from the Latin word for horse. Of course, the gritty realism of the modern war in this story makes a remarkable contrast to the horse. Take the submarine Hunley. Submarines are machines and thus can be considered unfeeling, especially as it attacks from under the water where conventional ships are above the water (on equal terms). With the representation of a machine with the horses, you can see how anachronistic chivalry becomes in modern war. Might work better if we have more chivalrous characters, but I am willing to bet that George, Orry, Billy, and Charles are the knights in this retelling of the Medieval story, with the modern fair ladies in the picture, the politicians in place of a wicked aristocrat, and the black slaves being the modern serfs. Of course, many other stock characters in such a drama are missing.
   In fact, the clash between the unfeeling and inequality of the machine aged war with the chivalry of a pre-enlighted period as illustrated by the horse is prominent even in Love and War. I mentioned how the characters are hard to relate to and the scenes are soap opera styled, in the end it doesn't really matter when reading this book because we don't really get in to the characters or how accurate the picture is, something Jakes tries to strive for. It is the image of George recovering a meteorite and making plans on exploiting this rare phenomena for a person profit; it is the desperate horse ride of Charles and his squadron as they race against time to join up with Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, not knowing that the Confederates were actually winning at Gettysburg at this point; it is Cooper missing out the maiden attack of the Hunley and having a survivor's guilt; it is Billy's experience in the prison camp with the tortures of Corporal Vesey coming upon him like the Inquisition's torture on a heretic, and Charles willing to go to great lengths to rescue his old friend from that; all of these show this clash and I would expect the miniseries to at least try to give those scenes their proper justice.
   Another I will bring up is that masculinity is a theme recurrent in John Jakes, as evidenced of it in the North and South Trilogy and Kent Family Series. John Jakes has the motif of that manliness in having egotistical male characters dominate the landscape and are often sociapathic, if not psychotic. Almost every Jakes book to my knowledge has this exemplified with violence where in almost every couple of pages the men get into a brawl, which result with one character kneeing or kicking another in the groin and then beating the guy up, sometimes one gets kneed and the other gets beaten up. In short, one reading Jakes is reading constantly about a bunch of men kicking each other's asses, to put it vulgarly. In Jakes' world, there are two kinds of men; those who are ready to fight with a fist and those who are merely there to provoke. In North and South, the entire trilogy opens with a man and a boy poised for conflict and the man is just pushing the boy toward it. Orry and George's introduction is the same way with Orry facing off with the Stevedore and two men who turn out to be robbers. Forbes LaMotte is even shown beating up a tourist in Charleston who was just opinionated. The same in the sequel with some of it directed to the fighting in the War. Basically, John Jakes defines being a man as having the ability to switch punches at everyone, even women and children, smoke, cuss, and fornicate. It's an animalistic definition at best -- he also admits to not trying the kind of dialogue people would have spoken in 1860s. People might not speak it either, but it really is anachronistic to have people in the period talk like people from the 1970s. Also, it matches to the clash of chivalry with the inhuman modern war where we see men hitting women and children in his books.
   The Catch-22 with the equality of the sexes is it permits men to hit women in anyway they like, while making the kick to the groin less of dirty fighting, but making a rule for men and women to not fight each other means there is a superior and inferior sex. That seems to be what Jakes is saying in this kind of characteristic style, as North and South and Love and War have shown. The irony is chivalry does promote equality by making sure two men fighting each other don't get the upper hand over the other. As a result, never have the strong pitted against the weak; either strong against strong and weak against weak. However, to some, if we are to be really have true equality we have to get rid of the phrase that "real men don't beat women", as it falls under the definition of "No true Scotsman" fallacy and it ignores situations where self defense is necessary (there is such thing as a female mugger) while redefining the word "abuse". The problem with using Jakes as an example is he still relies on what is referred to as "gender stereotypes" where men are violent and animal like while women are seductive and mischievous, and Love and War does this on plenty of occasions. This is only for start, to get really deep would take too much in this entry. Best save it for another entry. I will add that John Jakes does fall under what feminists would call "poisonous masculinity".
    Back to the book, Love and War is a massive entry to the trilogy and covers the War in one volume, which is more than what Jeff Shaaras can say. It might seem to be easier if Jakes split the whole thing into two books, given the amount of incidents that happen, but that can't be changed. It's set in stone now. Sure, at over 1000 pages, it seems a hard stretch, but there are thicker novels. It does feel tedious that Jakes takes twenty of the 147 chapters before we are out of July 1861 and the discussions of the generals might only interest a Civil War bluff, but the scenes described are worth it and so do the morphing of the characters. Rather or not it can equal such classics like Absolem! Absolem!, Gone With the Wind, or Jubilee is highly debatable.

North and South: Not Elizabeth Gaskell's Book.

    How do you do, 

   Seeing after giving y'all six weeks of hearing about the eight novels I was willing to read in high school, Anne of Green Gables, over the past summer I decided to continue with other books I read in high school and late elementary in the remainder of the year. First up is North and South by John Jakes.

   North and South is the first of three in a trilogy of novels dealing with the events before, during, and after the Civil War (or, as some in my neighborhood would call it, War of Southern Independence, War Between States, War of Northern Aggression, etc.) The first book is about the Antebellum days with the plot of the novel having two families from different sides of the Mason Dixon witnesses the events, and participating in them. I had been reading this and its two sequels since high school, continuing on through college, and I have read the Kent Family series, the works Jakes is most famous for. From that, I am willing to make this entry be about each book of the trilogy, just as I had done with Anne of Green Gables.
    One thing anyone might notice is that John Jakes' book shares the same title as Elizabeth Gaskell's novel, published within the time frame of this one, but taking place in Great Britain. To the British, North and South referred to Southern England and the Midlands (with the remarkably similar industrial vs agrarian setting as with the US). Of course, Gaskell was writing about a country girl going up to Manchester and learning of city life not being what it's cracked up to be while going through a plot like that of Austen. Jakes has different plot line in mind, which deals with two families representing the two regions and how they witness the coming apart of the US. Now, this is why I recommend new authors out there to do some research so as to avoid having a used title. Jakes didn't have the internet when he wrote, and I doubt he had even heard of Elizabeth Gaskell, so he can be excused. This is something people today cannot. I mean, we can't have a book about a compass that leads one to the treasure and call it "The Golden Compass", or some kind of tournament themed story that acts like Pokemon and call it "Game of Thrones", and I don't think "Gone With the Wind" can be used as the title of a book about tornadoes or hurricanes, nor can you write about someone going to the University of Notre Dame and call the story "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". So, as I said do some research before settling on a title for your book. If it can help, do what some would do like use a line from a poem or song, like how William Faulkner got As I Lay Dying from The Odyssey and John Updike got In the Beauty of the Lilies from "Battle Hymn of the Republic." You can also use something that was said by a character in what TV Tropes calls "a title drop," like with Harper Lee using the famous quote from her novel as the title.

   Following a prologue that establishes the families in the story, the Hazards and the Mains, we are first introduced to our protagonists: George Hazard of Pennsylvania and Orry Main of South Carolina. You'd notice that John Jakes doesn't go the traditional route and have them be descendants of some ancestor who came ashore at either Jamestown or Plymouth (which gave rise to Virginia and Massachusetts, respectively) as most American narratives tend to do. Instead, he focuses on the lesser known Atlantic colonies. South Carolina, and its northern neighbor, is named after King Charles I, with the Latin name Carolus, and with the female naming (just as Georgia is named after King George). Though named for the English king, who was tragically beheaded at the end of the English Civil War, South Carolina was first explored by the Spanish who set up a settlement and then abandoned some slaves in the area. Later, it was founded as an English colony with Charles Town (later called Charleston) as the capital. Even then, many of its inhabitants did not speak English, but French. This is because South Carolina was at one time inhabited by the Huguenots, French protestants exiled from France after King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. So, it is an English colony with a lot of Latin influences (name, early settlers), and some of these men set up homes in the murky and humid lands near Charles Town and grew rich off of rice production (through the labor of slaves). Among these French speaking British subjects, the ancestor of Orry appears. Pennsylvania is also a state founded as an English colony with non-English influences. Its name is conglomeration of Penn, named for William Penn, an Englishman who used the royal charter to establish a home of religious freedom, and Sylvania, which comes from the Latin word Sylva, meaning "forest"; this means the Commonwealth's name means literally "Penn's Forest." As with South Carolina, a great many in Pennsylvania didn't speak English. The Quakers and Anabaptists groups that were brought to the land, also escaping religious persecution, were German born, thus they spoke German (leading to people being named the Pennsylvanian Dutch, a corruption of Deutsch). George's ancestor was by another family, where a boy is shown to have run away from an abusive miner of a stepfather and fell in with a man named Hazard, even taking his name.
   Orry and George are as different as apples and oranges. One is the son of a rice planter, the other the son of an iron smith. However, they become good friends in the course of the novel. One might say, they are BFFs. They meet in New York, become friends, and enter the West Point Academy. In the time when college education was a privilege to the few, these two take up to entering the US Army and train in the Academy. This seems more convenient than going through college which costs thousands in tuition. West Point charges no tuition; all one had to do was get appointed by his representative or senator, then devote years of service to the Army. Now, such an easy entry doesn't make it easier: it's boot camp and ivy league college at once. Infractions lead to demerits, which affect one's standing, as do grades in the courses. They also have terms for three of the classes (Plebe, Yearling, Cow...) as opposed to Freshmen, Sophomore, and Junior. West Point gives the highest standing cadets places in the engineering and artillery while the lower guys are simply horsemen or infantrymen.
    Orry and George encounter future Civil War generals as cadets. They see Ulysses Grant and Thomas Jackson among the upper class-men (history will call them "U.S. Grant" and "Stonewall Jackson", respectively). These are two of the real men, but Orry and George meet a fictional upper class-man named Elkanah Bent, basically a combination of Peter Griffin and Himmelstoss in West Point garb. Bent takes an instant disliking of Orry and George and does everything in his power to trip them up so that he can report them and they each earn a demerit. The actions he does are appalling and it's a miracle he doesn't get expelled. Of course, he has friends in Washington who can pull strings and keep him there (yeah, he seems to have a 19th Century Don Corleone somewhere who will give West Point an offer it can't refuse and then Bent is in). In the meantime, Orry and George live in the Academy in what can basically two best friends going to military school plot used in some soap opera and moved into the 19th Century America. Another way to describe it is basically Harry Potter without magic, in military uniform, and without Hermione or Ginny. George and Orry are equal in collecting a demerit and being bullied by Bent, yet George is shown to be an excellent student in the academic side. He scores big in his class work and appears to be able to do that in his sleep, but Orry is mediocre at best, becoming one of the "Immortals". Remarkably, no envy arises in Orry. Then there is the social life where George goes to the hop and has time with women, drinking beer, and smoking cigars (two of those were frowned upon at West Point) while Orry seems more willing to keep studying.
    As tradition shows, Orry and George get visited by the Hazards as they become Yearlings, with Cooper coming by at one point. Then they get furlough at the end where Orry takes George down to South Carolina. We took a picture of the South when Cooper visited and took us down to Royal Mount. There come the Mains: Tillet, Clarissa, Ashton, Brett, and Cousin Charles. There is also the stubborn Priam, one of the slaves on the Main lands (no pun intended) and the overseer who bullies him in sight of Charles. From this, the Mains are fleshed out: Cooper shows no love of the South, thinking the society with it is obsolete in the Industrial Revolution while Tillet argues for the paternalistic viewpoint of slave owners (made symbolic in the father and son relationship presented; Cooper is the older son in one of Jesus' parables who doesn't want to do his father's will, yet is present in the South for it while Orry, the younger and more willing, is up in West Point), Charles is the orphaned nephew living in the plantation with scorn coming from many, including his uncle (basically Jakes' answer to Luke Skywalker, with the touch of Harry Potter), Clarissa is the rational mother figure who could rival Ellen O'Hara, while Ashton and Brett are Southern belles with two different characteristics, which will develop more as they become women. We even see how Priam is a ticking time bomb, basically any rebellious black man you can think of placed in the role of his ancestors, and his overseer is willing to push him into that state as Bent does to Orry and George.
    The Hazards were already introduced in chapter one. George also has a father named William, his mother, his sister Virgilia, and his brothers Stanley and Billy. The Hazards become noticeable in their introductions: Stanley is hard working though entitled, Billy is adventurous, and Virgilia is rebellious. If there is a good reason behind this simplification of the characters its largely a way of showing that despite the two families being from different states and having different status, with different prospects, and the fact one family owns slaves while the other does not, they are not that too far different. They both breathe the same air, they both face the same family troubles, and they both have deal with troubles back home. In a sense, it makes one wonder why the book wasn't called A Tale of Two States or A Tale of Two Regions, as opposed to simply North and South. The thing is, it seems that John Jakes, a Northerner, is willing to put more on the Southern characters. On the same note, both Jakes and Charles Dickens also feature well off men named Charles in their historic epics.
    George and Orry graduate from West Point just in time for the Mexican War to break out. You might have noticed something before we get to this point. Instead of starting on the eve of war, Jakes pushes the beginning back to 1842, just nineteen years prior to Fort Sumter. Just why does he do that? Why not be like Herman Wouk who had The Winds of War begin in 1939 and have World War II break out within one hundred pages? Or why not be like Margaret Mitchell who actually started on the eve of the Civil War? Instead, he goes like Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace with the story beginning right as Napoleon has declared himself emperor, even if the Invasion of Russia in 1812 (a mere eight years later) is the centerpiece of the story. There four reasons involved.  First it basically allows for the build up and the suspense in the leading up process that precedes the War. Secondly, it allows one to explore the contrasting worlds of the Antebellum South and North. Third, it lets the readers have a chance to see the drama that leads up to the War's outbreak: the Mexican War, the opening of the West, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Bleeding Kansas Affair, the Dred Scott Decision, John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry, the 1860 election, and finally the Secession Winter. Fourth and finally, the book is meant to partly be an adventure story (if lack of a better word) with some soap opera involved, and it requires one to get to known the characters, especially as they are part of the West Point class that make up the leaders on both sides of the Civil War. The modern reader gets that adventure just as he would with Dumas, Stevenson, or Tolstoy where he is transported to a different time period and see far away places that the reader just might know as his backyard. For example, the second half of the novel has scenes that take place in West Texas, which was considered the edge of civilization at the time, now it's home to over a million people.
    During the Mexican War, Orry and George run into Bent again, who proves a coward in some instances and a snake in others. In fact, the man is angry with them for staining his record and holds that grudge to the next generation. Orry and George report him to a superior who expresses the shock at the disloyalty among West Pointers. So, they continue on. Orry loses a hand during the Battle of Churubusco, and is mustered out at the end of the Mexican War. George also has his six years as an officer cut short by an early retirement in peace time. This was, after all, a short war and it takes place in a time when the US military would downscale after a war and never re-mobilize until the next one. Of course, that would make George and Orry lucky because many servicemen in the time period of the book would have wound up in some outpost in the Old West or sent to some base in Florida where malaria ran rampant.
   Once they come home, we see other parts of the novel take shape. Prior to the war, Orry encountered a woman named Madeline Fabray from Louisiana. He rescues her from a snake in what looks like a scene of chivalry. Orry had claimed he was a one woman man and was searching for someone like her. To him, it was Madeline. Then life comes in to take her away because she was engaged to one of his neighbors, Justin LaMotte, and their wedding happened within a day of their meeting! I certainly feel sorry for Orry, especially in recent days. You meet the right person for you and she or he is already taken (Rotten luck). Justin, and his brother Francis, are shown to be bullies, and older than Orry and Madeline (in fact, it gets pointed out on how Justin worried on his age compared to her while Madeline is said to expect a man Justin's age to behave). They live a life of ease like the Mains, but their plantations, like Justin's Resolute, are run with inefficiency and brute force. They spend more focus on breaking horses and slaves than tending to their plantations, and Justin sees his wife as another challenge like that of horses. Justin tells Francis he won't tolerate her opinions in a matter of a man who feels his manhood threatened and is trying to convince his peers that he is not weak (and we never get any justification). Later, when the LaMottes consummate their marriage it's rape at best (but the joke's on Justin because Madeline wasn't a virgin on her wedding night, and something else is in her that will be mentioned shortly). Madeline eventually comes to not enjoy being married to Justin who threatens her for voicing her opinion at one point and often holds her hostage on others. Eventually, Madeline becomes like Madame Bovary and loses all beliefs in fidelity and sanctity of marriage, which drives her into seeking an affair.
    The marriage of Madeline to Justin sort of shows the values dissonance in marriage in the 1840s, where men viewed their wives as property and opinionated women were not tolerated. This also shatters the image of the Antebellum South as a civilized place presented by Gone With the Wind, though I will say even that book subverts it (that's for a different entry), by presenting not only racism in a society build on enforced labor but sexism as well. In one scene, everyone talks with John Calhoun on the matter of secession and Madeline voices her two cents on it (an act that defies convention in the period) and Justin yanks her aside and talks to her as though she were a misbehaving child. He mentions of the Grimke sisters who were just as opinionated as her and they were banished from the South for it. Eventually, it comes to a point that he carries out his threat and isolates Madeline from all contact and starves her into submission.
    But, of course, the joke is on Justin because Madeline not only gave away her precious flower before marriage but she is one eighth black, in a time when having African ancestry was scandalous. Of course, Madeline withholds this information with the intention of revealing it at the right time, though it never comes up. Besides, after seeing the movie Mandingo, I wouldn't be surprised if Justin murders her to avenge his honor and then covers the murder up with a disease death that people would have understood.
    During the period of the Compromise of 1850, the Mains and the Hazards flesh out as the nation titters on the brink of break up. Virgilia Hazard becomes an Abolitionist and attends a rally at one point. While Orry is unmarried, thanks to his pining for Madeline, George meets Constance Flynn, to whom he marries, in spite of her Irish Catholic background, which shows that discrimination was felt up North. This was a time when Catholics were viewed with disdain by their Protestant citizens, fueled through Irish immigration and almost brought up in the Mexican War. So, by marrying Constance, George is exposing himself to it. Even his family is slow to warm to her. At least Constance is mild compared to Virgilia, who takes every moment to talk about the South in a vengeful manner, especially with slavery involved. When George brings his family to meet Orry's, Virgilia takes the time to see a slave of James Huntoon, a young lawyer who pays a call to the Mains with a few others for the Nashville Convention, and gets him to freedom. The action is commendable, though two things stand in the way. If we recognize in slavery that a man is someone's property, then what she does to give him freedom is theft. At the same time, she seduces him, in what most would say get some of the Jungle Fever sampling. The latter seems like a confirmation of the pro-slavery men who saw mixing of races involved with abolition. On neither thing does Virgilia apologize.
    The debate of slavery provokes tension between Orry and George, to the point that George convinces Orry to let Priam run off unharmed and Orry reminds George that the South doesn't need advice from outsiders. This puts a dark cloud in their friendship.
     In contrast, Cooper, Orry's older brother, knows of the slavery curse and wants to modernize the South, yet his father is against it, leading to arguments between the two. In a sense, Cooper comes across an angry cynic who just likes to poison everyone's statements with his rhetoric (like when some Atheist comments to a statement about praying when a tragedy strikes) and while Tillet plays up the grouchy old man stereotype (I also caught that Cooper and Charles are also the names of two rivers in South Carolina). Eventually, they decide time apart would do and Cooper goes into the city living of Charleston while Tillet remains in the plantation where he soon dies. With Cooper away, Orry becomes the head of the house with a reputation as a recluse.

   While time is made to develop the characters, I am willing to say that John Jakes gives us some of the most ungodly characters out there. Both the good guys and the bad guys seem alike in the pages to the point that one has troubles routing for. Both groups cuss and profane, both get into violent situations and threaten to beat people up or murder, both cheat on their spouses, both steal things, and just about any other commandment breaking one can think. The only characters who seem to be relatable in matters of finding someone who is not like this are the African Americans, but that is problematic for three reasons: one, most of them are enslaved; two, because of that they are mostly just present as background objects without much personality and only exist to show the horrors of slavery; and three, they hardly contribute to the plot. I know the Magic Negro trope not being used is a good thing and all, but it would have helped make them as people if we had one black character tell the heroes something that was useful. One could have told Orry some pearls of wisdom, one talk to George, or anything. Of course, the only sort of thing like that ever happens is when Virgilia sleeps with one and gets him to run away. This action doesn't really do much except invoke the black lover and Jungle Fever crazed white woman trope, while basically making the whole Abolitionist platform being presented from the point of view of a pro-slavery individual.
    Case in point are Madeline and Justin LaMotte. Justin cares more about his fragile male ego and his standing among his peers than his own plantation and his wife's feelings. As a result, he abuses her. Madeline then goes around him to see Orry in what any Christian reader would recognize as borderline adultery. This seems to be something with fiction where the means justifies the ends while having the protagonist a carte blanche when it comes to sins. In the eyes of God, Orry and Madeline are doing wrong, but that seems okay to the reader when considering Justin. This falls under the Orwellian term of doublethink and that is what this is when the hero is permitted to do terrible things and not be called out on it.
     The same with Virgillia. In slave owner terms, she is not just sleeping with an inferior being but she is also stealing property by helping him run away. But, that's okay because slavery is wrong and James Huntoon is not a nice guy after all. Again, that's doublethink. Even earlier in the book, Orry and George are willing to be petty. George calls out Orry on his book reading during their time together and aims to wash him of it (their conflicting statements on women maybe something for a feminist to deal with, though the idea of them wanting to be used "like a glove" sounds distasteful). Yet, the noble Orry is willing to chase after a run away slave and bring him to his owners, and has to be told of the wrong through George and Madeline (even if the idea of him being an enlightened sort who was ahead of his time might seem farfetched).
    Other times, George seems a weak man for letting Virgillia come to the South even knowing how she would behave around Southerners and not even calling out his family for their hypocrisy their treatment of his wife. The list could go on, with the obvious villains in the book pitted against questionable heroes, which seems to be a common theme in John Jakes. No doubt, its his way of saying we are all sinners and we have flaws. The trouble is with North and South is it becomes hard to tell who is good and who is unjust when the characters' morals are blurred together. But, this is not the worst of it.

    While it seems that George and Orry are the protagonists in the book, we see them shifting into the background in the later chapters and it becomes more toward Billy Hazard and Charles Main, the brother of George and cousin of Orry. It also seems that as Ashton and Brett grow, they begin to be more active, mostly to get suitors. Ashton becomes a woman first and is paired with James Huntoon, a fat lawyer turned politician who frequently is likened to an old toad or slug because of his physique. Like with Bent, we are encouraged to dislike Huntoon, though he is more sympathetic, more developed. Bent is just a bully, but Huntoon is crafty and ambitious, though naive and easy to intimidate.
    Huntoon is introduced merely to give us a picture of Southern courtship. At first, it may seem a romantic picture until we see him among the fire eaters. Of course, he is also courting the last sort of woman you would ever court. In Ashton and Brett, Jakes brings up the Madonna / Whore complex, with the Whore like Ashton and Madonna like Brett. This is most obvious when Ashton lusts over Billy and later goes into a quickie with Forbes LaMotte, son of Francis. Forbes starts out as a background character but is brought in when it's time for Brett to be courted. He courts Brett, which seems like an insult to Orry's injury that a LaMotte has his sweetheart and now another will take his sister. Forbes feels scared of Ashton, yet he can silence her beau by simply walking up to him and then threatening him. Ashton basically becomes Virgilia's Southern counterpart and Madeline's foil; she sleeps with other men and craves control of her destiny. Where Madeline will suffer abuse and sneak to Orry over it, Ashton keeps one man teased while she goes easily to another. Huntoon is willing to comply to the demands of courtship and he is not getting anything for it, until she accepts his proposal. Forbes, of course, goes with Ashton in secret and she opens her legs for him right away. Brett, meanwhile, saves her virginity for marriage, even as womanhood slowly comes to her. Like Elsa and Anna from Frozen they go through a time of separation in the course of the story.
    Then there is Billy Hazard, younger brother of George. At first, Ashton sets her eyes on him and it seems he would have her. However, after she teases him one too many, and discovers Brett's kindness, he leaves her for Brett. You of course know the saying "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" and it is the best way to describe Ashton after Billy dumps her. Ashton responds by closing herself to her sister, and her family, in that order, she sleeps around with others, including Forbes, and then marries James Huntoon just to get back at Billy. As the Civil War comes, Ashton then burns up her love of Billy because he is a Northerner and would like nothing better than to have him killed.

   If there is something redundant with Jakes is that he sometimes seems to repeat himself in this book. Best case in point is with the two young men in each family. First, it's Orry and George meeting and attending at West Point. Then we have Billy and Charles. Both are trained in the Academy and come out as officers. Then we have the love triangles with a Main and LaMotte guy occupying an angle: first with Orry, Justin, and Madeline, and then it's Billy, Brett, and Forbes. In the case of the two, the first triangle has it happening with Madeline and Justin already married, while Billy and Brett have the nation coming apart around them, making them the modern day Romeo and Juliet.
    George and Constance had their brush, especially from Stanley and Isabel, Stanley's wife, who distrust Constance being Catholic, while Virgillia makes it hard for George to be friends with Orry for her abolitionist stance, and now there's Billy and Brett, who might not wind up together because Ashton saw him first and wants to sink her claws into him, while his status as a Northerner can put him into the sights of Forbes. This as Billy and Charles go to the Academy, graduate, and then get into the US Army. Charles gets the most developing, or rather travels the farthest from the wings, in this section. He grows into a young man, fights his duel, and becomes a respectable sort. He also tangles with Bant on a few occasions. As their careers go, Charles spends time in Texas in handling a Comanche raid while Billy eventually gets sent to Charleston. At this point, the book starts to bring history into the mix, such as Orry and Virgillia witnessing John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. For Orry, the event is a hostage situation, while Virgillia comes out embittered with the South even more. A year later comes the presidential election that changed history. Abraham Lincoln is elected and South Carolina secedes from the Union: the sun came up, the Old Glory came down, and the United States of America comes apart. Cooper witnesses the moment when the legislature in Columbia declares "The Union Is Dissolved" while Billy is stationed in Fort Sumter.
    James Huntoon marries Ashton and takes part in the formation of the Confederacy. Billy decides to marry Brett, yet the LaMottes and a few others intend to have him killed. Madeline is able to escape Justin's clutches and warns Orry. Charles also sees Texas depart from the Union, where General Twiggs surrendered his forts while Colonel Lee is made to flee to Virginia, as he and others are now in enemy territory. Forbes appears drunk in beating some visitor and attempts to rape Brett. Eventually, it comes to a point of a duel that Billy is made to fight Forbes with and we see the two men competing for Brett resorting to the blade. Orry finds out about Ashton abusing slaves and having a hand in going after Billy. He then disowns her, thus banning James Huntoon from the plantation as well. They leave, but not without Ashton stating the Mains will be watched in the new government. Up north, the Hazards see Lincoln come and not think much about him. Billy and Brett leave South Carolina as Fort Sumter is fired on. As to George and Orry, we are left with them looking over the world and seeing how things have changed. They are now part of two opposing nations in an upcoming war, one that will answer the question: can a nation long endure half free and half slave? That is where the book ends and the War will be taken up in book two, Love and War.

     In telling the events leading up to the Civil War, John Jakes does a good job, though he does twist a few facts along the way. From a storytelling perspective, I do think North and South does bog down in the description of society, some of it is meant for the reader who has no idea how things were in the 19th Century, though he has the characters speak in less than dignified sort. The positives is that the adventure side of the story is worth the read, especially when you go through an 800 paged journey to Fort Sumter. At times, it can be felt like Harry Potter for big boys, minus the magic, which is what the scenes in West Point feel. At the same time, it gets into a soap opera term with the family drama in South Carolina. Despite being called North and South, much of the action deals with the Southern characters. Charles, for example, does most of the developing in the course of the novel that it can be argued that he, not Orry, is the hero of the book. In a way, one would wonder why Jakes didn't simply split this into two novels, especially as Jakes repeats himself a few times.
     If there is one thing to add with any discussion of the Civil War literature, I should add that there are lessons in this time that must be heeded. Many similarities of the Civil War era and today are remarkable and amazing: we have a republican in office now whose victory is a source of controversy and one state announced it was going to leave the Union (but did not carry it out, for some reason), there is a souring of race relations in the country not seen in decades, we are also seeing such abominations as the event that happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, and so on. Just recently, I have seen pick up trucks with Confederate flags hoisted in the bed driving up an down roads. So many issues now exposed and are threatening to tear the country apart, even now with Islamic terrorists still at large (and the 9/11/01 attacks' anniversary is nigh), North Korea's leader testing nukes and making everyone nervous, and now the South is seeing two powerful hurricanes come in and give a picture of what Noah's flood would have looked. When South Carolina left the Union, the United States was on the path to destruction, believe it or not. People were debating on slavery's legality, the legality of secession, the humanity of blacks, what this country is about, and so on back then and the breaking away of the Southern states was the tipping point of it. Of course, Fort Sumter was fired on and it unified the North against the Confederacy at the sight of the US flag fired upon. Even then, the United States of America was that close to dying and it would take a large conflict across many states with a million American men killed or wounded before it could come out reunified and stronger than before. So far, we haven't seen a Fort Sumter of our own. Charlottesville has made more division than unity.
     The Civil War was an epic tragedy, one that could have been prevented at some point, and it is believed to have concluded through the murder of a US president, though the scars still linger on. I do hope and pray that we don't have to witness something like that in order to get this country reunified. George and Orry were good pals and the Civil War really challenged that. We do not need to become like them and have to face the fact that a BFF or bestie is now in enemy territory and aiding your country's enemies, especially since those enemies are also your countrymen.

Anne of Ingleside: Celebrating 31 Years of Anne.

   How do you do,

    Well, the past month and one week has been dedicated in going over the Anne of Green Gables series and now it's finally coming to an end. Without further ado, we get into Anne of Ingleside.

   If there seems anything to the addition of this book, I would say that there was one reason for bringing up another book about Anne for Montgomery on part because the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the first book was arriving. What better way for Montgomery to celebrate it than to have another sequel. Another reason for this also was to fill up some gaps that in the narrative of the seven books already out there now. In this case, was to add a bridge between Anne's House of Dreams and Rainbow Valley, so we can find out how Jem got Dog Monday, how the kids evolved (since they weren't the focus of the now book seven), how Rilla was born, and so on. Apparently, she didn't make the thirtieth anniversary in getting it published, as it came out in 1939 (the year World War II began).
    The book opens with Anne visiting Diana (a first as the character was practically written out of the series in Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside) because Gilbert is attending the funeral of his father. For two chapters, Anne and Diana talk while making some remembrances on the past in places their children are playing in. During their talk, we are told about an Aunt Mary Maria Blythe, who is Gilbert's aunt. I find it interesting that she practically has the same name for a first and middle name (Mary is a variant of Maria). Mary Maria moves in with the Blythes, which signals trouble. She refers to Anne as Annie, a childish name that signifies Mary Maria to see Anne as a child despite being 34 now and with five children of her own.
     Remember the Blythe children from Rainbow Valley? They are shown younger here, all as kids, with Shirley still a two year old. We even see bookish Walter as a boy as well as the impish Jem. In the picture of the novel, you can tell who is who based on their clothes: Jem and Shirley are wearing suspenders while Walter is the sweater with sailor's collar and holding a book. Nearest to Anne are Nan and Di, the twins. The image in this edition does suggest that there is a closer bound between Anne and her daughters while the boys hardly have it. Justified as Susan reared the baby of the bunch while Anne was ill, according to the back story. Not only that, is really shows how the authoress viewed the sexes as the boys' world was something not known to her in opposition of girls' (contrast to Mark Twain who knew the boys' world better than girls'; while I have managed to learn both worlds at once). In a way, this is a more formal introduction that Rainbow Valley neglected (would be redundant if Montgomery made such then and then have them reintroduced here, though).
    As to Aunt Mary Maria, the conflict sometimes stems with her and the children. For example, when Jem gets into an argument about hanging out with some boys in another part of town, Mary Maria can't help but comment on how if she had given her parents lip they'd beat her up. We'd may think that because people use to spank children as recent as the sixties this remark would seem out of place. In reality, as corporal punishment did exist in the past there were plenty of people who opposed the use of it. In fact, the British Empire saw the downsizing of its use in 1860 (before Anne was born) where a child actually died after being whipped by his school master. This caused scandal and led to it being fazed out in both Europe and North America. That did change by the end of the century when it was perceived children were becoming wild and complaints died down. At the same time, it was noted that the use of pain to correct people is a short term punishment and rarely lasts long (practically leading to years of resentment, hostility, and strange sexual preferences, as well as a sadistic notion that it's okay to hurt and humiliate others). From a psychotic standpoint, Mary Maria grew up being spanked with a birch and seems jealous that a newer generation of children are not given the thrashing when they step out of line. No doubt, the statement is also a tact on the current society, at that time; a voice from the past taking note of the present and expressing an opinion over it.
    Mary Maria also exhibits a bit of classism where in the same scene she doesn't respond when Susan speaks up in favor of Jem. It's explained on page 21 that Mary Maria knew Susan to be a servant and her place was not at the table during company, but Anne was willing to let her be because Mary Maria is family as is she. In a way, she is. However, Mary Maria sees Susan as a spinster servant who doesn't belong. If this took place in the United States where such women as Susan Baker were usually black, it'd be understandable (given the times) to some. Since there doesn't seem to be alot of women of color in Prince Edward Island, at that time, the image of someone like Culpurnia from To Kill a Mockingbird would be anachronistic.
     Mary Maria basically becomes over opinionated in alot of things. She considers Gilbert's grace to be too short, the chimneys of the house too short, and that the children all have bad manners. So, she not only stays for two weeks, but they stretch into a month, and then occupy the book. There is the retold story of Hans Christian Andersen visiting Charles Dickens, once, and crashing on his sofa, for a couple of weeks, and then after he left Dickens stopped corresponding for some reason. Dickens' daughter remarked on how the man "stayed and stayed". No doubt, something happened, maybe it was Andersen, but it is something to relate to when mentioning of Mary Maria. She "stayed and stayed" while in the Blythe house. The house does belong to Gilbert, but the man never seems to get the nerve to tell his aunt that it's not her place to be judging his child rearing. When a child goes out of line with her, he is quick to lay down the law. However, if Mary Maria says something insulting, especially with the way she treats his wife and his maid, he does nothing short of permitting it. The grace part was just the beginning. At least, Anne does speak up to her when Mary Maria calls Walter a crybaby and speaks of how two families she knew wouldn't permit it (the old "if you don't stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about" deal) and Mary Maria reacts like some modern person taken aback at a snowflake's reaction to a statement. Still, Mary Maria can't help but use the scary black man image to keep Walter in line when he goes to Lowbridge (get it? Low Bridge?). The last is racially insensitive to modern readers, I know, but it is true: people actually believed in the boogie man who was black and would come to visit bad children for a pop. Frederick Douglass even spoke of it in his autobiography. The image is racist, but not the color coding; for centuries it's been seen in Western cultures that white means purity and goodness while black is darkness and maleficence. She uses that while criticizing Anne for believing in Santa Claus.
     Walter goes to Lowbridge and encounters the Parker family, where the boys are violent and prone to fights, opposed to the sweet and delicate Alice. Walter attempts to hold his own, but Alice makes him think his mom was ill. At that, Walter makes a run for home and finds Susan to greet him. She assures him that his mother is not ill. Then it turns out Walter was out, along with most of the others, because Anne was about to give birth (once more pregnancy wasn't brought up and it just happens out of the blue). Walter then gets to see Baby Rilla, the girl we see in the next two books. With Rilla now born, the number of children in the family has risen to six.
    After Rilla's birth, Rebecca Dew and Elizabeth Grayson return, the former to become kindred spirits with Susan, while the latter is shown to have grown into a lady. Not only do they return, but it is around this time that Jem gets a dog, with Gilbert bringing it up by quoting Lewis Carroll in Chapter 18. Originally, the Blythes had a dog named Rex, who was poisoned before the novel commences. Gyp is the name of the new dog and he dies in one chapter. Of course, Jem would get a new one.

    Even with episodes with the children, Anne is still the protagonist in the novel. Episodes involving her show up now and then, especially when she sees a man die and a poem dedicated to him is published in the obituaries with an added verse. The latter provides an early case of an emoji:

"!!!" said Ingleside. (p.125)

    It is a challenge to know what "!!!" means, but I am willing to guess it means "gasp!" But if there are things to bring up, it's that Montgomery sort of repeats the story at one point. First Walter comes running home to think Anne was dying. Then Nan does the same thing from different people. This time, no new baby. For the most part, things are episodic with some things involving Anne and some things focused on her children. We have a foreshadow of Walter's death, in one chapter, to connect it to Rilla of Ingleside. Besides the loss of a pet, one of the themes in the book is about who your friends are, which is something the Blythe children learn. Di gets a friend named Jenny Penny who treats her like a little thing and laughs at her praying. Rilla grows into a little girl and we see her with her lisps. Her first words in the saga are a prayer for rain. Rilla also is asked to carry a cake and thinks it shameful.
    Yet, the real plot of the novel, surprisingly, comes near the end where Gilbert is seen seeing Christine Stuart again. It amazes Anne who believes, following a fight, that he has fallen out of love with her. Next thing you know, divorce. Turned out to be false as Christine wasn't seeing Gilbert, even if she were widowed and childless. Besides, Gilbert was worried over some patient and it was all for naught. Eventually, they come to an understanding that things have been taken for granted.
    Then the novel ties into Rainbow Valley by having Anne and Gilbert go on a trip to the medical congress (which seems to last a year if it goes by the books, as Anne is forty one then). Earlier, Anne sets up a surprise party for Mary Maria, which is something that offends her terribly. At long last, she packs up and moves out and will never be brought back again. I cannot say but it is a relief when she is gone. She embodies the over opinionated old woman, like with grannies or spinster aunts, who pass down judgements on everything while being hostile to the heroines and never once having any fun. The novel takes place over a period of six years, which is longer than in any of the other installments. By the time the book ends, Anne is forty years old and Rilla is walking and talking.

   A few thoughts to add is Montgomery has once more added a new style to the book, while removing some of the cliches that plagued the previous installments. Of course, Anne of Ingleside is not perfect. I do miss seeing titled chapters in the text that would help with citing something. The chapters here just have numbers and makes it difficult. So, we have to rely on the old fashion method of the use of pages. Anne of Ingleside ties in to the narrative where we see Anne as a mother, after Anne's House of Dreams shows her as a newlywed, Anne of Windy Poplars as a working woman, Anne of the Island as a single lady, Anne of Avonlea as grown up, and Anne of Green Gables as a child. Thus, all six stages of her life in six books, with Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside added to show her as getting over the hill and stepping aside for the new generation. So, Anne of Ingleside is a necessary addition, though it doesn't improve the quality of the sequels much. The flaws in Anne of Ingleside still include the recycled material and situations involving imaginative girls, a death, and now a birth, and the flow of words do seem to have changed. In the last, it hardly seems like L. M. Montgomery of the past, though one could say the author has matured now.

   This is the last Anne of Green Gables novel to have L. M. Montgomery's personal touch. No doubt, another Anne book would have been in the making to bring the story to the Twenties, Thirties, and now the Forties, if the readers requested it. Of course, that meant that now Anne would be an elderly woman whose red hair has turned gray and white, thus removing her one source of shame very late in life. Either that or the focus would continue on her children. Who knows, because Montgomery didn't seem to have plans of another novel in the series by then. She was also creating another set of short stories that took place in Avonlea, titled as The Blythes Are Quoted, which was rejected by a publisher in 1942. So, if the future of Anne was to be told, it would be in a series of short stories. Sadly, on April 24, 1942, before another publisher could be found to publish, Montgomery died, apparently of drug overdose. She was 67 at the time of her death. Her newest entry would be edited into the book Road to Yesterday in the seventies, but it was published in its original form more recently. In the wikipedia page, this entry makes the books of the Anne of Green Gables Series go up to nine, though most would prefer the main eight already out as they are really novels, while The Blythes Are Quoted is not. So, this concludes this journey in examining Anne of Green Gables and its sequels. Rereading them all still brings the "scope to the imagination" again just as they did for the sixteen year old boy who first read them in high school, wanted to be with Anne Shirley, and visit the world of Avonlea. Today, it's been a century and nine years since the first book was published (next year it'll be 110). Things have changed over the previous century, but we still need moments to inspire imaginations. We need people like Anne in the current time and we need more enduring charms that come with her; we definitely need something to make us think of simpler times, as there is so much "scope to the imagination" that comes with the simpler times.


Montgomery, L. M. Anne of Ingleside. (1939) Bantom Books. New York. 1992.

Anne of Windy Poplars: Montgomery Brings Back Anne.

   How do you do, 

   In case most of y'all don't know, July 26th is the feast day of St. Anne, mother of Mary, and it's time of year for all the Novenas. The nine days leading up to Wednesday are when they take place, the first of them starting on July 17th. So, it's impeccable that this entry is done on the week of St. Anne's Day.

   After a fifteen year hiatus, L. M. Montgomery churned out another novel in the Anne of Green Gables Series, which has Anne's name in the title for the first time since Anne's House of Dreams. This means that Anne is once more protagonist. Now, I must make note that what I am blogging on is the US title; in Canada it was originally published as Anne of Windy Willows, but was changed in the US editors who felt it was too much like Kenneth Graham's The Wind In the Willows. Of course, the song remains the same, either way.

   1936 was quite a year for the new Anne book: The Great Depression is underway with some signs of recovery, only to see another crash; Nazi Germany hosts the Summer Olympics in Berlin (after the controversial rearming of Germany and militarizing the Rhineland); the Spanish Civil War breaks out; Mussolini has Italy invade Ethiopia; Japan sees the February Incident that ends with the arrests of 123 conspirators (19 of whom are executed); the United States reelects President Franklin Roosevelt; the Tupelo-Gainsville Tornado outbreak does extensive damage in the South; the Tasmanian tiger went extinct after the last one died in a zoo; Joseph Stalin orders the General Purge in the Soviet Union; King Edward VIII abdicates his throne for his brother, who becomes King George VI; the BBC makes a broadcast on television; Margaret Mitchell publishes Gone With the Wind while William Faulkner gave us Absolem! Absolem!.
    If you read in chronological, as opposed to publication, order, you are indeed reading Book Four in the series. It's the interquel, technically, with Anne of the Island as its prequel and Anne's House of Dreams as its sequel. There is a three year gap in between. Now, that means there is very little tension in the story. We all know that Anne and Gilbert will tie the knot in the next book, and they are committed to each other, so how can you produce some tension. Firstly, L.M. Montgomery writes the book in a different style that in the previous six installments. Instead of titled chapters that tell one the events to come, she writes an epistolary novel where Anne writes letters to Gilbert, who is attending medical school, while she becomes principal in Summerside High School (though it breaks into the standard third person narrative later on) while Gilbert never shows up. With Diana married and with her children back in Avonlea and the rest there as well, for the first time since leaving Green Gables for college, Anne is on her own.
    In Summerside, she meets the world totally different than before, which allows the book to be different that what was experienced in Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and Anne of the Island. Anne has gotten a job as principal in the high school and she encounters the vice-principal named Katherine Brooke. Anne takes delight that she spells it with a K, thinking it better than Katherine with a C, but Katherine proves to be something of Fredo in The Godfather Part II, she is upset that she was stepped over despite being older and more experienced than Anne. One way to snub Anne is shown when she replaces the K with a C. Katherine eventually becomes like an onion; a multi-layered character. She was orphaned like Anne, but she was raised by an uncle who payed for her learning and she feels obligated to repay him. Some of this causes her to be resentful and focus on her job more than life. Thus, Montgomery has provided a foil to Anne, who is grateful to Marilla but is still willing to put aside her work for life. However, Katherine is the least of Anne's worries.
     Enter the Pringles. No, they are not the people who created the potato chips that are stacked in cylinder cans. The potato chips you are thinking about weren't invented until 1968, so there's no chance that L.M. Montgomery named this family after it. The Pringles are a family of influence in Summerside. Some of us in towns know of such families that are like the Pringles. They are usually very rich (some nouveau riche and some "old money), had someone in the past who helped found the town, ran an successful business that basically pays for everything in the town, had someone who was a war hero, or a miser in the family who gave away his possessions to the town (like the Miser Madison gave his library to River City in The Music Man), and so on. Such families give so much to the town that the town makes them their important ones; a sort of New World gentry, or royalty. To be in the same fold opens doors in the town (or as Jumanji cynically adds, makes one a target for bullies) and even outside of town. To be friends with such families does both and their backing is often the make or break move for someone running for office. Though the last could mean the town leaders are basically puppets for such families, there is a plus side that they provide the wealth and employment in a town that otherwise would nothing but a shantytown of sharecroppers. They could do things for the poor that all of us are told to do in scripture but most can't as we are often impoverished as well (feeding the starving, clothing the naked, and so on). At the same time, having such families can be a double edged sword, as bad elements show up with them, like the recent case in the South where the heir of businessman raped a college girl and turned the tables her, permitting him to walk scant free of justice while the poor girl had to leave town and later commit suicide. The Pringles do have more respect for the system than the example used, but they could make it hard for Anne to keep her job.
    If you think back to "Dawson's Creek: Review of Commentary Part 3" where I mentioned of Principal Green running afoul of such families in one episode and was driven into resigning if he did not overturn his expulsion of a student. They painted him as an outsider with ideals of justice being not fit for Capeside (plus he was black in a town run by rich white men and women), and used the expulsion of a rich man's son as an excuse to run him out of town on a rail. Knowing that will make it easy to root for Anne as she is also from outside of Summerside and has to deal with the Pringles, who are also running the town and made up of rich people. Anne is also occupying a place of authority in the school, which is consisting of girls. Being principal of a school for girls was where Anne could get in her sex, but it would have been barrier busting if she were to be principal in an all boys school, or even co-ed. Either way, the Pringles make it clear that she is not wanted.
    What helps in rooting for Anne more is that the Pringle Family is a largely faceless entity for much of the book, only represented by the students in Anne's class. One stands out among them, Jan, to whom Anne believes could be a good student if she tries. However, Jan proves more than a handful and it gives Anne a reputation as a bad teacher to the Pringles. Eventually, that changes through a relative. Elizabeth Grayson, who is of Pringle stock. Elizabeth is lonely in school, as her mother died, leaving her with her great-grandmother and "the woman" to look after her. Anne and Elizabeth form a friendship during the course of the book where it is discovered her father is out of the country and left her to her great-grandmother when she was a baby. There were a few other things to add such as how the old woman made her walk in the dark despite being afraid of it in order to go to bed. Basically, she was starved of love in a way that Leonard was in The Big Bang Theory. Where Leonard had his science and self-love to fall back on, Elizabeth had her imagination which is about as fantastic as Anne's. In short, Elizabeth is Anne 2.0. To help, Anne brings her to Green Gables on a two week vacation and she likes it there. Later, Anne writes to Elizabeth's father and he shows up in the end to take her home. However, her guardians, the great-grandmother, believes that she has a good home with her, regardless of how Elizabeth feels. In the end, Mr. Grayson takes Elizabeth with him to Boston.
    Anne also brings Katherine to Green Gables in the book and it leads to a transformation of the character. Suddenly Katherine becomes a softer woman who has forgotten her jealousy of Anne. They then become good friends. Anne also befriends the owners of the namesake Windy Poplars, Aunt Chatty and Aunt Kate, along with Rebecca Dew. Aunt Chatty and Aunt Kate own the place which is used as resident spots for the faculty, though Rebecca Dew does most of the running. This wasn't something appointed to her but rather a case where the owners made her think she was running it in reverse psychology. The aunts living together and running the boarding house is hardly out of the ordinary for those seeing it in 19th Century lens. Some women who never married would move in with each other, and some got into Bostonian marriages, named for the book by Henry James. Rather or not they were actually Lesbians is never discussed and I can't find any reason to believe it here, either. They are likely just two widows living together for mutual advantages, just as Marilla and Rachael Lynde are living together for the same purpose. There are plenty of things that happen with this trio that Anne observes, but to cite them all here would require a much longer entry.
    I will simply say that L. M. Montgomery has it all done in a period of three years with Anne fighting an uphill battle with the power of the Pringle Family, and she comes out smelling like a rose. After the three years have completed, Anne bids Summerside adieu once more and all those who are found of Anne must wave their tearful good byes. Not one of them is going to be able to make her wedding, sadly, and I don't believe they are mentioned in Anne's House of Dreams either. But the book does try to wrap everything up like a bow in order to keep in connection with Book Five.

    To close, Anne of Windy Poplars is a good book. It is better than two of its predecessors and has a fresh new voice after Montgomery kept the Anne Books from the public for so long. The fact that Anne is dealing with the Pringles and the problem of Elizabeth and her great-grandmother, plus her dealing with Katherine Brooke, on her own and without the presence of Gilbert or any man restores the feminist side of the story, though one could argue that Mr. Grayson taking Elizabeth back into this house is a kind of cop out or deus ex machina with the man playing the rescuing cavalry. Where the last two books of the series (which were published first) seemed to reduce Anne as a character into a mother figure, this one can be refreshing to some in seeing Anne made into a strong female character. The image of Elizabeth and her house hold does involve a kind of feel that would make the book a Gothic novel, especially as the scenes of her and Anne take place at night in the start. Even the US title gives it a Gothic setting, even if Summerside doesn't invoke such. One of the best parts of the book is most of the cliches in the series are absent. We still have the lonely and imaginative girl in the midst, but the spinster lady who marries in the end is not there.
    One last thing to add is that this book, along with Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island, served as the source material for Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel, produced by Sullivan as a follow up the mini-series Anne of Green Gables. I do not know if I will make a review and commentary on that, yet, but I will say that this, the best entry of the trilogy, is an impressive adaptation of a trilogy of sequels to L.M. Montgomery's masterpiece.

Rilla of Ingleside: The Grand Finale.

   How do you do, 

   Some of y'all may remember the Harry Potter books where J.K. Rowling had us all waiting to find out if Harry and Lord Voldemort will have their climatic show down through seven books, which became eight movies with Warner Brothers' touch. Or with The Hunger Games where we waited for three (four in movies) to find out if they will ever over throw Panam. L. M. Montgomery didn't plan it so, but she had readers of the time waiting for years before a more recent event like World War I entered her writing. If you were to read the completed series today, you'd may have waited through Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne's House of Dreams, Anne of Ingleside, Rainbow Valley, and finally Rilla of Ingleside.

    In Rainbow Valley, we didn't have a clear protagonist, but instead had a bunch of children getting into trouble and causing adventures, which was sad when our main star is fading into the background. That is fixed in this book. We now have a protagonist, Bertha Marilla Blythe, or Rilla. The roly poly girl who was called "Spider" by her siblings and spoke with a lisp, is the one this book will center on as her brothers and sisters are grown up. Jem has been to college, as had Walter, and Shirley is getting into the academy. Nan and Di are also grown up. So, that puts us into learning of Rilla, in a manner of Seventh Heaven would have us focusing on Ruthie after all the Camden children have departed.
   Of course, Anne is still in the story, as she is Rilla's mother. Gilbert is still there, as is Miss Cornelia, and Mr. Douglas. We find out in the backstory that Marilla has finally died, thus ending the final link to Anne of Green Gables. No doubt, Rachel Lynde has also passed on, since nothing more is mentioned of her. It is also disappointing that Diana is rarely seen in these recent books. As to the Rainbow Valley bunch, besides the Blythe children we still have the Merediths, still have Mary Vance, and we have Owen Ford's son, Kenneth, or Ken, as he is often called. John Meredith, however, has retired as minister in the local church and his post is now occupied by Reverend Pryor, referred to as Whiskers On the Moon in the book due to his largely bald head with a mustache. According to the women, it seemed a group of boys came up with the name. From the start, the women don't consider Pryor to be fit to be elder and it won't end at this point. There's also the cat named Doc, short for Doctor Jekyll / Mister Hyde. The cats that Anne once had have died and Rilla had gotten a new one that she named Jack Frost, who then had kittens, and Doc is one them. Walter named him after Robert Louis Stevenson's book, and he shows the bipolar nature well. He goes back and forth between the two over the course of the book. Also returning is Dog Monday, the dog that Jem is attached to.

   The book opens with the same gossip that Anne absorbs before the main story begins. Susan Baker returns to read the Glen Notes, which mention the Assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Montgomery lets us know that this would effect everyone, yet when the news came out hardly anyone took notice. Susan sniffs in thought that everyone is getting killed in the Balkans while the ladies agree it doesn't concern them. Thinking on recent events, I have seen real life examples of people who have heard of some tragedy overseas and not take notice, even though history is being made. Today, people are just posting selfies on Pinterest or tweeting on Twitter, while watching some favorite show on Netflix, and reading this blog, I see (just wanted to see if you were paying attention). That to me shows the sad reality; we have the technology to know of the news overseas much better than the women of Glen St. Mary did, and yet the indifference is still there.
    They all keep their minds on what's at home, especially Rilla who is going to a dance at the Four Winds Lighthouse. There, she intends on getting to dance with and even have her first kiss with Ken Ford. Of course, the whole thing doesn't turn out so well. She got a few partners until she spoke with Ken who calls her "Rilla-my-Rilla", a pet name that her brother and a friend use. Apparently, it's enough to make her fall in love with him, because that is what happens. Then, she loses her shoes, winds up dancing with others after Ken departs, and has to walk home bare footed when the party breaks up, as she left her shoes behind. (on that note, given how people had some thoughts going up when two young people disappear into the night and reappear minutes later, the missing shoes would have done some scandal). Symbolically, the loss of her shoes and having her feet all bruised can be likened to virginity loss, however, that is missing the mark: Rilla is taking her first steps on a hard road to adulthood, which is about to get even harder.
   Then came the Great War which we never get to see any of the battles or the gloom, but it does occupy the plot of the novel. For a refresher, a month after Archduke Francis Ferdinand was assassinated, his country, Austria-Hungary, declared war on Serbia. Serbia's ally, Russia, then mobilized against Austria-Hungary, prompting her ally, Germany, to declare war on Russia, and then France as they were allies. Then Germany invaded Belgium to flank the French Army. The British then declare war to protect Belgium. Because Canada is a part of the British Empire, soon to be part of the Commonwealth, she supports England and will send her boys across the Atlantic to Europe. Germany brings in her military, largely shown with her army, while the British have an army in Europe and the Royal Navy, so the whole thing is far from even. On land, the British are vastly outnumbered and can only put in so much aid for the French. At sea, the Royal Navy is does well and blockades Germany. Both sides then get into a stalemate when the trench warfare dominates the Western Front and losses are great. Over time, the airplane is used as a weapon, the tank is introduced, and so is poison gas. Though the British score victories against the Germans, they are unable to really break the tie in World War I (it seems France and Russia fought more in Europe). Then the United States enters on the side of the Allies in 1917, sending in fresh troops to break things even in 1918, and the Great War ended with both sides agreeing to an Armistice on November 11, plus the official ending in the Treaty of Versailles in July of 1919, redrawing the map of Europe, imposing indemnities on Germany for the action, while she goes from empire to republic, which suffers economic woes in the paying of war time damages during the twenties, then the Depression in the thirties, thus paving the road to the rise of the Nazi Party, and a second world war. By then, millions of men have died, including Canada's men. So, we all know how the war will go, just as a reader of Gone With the Wind knows how the Civil War will end, but people living in the book do not and lack the overview of the reader. So, we will be sitting with them and seeing them having their lives changed by the Great War and what they do about it.
   To summarize a few things: Gilbert and Anne monitor the situation and fret, Susan Baker talks of how she could win the war for them by taking out the German Army single handedly, some of the women crochet and gossip about the war, Jerry Meredith is wounded at Vimy Ridge, Miller Douglas lost his leg at some point, Shirley Blythe flew fighters for the RAF, Walter was killed in action in the Somme Offensive, and Jem is captured in a trench raid late in the war.
  The women who talked of the Glen Notes now talk about World War I in their gossip. Miller Douglas' parents drop in, with Mr. Douglas talking of how Great Britain will settle things quickly, while his wife, who warned of the war, claims it won't be settled quickly. During the talking, one woman claims to have formulated a way to win the war and it seemed the generals weren't listening.  In a change in character, Anne doesn't resort to trying to imagine things during the years. You would think she would revert back to her girlish behavior in order to avoid thinking of her boys fighting and dying. Instead, she plays the worried mother and lets the other women be the varying sides of the issue. Susan is the more patriotic of the bunch, hoisting up the Union Jack in each new development, and would often claim to give the emperors in the Central Powers a good thrashing. The latter provokes the amusing image of the elderly woman with a broom, or cane, who is able to whip an opponent that everyone around her claims is too powerful. Think of the Madagascar films where we have that old woman beating up the lion quickly. In that example, it's meant to be joke that an old woman could over take a lion and beat him up, which actually doesn't encourage respect for elders like it was set up for. With Susan, meanwhile, it also provokes laughter since we all know an old house maid is no match for even a handful of battle hardened soldiers. If she tried charging them with a frying pan, and since they are always armed, she'll be dead before she even comes close. At the same time, the conversations concerning the names of cities they hear about are not really what we would consider politically correct. They view only English names as civilized, while anything of the foreign origin not so. This is, of course, in the 1910s, but if some talk was done today most of us would accuse the women of xenophobia. Besides, we have learned how the names are pronounced, which is more than what they did in the book.
    The drama still carries over in the story with many heart aches coming when someone dies or is captured. When Walter is killed, it is a sad chapter. Jem leaves Dog Monday at the station and the dog is seen waiting for him to return, just as Odysseus' dog waited the return of his master for a decade, finally dying when he saw him. Dog Monday lives, however. Then we come to the Pryors. Mr. Pryor, is a pacifist, which is something Montgomery seems to make the same as traitor. I have met people who oppose war, even a just one, and the idea of them being against war so they could turn coat on their country is largely an emotional response from the war supporters. Exceptions do come with this, such as in the 1960s when people opposed the War in Vietnam to the point of hampering the effort there. Of course, we don't really get to see it from his point of view, sadly, which is amazing as Montgomery has come to believe that the Great War was unnecessary by then. Instead, his image is slandered by gossip to the point the reader is forced to see him as the villain, especially when Susan claims Pryor was smiling over the sinking of Lusitania (an action that would have angered American readers who lost someone on that ship, back then). Because of that, he forbids his daughter, Miranda, from marrying Joe Milgrave, all the because the latter is enlisted (inversion of The Four Feathers where the engagement of a British officer is broken up by his resigning of commission). Then he says a prayer in a church meeting that appeals for peace, only to be tackled by Mr. Douglas; the "Old Pagan," they call him. Pryor also goes over to proposal to Susan, and is rejected with quite a reaction. All the events make the reader root against him: that he deserved to be bullied and should be driven out of the house in mad manner (and this apparently brings up a debatable question: at what point is there a limit to the commandment "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother"?). The image of him running from Susan is amusing to think of, though.
    But, Rilla tops them all!

 

   There is a noticeable passing of the torch thing in this and its prequel, Rainbow Valley, where Anne has began to step out of the frame for the main plot line and allow her children to take center stage. In this one, Rilla is the protagonist, as evidenced by the titles. Not since Anne's House of Dreams (in the 1920s, not so after Anne of Ingleside was published) has Anne's name even be placed in the title which further shows how her status as the heroine of the series has ended (even if we still call it Anne of Green Gables Series). Anne is in her fifties now and is gradually becoming an old woman (her red hair that she once hated is beginning to gray) while her daughter is coming into her own, which is how this passing of the torch is evident. By Rilla of Ingleside, Anne is no longer protagonist while her daughter has taken the mantle. Instead, Anne is just the heroine's mother. I am sure if Stephany Meyer were to make a sequel series to Twilight, Bella's daughter would take center stage while Bella and Edward are just the parents in this (assuming they stay together).
    Rilla spends the bulk of the book growing, which is a contrast to the prequel where she was hardly there at all. At the start, all she she can think of is dancing with Ken and getting her first kiss. Of course, the news of World War I breaking out ruins the night. Ken expresses favor while Rilla goes all Scarlet about it. Of course, she has to watch as the two men she loves, her brother Walter and Ken, enlist. So, it would seem that Rilla would spend her time in the novel just pining away while those two are out in the Flanders region.
    Then she brings a baby without parents in a soup tureen. I can imagine all sorts of symbolic wombs to be of use, though kitchen wear seems the last thing to think of. Of course, one could argue of the birth membrane being represented by the stew or soup in the bowl and the baby as the bits of steak. Regardless, she transports the baby after its parents have gone. The baby's mother dies while the father is in the war. So, it falls to Rilla to tend to the child, with everyone giving her advice. She names him James Kitchener Anderson, called Jims a couple of times. During the time while listening in on the war's progress, Rilla experiences motherhood, though she gets more relation from Susan than from Anne during the course of the rearing.
    When Ken appears, the presence of the baby nearly ruins their time together, but it seems Ken doesn't seem to mind. He is likely impressed with Rilla. Susan even reminds him of the way he use to be and how things with Rilla were. Then, when the chance comes, he kisses her and asks that she not let anyone else do so. This request seems much to modern women, and more so to the times of the book as everyone then asks if Rilla is engaged to Ken. It does speed up the courtship than before; Anne and Gilbert took three books to get engaged, plus one more before marriage came. Here, Rilla and Ken (I wonder if we call them KRilla or Rillaken?) go through much of the book without seeing each other. Ken and Rilla have a dance in August of 1914. Then they meet again in the Blythe House where Rilla gets her first kiss. After that, he is out in the front for the remaining half of the book. A few letters are written and Rilla has to turn down another guy who likes her in order to keep her promise. She does express regret over that she is sending a man off with a broken heart, especially since he may die.
    Rilla and her mother, and the others, see it all in the home front: the draft calls, the goods rationing, the Red Cross volunteers, and the Daylight Savings Time (with Susan refusing to set her clocks ahead, which would have led to problems of her being an hour late at everything). Like everybody else, when Cambai was fought, she and Anne "wept and prayed", to quote It's a Wonderful Life; when Jerusalem was captured they "wept and prayed again"; when the Armistice was made they once more "wept and prayed." The chapters "Victory" and "Mr. Hyde Goes to His Own Place..." handle the moments with the Armistice happening (the even that is one year away from reaching its centennial) with all the built in energy being released by the locals. Out with the rationing, out with Daylight Savings Time, and out with recruitment notices. Peace has come again and we can go back to the way things were. However, it doesn't entirely do so: Susan Baker decides to go on holiday (or "take a honeymoon" as she calls it), Mr. Pryor suffers a stroke which means a new elder is needed, and the cat ran off, never to bother anyone again with its dual personality. I do like that Susan is doing so without getting married as it breaks the cycle of spinster women who never found love yet winding up married.
    In the States, we have the song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home", which is a fitting song to play as the boys return in the spring of 1919. Jem returns also and is engaged to Faith Meredith. Miller Douglas returns with a wooden leg, yet he is still engaged to Mary Vance. In all the hullabaloo, we don't get any mention of the Influenza outbreak that killed scores of people. We also don't get to read of anyone's reactions to the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, which officially ended World War I. The absence of the two is likely because Montgomery wanted to give a happier and more satisfying conclusion to her book after two hundred pages of agony over reading the war process (the miniseries Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story does one better and actually bring the characters into the war itself and have them running about the post-war Europe with everything around them falling). But Rilla records Jem stating that the Great War has seen to the end of the old world that they all knew and it was time to build a new one. This is echoed by that final scene in The Patriot where they start by rebuilding Mel Gibson's house. How it will be build is Jem going to college, along with others. Rilla even settles with some schooling as she has heard nothing from Ken. Jims' father shows up with a new wife in 1918 and they adopt the boy as their own again. They even take the soup tureen with them, thus Rilla gets to see the toughest thing in being a mother: letting the child go. Then comes the scene in the last page where Ken shows up and they behold each other. They see that they have both changed: Ken has seen war and lost much of his boyhood side in physical appearance while Rilla has matured and grown wiser from her silly romantic ways. So, it's no surprise they hardly recognize each other. Yet, Ken calls her "Rilla my Rilla" and Rilla's last word in the book is the slip back into her lisp. I am sure they kissed soon after and that concludes the last book in the series.



     To conclude, Rilla of Ingleside is a great improvement over Rainbow Valley. Montgomery puts away some of the cliches of the previous installments and focuses on one character, even if she hardly had much in the prequel. The introduction of the outside world events adds tension to the story and makes it a page turner. Historic wise, Rilla of Ingleside is a nice place to see in a story telling the home front of World War I in Canada. Rilla is a nice character to know and watching her blossom into a woman is noteworthy. A few flaws are in the book,
     Some research on the book has told me that what I have in the series is abridged. Sometime after Montgomery's death, it was decided the Anti-German sentiment in the book would make it dated and it was cut out. That bugs me: cutting those out because it dates the book has no logic and you might as well just cut every mention of the Germans from the book and make the war seem like something happening on another planet. Thankfully, a group of editors have published in 2010 an annotated version that restores all the deleted sections and adds footnotes and maps in there. All the new additions to the text now makes it possible to read this book in the way those of the 1920s did.
     As to the future, what is in store for Ken and Rilla? It does seem that the circle of life is continuing now that Anne has passed the torch to Rilla, but will there be a branching off into "Rilla Books"? Could it be possible that Montgomery could go until we see the tragic chapter where Anne dies and that is the end of the series? Not so. Rilla of Ingleside was published as the final book in the Anne of Green Gables series, and it stays that way chronologically. In the meantime, Montgomery had focused her talents on non-Anne books as well like Emily of New Moon, Pat of Silver Bush, and The Blue Castle. The two times she did return to Avonlea was in Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles of Avonlea. It would not be until the Thirties before L.M. Montgomery would bring in another installment to the Anne Books.

Rainbow Valley: The Next Generation.

   How do you do, 

   It's 1919. World War I is called the Great War and it just ended through the Treaty of Versailles. So now one would wonder what is there to write about or if L.M. Montgomery would be done with Anne for a time and get on some other project. But, in this year, with the new source of nostalgia fuel being read (the days before the war broke out) and because many readers would want to know of Anne experiencing motherhood, we are given Rainbow Valley. 

   The first thing to take note is the title. Anne's name is not in the title, so at first glance one would think it was a different book. Then you open it up and you find that Anne is in there, along with Gilbert, so it is a sequel to Anne of Green Gables. But, why is Anne's name not in the title? This is why this entry has the name "the next generation". Here, the focus has shifted away from Anne and now has gone to a new generation of imaginative children. This does rob Anne of having the status as protagonist in the story, something she had in the past.
   By now, Anne and Gilbert have additional children: sons Jem, Walter, Shirley, and daughters Di and Nan (twins) and Rilla. Jem was the baby boy born back in Anne's House of Dreams. Now he has grown into a strapping boy on the verge of becoming a man (they grow up so fast). He is now the older brother of Walter Cuthbert Blythe, the sensitive poetic boy (who gives Rainbow Valley its name) and Shirley Blythe (You can call him "Shirley"). Those are the boys while Diana and Anne are a pair of twins for elder daughters (both of whom are older than Shirley). Just to keep from confusion, they are called Di and Nan. It's interesting now that Anne had babysat twins several times in her life and now she gets to be a mother to a set of them. Finally, there is little Bertha Marilla Blythe, or Rilla, as she is called. They all live with their maid, Susan Baker, in a house called Ingleside.
   The six children have their own traits. Walter is a poetic boy who is seen as a girl by some boys in Glen St. Mary, Jem , Shirley calls Susan Baker his Mother Susan due to her nursing him when Anne was sick. The twin girls are basically Anne and Diana of the new generation, which makes it easy to know. As to Rilla, she is shown as a roly-poly girl and is called so, along with "spider", and she also lisps. Some of the Blythe children are up in Green Gables when Anne and Gilbert go on a trip to Europe, which allows them to tell the reader that not only are Marilla and Rachel Lynde doing well, but Davy has become the father to his own children. Unlike the reader, they don't have much of anything nice to say about Avonlea, which is understand about. It was just Mama's home and not theirs.
   The book also introduces the Meredith Clan, consisting of John Meredith, a new minister, and his children, Faith, Una, Mary Vance, Jerry, and Carl. It's nice to know that the Blythe children are going to be having some new friends. However, Montgomery sort of shifts the point of identification from the Blythes to the Merediths, which does make things confusing. It can also explain why it's not called "Anne of Rainbow Valley" or "Jem of Rainbow Valley". As to the children of the Meredith Clan, Mary Vance stands out among them for not having the same surname. It turns out, she was a runaway who was welcomed in by the two boys and two girls, one of whom introduces her to Missus Elliott, who adopts her. Mary Vance is a broken dove sort of girl, shown to swear and boast alot, which puts awe in the eyes of the children. She could have easily be Anne Shirley 2.0, if it weren't for the last (I mean, Anne has four letters and Mary has four letters, both Biblical in origin -- St. Anne was the mother of the Virgin Mary, after all). However, it doesn't turn out so. Instead, Mary Vance is something of a foil. Anne went through trauma and came out still innocent while Mary Vance was beaten a few times and came out mischievous.
   The Meredith Children sort of invert what The Lord of the Flies had in mind where a group of children operating without supervision of adults become akin to wild animals with stereotypical traits of natives. This is noted in their creation of the "Good-Conduct Club" where they decide to make themselves be the judges on being good or bad without the use of grown ups. It sort of works and the children keep each other in line. One could say that if given the chance, children could keep themselves disciplined without the need of adult figures doing that. However, Montgomery is not advocating it and shows how that can fall apart. Carl gets sick in one chapter and that basically breaks down the need for the Good-Conduct Club. Rev. Mr. Meredith even thinks he is not a good father.
    This one choice was to give his children a mother. That is where we meet once more two over the hill women who are not married because of circumstances. This time, they made a promise to not leave each other after the deaths of their parents. You would think they believe that to be childish by now, but they stick with it into old age. The girl that John is into is Rosemary West, the younger. Her older sister, Ellen, who is the one who forbids it. That becomes inverted later when Ellen is reunited with an old beau, Norman Douglas, who comes to court her. Eventually, the two decide they were two old for such promises and marry their men.

    Coming of age becomes the subplot for the Blythe and Meredith Children in Rainbow Valley. Jem is fifteen at the end of the book and begins studying to go to the Queen's Academy. Walter also becomes interested in Faith, which leads to him fighting a boy named Dan Reese when the latter insults her and his mother. After this fight, the bookish Walter is respected by all, which most modern readers may find off putting. It's almost as though Montgomery has decided to leave the feminist stance in the first book and is going back to traditional gender roles by this point. I'm not a feminist, after all, so it can't dominate the post. I can let some real feminist deal with that.
    Walter then speaks of the Pied Piper coming in the final chapter, which foreshadows World War I. Of course, the book takes place a decade before it broke out, so it's just a foreshadow. It's make the impression that Rainbow Valley and the next installment, Rilla of Ingleside, to be two parts of a longer novel that Montgomery decided to break in two, just as she did with Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island. Jem welcomes the arrival of Walter's Piper in the final dialogue. From that moment, the whole thing stops, which is sad as the book felt like it was finally getting something more than an episodic plot line. Of course, for the readers in 1919, this kind of story telling gave a nostalgic feel that all the installments before it lacked. In fact, Montgomery dedicated this entry to three men she knew who served and died for Canada in World War I: Goldwin Lapp, Robert Brookes, and Morley Shier. In the chapter, "Let the Piper Come", she makes another note of the First World War by saying how the boys playing about Rainbow Valley would all grow up to be soldiers and sent to Europe when the war began.
    Even with it, I do consider Rainbow Valley to be somewhat the weakest in the series. It relies heavily on recycled plot lines and characters, and it doesn't seem to have a clear idea of who we are to relate to as a protagonist, which is bad when Anne is retiring into the background at this point. Perhaps the title would have told us about the latter. In the previous four installments (later six), Anne is the protagonist which is why her name is in the title. The star is always going to be Anne and everyone else is going around her. In Rainbow Valley, that's out the window and the point of identity changes to where Anne the protagonist we had come to know and love is one of the characters revolving around a star, yet we have not one but many stars. Since this is the next generation, I would think that it should be one of her children. Instead, we get the Merediths who occupy much of the stage while the Blythe children are sidelined. At least, Montgomery changes that in the next installment. Besides, she later writes a prequel to the book, or rather interquel as its between books five and seven. The thing of recycling plot lines and traits can be justified as this whole thing was a series and things tend to get repeated in a series. Yet, it does make it harder and harder to really become invested when the same thing keeps getting repeated. The thing that Montgomery keeps repeating, of course, is that thing of unmarried women who are over forty, or thirty, who had a past love and it ended. Marilla Cuthbert started it and she was enduring as we didn't know of it until the end, but it worked for her as she was a determined woman who could handle things on her own, leaving her brother to do man's work in the process. She never marries in the series and that made it all work. The imitation of Marilla in her love life is brought up again in the series, with Ellen and Rosemary West being the latest, yet each time we meet one, they wind up married at the end of the book. First, Anne of Avonlea gave us Lavendar Lewis, the woman who loved Mr. Irving but was kept from marrying him. Of course, she gets married in the end of the book. Next, Anne of the Island gave us Janet who is kept from Mister Douglass by his mother. They get married because the man's mother is dead in the end. Anne's House of Dreams gives us Miss Cornelia whose beau kept his distance for political reasons, which stop impeding the wedding in the end. So, that's three times we have Marilla wannabes in the story who only lack the crusty exterior that defined her and they get married at the end of the book, whereas Marilla stayed single. I can't think of any excuse in all the cases: maybe L.M. Montgomery decided that one Marilla Cuthbert is enough, or Aunt Josephine, or maybe she thought that everyone should get married and tries to make it so in her books. If there is a Montgomery scholar out there who can explain it better, let him or her now speak.
    So, even if Rainbow Valley doesn't have the same strength as the earlier books, it can still be read as a nostalgic fantasy to the Edwardian period, just as Anne of Green Gables was seen to the Victorian. By this point, we are now in the early 20th Century and one can see the untouched innocence of the new century to come before everything that was to happen has happened. It's a pity we can't find such with the 21st, given how a short period came before the 9/11/01 attacks came and all. Either way, we all miss Avonlea, sitting on the front porch....