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....
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