"Just Like a Man!": Continuing L.M. Montgomery's Passive Gender Activism Through the Arts
‘After All the Years of Separation’: Musically Representing Author L.M. Montgomery’s Suspended Romances
Canadian author L.M. Montgomery did not set out to write stories about romance. As she indicated in her journals, she wrote character-driven stories of young girls navigating their way through girlhood. However, she understood that the public, and her publishers, expected these girls to experience romance that culminated in marriage, following the societal traditions of the time. Montgomery managed this dichotomy by having many characters experience a suspended romance, delaying the romantic aspect of the relationship for as long as possible. Arts-based practice is a mode of analysis and offers the opportunity to find a new way of understanding and communicating Montgomery's type of suspended romance. Music is, in many ways, considered romantic, so it is an appropriate medium to communicate Montgomery's romantic narrative structures. This paper investigates Montgomery's use of suspended romance in her novels and how this delay provided her characters with time to develop other areas of their lives. An arts-based methodology was used to identify and analyse recurring themes in Montgomery's work, as the question is not can Montgomery's theme of romance be musically represented but how. The result of this creative experimentation is a new musical composition that articulates these suspended romances using six different musical devices. This creative work exemplifies the intertextual link that exists between Montgomery's work and new musical compositions.
'Just like a man': A project continuing L.M. Montgomery’s subtle gender activism through the arts
There is a long history of utilising various facets of the arts in peace activism. Writing in Canada at the fin de siècle, author L.M. Montgomery's work contains numerous examples of her gender activism with her creation of peaceful societies for her female protagonists. As this was a time when women were not free to openly express dissatisfaction with their role in society, the arts were a method by which they could subtly share their views. While several authors consider Montgomery's subversive views on gender, few authors involve arts practice as part of their research. This paper will investigate Montgomery's building of strong, supportive female communities in her Anne series of novels. I will continue the culture of utilising creative arts to explore these gender dynamics by using an arts-based methodology to identify themes in Montgomery's work, resulting in a new musical composition that articulates the gender struggle. This work exemplifies how responding to gender dynamics through art continues, well beyond Montgomery's era, to provide a peaceful form of gender-based activism.