Abstract
In Anne’s House of Dreams, which Elizabeth Epperly calls Montgomery’s most philosophical novel, Montgomery delves into painful topics of loss, suicide, bad marriages, ill-timed love, poverty, and the beautiful-terrible consequences of duty. The result is a complex and nuanced consideration of faithful living in the face of unexplainable evil that functions as a lived theodicy in story form. “I reckon when the darkness is close to us it is a friend. But when we sorter push it away from us—divorce ourselves from it, so to speak, with lantern light—it becomes an enemy.” —L.M. Montgomery, Captain Jim in Anne’s House of Dreams
Highlights
Montgomery’s biographers will undoubtedly struggle to understand how to reconcile this robust and instinctive theodicy in fiction with Montgomery’s personal challenges, doubts, and fears—especially given the biographical links that critics such as Rubio, Epperly, Cowger, Drain, Gerson, and Thompson make with the novel.[89]
I am arguing in this paper that there is value in appreciating Montgomery’s experience in writing Anne’s House of Dreams in the context of war and loss
The precise links between the novel and Montgomery’s journals are compelling evidence of the interrelationship between Montgomery’s personal life and the shadows, darkness, and nuance that she writes into this novel
Summary
One of Anne’s persistent worries in House of Dreams is her inability to break through the emotional distance between her and Leslie. Like Captain Jim in approach and Montgomery in her work as a novelist—and resonant of the “sea” imagery that Epperly explores in Anne’s House of Dreams—Wright provides a response to the problem of evil that includes these same steps: considering the problem, thinking critically about it, forming a moral response, and telling the story “in such a way that, without attempting to ‘solve’ the problem in a simplistic way, we can address it in a mature fashion, and in the middle of it come to a deeper and wiser faith in the creator and redeemer God whose all-conquering love will one day make a new creation in which the dark and threatening sea of chaos will be no more.”[88]. While it is important to see the darkness, name the evil, and recognize suffering, what is critical is the practical, lived-experience response of resisting evil, supporting those who suffer, coming to terms with darkness, and telling stories that provide light in the midst of the darkness
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