September 18, 2024
On Emily-Splaining
People are weird on the internet. A couple of weeks ago, a comment turned up on a post I published more than four years ago about rereading Emily of New Moon, and this commenter was not having it, unleashing a diatribe of scolding. And not even for having stolen a copy of the book from my school library (which would have been fair!), but for having understood Emily within the context of Anne, and for judging a book by its cover. Of my trouble with the drowned barn cats, they wrote “If your delicate modern sensibilities are disturbed by this, well — you need to read other books.” OMG, SERIOUSLY, COMMENTER: DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?? I have read ALL THE BOOKS. And then they proceeded to answer all the questions I’d posed in my post, which was really really annoying since these were actually the questions I’d had about the books when I was 9, and I’d actually worked most of them out by now. It was more than a little PATRONIZING.
But I’m not bringing this all up so you can be indignant along with me. (Okay, I am A LITTLE BIT). But instead because I also really understood where this annoying person was coming from—and perhaps this is why I’m especially indignant because I’m just the same. To ASSUME that you could explain L.M. Montgomery to ME! And I understand that there is a whole community of Montgomery scholars and historians, and they even have a society, and that’s fine, but I’m still quite sure that nobody there could have the connection to Montgomery and her work that I do. I’m entirely wrong about this, just in case that needs stating, but it doesn’t matter, because my connection to Anne and to L.M. Montgomery’s story feels so fundamental and so personal that it’s impossible to imagine that anyone else could precisely know what I’m talking about when I mention it. And of course they can, but there are parts of the story that were mine alone—my Anne of Green Gables clothespeg doll I bought in Fenelon Falls, the Anne of Green Gables Treasury I absolutely coveted from this folksy store at the mall and saved up for. When I was Anne for Halloween, the copies of the novel that were gifts from my Grandma. The time we were out on a boat with another family, and I asked my mom how Anne and Gilbert managed to make all their children because, according to Anne of Ingleside, they slept in separate bedrooms…
If that commenter is anything like me, they are possessive of their Emily. Other people might have their own Emily stories, but it’s not the same, and it’s the strangeness of these characters we got to know in our most formative years, the way it felt like they were speaking directly to our souls, but other readers were picking up the very same signals. The way that reading seems like such a solitary thing, a private universe, but there are so many of these, and the shock of realizing the connection may not have been quite so intimate after all.
