Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict

by Jean Mitchell (Editor)

In the past quarter century, L. M. Montgomery has emerged as the most internationally influential Canadian writer of the first half of the 20th century. This coincided with the publication, starting in 1985, of Montgomery's own personal journals, kept from 1889 to 1942. They revealed an incredibly complex and well-read woman, one as witty as she was tortured. Storm and Dissonance is a collection of inter-related essays that explore how and why Montgomery's 'gentle landscapes and optimistic stories contain undercurrents of anger, malice, relentless gossip, obsession, and violence' that haunt the margins of Montgomery's work before the reader gets to her 'happy endings'. Edited and introduced by Island-born anthropologist Jean Mitchell, the essays enrich the reader's understanding of Montgomery's complex ways of coding experiences and perceptions. This book is important for anyone interested in Montgomery's artistry and in her creation of cultural images that resonate more than one hundred years later.

415 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Manybooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict features twenty individual academic essays (and all appearing with source notes and a list of words cited) as well as an introduction and an epilogue by editor Jean Mitchell that explore and analyse the darker side of both L.M. Montgomery’s fiction and also her published journals (Montgomery's often unhappy and fraught with mental health issues life and marriage, how the conflict and dissonance of the book title are represented and sometimes quite painfully so in her work and often reflect L.M. Montgomery's own life and its challenges, troublesome translation issues, problematic media representations of in particular Anne Shirley, questions as to whether Anne's beloved Green Gables is actually ecologically "green" and indeed much much more).

Thus yes and in my humble opinion, Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict is most definitely an important and equally a necessary contribution and addition to L.M. Montgomery criticism and research (and it certainly is quite frustrating and annoying that Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict is both not in current print and also quite difficult to obtain used). Because it is indeed high time to point out and to also concentrate on the fact and the truth of the matter (even if this might potentially be uncomfortable) that although Montgomery's novels and short stories textually show much that is the proverbial sweetness and light, seemingly always lurking below the surface and sometimes even pretty much on the surface are or at least can be pain and sometimes even intense emotional anguish (such as for example with Anne Blythe's daughter dying shortly after birth and Leslie Moore's intense domestic unhappiness in Anne's House of Dreams and with Walther Blythe's death on the WWI battlefields of France in Rilla of Ingleside), that L.M. Montgomery’s own disenchantment and emotional suffering (made very much evident in the posthumous publication of her private journals) are also rather abundantly present in her work, that how publishers, translators and the media have approached and considered both author and oeuvre has often been seething and teeming with negativity, full of conflict and also showing to and for me rather a major lack of personal respect.

So yes and indeed, by exploring these aspects of Montgomery’s writing and in her biography, the twenty essays of Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict provide new and intriguing, enlightening insights into the complexity of Montgomery's work and life, showing that Montgomery’s gentle landscapes and optimistic stories often contain intense undercurrents of sadness, horror, anger, malice, obsession, loss, violence and destructiveness and that especially the media and publishers/translators also and really do have a lot to proverbially answer for, since for example, the entire "Anne Shirley is a Lesbian" fiasco in 2000 actually should never have happened as Laura Robinson pretty clearly and convincingly points out in her article for Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict that her academic conference paper on Lesbian desire in Anne of Green Gables actually never once does claim that Anne Shirley and Diana Barry are actual Lesbians and that the German translation of Anne of Green Gables for one only happened in 1986 (after the Kevin Sullivan mini-series was shown in Germany) and for two was actually closer to Sullivan's movie script than to L.M. Montgomery's text (argued very astutely by Monika Seifert, of much personal interest to and for me, but also leaving me frustrated, angry and majorly glad that I have in fact not read Anne of Green Gables in German).

Five stars for Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict, with every article (and also the introduction and the epilogue) both readable and containing textual messages with which I strongly happen to agree (and which is a hugely pleasant personal surprise, as generally, for essay collections, I do tend to enjoy some offerings much more than others) and that even with Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict not being in print and not all that easy to find, this book is highly recommended and as such also well worth seeking out for serious and interested L.M. Montgomery fans.