Rainbow Valley as Embodied Heaven: Initial Explorations into L.M. Montgomery's Spirituality in Fiction

Intriguingly, L.M. Montgomery’s generally realistic fiction is filled with fantastic elements. This article argues that by following Montgomery into the heavenly fairyland of Rainbow Valley, readers can discern a joyful, creative, imaginative, and integrated image of spiritual life in the conversations, the characters, and the magic valley itself.

polemical as she attempts to recover a critical reading of Montgomery's works while resisting reductive or dismissive approaches that include "overt and covert assumptions about romance."17 In carving out this critical path, Epperly chooses to limit the use of "romance" and "romantic" to the popular sense, while trying to leave an opening for the reader to imagine the deeper literary resonances. 18 Epperly thus includes elements of chivalric, heroic, Wordsworthian, and Victorian romance in her analysis, but focuses less on supernatural and faërie elements of romantic traditions. Thus, in her analysis, "fairy tale" is typically treated as a kind of heroic love story. For example, Epperly reads the John Meredith-Rosemary West thread in Rainbow Valley as a fairy tale with chivalric notes.19 This approach to romance takes a darker tone in Epperly's analysis of the Emily cycle, with some suggestions of faërie beyond the everyday and literary realms of romantic love. 20 Epperly admits in her 2014 preface that she might define "romance" differently today.21 Following Epperly's instinct to open the word "romance" to non-mimetic elements, this article explores romantic images from the worlds of fairy and the supernatural without negating the more popular elements of romance that Epperly explores.
Extending the definition of "romance" to include "poetry, classical myth, and the worlds. This exploration uses the following definition for the term "spirituality": what it means to "live, live fully and well"-a definition proposed by Eugene Peterson and one that works well in the current lived-experience trend among scholars of religion.
As a community leader, diarist, poet, and fiction writer, Montgomery opens up numerous possible scholarly approaches to study lived experience in her fairy-tinged fiction. A brief survey of Montgomery scholarship shows movement from exploring religious and theological constructs in Montgomery's life and writing to more intimate and embedded concepts of spirituality. In a similar vein, this study suggests a model for considering Montgomery's spirituality that turns from religious structures and doctrinal beliefs to focus upon images of spiritual life-without negating the importance of institutional and doctrinal aspects of faith. These moments that provide models for "living, living fully and well" emerge from Montgomery's text as a narrative spirituality, embedded in story, character, and theme. In particular, this study argues that Montgomery's use of faërie motifs and evocations of fairyland provoke in the reader a more capacious and imaginative view of spiritual life.
With a definition of spirituality and a model for turning to images of spiritual life in Montgomery's fiction, it is important to test the quality of Montgomery's preternatural passport by following her on a reader's pilgrimage into her work.
Montgomery has written twenty novels and at least five hundred short stories.
Given this extended bibliography and the limited nature of the study, and because for Montgomery reading held the "faithful old key to the gates of fairyland,"25 it is wise to stay as much as possible in her fiction. Narrowing in upon a single theme within a single text works to test the capacity for a narrative spirituality approach to This journey into Montgomery's fairylands will only give a few glimpses of what Montgomery is intimating for her readers; Montgomery's references to fey folk and their magical worlds are numerous and extensive. And any journey into faërie can be a perilous one.27 But as someone who grew up on Prince Edward Island's north shore and who played in Montgomery's woods and fields, I know that the inhabitants of fairyland are very shy anyway. A glimpse is all we can ever expect to get, and looking out of the corner of our eyes is the proper approach to viewing fairy folk in their natural environment. It is fitting, then, that the turn to spirituality in story is also a kind of sideways glance, a looking away and a shy peek into other worlds. Jane Cowan Fredeman suggests that to understand what Montgomery is doing, we must "understand the distinction made in the novels between fantasy and those true glimpses beyond the veil which separate the real from an ideal world."28 I think, by contrast, that if readers follow Montgomery into fairyland-on this particular journey, into Rainbow Valley-they will discover that in those enchanted woods and lanes that the veil between the worlds is torn away.
So if you are kindred spirits, if you are of the race that knows Joseph29 and are kin to tribes of elfland,30 if you are "that kind of people" that see rock people on the Island's north shores,31 if you are of the "sect of dreamers"32 or the "household of faith,"33 if you are "children of light"34-by birthright or by any other means-or even if you are "next door to a perfect heathen"35 with bright eyes and an open heart-if you have eyes to see-you are invited on this journey.

The Turn to Spirituality
As this is a quest to discern Montgomery's storied spirituality, it is important to pause and define what is meant by "spirituality" as a heuristic tool and to consider this particular approach to discerning how stories can reveal ideas about the spiritual life. As it is such a widely popular term, "spirituality" can be quite ambiguous. As diverse as definitions are, contemporary scholars in the study of Christian spirituality consistently use the words "lived," "life," or "living."36 Eugene This combination of heart-closeness and numinous awe is perhaps a way to capture Anne's rapturous response to natural beauty in her first drive from Bright River to Green Gables. She cries "Oh!" numerous times in response to scenes that transcend Matthew's sense of ordinary natural beauty. Anne wonders, slips into reverie, lifts her face in rapture, and sighs-struck dumb at one moment and speaking in constant delight the next.38 When she sees "the Avenue" she declares, "It's the first thing I ever saw that couldn't be improved upon by imagination. It just satisfies me."39 Anne places her hand upon her breast and speaks of the queer and funny yet pleasant ache she feels there. While Matthew cannot recall having this sort of heartache, Anne admits that she feels it often-and feels a similar thrill in first seeing the Lake of Shining Waters and silent reverence in first seeing Green Gables as they come around a bend in the path. Anne feels rapture in nature, in walks, in friendship, and in art. This rapture combines with reverence and a "thrill of joy" and a countenance that is only "half-earthly" as she meditates upon the Cuthberts' chromolithograph, "Christ Blessing Little Children."40 Other of Montgomery's characters combine transcendence and intimacy in ways analogous to Anne, including the complex experience of the "flash" in the Emily trilogy.41 At the beginning of Emily of New Moon, the reader meets Emily as though she lives in a Garden of Eden-with Adam and Eve and an apple tree between them-and reading The Pilgrim's Progress. 42 Often enough, Emily walks "the straight and narrow path with Christian and Christiana,"43 but soon, she is running through the "spruce barrens" and "sloping pastures" in "a place where magic was made."44 She is a character of "fairy birthright"-the kin of the elfin folk, her father calls her-and companion to all "the fairies of the white clover and satin catkins, the little green folk of the grass, the elves of the young fir-trees, sprites of wind and wild fern and thistledown."45 She plays hide and seek with the Wind Woman as "there was a sudden rift in the curdled clouds westward, and a lovely, pale, pinkygreen lake of sky with a new moon in it."46 At the sight, Emily clasps her hands, turns her head upwards, and knows in her heart she must write about it. And then, "for one glorious, supreme moment, came 'the flash.'"47 This short introduction brings together images of Emily's familial, literary, religious, faërie, magical, and mystical imagination. These moments then culminate in the indescribable experience of the flash, which Alice Munro calls a "moment of joy, of pure recognition"48 and that Epperly says offers a "tantalizing glimpse of a world beyond, where beauty lives"-an experience of transcendence that "consecrates" Emily to her poetry.49 In Anne's early encounters in Avonlea and Emily's experience of the flash, Montgomery describes well the intermingling of transcendent otherness and immanent experience that Peterson uses to define spirituality.
Thinking of both the transcendent and the intimate, the heavenly and mundane, Peterson argues that at its heart, spirituality is about "Living, living fully and well."50 Throughout his writing on the spiritual life, Peterson consistently uses poetry and story to reveal the implications of living fully and well. Story, Peterson argues, "is the most natural way of enlarging and deepening our sense of reality, and then enlisting us as participants in it."51 There is for Peterson something theologically essential about story: "Reality is story-shaped. The world is story-shaped. Our lives are story-shaped."52 Theologian of literature Sallie McFague argues that "ordinary life and the transcendent" likewise meet in theology and in stories because they "are so intertwined that there is no way of separating them out."53 There is an integrative reality to lived spirituality as it is tucked into the stories people tell one another and as it reveals itself in the books readers enjoy, potentially leading them into "a new way to live ordinary life."54 This focus upon the emergent quality of spiritual life in story form is what I call a narrative spirituality.
Admittedly, "spirituality" as a term would have been somewhat foreign in Montgomery's context; there appears to be only one occurrence of the term in

Heavenly Discourses in Rainbow Valley
Drawing upon myriad traditions of wonder-magic, fairyland, myth, religion-the valley's "enchantment" is the spiritual background against which Montgomery presents a second way of thinking about heaven in Rainbow Valley, namely the "nice tasty discourse[s] on heaven" that arise.94 Rainbow Valley begins thinking about heaven because heaven is built into its essential framework. Susan Baker considers how everyone will be beautiful in the afterlife95 and doubts that being a polyglot paves the way to heaven in any particular way. 96 The second chapter introduces the "beloved Rainbow Valley" and the report that "Little Jem said once he would rather go to Rainbow Valley than to heaven when he died,"97 a comment that is filled with the kind of impropriety that Susan always struggles with but that demonstrates the tangible link between heaven as a concept and Rainbow Valley as a sacred space.
Others in the text wrestle with questions of what heaven may be like. In a friendly debate with Susan Baker and Anne Blythe, Miss Cornelia contests the "everlasting rest doctrine,"98 arguing that she wants "to bustle round in heaven the same as here," pitching in on whatever "celestial substitute for pies and doughnuts" exists in the great beyond.99 Susan objects when someone imagines out loud that they will laugh and cry when greeting lost loved ones in heaven. When pressed, she relents a little: "I might go so far as to say that you both would have to smile now and again, but I can never admit that there will be laughing in heaven. The idea seems really irreverent, Mrs. Dr. dear."100 While this discourse could be dismissed as mere "kitchen talk," the conversation reveals important theological points that rhyme with the discoveries of the children discussed below. As the children will contemplate the revelation that heaven has trees and natural beauty, so the adults discover that there is creativity in heaven and good work to do-"something that has to be made."101 There is laughter and enjoyment in the kingdom of heaven, something that Anne suspects, even as a next door-to-a-heathen child under the Experimentally, tentatively, I have argued that by following Montgomery into the fairylands in her realistic fiction, we can learn something about how to live fully and well. To cross this temenos, to move beyond the threshold into Montgomery's fairyland, we do not need a Narnian wardrobe. Walter and his siblings do not enter an ethereal rabbit hole or tangible door in the air to find their way into Rainbow Valley; it is their imaginations that are key. Anne does not arrive in Avonlea through Platform 9¾ but takes the 5:30 train to Bright River and rides home to Green Gables in Matthew's buggy, tugged along by the sorrel mare. In the way that Montgomery has constructed her fictional universe, even in Rainbow Valley where Anne is not at the front of the narrative, Anne herself is the "woods between the worlds," and she passes this imaginative inheritance to the children of Rainbow Valley. Anne is the "wicket gate" into a land of wonder, the portkey into imagination, the guide to and embodiment of elfin lands. Anne carries fairyland in her own being, for, as Epperly has noted, the "mixture of magic and fact" in Montgomery's fiction "is personified in Anne herself."122 Thus, in following Montgomery into her realistic fiction, as in Brenton is married to a superstar kindergarten teacher, Kerry, and they parent a red-headed teenager son, Nicolas, who is working to become a rock legend.