tANNEgent

Book 1. Chapter 1. tANNEgent 4. Is Marilla … kind of a bigot? Yes.

I am not coming at you if you love Marilla. I am saying loving Marilla means understanding her journey, and understanding her journey requires some honesty about where she begins.

Well, we’ve been thinking about it for some time—all winter in fact,” returned Marilla. “Mrs. Alexander Spencer was up here one day before Christmas and she said she was going to get a little girl from the asylum …  So Matthew and I have talked it over off and on ever since. We thought we’d get a boy. Matthew is getting up in years, you know—he’s sixty—and he isn’t so spry as he once was. His heart troubles him a good deal. And you know how desperate hard it’s got to be to get hired help. There’s never anybody to be had but those stupid, half-grown little French boys; and as soon as you do get one broke into your ways and taught something he’s up and off to the lobster canneries or the States. At first Matthew suggested getting a Home boy. But I said ‘no’ flat to that. ‘They may be all right—I’m not saying they’re not—but no London street Arabs for me,’ I said. ‘Give me a native born at least. There’ll be a risk, no matter who we get. But I’ll feel easier in my mind and sleep sounder at nights if we get a born Canadian.’

In the first conversation we hear Marilla having, she is openly biased if not bigoted against the French—Acadians, that is—as well as immigrants generally and Arabs specifically.

Look me in the eyes and tell me there are not still Anglophones like Marilla in the Maritimes.

I THOUGHT SO.

Today social media is full of Canadians talking about their local Tim Horton’s staff with exactly the same level of kindness that Marilla demonstrates here. The progress I suppose is that Marilla’s stance was once near universal, and it is at long last becoming the marginal rantings of Facebook’s worst people.

It is also important to note that Marilla’s open mindedness to orphans at all put her in a progressive position than her neighbour Rachel Lynde.

There was a social hierarchy in 19th-century Prince Edward Island, at least for those who believed themselves to be on the top of it. Families that had lived there longer were better than newer ones. If they were white and Anglophone that is, because the social ranking of the French-speaking Acadians was lower, and the First Nations even lower still. And within the Anglophone old families, LM Montgomery came from a lowland Scottish family who saw themselves as above highland Scottish people who were in turn better than the Irish.

LM Montgomery herself demonstrated similar biases to Marilla outside of her novels. And she evolved, a little, but not totally, over the course of her life. Like Marilla.

In terms of narrative structure, if Marilla were perfect from the start, she could not grow. We don’t get much in the way of evidence that Marilla’s ethnic biases improve in the series.

But her view of orphans will. This is basic contact hypothesis, that while some people are rigid bigots, many people will become more open with exposure to and familiarity with diversity.

Those people, those Marillas, those LM Montgomerys even, require the people who they are biased against to remain in their lives for them to have a chance to grow. This is where it gets so messy. Obviously we should not make people stay around people who are bigoted against them.

In historic fiction, accurate bigotries make modern readers uncomfortable because we should be uncomfortable with those bigotries. Yet, it would not be fair to Acadians, for example, if the way LM Montgomery coped with our history of both being on Prince Edward Island and being a disdained underclass was to either erase us from the story or pretend everyone respected us.

We can just chalk Marilla up to being a product of her time and place. And sure enough, she would be. But product of their time arguments fall apart when we remember in every time some people did oppose the bigotries, the victims of it foremost but also other, kinder neighbours. Yet, the opposite temptation to dismiss the worth of characters who have preconceived biases has its own risks. Ultimately very few of us will survive the scrutiny of perfect inclusivity at all stages of our life.

Marilla can be both problematic and a compassionate woman who took in an orphan. Most of us have biases and blindspots, that we should not excuse, but we also should not write off people for being wrong from the start. Some end up right, or even just better, in the end.