Notes on “Chronicles of Avonlea” and “Further Chronicles of Avonlea”

[x_los]

- It’s so weird to be done with this series (save for the unfinished “The Blythes are Quoted”, which will also be the only one I’ve read rather than listened to).

- There’s a weird tonal melange, most noticeably with the second book’s low-income gothic, high-key regionalism: it’s like Faulkner with happy endings.

- The endings are almost always happy, and it makes me think of the extent to which people say Dickens is a sentimentalist par excellence, which isn’t really true, because people talk shit about Dickens more than they read Dickens or his contemporaries (and when they read him, they read him badly, through a haze of vague, self-serving preconceptions about The Victorian.) This work is more technically ‘sentimental’, but it’s effectively so, and I’m not sure many of these projects would have necessarily been improved by more varied endings or a greater inclusion of the possibility of disaster.

- I was really often emotionally affected by these. Is it cheap if it works?

- The thing I will say there, though, is that the presentation of heterosexual union as life-fulfilment is relentless in these, as a pattern. It’s not bad to read but it is THE shape of a story, which almost inevitably takes up the burden of showing us a woman’s whole Fate and rewarding her struggles with mawwidge, what bwings us hwere twoday. The one adventure of life for the middle classes, to paraphrase Dizzy.

- Partly, the issue here is that short stories are not a favourite mode of mine.

- I didn’t necessarily feel like the best use was made of the series’ already huge cast of characters. We could have seen them in more roles rather than being left to wonder how many people actually live in this ‘small’ town. Part of the problem here, though, is that I didn’t necessarily always catch a familiar name. I think I’m over-all right, but there may have been a few connections I lost track of.

- The age-gap story in “Further” feels slightly Austen-inflected in its delivery as well as its tone.

- The final story in “Further” is thoroughly, violently and unremittingly racist in a totally unprecedented way I did not know this series had in it. There’s something sickening about watching the author describe behaviour she’d be sympathetic to in a white female character as proof of a partly Native American girl’s alienness and inherent lowness. The statements that this character only looks like a person, is only, with her education and feelings, playing ‘a girl’ in a thin and unconvincing way while actually being an animal are poisonous. The piece is so nasty that it undercuts your general trust in the writer’s broader ability to understand people, which is her entire selling point and the lynchpin of the series.

This story also rests on the laughable conceit of Eastern Canada as somehow European, free from its own Native American population (alive and well on Prince Edward Island this whole fucking time?). It’s like when these books talk about mighty ‘old families’. I’m supposed to believe some small town, three generation deep colonial affair is impressive? I can’t. It’s not fucking Manderley, or even Red Shift. We’re ranking absolute nobodies out in the provinces who’ve lived here all of ten minutes in historical time, what ‘established family seat’? Is that at the root of this frantic defensiveness? Guilt, and a suppressed knowledge of how thoroughly everyone here fails, by the stupid, classed and racist standards they’re establishing and enforcing? ‘They didn’t understand that though he was only a telegraph operator/factory girl, his second cousin was a baronet!!!’ *fart noises forever*

We’re told at some point in this mess that the white girl love rival of the cursed but beautiful ‘breed’ (half-breed) has ‘good island blood in her’. If she did, she’d be Native American herself, and the writer couldn’t go a sentence without implying she too was subhuman, like a hot, fuckable farm animal or something. What an awful note to end your series on! Way to sour your book and your overall project in one move.

Comments

[sallymn]

Interesting - I haven't seen the series but did read the books of short stories when I was much younger. Most of the stories had happy endings but as I recall some of them were anything but...

[x_los]

Yeah, I think reading both the collections together in a glut made me focus on overall percentages, maybe--a strong feeling of dominant patterns.

[sallymn]

I believe she had a mostly unhappy life, and sometimes for me there's a strain of sharp bitterness that shows through, mostly breifly but definitely there and it actually makes the story it's in better than the general run of similar writing.

[x_los]

I think that’s true, she’s definitely in touch with that emotional register and enfolding it into many of these.