The "Disappointed" House: Trance, Loss, and the Uncanny in L. M. Montgomery's Emily Trilogy

The "Disappointed" House:Trance, Loss, and the Uncanny in L. M. Montgomery's Emily Trilogy Kate Lawson (bio) The three novels that make up the Emily trilogy—Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, and Emily's Quest —were written by L. M. Montgomery from 1923 to 1927. The Emily series is a marked departure for Montgomery from what had become the "stale" Anne books. Although similar in tracing the growth and development of an orphan girl from childhood through adolescence to adulthood, the Emily trilogy as a whole hints at darker forces of personality and identity than are evident in Anne of Green Gables and its immediate successors.1 This essay examines the repeated psychic or supernatural experiences in Emily's life and argues that they point to or figure a traumatic lack and absence. Seen through the lens of Freud's paradoxical notion of the unheimlich, Emily's uncanny experiences reveal that the familiar world in which she lives is also inhabited by figurations of loss and estrangement. Freud claims that the uncanny is a disturbing combination of dread and horror in which the "homelike" and the "unhomely," the familiar and the unfamiliar, the known and the unknown, the human and the inhuman merge.2 Arguably, Emily's supernatural vision in each of the three novels relates to a house or homelike space that resonates strongly with her imaginative sense of the familiar: in Emily of New Moon, Beatrice Burnley is returning happily home to her husband and baby when Emily "sees" her meet her tragic death; in Emily Climbs, Emily claims to "own" the empty house that a boy, Allan Bradshaw, has inquisitively explored and then found himself unable to escape; in Emily's Quest, Teddy Kent is returning home to Canada from Europe when Emily, thousands of miles away, prevents him from boarding a fatal ship. The clearest connection between the uncanny stories is the idea of leaving and returning home and of that home being unhomely, "inhabited" by emptiness and loss. Each of Emily's visions involves a light-hearted, innocent, even joyous journey that meets, or almost meets, with disaster rather than with a safe return to the familiar and reassuring. Each trip thus involves a perilous detour, indicating [End Page 71] that the return to the homelike, and therefore the home itself, is fraught with complication and danger. In one sense, Emily seems to be a third party to these dangerous returns home, since her visions could be read as magical and selfless "good deeds" that assist others in clearing away painful misapprehensions or preventing tragic loss. In Emily of New Moon she heals the Burnley family by recovering the truth about their dead wife and mother, Beatrice; in Emily Climbs she assists a family by finding their lost and dying son; in Emily's Quest she prevents her friend Teddy from boarding a doomed ship. Save perhaps the last event, which involves her fraught relationship with Teddy Kent, these experiences seem largely unconnected to Emily's own psychic life. Further, Emily herself, unlike other characters, seems to avoid dangerous journeys to the unhomely by remaining attached to New Moon; although she lives in or visits other houses—the house in the hollow that she shared with her father, her Aunt Ruth's house in Shrewsbury, where she attends college, her great-aunt Nancy's house, Wyther Grange—Emily is and remains "Emily of New Moon"; she is not, like Anne of Green Gables, later linked to other or larger homes—Avonlea, Island, or "House of Dreams." Whereas Emily's friends Use, Teddy, and Perry leave the Blair Water area, whether for Charlottetown, Montreal, or Europe, Emily refuses the offer to pursue her career in New York and remains "of" New Moon, bound to one place and one home. The other houses that play an important role in Emily's psychic life are all, significantly, empty houses: the Old John house, where she and her friends seek shelter from a snow storm, the shore house that she feels she "owns," and the "Disappointed" house that she and Dean lovingly furnish during their engagement. Thus although Emily is strongly connected to the homelike and familiar...