The Cheerful Lie

Käthe Kollwitz, "The Mothers"

Although best known for her Anne of Green Gables fiction series, L.M. Montgomery was first published as a poet.* Yet during her lifetime, Montgomery published only one poem that explicitly addresses the First World War: “Our Women.”** A cursory reading of “Our Women” is likely to dismiss the poem as naively patriotic, but when read in the context of Montgomery’s other war writings and her personal grief, the poem reveals a complex, ambivalent view of the conflict. In its three short stanzas, Montgomery describes three women, each of whom is grappling with the emotional traumas of war.

"Would some thoughtful hand in this
distant land please scatter some 
flowers for me?" 

Our Women

Bride of a day, your eye is bright,
   And the flower of your cheek is red.
‘He died with a smile on a field of France—
   I smile for his sake,’ she said.

Mother of one, the baby you bore
   Sleeps in a chilly bed.
‘He gave himself with a gallant pride—
   Shall I be less proud?’ she said.

Woman, you weep and sit apart,
   Whence is your sorrow fed?
‘I have none of love or kin to go—
   I am shamed and sad,’ she said.
       —L.M. Montgomery

Each of the bereaved women portrayed in “Our Women” is isolated, walled off within her own stanza, set apart from both the grief and the comfort of others. Each speaks to herself in a private monologue of mourning. 

In the first stanza, a new bride attempts to convince herself that she must appear happy, and so she determinedly represses her grief at the death of her husband. She encourages herself to believe the implausible story that was often written in letters informing women of their husband’s, son’s, and sweetheart’s deaths: the end was quick and painless; he “died with a smile.” Mirroring the action of her husband at the moment of his death, the bride smiles “for his sake,” offering up the arduous task of concealing her own anguish as an act of patriotic service akin to that of her husband’s. Like soldiers who neither speak nor write of the horrors they witness at the front, women are also engaged in the nation-wide practice of telling, selling, and believing what Montgomery refers to in both Rilla of Ingleside and her journals as “the cheerful lie.”***

In the second stanza, a mother persuades herself to feel proud that her son is dead. First World War researchers have argued that the pressure on women to forego public mourning was especially true for mothers: “In many cultures, mothers were expected to disavow their grief and channel it into forms of patriotism and heightened nationalistic pride.”†  Nearly all countries involved in the First World War attempted to harness the political power of the ideals of Mother and Motherhood. Before the 1918 German offensive, Canadian General Sir Arthur Currie addressed his troops: “To those who will fall I say, ‘you will not die, but step into immortality. Your mothers will not lament your fate, but will be proud to have borne such sons.’”†† Taking pride in a child’s death was one of the ways that mothers were encouraged to find a sense of worth and purpose during the war. 

The only woman who allows herself to weep is the woman who has no one to give to the war. Both the grieving bride and mother define themselves in their relationships to the soldiers they have loved and lost. Both women model their behaviour after that of their soldier, giving smile for smile, pride for pride. The childless woman sits alone and weeps in shame: she does not have a loved one to sacrifice to the war. 

Montgomery’s personal situation was closest to the solitary figure described in the third stanza. Montgomery’s husband, Ewan Macdonald, was forty-four years old when the war began; her eldest son, Chester, had just turned two; and her second son, Hugh, was stillborn on August 13, 1914, just nine days after England declared war on Germany.†††  The loss of her infant son devastated Montgomery. In her thinking and writing, Montgomery’s maternal grief becomes entangled with the dead of the war. Like the women whose sons died far from home, she is haunted by the thought of her son “lying lonely in his little grave” and imagines hearing his cry: “Little Hugh was calling to me from his grave—‘Mother, won’t you come to me?’”†††† For Montgomery, the tragedy of her son’s death at birth is linked to the larger national tragedy of the war. Given this context, the shamed, weeping woman of “Our Women” who has no son to surrender to the state may be read as a disguised expression of the author’s own grief. 

Strikingly and at its core, Montgomery’s “Our Women” subverts the traditional elegy. There is no mourning for soldiers who have died; tears are shed only for the absence of bodies to lie on the altar of sacrifice. Mourning is reserved for the woman who sits apart, shamed and isolated in her own No Man’s Land. This woman feeds on the sorrow of failure, a failure to participate in the womanly patriotism that her culture and her country demand of her. “Our Women” is an anti-elegy that focuses not on men’s deaths, but on women’s interior experiences of war. The poem speaks with an undercurrent of quiet despair as it catalogues women’s limited options for action and emotion during the First World War. 

I published a more fully developed essay on the subject in the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies: “‘I Smile for His Sake’: Unmasking Grief in L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Our Women.’”
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* Her poem “On Cape Le Force” appeared in the Charlotte Daily Patriot in 1890, when Montgomery was fifteen years old.
** “Our Women” was published in John W. Garvin’s Canadian Poems of the Great War, McClelland and Stewart, 1918.
*** L.M. Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside, Virago, 2014, p. 160 and L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1911–1917, (24 July 1915), p. 200.
† Joy Demousi, “Gender and Mourning” in Susan R. Grayzel and Tammy M. Proctor (eds.) Gender and the Great War, 2017, p. 213.
†† Arthur Currie, qtd. in Suzanne Evans’ Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief, McGill-Queens UP, 2007, p. 77.
††† For further discussion of Montgomery, motherhood, and the death of Hugh, see Rita Bode’s “LM Montgomery and the Anguish of Mother Loss,” in Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict, edited by Jean Mitchell, Cambridge Scholars, 2008, pp. 50–66; and Tara K. Parmiter’s “Like a Childless Mother: LM Montgomery and the Anguish of a Mother’s Loss,” in L.M. Montgomery and Gender, edited by E. Holly Pike and Laura M. Robinson, MQUP, 2021, pp. 316–330.
†††† L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1911–1917, (Sept. 3rd and 8th, 1914), pp. 165, 167.