osprey_archer | Book Review: Pat of Silver Bush

I’ve got a bit of a backlog of Montgomery reviews, which I’ll be posting over the next few days, because they’ve piled up rather while I was pondering what to write about Pat of Silver Bush.

This is one of my favorite Montgomery novels, which is, I understand, a minority view. But I see a lot of myself in Pat, in her hatred of change, her desire to remain a child forever (I once read a book which asserted “All children want to grow up,” and I’ve never felt so alienated), her lamentations that it really is a pity that people have to grow up and get married and move away.

I don’t, admittedly, share her intense domesticity: her love of washing dishes, her enthusiasm for spring cleaning the house from top to bottom, her general desire to make her childhood home Silver Bush her life’s work. But it is fascinating to me that this domesticity actually makes Pat feel alienated from most of the girls she knows. As she sighs to Judy (a servant at Silver Bush, but really Pat’s foster-mother in all but name), “I don’t seem to be like other girls, Judy. They all want to go to college and have a career. I don’t… I just want to stay at Silver Bush and help you and mother.”

The 1930s seems rather early for all the other girls to be wanting college and a career, and yet here’s Pat already sighing over it. (Of course, part of this is that there was a backlash against this sort of thing in the 1950s, and the memory of the later decade tends to efface the earlier one nowadays.)

But if Pat isn’t like the other, modern girls, she’s not the traditional girl her elders might desire, either. She doesn’t want to get married and have what society would regard as a home of her own. Nor will she ever fulfill the average readers’ desire that she stop crying over every tree that gets cut down and find some greater ambition than washing the dishes till they shine.

Pat knows exactly who she is and what she wants, and what she wants is to stay in her own home, her childhood home, and love it and take care of it and ensure that here in this one place nothing ever changes. She cannot and will not change to please anyone else, and I admire the pigheadedness even as I recognize that in trying to stop change, Pat might as well be trying to stop the sun.