They both had something to say about the feeling of being innately different from the people around them and the horrors of having to live an ordinary life. They both came to realise that their marriage was a terrible mistake.
Shared feelings of being different
Feeling fundamentally different is so common in creative people as to be almost a cliché. I have quoted Kathleen Raine on the subject.
This feeling usually goes with the territory, although they don’t
all go as far as Stella Benson did and believe that they have the souls of
snakes!
As previously mentioned, Stella Benson felt different in kind from the throng of ‘real girls’ who surrounded her. Sometimes she felt superior to them. She wrote, “I know I have something infinitely more important which these giggling girls have not.“
L. M. Montgomery too felt this way. I
mentioned in a previous article that, like many others of her kind, she felt
that she did not fully belong in this world. She seems ambivalent about this:
“It was really dreadful to be so different
from other people…and yet rather wonderful, too, as if you were a being strayed
from another star.”
-From Anne of Windy Poplars
Shared horror of an ordinary life
Stella Benson and L. M. Montgomery both
wanted to be someone; they felt that a mediocre life was not worth living.
In Lucy Maud
Montgomery’s words:
“It's bad enough
to feel insignificant, but it's unbearable to have it grained into your soul
that you will never, can never, be anything but insignificant."
-From Anne of the Island
Stella Benson said in her diary:
“I want to be great in ways that
marriage would prevent. If it was impressed upon me that I was perfectly
ordinary and my future ordinary marriage and consequent silly dependence, I
should have no illusions left to live on. I should flare up and die a burnt out
cinder.”
Being limited to living the life of an ordinary
person seems like a fate worse than death. There is nothing in it for them. It
has no attractions whatsoever. If they knew for sure that this was all that
awaited them, they would lose the will to live.
This all sounds extreme, but this is how many
writers and other creative people feel. They are strongly programmed to make a
unique contribution, and they want to be with their own people not the alien
earthlings!
Shared regret for their marriage
Both L. M. Montgomery and Stella Benson were
very unhappily married. They did not enter into the commitment in the right
spirit, nor did they have the right feelings for the men they married. Maybe
they both thought that they might as well settle for less than they had hoped
for as time was getting on and they were running out of options.
Ordinary people can get away with this and
are not punished with great suffering, but the rules are different for some
people.
It turned into a nightmare scenario for both
of them. They were both very depressed about their situations. Even reading
about their lives is depressing.
Stella Benson is on record as saying that she
must have been mad to marry such a humourless and unsympathetic man. It seemed
to her that she had given up everything and received nothing in return.
It speaks for itself that L. M. Montgomery’s
husband did not read literature at all. She often wrote that she wished she had
married someone else. She said that her life was ‘hell, hell, hell’.
They both seem doomed. Surely sinister unseen
influences were at work in their lives.
Stella Benson as a young woman:
L. M. Montgomery as a young woman:
