3:22am May 13, 2015

Rilla of Ingleside (mild spoilers, this is your only warning, also cw for stalking and institutions and war)

It’s actually my favorite book in the entire Anne of Green Gables series. I read the whole series once while recuperating from an illness: I tend to read “easy” stuff at times like that, because my brain won’t handle anything better.

Anyway, this was a very surprising book to me. It’s different from any other book in the entire series. It sucked me straight into what World War I was like for at least some of the Canadian women left behind. And it remains the only book written by a Canadian woman who lived through World War I, about the experiences of Canadian women during World War I.

To give you a glimpse of the changed tone – you know that famous imagination of Anne’s? She says that these days the only use it is, is to give her vivid images of all the different ways her sons could die in combat. They talk about body lice (!). And Rilla grows from an irresponsible and frivolous teen to a responsible adult within the course of the book.

But the reason I was thinking of it today, is because there was an interaction between characters that reminds me of interactions I’ve had with my (primary) stalker.

There’s another girl Rilla’s age (they’re in their mid to late teens) who is quite a bit of an asshole. Rilla, like all of her family, has taken the idea very seriously that as women it’s part of their job to be strong, so that their family, friends, and significant others who are off fighting the war don’t have to take care of their feelings in addition to the horrors they’re living with. So they have very intense feelings about the whole matter, but they aren’t about to show them in public. You can debate whether this is a good idea or not, but I could see the logic behind it in a way I never had before.

(I have a lot of relatives who are veterans, but I’ve never had anyone close to me go off to war while I was alive. This book gave me a window into what that can be like, and what it was like in a war that was unlike one anyone had ever seen. The book also showed me how important World War I was to 20th century history and beyond. It changed everything.)

Anyway, so the girl who was being an asshole, was not only not hiding her feelings (which would’ve been okay, in and of itself, it seems to me that’s a personal choice that can go either way for any number of reasons) but was exaggerating her feelings to get sympathy from others, and then pointing at Rilla and saying “See, she has no feelings even though her boyfriend and brothers are all off fighting. She’s a heartless, soulless monster.”

And that made me feel really vindicated at the time.

Because my stalker was saying similar things about me. She was posting all over the web about how distraught I made her, how I was ruining her life, making her lose weight from sheer terror (because I was “stealing her life story” and therefore must have been stalking her since I was an age too young to understand what stalking was… all of this being purely made up on her part to make me look really bad), and on and on and on. And how since I was still fat (although I did go through a period where I was too scared of her to eat, I hold onto calories better than her for reasons both hereditary and related to prior starvation), and since I wasn’t writing about her, and since I wasn’t writing about how upset I was, and etc., then I must just be a heartless soulless monstrous sociopath who has no regard for the feelings of others and no feelings of my own.

The truth was I wasn’t putting my feelings out there because I felt that would make me more vulnerable, which is the truth. Any time I showed her what really hurt me, she’d do whatever it took to hurt me in that way, and she’d gleefully announce what she was doing, but in a way where nobody else could understand she was threatening me.

Case in point: I once confided in her that a reason I didn’t like being accused of “copying people” (something she accused me of constantly) was that when I was in mental institutions, special ed, and day programs, there was this sequence of events that always happened: One person would get upset, and get taken into the seclusion room or whatever passed for one in the place we were at. They would get treated badly, of course, but not as badly as… the next person to get upset. The next person to get upset would get accused of “feeding off of” or “copying” the first person. And they would also get punished by seclusion room, only their punishment was worse and longer for being second. And if a third person got upset, given that there were only two seclusion rooms per ward (plus sometimes wards shared seclusion rooms with other wards, and sometimes there was a bedroom with a restraint bed they could use as a seclusion room in a pinch)… at any rate, if the seclusion rooms on a ward were full, and you did something that resulted in them putting you in seclusion, they had to carry you to one of the adult wards, and they would treat you even worse. Again, for “feeding off of,” “copying”, etc.

So when my stalker wanted to threaten me with something, she said “I will make sure that you are always second.” A statement that sounds innocuous, but actually means “I am going to trigger the fuck out of you on purpose, and yet claim to be the one who’s really triggered and that you’re just feeding off of/copying me.” That kind of thing.

Anyway, the asshole girl in Rilla of Ingleside reminded me of my stalker in that one way. She didn’t issue death threats the way my stalker did, but she did run around claiming emotions well beyond the ones she actually had (which my stalker definitely did, don’t ask how I know, it’s too long a story, but I can say that many of the things she did to make it seem like I was hurting her emotionally, were purely setups on her part, not actually spontaneous displays of emotion in response to something I’d really done), and she did run around claiming that Rilla’s attempts to keep her own emotions in check so that she could function and so that her boyfriend and brothers wouldn’t have her to worry about while they were off fighting… that this meant Rilla was inhuman basically. And that’s all very vindicating to read when you’ve been subject to that kind of treatment.

And yes, that’s one of many reasons that I don’t engage directly with my stalker or show most of my emotions on the matter in public: Because I know it will just end up hurting me or people I care about. It’s not fair that life is like this, but life isn’t fair. And I was surprised at the level of depth in this book compared to the others in the series. Not that I didn’t like some of the others, but this one has got to be my favorite.

(If you read it, get the version that wasn’t Bowdlerized to remove anti-Germaan sentiment and things like that. Yes, there are some offensive things said in the book. But i think they were reflecting what the author had actually seen and heard people saying at the time, and while she could’ve handled it differently I’m sure, she didn’t. And I’d far rather read the version she actually wrote, rather than the version that was rewriten for her to take out the parts that later generations found unpalatable.)

I’m not sure whether it’s one of the books that is free, or whether you have to pay some kind of small fee tto read it – it all depends on the copyright date, and I remember the series straddling the date when copyright becomes an issue in obtaining the books. I downloaded it online and put it on my Kindle, along with the rest, and had an Anne of Green Gables marathon while I was recuperating from some illness or another (I still don’t remember which – given the timing, I’m wondering if it was the onset of my 2008 health crisis, when the myasthenia and the adrenal insufficiency both kicked in with a vengeance – a time when I was also hiding that fact from the online world, for fear of showing a vulnerability my stalkers could exploit… and they would have, had they known how sick I was). And it’s still probably my favorite Anne book even though it’s really more a Rilla book (Anne is her mother).