Kilmeny of the Orchard

A novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables. A young man named Eric Marshall goes to teach a school in a small town on Prince Edward Island and meets Kilmeny Gordon, a mute girl who has perfect hearing. He sees her when he is walking in the woods and hears her playing the violin. He visits her a number of times and gradually falls in love with her--much to the horror of Kilmeny's adopted cousin, Neil, who is besotted with Kilmeny himself and viciously, lethally jealous of Eric.

After Eric's landlady makes him realize how much he loves Kilmeny, he proposes--only to be turned down because Kilmeny doesn't want to burden him with a wife who can't speak. Meanwhile, Eric's best friend--"a specialist in troubles of the throat and voice," becomes curious as to why Eric has contracted to teach at the Lindsay school for a year when he was only planning on serving out the end of an ill friend's contract, visits the town and meets Kilmeny. Later, he examines her at Eric's insistence, though Kilmeny's uncle and aunt regard this as a waste of time, believing that her muteness is a case of the sins of the fathers being visited on the child. He determines that there is nothing physically preventing Kilmeny from speaking, but that at this point, only a desperate need to speak could shatter the psychological barrier.

"What I do mean is–a sudden, vehement, passionate inrush of desire, physical, psychical, mental, all in one, mighty enough to rend asunder the invisible fetters that hold her speech in bondage. If any occasion should arise to evoke such a desire I believe that Kilmeny would speak–and having once spoken would thenceforth be normal in that respect–ay, if she spoke but the one word."

Once Kilmeny learns this, she refuses to see Eric any longer. Her uncle advises Eric to leave Lindsay and not to try to see Kilmeny again, as she won't change her mind.

The two are wretched for some time. Then one day there is a funeral and the school is closed. Unaware of each other's plans, Eric and Kilmeny both head toward the decrepit orchard in which they first met. Kilmeny arrives shortly after Eric--just in time to see Neil creeping up behind Eric, [Ax Crazy prepared to cleave him in two with an axe]. Kilmeny, frantic, screams out a warning which saves Eric's life. Neil, panicked, flees. Later Eric learns that Neil sold his horse and left Lindsay on the harvest excursion train--which would have taken him to the Canadian prairies to help bring in a harvest, to homestead or both. Shortly after this, Mr. Marshall--Eric's father--arrives, also meets Kilmeny, and gives his blessing to their future marriage.

Tropes used in Kilmeny of the Orchard include:
  • Beauty Equals Goodness: Kilmeny is very beautiful. And so painfully, perfectly good.
  • Comedy of Remarriage: Averted with Kilmeny's mother, Margaret Gordon. Margaret marries Ronald Fraser and the two are very happy... until Ronald's first wife shows up. Ronald goes back to his first wife and dies shortly thereafter, while Margaret is permanently embittered by what has happened. While the setup is the same as it would be for a romcom with a Disposable Fiancé, the novel makes it clear that for Margaret, Ronald and Kilmeny, this was a tragedy.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Kilmeny's violin playing. Eric, on first hearing it, thinks of it as "the very soul of music, with all sense and earthliness refined away."

It was an elusive, haunting melody, strangely suited to the time and place; it had in it the sigh of the wind in the woods, the eerie whispering of the grasses at dewfall, the white thoughts of the June lilies, the rejoicing of the apple blossoms; all the soul of all the old laughter and song and tears and gladness and sobs the orchard had ever known in the lost years; and besides all this, there was in it a pitiful, plaintive cry as of some imprisoned thing calling for freedom and utterance.

 Kilmeny: "It would be doing you a great wrong to marry you when I cannot speak, and I will not do it because I love you too much to do anything that would harm you. Your world would think you had done a very foolish thing and it would be right. I have thought it all over many times since something Aunt Janet said made me understand, and I know I am doing right. I am sorry I did not understand sooner, before you had learned to care so much."

  • In the Blood: Characters in the book are distrustful of Neil Gordon, the child adopted by Thomas and Janet Gordon (the brother and sister of Kilmeny's mother Margaret). Neil's jealous and violent behaviour is attributed to his being the child of Italian parents, a view the author appears to endorse by making him the villain of the story.
  • Love At First Sight: Eric falls in love with Kilmeny the moment he sees her, which he discovers later during his...
  • Love Epiphany
  • Missing Mom: Eric's mother died when he was young. Kilmeny's mother passed away a few years before the story opens.
  • Obfuscating Disability: Played with. Kilmeny is mute, but her muteness is due to psychological reasons, not physical illness or birth defects.
  • Parental Abandonment: Neil's mother died when he was born, and his father abandoned him right after.
  • Psychopathic Manchild: Neil Gordon. Prior to his attempt to bisect Eric with an axe, he'd choked a boy he'd hated until the boy was black in the face from lack of oxygen.
  • Scenery Porn: Like all Montgomery's novels. The setting is almost a character in itself.
  • She's All Grown Up: Happens after Eric kisses Kilmeny for the first time. The kiss has a weirdly transformative effect.

He knew that it had opened the gates of womanhood to Kilmeny. Never again, he felt, would her eyes meet his with their old unclouded frankness. When next he looked into them he knew that he should see there the consciousness of his kiss. Behind her in the orchard that night Kilmeny had left her childhood.

    • He's decidedly attracted to what he sees as eighteen-year-old Kilmeny's childlike qualities before that, however.
  • So Beautiful It's a Curse: Kilmeny's mother felt this way about Kilmeny's looks.
  • Suddenly Voiced: After Kilmeny screams a warning to save Eric, she continues speaking as if she's been talking all along.
  • Throwing Off the Disability: Kilmeny...at the dramatically appropriate moment, of course.
  • Unfortunate Implications/Literature: It's stated that Neil is not a decent or trustworthy person because he's the biological child of two Italian peddlers. In fact,he comes in for a lot of criticism before he even does anything wrong. He's described as "rather too much [Italian], for decent folks' taste"; his anger is "the untamed fury of the Italian peasant thwarted in his heart's desire"; and is consistently described as an animal--either in general or specifically as a wild animal.
  • Values Dissonance: The anti-Italian attitude seems to have been a depiction of how Italians were viewed by Canadians between 1880 and 1914. Canadian distrust of Italians and official favoritism towards British and Northern European immigrants was policy for a very long time. And America was no better; for quite some time, Americans didn't view Italians as white.
    • Also, Kilmeny's conviction that a disabled woman should not marry an able-bodied man.
    • And the constant reiteration that Kilmeny is "dumb," meaning "unable to speak."
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