Any thoughts on Shirley’s relationship with Susan compared to Anne and the way he starts calling Susan “Mother Susan”? I kinda feel like Susan stole one of Anne kids ☠️
I think for Shirley, or any other more minor canon character that doesn’t get a huge amount of time in the spotlight, that it’s easy for readers to grab onto sparse canon fragments and expound on them tenfold because really – it’s all you have. For instance say X character is mentioned only twice in a novel, and each time they happened to be wearing pink sunglasses… now in fanon the jump is “X’s favourite colour is pink, and they only wear pink because they love it so much, and they always dreamed of having pink hair…” (this is a supremely stupid example, but you know what I mean?) and so on, and imo you can get really exaggerated versions of certain characters this way. And I do think this is sometimes the case with Shirley (even though it’s an impulse I understand, and one born out of necessity), and this is how we end up with some believing or thinking Shirley isn’t as much of a Blythe as the rest of his family, or that he prefers Susan to Anne, or that he isn’t very close to Anne, or even as you say, that he continued to call Susan “mother Susan” after the war. When really, we have no textual evidence to support that it did continue. It’s one of those things like yeah sure, it is possible… but it’s equally as possible that it didn’t. (And I personally doubt that it did. When I read that scene, I see a moment where Shirley is declaring for his girl, so to speak. He isn’t sure if he’ll come back from his service – after all, Walter already didn’t – and he wants Susan to know she’s been/is a Mother to him. There were many different types of ‘good-byes’ and ‘thank-yous’ to be said before boys went on to wear khaki for their country. It’s perfectly natural that Shirley would’ve done this for Susan, and it is very very sweet.)
It’s interesting though with Maud, because she does provide a lot of surrogate-type mothers in her books and short stories, and while she effortlessly proves the ferocity of the strength of these found-family bonds, she also can draw some pretty firm lines there. Like when Marilla won’t permit Anne call her “aunt Marilla,” because Marilla doesn’t believe in calling people by names or titles that don’t belong to them. For Shirley, there’s that line in Rainbow Valley narrative where Maud gives the ole air-quote to Susan’s “mothering” of Shirley – put there to pointedly differentiate from plain mothering.
Rainbow Valley by L.M. Montgomery
My own preoccupation on this subject has always been like, welllll what about Shirley? What did he feel? And it’s again, very hard to resolutely say. We just know too little. We only know Susan’s feelings. Like at the end of Anne of Ingleside, when Anne and Gilbert leave for a second honeymoon, and Shirley goes with Susan to her sisters house instead of Avonlea with the rest of the bigger kids… the text doesn’t tell us that this was necessarily Shirley’s choice. It doesn’t say, “Shirley wanted…”, instead it says: “Susan took…” (btw I don’t mean this to reflect poorly on Susan, only highlighting that it doesn’t give us any insight into Shirley’s feelings lol). Meanwhile, we do have examples of Susan putting Shirley to bed each night and ‘allowing’ Anne to on special occasion, but even in those, we also emphatically hear that Shirley still wants Anne to be the one tucking him in, despite it all.
Anne of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery
Then we’ll flip-flop and have something like Shirley going to Susan about his bumps and scrapes, and to avoid “well deserved” spankings… which all things considered, this is a less of a motherly trait, so much as an indulgent grandmotherly trait (keep in mind, Susan was described as ‘elderly’ back in HOD days).
🫠 So yeah lmao all this to say/for the TLDR, at least for me and what can be fairly deducted from the text, that Anne and Susan are basically equals in the matter of Bringing Up Shirley… and that we definitely can’t say it’s canon that Susan is an usurper (or baby stealer!) of Anne in this way.
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