Work Text:
7. Speaking of which... Dick Moore! That whole situation would be presented and discussed very differently today. I don't mean that it's badly handled for the time. I think it's well handled for the time. But nowadays, we'd talk a lot more about Leslie being 16 when she was coerced into marriage, and even younger when Dick was first eyeing her. And there's George Moore, and there's the case Gilbert makes for the operation.
First, I think that as a doctor, Gilbert is technically right. Being a doctor means you have different responsibilities from other people. And as a doctor who knows he can potentially "heal" someone, Gilbert is obligated to put that over his identity as a private citizen.
But, as Leslie's friend, I'm astonished that he thought Anne would take this well! He's proposing to bring back Leslie's abuser, and let's be honest, her attempted groomer and actual rapist. Even if the specific impact of her young age wasn't something people recognized back then, I think there's an implicit understanding all through the book that Dick Moore did rape Leslie. I realize that marital rape wasn't recognized widely until very recently, but this book knows Leslie has been hurt very badly, and I don't think it treats her marriage as equivalent to other marriages where LMM might, if she ever addressed the topic explicitly, have justified rape because of how people saw consent at the time. Leslie only said yes under intense pressure from her mother, and Dick is marked as sexually wrong as openly as LMM was willing to get: people talk about "a girl down at the harbor" whom he previously wronged. In context, he must have gotten her pregnant and abandoned her. Most likely the sex was consensual. Consensual sex outside of marriage would have been bad enough to readers in this time period. But we hear about this as something Dick did to a woman. This is his fault. The girl is not brought up as a person so she can share in the blame, as she would have to do. Having sex out of wedlock is not something that could be morally justified in these books--I don't know what LMM's private views were, and more than a few of her of her readers probably knew secretly that people break rules all the time and we don't always count how many shockingly early births there have been among the respectable married couples in our town. But as a woman writing popular books at this time--no. As a pastor's wife, certainly not! So this girl is just a cipher, a ruined woman kept at arm's length. She's never a heroine or a sympathetic victim. But... her status as a cipher also protects her from taking on any real blame. She isn't cast as a depraved woman or a stupid young girl who sowed the seeds of her own ruin. By virtue of her absence, this is laid firmly at Dick's feet.
Yet this sexual wrong Dick committed, the only sexual statement made about him, is not what he did to Leslie. It would have been impossible for him to do that to Leslie, because his whole plan was to keep her for life. If he got her pregnant, it would've been fine, at least in terms of her reputation. Even if he did run out on her later, having a child wouldn't have been the problem. A woman with a child but no man is not defiled as long as she has the man's last name. And yet Leslie tells us that knowing about that girl is the one thing that would have made her refuse to marry Dick, no matter how much her mother threatened or guilted her. Why should that be so, when she already knew she hated Dick, he was a cruel man, and she didn't want to marry him? Well, she was 16 then. What is the only thing this girl down at the harbor could have shown Leslie that she didn't already know? That there's one more way Dick Moore can mistreat a woman. Dick Moore can do things to a woman that a 16 year old girl in this time period could never have imagined before marrying him. Leslie had already seen her young brother crushed to death before her eyes. She found her father's hanging body on her own birthday! It's almost too much! Her mother abused her up until they were separated by death, and her last gift was guilting Leslie down the path to hell. Why was this girl by the harbor even added? Because we need to know that Dick Moore doesn't do good things to women. Read into that what you will.
So, is Gilbert right as Leslie's friend? I don't think so. And overall, I think it's worse to bring Dick Moore back. I don't think a doctor's responsibility can completely outweigh the potential human cost of this decision. Dick could've beaten Leslie to death later on if it had really been him. As far as he knows, Gilbert isn't saving anyone's physical life with this operation. I wish he'd been more conflicted, and I wish Anne hadn't gone over to his side completely.
It turns out, of course, that Gilbert did save George Moore, and in the process he saved Leslie too, and because of him pushing for this, Persis and Kenneth Ford blink back into the Polaroid Back to the Future style, along with Gilbert's own grandchildren through Rilla. Hooray! But there's also:
8. "Dick" Moore. The way this story talks about him is typical of the time period. In fact, it's kinder than many people would have been to someone like him. He's not shown as a grotesque or a menace to society, and wonder of wonders, no one ever laughs at him. He's not a joke. His disability isn't a joke. Not the way he talks or the way he thinks or the way he ended up like this. It's a pretty realistic depiction of someone with an intellectual disability. Sometimes he's easy to be around and sometimes he makes trouble because he doesn't understand the consequences. There's more asperity in the way Miss Cornelia talks about his mischief, whereas Captain Jim seems more patient, and that just reflects who those two are as people. If you look at how other authors of the time were writing about people with ID, it's almost like night and day. In fact, it's like night and day when you look at how LMM wrote about people who happened to be Italian!
But. "Dick" Moore is a burden. He's a weight keeping Leslie from ever being happy. He's more of a person than many other authors could have made him, but within the story, he's the remains of a monster. His face must remind Leslie of her time with Dick every second she's with him, even if it looks a tiny bit different because of that fight. And she's with him just about all the time. We can't look at how he's presented without taking into account how it ends for him: everyone's better off without him. He's what happens to a woman who picks wrong in an era without divorce. He's the rest of your life in hell. He's leagues better than the old Dick Moore, certainly he's not the ninth circle of hell (if the cast will forgive me for referencing a Catholic)... but if you can get rid of someone like him, then you should do it.
To be fair, this is presented as a heavy moral dilemma. Gilbert doesn't push this unilaterally on Leslie. He tells her there's a chance that he can heal Dick, and she decides it's the right thing to do. I don't remember it being couched in any religious terms, but I have no doubt that would be a huge factor in how these characters see the matter. I'm coming at this from a fundamentally different perspective.
My perspective is that of a disabled person, though. That's something they don't have. As I see it, this decision was forced unilaterally on the person George Moore was at that time. No one asks him if he wants to stop existing. It's up to Leslie. Who makes an incredible principled decision for someone who thinks she's bringing back her abuser. And it happens I don't agree with those principles. With the knowledge they all had at that time, this man she's been caring for is so different from the original Dick that he is functionally a new and different person. Curing his condition would erase this new person from existence. Except the whole reason this decision is a matter of principle is because someone like "Dick Moore" doesn't really get to be a person. He's an affliction that befalls the real people who care for him. He's the worst kind of child a a husband can give you, and he has approximately the same right to decide his own fate as a child of the 1800s. In fact, less. If a child hears that he's going to stop existing in a few days, he might be able to run away.
With the information they all had at the time, I think it's completely wrong to erase this man everyone knows as Dick Moore. He's not a brute or an abuser or a man who coerces young girls into marrying him. He's a person, not a broken version of someone else. He hurts people physically sometimes, but only because he doesn't understand, and they have the power to make him stop. In fact, they have every possible power over him except that he could potentially overpower them physically. If the people around him make certain decisions, "Dick Moore" doesn't necessarily have to eat tonight. He doesn't have to be allowed back inside the house. He doesn't have the capacity to go to the authorities and ask for help if that happens. It wouldn't occur to him to break a window and beat the person responsible, as the real Dick Moore would have done if anyone defied him. So he's not too much of a genuine threat. He never tries to overpower anyone. He just pulls childish tricks. Nobody ever suggests that Leslie or Miss Cornelia or Captain Jim might be unsafe with him.
And for what? Did the old Dick Moore leave a diary behind saying that life is something he just absolutely loves? Was his existence more valuable than the one they have now, purely because he could theoretically work a job? Would he work? Is there any reason to believe he won't keep going on violent drinking binges? This is a man who could easily kill Leslie somewhere down the line. The old Dick is more of a burden than the new one could ever be. (And I'm not arguing that by the characters' morals, Leslie should have killed the old Dick--though I would support her.)
Now, from a Presbyterian Christian perspective: I suppose the argument would be that Dick Moore should be restored to the way God created him, so long as God has given mankind the tools to do so. It's not up to them to decide what Dick's immortal soul or presence in this world is worth. Even Miss Cornelia would have to admit that the fate of Dick's soul has been decided already by God Himself. God allowed for this operation to be invented, and He moved Gilbert Blythe in next door to Leslie and Dick His wonders to perform. To them, I suppose, there is no second Dick Moore at all. Dick is not composed of the sum total of the thoughts and actions his physical brain will allow. There's just the one soul. This can't have been an afterthought to LMM as she was writing the story, it would have been the entire basis of how she saw the moral dilemma. She could not have seen identity as the product of someone's brain chemistry the way I see it.
But none of that is ever really cited in the story. "Dick" as he is needs constant supervision and care, and he can't work. God's plan for him isn't openly weighed in the same way as his ability to support himself. To me, a disabled person who's never able to work, he was removed from the world largely because the world doesn't want people like him to exist. Gilbert speaks of him as a burden because he can't contribute. That's a huge part of his argument in favor of performing the operation. It's not just a matter of his ethical responsibility as a doctor.
Well, that's how most people do see people who need more than they can give. Even today. Medical science has come a long way since Gilbert learned about this newfangled operation, but still precious few of us can be turned into the old versions of ourselves, back before we needed all this help to survive. Some of us don't have a George Moore identity to go back to at all. We never could work or be a normal person.
Anne and her friends are pretty good people. If you're born like that, they could forgive you for it.
With the benefit of hindsight, in this fictional book. we can say that George Moore is also a person, and because of that operation he was able to return to the world, and the woman who loved him has him back, and Leslie and Owen are free. Because this is a book, thank goodness, there was never any second Dick. There was just George, who wasn't so different from his disabled self that we can declare him a different consciousness. The worst thing George ever did was be close with Dick Moore, and maybe Dick put on a nicer face around his family. So in hindsight, of course he deserved to be restored to this world.
"Dick Moore", though: he's gone now.