James A. Harrison—Emily Harrison

James A. Harrison and Emily Harrison’s marriage is shaped by a collision between domestic order and personal independence, with Ginger the parrot becoming the final point of rupture. Their later reunion does not erase their old grievances; instead, it reveals how affection and irritation have continued to coexist beneath them, and how readily James’s complaints give way to pleasure at having his wife home.

A marriage arranged against expectation

Before moving to Avonlea, James lived in Scottsford, New Brunswick, where his sister kept house for him. He was comfortable with her moderate tidiness and indulgent care. When she died, three years before he recounted the story, she worried about what would become of him and urged him to marry. She suggested Emily Scott, who had money of her own and a reputation as an exemplary housekeeper. James doubted that Emily would accept him, but promised his sister he would ask; Emily said yes, to his astonishment. He initially felt fortunate to have married a smart, pretty woman whom he had not expected to choose him.

Their wedding trip lasted a fortnight in St. John. The contrast between James’s expectations and Emily’s habits appeared almost immediately after they returned home at ten at night: within half an hour, she was cleaning. James acknowledged that his bachelor household had become disordered, though he believed he had arranged for cleaning and repairs before the wedding. Emily’s impulse to scrub even a new white-marble palace, as he imagined it, made clear that her standards were not simply a response to the state of his house. Housekeeping was central to how she occupied their shared home.

The household as a field of conflict

Emily cleaned late into the night and was at work again by four in the morning. Her sweeping, dusting, and scouring continued through the week; Sunday offered only a pause in the work, not relief from anticipating its return. James says he could have accepted her industriousness if she had left him alone. Instead, Emily tried to reform his habits as well as the house. He had to change his boots for slippers at the door, could smoke only in the barn, and was corrected for his grammar and for eating with his knife. Emily had once been a schoolteacher, and James understood that her corrective manner had outlasted her career.

The conflict was reciprocal rather than a simple contest between an orderly wife and an unreasonable husband. James admits that he was cantankerous and made little effort to improve; when Emily criticized him, he became cranky and disagreeable. He recalls telling her that she had not complained about his grammar when he proposed. He recognizes the remark as tactless, and his account gives both spouses a part in the pattern: Emily presses for reform, while James resists it and answers correction with resentment. Their repeated domestic disputes were unpleasant, though he thinks they might have grown accustomed to each other had another issue not intervened.

Ginger and the breaking point

The decisive division concerned Ginger, the parrot Emily disliked and could not tolerate because of his profane speech. James’s attachment to the bird had a history: his sailor brother, a beloved figure from childhood, sent Ginger to him while dying. James distinguishes the parrot’s repeated words from human profanity, reasoning that Ginger merely echoed language without understanding it. Emily did not share that distinction and tried unsuccessfully to stop him swearing.

The failed effort became a pointed parallel to Emily’s attempts to correct James. As she was no more successful at changing Ginger’s speech than she was at changing James’s grammar, the harder she tried, the worse both seemed to become. The parrot was thus more than a household nuisance: it embodied an attachment James would not surrender and a disagreement Emily could not resolve by imposing her standards. James identifies Ginger as the rock on which the marriage finally split, while also placing that rupture within a wider accumulation of nagging, resistance, and mutual irritation.

Return and reconciliation

Emily’s return is announced through an unexpected encounter with Anne Shirley. A rosy woman in a wagon identifies herself as James’s wife and says she has come because she suspects he may be up to mischief. She already knows about the joke that placed his name in a newspaper as a new citizen, which Anne had interpreted as a possible sign he intended to marry. The revelation that he is married overturns Anne’s assumption and makes the return of Emily, rather than a new courtship, the event that changes James’s household.

By the time Anne visits, Emily has gone to Carmody with Rachel Lynde to choose new paper for the parlor. James’s home has been scrubbed and polished: the floor and furniture are clean, the stove shines, the walls are whitewashed, and the windows sparkle. James himself is shaved and neatly dressed in patched, brushed clothes. The transformation registers Emily’s return through the very domestic order that had once troubled him. James complains that his easy days are over and predicts a lifetime of tidiness, but the twinkle in his eye betrays his solemn performance. Anne tells him she can see that he is glad; his sheepish smile and admission that he was not sorry to see Emily confirm her reading.

James also explains that Emily has quickly formed a close friendship with Rachel, and that she has gone to buy parlor paper with her. His grumbling about women’s contrariness and the discipline of a neat house sits beside his unmistakable welcome of Emily. He can be irritated by the changes her presence brings without wanting her absent. The marriage resumes not through a declaration that their differences have vanished, but through the visible return of Emily to the house and James’s inability to disguise his happiness.

The relation’s comic and emotional shape

The story of James and Emily’s marriage is told through James’s retrospective account to Anne, followed by the present-tense evidence of Emily’s return. That structure places his earlier complaints beside the cleaned house, his own careful appearance, and his embarrassed pleasure. His tale makes the causes of their estrangement concrete, but the reunion changes the meaning of his complaints: the man who once resented Emily’s efforts to make him over now jokes about living under her standards for the rest of his life, while welcoming her back.

Their relationship remains marked by genuine differences. Emily values order and correction; James values being left to his own habits, including habits he admits he could have changed. Ginger’s place in the marriage joins affection, loyalty to James’s dead brother, and household conflict in a single object of dispute. Yet the reunion shows that neither the parrot nor their long-running quarrels exhausts the bond between them. Their renewed shared life is presented with comic friction rather than a claim of effortless harmony: tidiness returns, James protests, and his relief at Emily’s presence is plain beneath the protest.