ANNE OF GREEN GABLES is one of those books you feel almost guilty liking, because so many other people seem to like it as well. If it’s that popular, you feel, it can’t possibly be good, or good for you.
Like many others, I read this book as a child, and absorbed it so thoroughly that I can’t even remember when. I read it to my own daughter when she was eight, and she read it again to herself later, and acquired all the sequels — which she, like everyone else including the author, realized were not on quite the same level as the original. I saw the television series too, and, despite rewrites and excisions, the central story was as strong and as appealing as ever.
And several summers ago, when my family and I were spending some time on Prince Edward Island, I even saw the musical. The theatre gift store was offering Anne dolls, an Anne cookbook, and Anne paraphernalia of all kinds. The theatre itself was large but crowded; in front of us was a long row of Japanese tourists. During one especially culture-specific moment — a dance in which a horde of people leapt around holding eggs glued on to spoons clenched between their teeth — I wondered what the Japanese tourists could possibly be making of it. Then I took to wondering what they could be making of the whole phenomenon. What did they make of the Anne dolls, the Anne knick-knacks, the Anne books themselves? Why was Anne Shirley, the talkative red-haired orphan, so astonishingly popular among them?
Possibly it was the red hair: that must be exotic, I thought. Or possibly Japanese women and girls found Anne encouraging: in danger of rejection because she is not the desired and valued boy, she manages to win over the hearts of her adoptive parents and to end the book with a great deal of social approval. But she triumphs without sacrificing her sense of herself: she will not tolerate insult, she defends herself, she even loses her temper and gets away with it. She breaks taboos. On a more conventional level, she studies hard at school and wins a scholarship, she respects her elders, or at least some of them, and she has a great love of Nature (although it is Nature in its more subdued aspect; hers is a pastoral world of gardens and blossoming trees, not mountains and hurricanes).
It was helpful for me to try looking at Anne’s virtues through other eyes, because for a Canadian woman — once a Canadian girl — Anne is a truism. Readers of my generation, and of several generations before and since, do not think of Anne as “written.” It has simply always been there. It is difficult not to take the book for granted, and almost impossible to see it fresh, to realize what an impact it must have had when it first appeared.
It is tempting to think of Anne as just a very good “girls’ book,” about — and intended for — pre-adolescents. And on one level, it is just that. Anne’s intense friendship with the ever-faithful Diana Barry, the hatefulness of Josie Pye, the schoolroom politics, the tempest-ina-teapot “scrapes,” Anne’s overdone vanity, and her consciousness of fashion in clothes and bookmarks — all are familiar to us, both from our own observation and experience and from other “girls’ books.”
But Anne draws on a darker, and, some would say, a more respectable literary lineage. Anne Shirley is, after all, an orphan, and the opening chapters of Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, and, later and closer to Anne, the bad-tempered, unhappy, sallow-faced little Mary of The Secret Garden, have all contributed both to Anne Shirley’s formation as orphan-heroine and to the reader’s understanding of the perils of orphanhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unless she had been allowed to stay at Green Gables, Anne’s fate would have been to be passed around as a cheap drudge from one set of uncaring adults to another. In the real world, as opposed to the literary one, she would have been in great danger of ending up pregnant and disgraced, raped — like many of the Barnardo Homes female orphans — by the men in the families in which they had been “placed.” We have forgotten, by now, that orphans were once despised, exploited, and feared, considered to be the offspring of criminals or the products of immoral sex. Rachel Lynde, in her tales of orphans who have poisoned and set fire to the families who have taken them in, is merely voicing received opinion. No wonder Anne cries so much when she thinks she will be “returned,” and no wonder Marilla and Matthew are considered “odd” for keeping her!
But Anne partakes of another “orphan” tradition as well: the folk-tale orphan who wins despite everything, the magic child who appears, as it seems, from nowhere — like King Arthur — and proves to have qualities far superior to anyone around her.
Such literary echoes may form the structural underpinnings of Anne’s tale, but the texture is relentlessly local. L. M. Montgomery stays within the parameters of the conventions available to her: nobody goes to the bathroom in this book, and although we are in the country, no pigs are visibly slaughtered. But, that said, she remains faithful to her own aesthetic credo, as set forth by Anne’s beloved schoolteacher Miss Stacy, who “won’t let us write anything but what might happen in Avonlea in our own lives.” Part of the current interest in “Avonlea” is that it appears to be a “jollier,” more innocent world, long gone and very different from our own; but for Montgomery, “Avonlea” was simply reality edited. She was determined to write from what she knew: not the whole truth, perhaps, but not a total romanticization either. Rooms and clothes and malicious gossip are described much as they were, and people talk in the vernacular, minus the swear words — but then, the people we hear speaking are mostly “respectable” women, who would not have sworn anyway. This world was familiar to me through the stories told to me by my Maritime parents and aunts: the sense of community and “family,” the horror of being “talked about,” the smug rectitude, the distrust of outsiders, the sharp division between what was “respectable” and what was not, as well as the pride in hard work and the respect for achievement, all are faithfully depicted by Montgomery. Marilla’s speech to Anne — “I believe in a girl being fitted to earn her own living whether ever she has to or not” — may sound like radical feminism to some, but in fact it is just a sample of Maritime self-reliance. My mother was brought up like that; consequently, so was I.
Montgomery wrote from her own experience in another and more profound way as well. Knowing what we now know about her life, we realize that Anne’s story was a mirror image of her own, and gathers much of its force and poignancy from thwarted wish fulfillment. Montgomery, too, was virtually an orphan, abandoned by her father after her mother’s death to a set of strict, judgemental grandparents, but she never gained the love she grants so lavishly to Anne. Anne’s experience of exclusion was undoubtedly hers; the longing for acceptance must have been hers as well. So was the lyricism; so was the sense of injustice; so was the rebellious rage.
Children identify with Anne because she is what they often feel themselves to be — powerless and scorned and misunderstood. She revolts as they would like to revolt, she gets what they would like to have, and she is cherished as they themselves would like to be. When I was a child, I thought — as all children do — that Anne was the centre of the book. I cheered her on, and applauded her victories over the adults, her thwartings of their wills. But there is another perspective.
Although Anne is about childhood, it is also very much centred on the difficult and sometimes heartbreaking relationship between children and adults. Anne seems to have no power, but in reality she has the vast though unconscious power of a beloved child. Although she changes in the book — she grows up — her main transformation is physical. Like the Ugly Duckling, she becomes a swan; but the inner Anne — her moral essence — remains much what it has always been. Matthew, too, begins as he means to go on: he is one of those shy, childlike men who delight Montgomery’s heart (like Cousin Jimmy in the Emily books), he loves Anne from the moment he sees her, and he takes her part in every way and on every occasion.
The only character who goes though any sort of essential transformation is Marilla. Anne of Green Gables is not about Anne becoming a good little girl: it is about Marilla Cuthbert becoming a good — and more complete — woman. At the book’s beginning, she is hardly even alive; as Rachel Lynde, the common-sense voice of the community, puts it, Marilla is not living, just staying. Marilla takes Anne on, not out of love as Matthew does, but out of a cold sense of duty. It is only in the course of the book that we realize there is a strong family resemblance between the two. Matthew, as we have always known, is a “kindred spirit” for Anne, but the kinship with Marilla goes deeper: Marilla, too, has been “odd,” ugly, unloved. She, too, has been the victim of fate and injustice.
Anne without Marilla would — admit it — be sadly one-dimensional, an overtalkative child whose precocious cuteness might very easily pall. Marilla adds the saving touch of lemon juice. On the other hand, Anne acts out a great many of Marilla’s concealed wishes, thoughts, and desires, which is the key to their relationship. And, in her battles of will with Anne, Marilla is forced to confront herself, and to regain what she has lost or repressed: her capacity to love, the full range of her emotions. Underneath her painful cleanliness and practicality, she is a passionate woman, as her outpouring of grief at Matthew’s death testifies. The most moving declaration of love in the book has nothing to do with Gilbert Blythe: it is Marilla’s wrenching confession in the penultimate chapter:
Oh, Anne, I know I’ve been kind of strict and harsh with you maybe — but you mustn’t think I didn’t love you as well as Matthew did, for all that. I want to tell you now when I can. It’s never been easy for me to say things out of my heart, but at times like this it’s easier. I love you as dear as if you were my own flesh and blood and you’ve been my joy and comfort ever since you came to Green Gables.
The Marilla we first meet could never have laid herself bare like this. Only when she has recovered — painfully enough, awkwardly enough — her capacity to feel and express, can she become what Anne herself has lost long ago, and truly wants: a mother. But to love is to become vulnerable. At the beginning of the book, Marilla is all-powerful, but by the end, the structure has been reversed, and Anne has much more to offer Marilla than the other way around.
It may be the ludicrous escapades of Anne that render the book so attractive to children, but it is the struggles of Marilla that give it resonance for adults. Anne may be the orphan in all of us, but then, so is Marilla. Anne is the fairy-tale, wish-fulfillment version, what Montgomery longed for. Marilla is, more likely, what she feared she might become: joyless, bereft, trapped, hopeless, unloved. Each of them saves the other. It is the neatness of their psychological fit — as well as the invention, humour, and fidelity of the writing — that makes Anne such a satisfying and enduring fable.