This Old Place Has a Soul, Green Gables
I wrote it in the evenings after my regular day’s work was done, wrote most of it at the window of the little gable room which had been mine for years.
— Maud about writing Anne of Green Gables in the
upstairs den of the old homestead1
In the summer of 1905, Maud made rapid progress on her chapters. During the evening hours, she would sit at the window of the little upstairs gable room that had been hers since childhood, her black Waverly pen racing over her writing portfolio at the speed of her own voice. At her desk in the twilight of the day, Maud’s southern view overlooked the green fields of Cavendish. That year the Cavendish summer throbbed with lazy rhythm, and nasturtiums and roses were blooming around the homestead.
Landscape was central to Maud’s Romantic aesthetic and she structured the world of her novel from her little window. In her journal and memoir, Maud would later link many of the landmarks of the fictional village of Avonlea to local sites, but like the character of Anne herself, the design and landscape of Green Gables, Lover’s Lane, the Birch Path, and the Lake of Shining Waters were a blend of the personal and the borrowed, the literary and the popular, the local and the global.
The fictitious Green Gables was based not only on a neighboring farm, but on the old homestead that Maud loved intensely. The atmosphere of
the homestead, the comings and goings, the vistas and surroundings, and the unique stresses concerning the homestead that year shaped Green Gables. Even more important, Green Gables was built on national, literary, and aesthetic ideals of home that would resonate with readers who felt uprooted in a modern world of flux. That tension could be felt underneath the peaceful surroundings of Green Gables.
“This is the fag end of a very doggy dog-day and was never meant for writing letters at all,” Maud began in a letter to George MacMillan on August 23, when she was almost midway through her writing of Anne of Green Gables. What exactly caused her bad day, she does not reveal. Touring Ireland, her Scottish pen pal had sent her a fragment of a stone from the famous Blarney Castle. It had arrived that very day and prompted an immediate, exuberant response. A superstitious believer, Maud immediately kissed the fragment, for the Blarney Stone was said to bestow the gift of the gab to those who kissed it. “Even although it isn’t the Blarney Stone itself surely some virtue must have leaked into it during the years. I shall expect an added smoothness of tongue henceforth—or perhaps it will show itself in my pen, which the gods permit!”2
Perhaps the Blarney stone helped build the soulful walls of Green Gables, for Green Gables, like Lover’s Lane, was almost a character in her novel. A house, Maud believed, had its own unique personality. Her prose convinces us that rooms can soak up tears and laughter, sorrow and happiness. We feel that the walls of Green Gables, New Moon, and Silver Bush are filled with memories and emotions—Maud’s own emotions. We know she loved the old homestead, where she had spent virtually her entire life, from 1876 until 1911—a total of thirty-five years. Yet we know little about how the homestead shaped the world of Green Gables.
The homes of famous writers are fascinating because they are the spaces that mold the interior lives of their inhabitants. Writers frequently rely on the rooms they live in to sharpen one or more of the traditional five senses, and to tap their emotional inner spaces. Emily Dickinson
rarely left her homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, and drew mostly on sight to create her poetry. In Easton, Connecticut, the blind and deaf Helen Keller relied on touch. Sigmund Freud, in his specially arranged Vienna consulting room, perceived the world through hearing. Marcel Proust, who battled asthma and was confined to his bedroom in Paris, drew upon taste and smell. “The sensory experience of dwelling animates the work of all four writers, in ways both intensely physical and deeply philosophical,” writes literary scholar Diana Fuss in her book The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them.3 The house, its layout, its literary interior, and the writer’s physical movements as they live and move through it, as Fuss documents, become an agent in shaping the literature.
All that remains of Maud’s old homestead today is a large hole with old cellar walls, surrounded by birches, poplars, spruces, and the old apple trees. The ruins invite the imagination of literary tourists and fans who have traveled here from as far away as Japan, Sweden, and Florida, trying to recapture their own childhood memories of reading and loving the novel. What were the visual landmarks and social relations within the house and how did they sharpen Maud’s visual perception and imagination? This is the story of how the imaginative world of Green Gables was born out of the shell of an old and dying homestead. We will look for Anne by tracking Maud’s physical movements through the old rooms and corridors before we solve the mystery of what shadowed Maud’s beautiful August, halfway through the writing of Anne of Green Gables.
Set back from the main road and nestled among tree groves, the homestead was built in the early nineteenth century. The one-and-a-half storey house on the forty-acre farm had been home to several generations of Macneills. To the north, a copse of trees sheltered the house from the ferocious and unrelenting north shore storms. Facing west, the homestead overlooked the front orchard, which great-grandfather William Macneill had planted many years earlier. Maud’s grandfather, Alexander Macneill, had planted the back orchard, naming the trees after the children: John’s tree, Emily’s tree, Clara’s tree, and so on. In the novel, Maud similarly delivers the “big, rambling, orchard-embowered house” called Green Gables, which, like her homestead, is accessed via a long deeprutted, grassy land bordered with wild roses.4
In a March 1917 letter, Frede Campbell recalls the ambiance of the backyard, which faced east toward the sea. Here, she writes, painting a nostalgic picture of a summer’s day, you could see Grandmother feed the chickens, or watch the bucket go down in the ferns by the well. Frede fondly recalled visiting and sitting at the kitchen table, eating Grandmother’s good bread with ham and pickles and drinking her homemade currant wine.5
The kitchen reflected Grandmother Macneill’s realm and rule, just as the painfully clean Green Gables kitchen (tidy as an “unused parlor”) reflects Marilla’s controlling personality.6 During the day Grandmother might be busy sorting the mail in the post office in the eastern corner of the spacious kitchen wing. Her mouth was pinched, and she was hard of hearing and not easy to talk to. Posing for a rare family photograph taken in the orchard in 1900, Grandmother Macneill held little Edith Macneill on her lap, wildflowers at her feet; her face produced a reluctant smile that reminds one of Marilla’s “rusty” smile in the novel.7 From the kitchen, Marilla made pilgrimages into the cellar to pick up apples and potatoes. It is the same ruined cellar found at the site of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Cavendish Home today.
In the winter, the world of the large homestead contracted like an old drafty castle in which only a few rooms are livable. The women virtually lived in the kitchen: cooking, entertaining, sorting mail, reading, writing, bathing, and occasionally sleeping in the warm room. The large woodstove, centered against the coldest northern wall, radiated its heat throughout the room.8 From November to April, there was little privacy There were three small bedrooms downstairs—Grandma’s, Maud’s winter bedroom, and the spare bedroom—all facing east, with kitchen, parlor, and sitting room facing west. “I hate that room venomously,” Maud wrote about her downstairs bedroom. “It’s dark and dull and I can’t even fix it up as I want to because it was ‘newly papered’ ten years ago and poor grandmother would have a convulsion if so much as a tack were driven into that ‘new’ paper. So I have no pictures and feel as if I had no eyes.”9
In winter, at Grandmother’s command, the lights went out at 9:00 p.m. Maud’s gaze, already focused on herself, was forced to delve even further inward to her world of dreams. It seems appropriate that toward the end of the novel, Marilla should be threatened with losing her eyesight, as nothing could be more incapacitating and cruel from the writer’s own perspective. Maud’s own eyes had weakened early in life and she used an
elegant pair of pince-nez for reading and writing. The specter of blindness must have been a horror for a young woman who perceived the world through her eyes and had sharpened her sense of visual perception through her camera work, scrapbooking, needlework, and fashion style. Winters were long and dark, and her journal reveals that her bottled-up feelings collapsed into depression in seasonal patterns. As we have seen earlier, they also sought release in vivid imaginative dreams.
Maud’s creative life took place upstairs. As a child and teen she would lie awake in the old Cavendish farmhouse by the eastern sea and compose stories in her mind, thinking out plots and stashing them away in her “mental storehouse.”10 During the summer, Maud lived in her beloved den, the gable room that was hers since age twelve. She spent time here when she was not reveling in the garden outside. “I love this room—but it’s the Mecca of my heart,” she had gushed the year before on April 30, 1904. “Here I am a woman not a child, and order my ways as suits me.”11 Here was her bed, where she would fling herself and cry, or lie and daydream. Here she escaped Grandma’s sharp eyes. She was queen of the entire upstairs, with views in almost all directions. The trunk room faced north. The boudoir west. The den south. Missing only was the eastern view, a vista Maud will give Anne by locating her room in the east gable, thus completing the 360-degree panorama.
From her upstairs window, Maud could peer down the lane and see visitors approaching without being seen. She would watch Mr. Crewe drive up the lane in the buggy to deliver the mail, or observe friends approach the house. Her position was not unlike the panoptic Mrs. Lynde’s who keeps watch over Avonlea’s main road, registering all the comings and goings. Maud referred to the boudoir dormer as her lookout, and like her boudoir, Maud’s den was a tiny hideaway, a refuge giving her privacy, peace, and intimacy. She loved the pretty white wallpaper with its delicate flowers, and papered Anne’s room in the same pattern in the second half of the novel.
At Green Gables, life has a similar texture and structure. The upstairs contains the east-gable room and Marilla’s room; the downstairs contains the kitchen and Matthew’s room. Anne’s introspective life takes place upstairs, where Matthew sets foot only once in the novel, when he walks up the stairs to persuade Anne to apologize to Mrs. Lynde. Similarly, because Grandmother Macneill rarely climbed the stairs, the gable room
became Maud’s space of freedom where she could be both worldly (earning an income with her pen) and romantic (daydreaming and indulging her emotions).
Maud’s den was a modest room with sloping eastern and western walls, crowded with the double bed underneath the slope. Double beds were customary in rural houses, allowing families to sleep “double” when guests arrived. The miniature chair at the foot of the bed added a childlike element, while cushions, lace work, and doilies dressed the room with a maidenish and old-fashioned femininity. The room housed the author’s tools of her craft, such as her books. “I like to look up from my work occasionally and gloat my eyes on them,” she had written of her book collection in a June 17, 1900, journal entry. “They are all my pets.”12 The modern typewriter she procured in 1903 is absent from the many photographs she took of the room. Maud’s red scrapbook rests on the floor in the left front of one of the photos, as if inviting the viewer to reach out and open it.13 Three vases of ferns brought the garden and surrounding woodlands into the room, connecting the inside with the outside and providing the musky fragrance with which she spiced her novel. A clock shows that the photo was taken at ten minutes to ten in the morning, yet the photo is timeless with its old-fashioned flair. Holding the pictures and letters of yore, the den was a museum in which Maud archived her memories. It was a place where time seemed to stand still.
While Maud wrote the first sentence of her first Anne book in the kitchen, she wrote most of the novel in her little upstairs room, sitting at the wooden table in the evening, near the gable window with its beautiful vista. From here she watched the emerald light over the hills and trees. She saw the fields—green and dewy and placid. “Oh, how I love summer twilights!”14 We can almost hear her voice. She named the view of the fields from her window “haunts of ancient peace” adopting the Tennyson quotation in the unpublished entry of July 3, 1904.15 The southern vista, framed by the window casement, was like a painting or a moving picture that changed depending on the angle of light, the weather, or the curtain stirring in the wind. In fact, this little window, with its muslin shroud, was the threshold connecting the inside with the outside. In the summer the old casement window would be open, and she would hear the “subtly sweet ‘voices of the night’”: the rustle of poplars, the voice of a frog, and
the singing of birds.16 In the twilight she could see the pasture dotted with sheep. The description of this view seems timeless, and journal entries decades apart echo the same descriptions.
“It opened on a world of wonder,” she had written about this very window in a rhapsodic poem published in the Ladies’ Journal in May 1897. Evocatively titled “The Gable Window,” the poem anticipates the title of Anne of Green Gables.
’Twas there I passed my hours of dreaming,
’Twas there I knelt at night to pray;
Just as in the novel, Anne Shirley kneels and prays by the open window under the evening stars. The windowsill is a bridge between the inside and outside:
The airy dreams of child and maiden
Hang round that gable window still,
As cling the vines, green and leaf-laden,
About the Sill … . 17 Windows were central to Maud’s aesthetics. The sights, scents, and sounds that entered through the window animated her writing, sparking memory and emotion and daydreams: “The view from here is such a pretty one and it is also dear to me for all the sweet old memories associated with almost every feature—brooks, woods, and fields,” she noted in an unpublished May 10, 1893, journal entry.18 From her upstairs rooms she surveyed her territory—the spaces that she explored in her daily rambles, never straying too far from the homestead. Consider that the Green Gables kitchen has two windows, a western one (its view corresponding to the western view from the homestead kitchen) and “the east one, whence you got a glimpse of the bloom[ing] white cherry trees in the left orchard and nodding, slender birches down in the hollow by the brook … greened over by a tangle of vines.”19 This view was drawn directly from the southern gable window of Maud’s upstairs den. Looking down the lane as she wrote, she could see the cherry trees in bloom, the birches along the lane, and the green tangle of vines around the windowsill.
Maud’s landscape poetry was embedded in the Romantic sensibility. In fact, eighteenth-century Romantic aesthetics had strongly influenced English-Canadian poetry, in particular the landscape poetry of Thomas Cary, Charles G. D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Isabella Valancy Crawford, and others.20 The pastoral and peaceful nature environment described by these Canadian poets, like that of Anne of Green Gables, belies the image of hostile nature that Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood recognized as being at the heart of Canadian literature. Indeed, the twentieth-century Canadian literary establishment disparaged Romantic nature writing of this sort for decades. Having read and reread the British and Scottish Romantic poets during childhood, Maud was profoundly influenced by Robert Burns; William Wordsworth; Sir Walter Scott; Lord Byron; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and Robert and Elizabeth Browning.21 She was also influenced by American Romantic poets William Cullen Bryant, R. W Emerson, H. W Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier. In depicting landscape, she was even influenced by the travel literature of the Romantic era, as seen in her fondness for Washington Irving’s The Alhambra. Her depiction of Prince Edward Island is similar in tone and imagery to the tourist literature in print during the era. Enveloped in lush greenery against the sparkling blue of the gulf, Maud’s garden isle evokes the tranquility and beauty of the vacation spot.22
From the vantage point of her den, sitting beside the window, Maud’s Romantic eye structured and organized the landscape like a work of visual art, as did photographer Rudolf Eickemeyer with images and captions that were both pastoral and poetic, or the artwork of the Hudson River School painters. Influenced by European philosophies, this Romantic sensibility endowed nature and childhood with purity and innocence. It celebrated strong emotions, both love and hatred, as well as wild mood swings. It also endowed the child with a special vision and spirituality.
Who can forget the visual and emotional power of Anne’s buggy ride with Matthew from Bright River Station to Avonlea? The formulaic scene, common to much popular fiction, in which the urban girl first awakens to the beauty of nature, became, in Maud’s hands, a holy experience, beginning with Anne’s first vision of the sun setting over the White Way of Delight:
“The Avenue,” so called by the Newbridge people, was a stretch of road four or five hundred yards long, completely arched over with huge, wide-spreading apple-trees, planted years ago by an eccentric old farmer. Overhead was one long canopy of snowy fragrant bloom. Below the boughs the air was full of a purple twilight and far ahead a glimpse of painted sunset sky shone like a great rose window at the end of a cathedral aisle.
Its beauty seemed to strike the child dumb.23 Like visual art, the landscape (blooming apple trees and sunset sky) is composed of colors (purple, painted, rose), architectural forms (arch, window, cathedral), and light (twilight, sunset, shone). Maud used her lyrical prose to transform the landscape into artwork and to cultivate an aesthetic perception of nature.
Anne’s uplifted and dumbstruck gaze at the colorful cathedral-like picture is evocative of jean-François Millet’s illustrious painting The Angelus, which depicts two field workers praying at the ring of the vesper bell in the day’s twilight with the church spire in the background. Drawn to the glorious waning of day in a moment of spiritual devotion, Anne’s expression also mirrors Evelyn Nesbit’s enraptured pose. In Emily of New Moon, this unearthly experience of the “flash” is likened to this moment at the windowsill, when the movement of the thin curtain blown by the wind provides “a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond.”24 The magical moment at the windowsill, like the sudden flash of a camera in the dark, is the threshold where light and dark, nature and art, inside and outside, past and present converge to create magic.
Anne’s nature reverie is a reflection of Maud’s own. Laird’s Hill in Cavendish was her favorite spot for sunsets; here she had stood many times viewing the Cavendish pond and the sea beyond.25 It must have been gratifying to relive these moments in the quiet of her den, as she wrote the eleven extended scenes of sunsets or sunset afterglow scenes that appear in the novel.26 But from the vantage point of her little window, Maud also imposed her interior order on the world of Avonlea by rigorously cropping unwanted edges, silencing and censoring perceptions that would have marred her picture and pleasure.
In March 1905 the New York Delineator published Zona Gale’s story “The Things That Are Real,” which would have deeply resonated with Maud, for it seemed to echo her own loneliness and dreamy imagination. Its heroine was another Anne. Dreamy and bookish Anne Davenport lives with her pragmatic aunt, who would like her niece to be more in touch with the real world. Anne is profoundly lonely and misunderstood. Then Anne Davenport meets Jared Dixon, a writer and teacher who appears at a town reception with a book in his pocket. It’s love at first sight. He reads a verse of romantic poetry, and Anne catches her breath and spontaneously supplies the stanza’s final line:
“In Avalon he groweth old!”27 In fact, the verse is drawn from William Morris’s “Golden Wings,” and the romantic line alludes to the legendary King Arthur and the misty isle of Avalon where his fabled sword Excalibur was forged. Since Avalon is also the Celtic island of apples, the evocative name would have been a short imaginative leap to Prince Edward Island with its famous apple blossoms. Certainly the timing of this reference here in the familiar Delineator magazine in March 1905, just months before she would write the first page of Anne, is noteworthy. Was it here that Maud struck on the idea of baptizing Cavendish with the romantic name of Avonlea?
The word was rich in associations and would be recognized by millions of readers. Everybody knew Shakespeare’s birth place Stratfordupon-Avon. Maud also knew “Avon,” the beautiful pastoral river in Nova Scotia described in the romantic poetry by Arthur John Lockhart (the uncle of her school sweetheart, Nate Lockhart). Maud would have made these associations in a flash probably without even thinking about them or being necessarily conscious of them.
Writing Anne of Green Gables from the vantage point of her den allowed Maud to erase the parts of nature she did not like. As she grew older, she hated winter. It was the season in which she was deprived of sunlight and became a prisoner of the house. Maud could have chosen to romanticize the Prince Edward Island winter, as American author Marian C. L. Reeves had done in Godey’s Lady’s Book in February 1892. Reeves’s short story “On Her Sixth Birthday” describes a rough crossing from Nova Scotia to Prince Edward Island, onboard the icebreaker Northern Lights, as a winter sublime. “It was an awesome thing, to stand looking down on that wild frozen ocean,” she noted about the iced-in Strait in February. “The wildness of it! The beauty of it! No storm-tossed seas could have so heaved and billowed in white crests, as those great drifts and hummocks of ice, swaying hither and thither with the tides, and hemming us in, resistlessly.”28 Maud lived close to the sea, just a short walk away, but there are no descriptions or photos of the dramatic ice shards that pile up each winter and transform the landscape with a truly surreal beauty. Their total absence suggests that in the winter she did not venture out as far as the shore. The only winter photographs of the homestead were taken just meters from the kitchen door, although her journal reveals that she did venture into Lover’s Lane.
Anne of Green Gables covers five years in the life of Anne, from age eleven to sixteen, but almost half of the plot is set in June, Maud’s favorite month on Prince Edward Island and the season of young girlhood. For Maud it was the month of pagan resurrection, when she could feast on sensuous vegetation, dancing sunshine, and lovely blue skies. The novel does contain equally glowing references to autumn with its crisp and fine September mornings and its glorious October. Three chapters evoke the shorn harvest fields and the beautiful and myriad fall colors. Maud’s own birth month November, however, is omitted altogether from the account of Anne’s first two years in Avonlea, to be dismissed in the third year merely as “dull November.” Maud hated November with a passion.
The harsh Prince Edward Island winter months are rarely described even though February and March are Diana and Anne’s birth months. Suffering from seasonal depression, Maud relegated these dark months to her “grumble book,” her private journal. When winter is mentioned at all
in Green Gables, it is to remember the nostalgic winter rituals of childhood. It is remembered for Christmas (when Matthew gives Anne her brown dress with puffed sleeves), and for the romantic sleigh ride shared by Diana and Anne. Maud’s complaints in her journal concerning the masses of snow covering the roads in February, which frequently kept her snow-bound in Cavendish, or the large ice shards that blocked the passage of the legendary ice-breakers, thus severing the Island from the mainland, are absent from this novel dedicated to spring pleasure.
The June 1905 newspaper weather columns reported numerous showers, and it was so cold that year that even by the end of June Maud still had to sit in the kitchen, writing by the fire. Yet a rigorous censorship all but eliminates precipitation from Avonlea. Prince Edward Island’s lushly green pastures and rich fields depend on generous rainfall (130 to 160 wet days per year with an average of 1,100 millimeters of precipitation, according to Environment Canada), and, as Islanders know, spring and summer rainfalls are so constant that outdoor events are routinely announced with alternate indoor locations. Rain turns the soft red clay roads into muddy quagmires; rain spoils picnics and hairdos. Yet, like other unmentionables such as sex, divorce, and the outhouse, precipitation in form of rain, sleet, hail, and snow is for the most part banished from the novel. By contrast, in Maud’s 1917 sequel Anne’s House of Dreams, which was written during the war and explores a woman’s entrapment in a hellish marriage, as well as Anne’s marriage and childbirth, the atmosphere is drenched in humidity, from the fog that hangs over Four Winds Harbor to the storms battering the ships in Captain Jim’s stories.
If the pattern in which she wrote the sequel to Anne is any indication, Maud would have spent three hours of concentrated literary work each day: one hour of magazine work in the morning, her bread-and-butter job, one hour at the typewriter in the afternoon, and one hour in the evening on her new novel. “Yes,” she confirmed to her friend Ephraim Weber on April 5, 1908, “I only do three hours’ literary work a day—two hours’ writing and one typewriting. I write fast, having ‘thought out’ plot and dialogue while I go about my household work.”29 Besides writing, each day was filled with housework, post office work, and caring for her grandmother. She also had her correspondence and magazine work, publishing at least forty-four stories in 1905.
As Maud sat in her den by the window overlooking the fields and hills of Cavendish in the twilight of the day, her writing was compressed in space and time. The daily rhythm of her writing influenced the novel’s episodic structure: there is no intricate plot, just one interconnected story following the next, each with its own emotional peak. And something else: her novel was meant to provide daily moments of pleasure for both the writer and reader.30
Writing the novel was like writing the journal, with no immediate commercial return. And so the novel was also a gamble, and the episodic structure her safety net. If her gamble didn’t pay off, she could dismantle the book into a serial—just as she mined her journal for fiction. She might be able to get $40. Not all would be lost. In the meantime she enjoyed the adventure. Such pleasure she had in writing! Would this be the novel to bring her fame? It was like flirting with a suitor without the pressure of serious commitment.
With so much joy in writing her novel, what caused the mysterious downturn she first alluded to in her August 23 letter to George MacMillan? July had come and gone with apparent happiness, and she was still on a high on August 4, when she returned to her journal after a long hiatus. “This August day was a great golden dulcet dream of peace through which the heart of summer throbbed with lazy rhythm,” she wrote in the unpublished entry. On this calm and golden August night, she had gone for a walk over the hill. “In its arch I saw a poem. Two spruces were clasping dark hands over an arc of silvery twilight sky; and right under the arch formed by their boughs was the new moon, like a sickle of red-gold.” It was a picture-perfect day and yet there was already a faint scent of farewell. That day she had sung the requiem for the roses, picking the last bud. But summer wasn’t done yet. The yellow poppies were out. “It has taken the sunshine of the summer to color them.” The sweet peas were out. “My own soul seems filled with flowers.”31 Intoxicated by blossoms, she still seemed perfectly happy. What happened? What were the shadows that she was able to keep out of her novel, as she would cryptically note in later years? What was the mystery behind quiet, unmysterious Green Gables?
Probably within just one or two weeks of this happy August 4, 1905, entry, Uncle John and his son Prescott came visiting on important business. Grandmother Macneill’s second son and his family lived on the seventyfive acre farm immediately adjacent to the old homestead, and he had gradually assumed the operation of his aging father’s farm, as was the practice in farming families.32 A rare private photograph taken in the studio of the Pach Brothers on Broadway in New York City shows that the younger John Franklin Macneill was strikingly handsome. Virile, with a heavy moustache, his strong features reflect a dashing Hemingway type of handsomeness. His expression is regal and proud. At the age of fifty-four, Uncle John still looked the same but his expression had mellowed. In a later photograph with his wife Annie he looks more established and more relaxed. Although Maud had been friends with his daughter Lucy and had nursed Katie, there was no love lost between uncle and niece.
He was a domineering man, said Maud, who had disliked and feared him since early childhood. He was uneducated, insulting, unjust, and badtempered, she charged. He was a miser and a bully. As she saw it, Uncle John destroyed the landscape for a few more bushels of potatoes. It was Uncle John who cut down the old trees for firewood but did not plant new ones, she said. In Anne of Green Gables she evokes the dryads (with her naming of Dryad’s Bubble), the mythological wood nymphs who live in trees and die when the tree dies. Dryads are believed to punish those who destroy their beloved abodes. Uncle John obviously did not share Maud’s ecological consciousness, her love of nature, or her poetic sensibility. But was Uncle John the monster Maud portrayed him as? Caring very little for the farmer’s perspective, Maud’s dreamy attitude clashed with her uncle’s pragmatism. He was concerned with the business of farming; she was concerned with the charm of the landscape. Although she might be seen walking down Lover’s Lane to help a friend get the cows for milking, she was more interested in the cats than the cows. Potatoes don’t make for good poetry (although folk singer Stompin’ Tom Connors of “Bud the Spud” fame might disagree) and are referred to only perfunctorily by Anne and Diana during the raspberry cordial episode. Making cliched conversation, the bosom friends talk about the potato harvest but readers
would never be able to tell that the two girls were talking about the main staple of the Prince Edward Island economy.
No doubt jealousy and mistrust also played a role in the soured family relations. The purpose of Uncle John’s midsummer visit was serious. Twenty-five-year-old Prescott was hoping to get married and wanted the house. A few years earlier, in 1902, Prescott had been living with Grandma to enable Maud to go to Halifax and work as a proofreader. But Grandmother was not contented with Prescott and was happy when Maud returned several months later. So when Uncle John suggested that Prescott and his bride move into the old homestead, Grandmother Macneill did not encourage the proposed change. The commotion of a new family, and presumably children, would have been overwhelming for Grandma and Maud who both liked things just the way they were—quiet. In fact, the two women both hated change. As for Maud, she had little enough control in the house with just Grandmother Macneill giving orders. Moreover, Maud needed solitude to write. With half a novel written, a serious disruption such as a move or sharing of the home with uncongenial family would have put the book in jeopardy. Given Maud’s sensitive radar for incompatible houseguests, the stress and upset she voiced in her journal are understandable.
Uncle John’s proposal might have been as laughable as Mr. Collins’s verbosely clumsy marriage proposal to intelligent Eliza Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, but for the tricky legal situation. Grandfather Macneill’s “absurd will,” as Maud called it, had transferred the homestead to Uncle John, and the personal property to Grandmother Macneill. It was practice at the time for Grandmother Macneill to be given lifetime occupancy, but these rights were not stated clearly in the will. Celebrating her eighty-first birthday that very month, on August 28, Grandmother Macneill was becoming old and “childish,” as Maud described in a letter to George MacMillan. Maud’s frank words suggest the usual failings of age, but may possibly also allude to a mild form of dementia. Never a very social person, Grandmother Macneill was sometimes rude to visitors, causing Maud to feel embarrassed and ashamed. As was her habit, Maud tried to cover up and maintain a façade of normalcy.
In fairness to Uncle John, as head of the family, he may well have tried to solve several problems with one stroke of his pragmatic, but not always
sensitive, genius. No doubt what he had in mind was to equip his son with a house, enabling him to marry and settle down. Prescott would have taken care of the old homestead that, from lack of proper maintenance, was deteriorating from year to year. In exchange for the house, presumably Prescott’s wife would have taken care of Grandmother Macneill. Or Uncle John may have offered his mother to move into his home. Maud refused to provide the details, but both alternatives would have freed up Maud instantly to get married to the minister who was spending a lot of time visiting at the homestead. From their neighboring home, John and his wife Annie would have been able to see the minister come and go, and they may have put two and two together. Besides, they must have figured, dreamy and head-in-the-clouds Maud was not getting any younger. They may even have commented on how stuck-up Maud had foolishly let Ed Simpson slip through her fingers when he visited and lingered in 1903. Perhaps they thought a little pressure would do the trick to get her finally settled. They probably sensed that Maud, regal and proud with her books and writing, with her education and ambition, thought she was better than the farmer’s family who worked with their hands planting and harvesting hay and potatoes. It is safe to assume that Uncle John would have been content to see Maud go.
Uncle John’s plan was all mapped out except for the fact that Grandmother Macneill, assisted by Maud, resisted it with more force than expected. Grandmother had lived and worked in the house for almost six decades. She had moved in as a young wife and mother. Here, in the old home, she had given birth to five more children. Here she had nursed Clara when she was sick with tuberculosis. Here she had been given a second chance at life when she herself became deadly sick after Clara’s death. Here she had lived a happy marriage and had seen her husband die—all in the old homestead. In that turbulent summer of 1905, the prolonged family crisis might have been avoided had Uncle John kept his cool and simply stepped away and respected his mother’s wishes. But the Macneill pride and stubbornness won out. Once Uncle John had started his campaign, it took on its own dynamic. Had Uncle Leander been visiting, he might have negotiated a peace settlement. But Maud’s lack of communication and negotiation skills presumably did not help, nor did the fact that she was a woman. Like all feuds, this one involved accusations, recriminations, and the dredging up
of past failings and insensitivities. Uncle John dug in his heels. He and Prescott persisted in their pressuring campaign throughout the summer. Sitting in her rocker at the kitchen table, Grandmother Macneill was upset and crying. Maud was outraged. That they were trying to “oust” Grandma from her home was how Maud eventually formulated the event after a twomonth delay on October i in her journal.
Grandma won the battle. What exactly she said to her son we will probably never know. But we know from Maud’s journal that Grandmother Macneill could be blunt and rude. There must have been words that caused the bitter chasm in the family. Uncle John ceased to visit. He ceased to speak with his mother. He ceased to provide help with the homestead. There were no winners in this war. Prescott never married; a year later, he became gravely ill with tuberculosis and died in 1910. In Maud’s journal we look in vain for expressions of sympathy. “It is hard to feel sorry for him after the way he has acted,” she noted on April 18, 1906.33 Her heart had hardened, as the family acrimony had calcified. Humiliated about not even having a place for the visitors’ horses, for the barns belonged to Uncle John, she could no longer encourage visitors to come to the house. One wonders if Maud would have discussed these unsavory family matters with Ewan Macdonald. Most likely she did not. Her impulse was always to maintain an image of propriety. The dark feud in her own backyard was too unsavory to confess in full even to her journal; as so often when upset, she kept the entries exceedingly short. The journal reveals that the only person she confessed these secrets to was Frede Campbell, her confidante and spiritual kin.
For Maud, the altercation with Uncle John made it clear that her own days in the homestead were numbered. “Uncle John and his brood detest me,” she wrote in her October 1, 1905, journal entry. “It will, of course, hurt me deeply to leave this old home which I have always loved so passionately.”34 During the very same time that this family feud was unfolding from summer to fall, poisoning the relationship with her closest blood relations, Maud was ironically in the midst of writing her family romance with “quiet unmysterious” Green Gables at its center. The loss of the homestead was the threat that hung over her head as she composed the second half of the novel, in which Green Gables and its potential loss are being discussed. Marilla breaks down sobbing, as she discusses the
selling of Green Gables after Matthew’s death. It is at this point that Anne takes the decision in her hand. ‘“You mustn’t sell Green Gables,’ said Anne resolutely.”35 One wonders if the conversation might have gone in similar ways at the homestead that summer. “It is only on grandmother’s account I am worried,” Maud wrote.36 Yet this sacrificial pose was perhaps a little disingenuous. She too had a stake in the homestead, having lived there for three decades of her life and hoping to finish her novel in the solitude of her home, but she avoided confrontation at all cost, whereas Anne acts by making a decision to stay She saves the house.
The old homestead went through steady decline while the women were living there alone. In winter, it was Maud, never physically strong, who shoveled the snow to open a path to the back door. Anyone who knows firsthand the masses of snow that cover the Maritimes will appreciate the hard physical labor required. The blustery winds and winter storms bombarded the house, and when the spring thaws set in, the old house sprang leaks, making the plaster and wall-paper blister and soften. Maud’s makeshift repairs (she used cotton to patch up the breaks and leaks) could not prevent the house from slowly falling into disrepair. When she replaced the wallpaper in her upstairs den, in lieu of clean edges and smooth surfaces, there were bumps and bubbles visible in the photographs. In the winter of 1911, a big chunk of ceiling plaster came crashing down. Her beloved den was literally falling apart.37 The house needed serious repair, even while Maud was writing the novel. It’s intriguing that in the novel, Marilla comments that the Green Gables buildings are old and not worth very much. Similarly, the Macneill apple orchard had been neglected for years. Its trees were scraggly and ugly, giving a personal touch to Marilla’s pragmatic comment about the Green Gables cherry tree: “ … it blooms great, but the fruit don’t amount to much never—small and wormy.”38 These were the emotional currents that fueled the second half of Maud’s novel with a deeply personal charge that was also connected to her nostalgic vision of Prince Edward Island.
Since for Maud, the Island was an extension of the homestead, and the entire novel was a nostalgic ode to home and homeland all at once, it’s worth remembering that nostalgia was originally identified as a medical condition. The roots of the word consist of nostos, “homeland,” and algos, “pain” or “longing”. Its German variant is Heimweh, literally “home-pain,” a feeling generally accompanied by the suppression of negative memories related to home. Unable to prevent the loss of her home, Maud reconstructed in fiction the home of her dreams: Green Gables. In chapter twenty-six, Maud describes the love of home from Marilla’s point of view as she returns home, her eyes dwelling affectionately on Green Gables, “peering through its network of trees and reflecting the sunlight back from its windows in several little coruscations of glory.”39 In another scene, Anne returns home to see the kitchen light burning—the very beacon of home that was Maud’s own when she returned from her twilight walks.
In fact, Maud went to great lengths to ensure that readers would not mistake Green Gables for the homestead. She veiled her personal investment. The house she identified as the model for Green Gables belonged to her distant cousins David and Margaret Macneill, an aging brother and sister, who lived back in the woods across the street from Pierce Macneill’s. “[T]he truth of my description of it is attested by the fact that everybody has recognized it,” Maud wrote in her January 27, 1911, journal entry.40 Built in 1831, the gabled, one-and-a half storey house with a kitchen addition was typical of Prince Edward Island architecture. There was a large barn, a woodshed, and a granary to the north. The farm was located west of the Macneill homestead, beyond the Cavendish school, the cemetery, and the Haunted Wood, but it was probably its romantic proximity to Lover’s Lane that enabled its transformation into idyllic Green Gables. Of course, Maud conveniently overlooked the fact that the farm’s unromantic outhouse was placed just at the opening to Lover’s Lane.41 In imagining Green Gables, Maud did not copy the architecture of the house but was inspired by the scenery and situation. The reality of the historical
pictures and the untidy surroundings belie the romanticism of Maud’s vision of Green Gables.
There was another secret. Maud was mum about the fact that midway through her writing of Anne, the house she had secretly named “Green Gables” hosted a grand event at which she was present: the wedding of Maud’s distant cousin Myrtle Macneill to Ernest Webb. Myrtle was the woman who stood to inherit the “Green Gables” farm, named as such only in Maud’s imagination. Born in 1883 in New Brunswick, Myrtle had been adopted at age eleven in 1894 by elderly brother and sister David and Margaret Macneill. No doubt something of Myrtle’s history had blended with the myriad of other influences that went into imagining Anne. The wedding took place on Wednesday, September 20, 1905, at eleven o’clock in the morning. Maud had received a wedding invitation in neat, old-fashioned handwriting, which she tucked into the scrapbook, the only reference to the wedding. Maud would have worn her pretty organdy dress with the beautiful puffs and thrills, the same she would wear again in December when she was the bridesmaid at Bertha McKenzie’s wedding. The Reverend Ewan Macdonald officiated at the happy event, presumably also quietly eyeing the woman he was hoping might become Mrs. Macdonald. It is strange that Maud should never mention the event at all in her journal, all the more as the house was playing such an important role in her creative life at that very time. The total silence amplifyes the aura of secrecy and mystery surrounding Ewan’s courtship and her writing of Anne of Green Gables.
Still, the wedding at “Green Gables” may have shaped aspects of Anne’s wedding in Anne’s House of Dreams. In chapter four, “The First Bride of Green Gables,” Anne, like Myrtle, is a September bride: “it was a happy and beautiful bride who came down the old, homespun-carpeted stairs that September noon—the first bride of Green Gables, slender and shining-eyed, in the midst of her maiden veil, with her arms full of roses.”42 They are married by Mr. Allan in the old orchard.
The name “Green Gables” was brilliant in its evocative simplicity. It was a name that appealed to the heart. “Everybody likes color; with me it is a passion. I revel in it,” she told George MacMillan on August 23: “My emotions were exactly what you describe yours as being when listening to music. Everything you say of music I can say of color.”43 Maud could revel in the color of the fields in spring, the view from her window. Also, the green of the house created a flashing contrast with the red of her heroine’s hair and the Prince Edward Island soil. Like a painter, Maud would visualize vibrant color contrasts and striking shapes. Gables, a distinctive feature of Maritime architecture, adorned all of the houses Maud loved, including her birthplace in Clifton (New London), the Campbell house in Park Corner, and her Grandfather Montgomery’s house across the road from the Campbell home. The Green Gables title evoked childhood memories, but it did more. In choosing her title, Maud was building her house of dreams on a solid literary foundation.
On Tuesday April 12, 1903, Maud had noted in her journal that reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1851 novel The House of the Seven Gables had made her cry.44 It is the story of a house haunted by the ghost of Matthew Maule, a former inhabitant executed for witchcraft during the Salem trials. The House of the Seven Gables filled Maud with pleasure and pain, perhaps the same blend of feelings she had toward her own homestead. In the preface to the book, Hawthorne defined romance as a legend prolonging itself, a comment that must have intrigued Maud, given her preoccupation with the influence of the past on the present. Two of the main characters in Hawthorne’s novel are elderly sister and brother Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon. Phoebe, the young heroine of Hawthorne’s novel, has the same boundless optimism as Anne. She brings new life and energy into the House of Seven Gables, which is marked by decay and ancestral guilt (not unlike the Macneill homestead). Even the names of Hawthorne’s characters are echoed in Maud’s novel. Matthew is a common name, so perhaps we should not make too much of the fact that the shy Matthew Cuthbert shares his given name with the humble Matthew Maule of Seven Gables. Hepzibah, in contrast, is a most unusual name, yet Anne recalls, in the first chapter of Green Gables, that “There was a girl at the asylum whose name was Hepzibah Jenkins.”45 It was common practice, in the literature of the day, to embed subtle allusions of
this type in titles and texts; the point was to underscore the work’s literary value by tantalizing the educated reader with intertextual play. As the architect gives the house good bones, so she gave her novel strong literary antecedents that would resonate with well-versed readers of Maud’s era.
Green Gables represented the dream of the simple and authentic life. Anne fans may be startled and delighted to discover that the Green Gables spark that inspired Maud likely was attributable to the President of the United States; the name “Green Gables” may have been inspired by the name of Grover Cleveland’s summer White House at Cape Cod in Massachusetts named “Gray Gables.” Grover Cleveland, the twenty-second and twenty-fourth president of the United States, loved to spend time at Gray Gables, particularly during the 1892 Presidential election campaign that pitted Democrat Cleveland against incumbent Republican President Benjamin Harrison. Mrs. Grover Cleveland was pictured at Gray Gables, a “quaint little cottage,” in Maud’s beloved Godey’s Lady’s Book.46
Gray Gables was a typical New England cottage, a two-storey wooden Queen Anne with a wrap-around deck and many gables and dormers. There was also a Victorian Gray Gables railway station that serviced the president at his summer resort and that is still standing. Sadly, Gray Gables burned down in the 1970s, but the Bourne Historical Society has preserved its memory. One of its veteran volunteer staff members, Thelma Loring, who worked at the Gray Gables inn before it was destroyed, remembers Gray Gables. “It was nothing spectacular, definitely not luxurious,” she said, “but I think that’s why the president and his family liked it; they did not have to put on airs.”47 There is a kinship between the spirit of Gray Gables and Green Gables. One of the first houses Anne Shirley sees when she looks out of her gabled window has a “gray gable end.”48
Maud would have seen Mattie Sheridan’s article in Godey’s Lady’s Book in September 1892, coincidentally (or not?) the same year and month that the little orphan girl Ellen Macneill arrived in Cavendish to provide the kernel for Anne’s story. It was the year Maud was squirreling away many other references in Godey’s that would figure in her novel. Sheridan describes Mrs. Frances Folsom Cleveland, “the sweet girl-wife” (she was twenty-seven years younger than her husband) at her Gray Gables home. During Cleveland’s first term she had become a much-photographed celebrity, yet Mr. Cleveland had a “violent objection” to any association of his wife with politics.
She avoided overshadowing her husband’s re-election campaign by withdrawing to Gray Gables. “Since her wedding-day, she has probably lived through no days so uneventful, so quiet, so secluded from public friction as those of the past summer.” Meanwhile, for the president, Gray Gables was a place to escape from “the restless, resistless political atmosphere.”49 These subliminal associations of peace and escape with Gray Gables were certainly a factor in the novel’s appeal to a mass reading public, including Americans.
Finally, Maud ensured that Green Gables was a tasteful work of art, like a simple but elegantly dressed woman. What better way to ensure that than to follow the experts. Unlike contemporary novels such as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm or Helen Winslow’s Peggy at Spinster Farm, Maud’s title avoided the reference to farm and opted for the more noble and poetic name of Green Gables. At around the very same time that she would have chosen her title Anne of Green Gables, an article entitled “High Gables” appeared in the March 1905 Delineator (the same issue that featured Zona Gale’s orphan story “The Things That Are Real”).50 This article devoted two full pages of illustrations and text to the “High Gables” architectural design, which entailed multiple gables, a gray shingled roof, and red chimneys. The interior design favored different shades of—what color? Green, green, and more green. Green burlap covers the library walls, green silk the window, and green velour curtains are hung over the door. The fireplace is made of red brick with a white wood mantel. It seems that all home decorator Maud had to do was to turn the interior decor outside and voilà: green gables, white siding, and red clay soil. She had given the old gray gables a lick of fresh paint and a modern punch, as well as a more exalted status.
Green Gables is evoked rather than described. More details are provided in the sequels. In the 1917 sequel Anne’s House of Dreams, Green Gables appears as the “old gray-green” house.51 A different picture of the Green Gables’ exterior does not appear until the 1936 sequel Anne of Windy Poplars, when Anne describes her new Summerside home to Gilbert Blythe:
I may describe it to you as a white frame house … very white … with green shutters … very green … with a ‘tower’ in the corner and a dormer-window on either side … .In short, it is a house with a delightfull personality and has something of the flavor of Green Gables about it. 52 Evocative of the genteel New England family home of the nineteenth century, this belated description reflects the sprucing up of the Green Gables house by Ernest Webb, after the success of Anne of Green Gables had made the house famous. A popular postcard from the 1930s featuring the Green Gables house in Cavendish is found in Maud’s 1936 journal. With the siding looking nice and white and clean, the polished Green Gables tourist site now served as a concrete image of what Green Gables looked like. By being vague and evocative in her first novel, Maud created in Green Gables an idealized home into which millions of readers from different backgrounds could project their own ideal of home.
The little cow path, which Maud had romantically named Lover’s Lane, and that was at the heart of the Green Gables mythology, had its beginnings south of Margaret and David Macneill’s farm from where it led down to a wooded trail to where two bridges crossed a cool streamlet—a capital place for trout fishing with the Nelson boys and, later, with Frede.53 Maud had first discovered the path when she was twelve, close to Anne’s age when she arrived at Green Gables. To Maud, the lane had magic. She spent pages describing it in her journal, tracing it through dif ferent seasons and colors. Lover’s Lane was like a companion. Here, she said, she never felt depressed or sad; the lane always lifted her mood. Here she thought out many of the chapters for Green Gables. Prowling with her camera in the sunshine and snow she took possession of it imaginatively. She never tired of the fascinating tunnel effect achieved by focusing her camera down the lane toward the flood of light at its end. As she chased the tunnel of light with her camera she was composing a story about it. She never tired of registering the lane’s different colors and moods in her journals, pasting in, years later, the different photos she had taken.
Walking through Lover’s Lane was therapy for Maud, as was writing about it. She had first given the world a glimpse of her beloved Cavendish lane in her poem, “In Lovers Lane,” which appeared in July 1903 in the
Delineator. A fragrant space where wild roses grow, where beeches provide shadow, and where the invisible brook can be heard, Lover’s Lane causes hearts to commune with no need for words:
And eyes will meet with seeking eyes
And hands will clasp in Lovers’ Lane.54 A few months later, in January 1904, Maud was jolted to see “Winter in Lovers’ Lane” in the same magazine. Signed by Clinton Scollard, a prolific New York State poet whose name she had seen many times in Godey’s Lady’s Book, the poem read as if it were a sequel to hers: “In Lovers’ Lane’tis winter now/ (Will spring tide never come again?)” the poet asks and seems to speak to Maud directly:
Will hearts no more be wooed and won
In memory-haunted Lovers’ Lane?55 Maud must have felt a curious combination of flattery and irritation in seeing her own “Lover’s Lane” appropriated by the American poet. As she had done with the photo of Evelyn Nesbit, Maud took a pair of scissors, clipped out the poem and glued it in her scrapbook (without identifying its source). She did more. As if hoisting a flag underneath the poem, she glued a red maple leaf, big and prominent, taken from a tree growing in her own Lover’s Lane. Even though the maple leaf would not become the national flag until 1965, during Maud’s era it was featured on Canadian coins and in Alexander Muir’s song The Maple Leaf Forever, written in the year of Canada’s Confederation in 1867. Indeed, Maud’s description of spring in chapter twenty is much more specifically Canadian than the Romantic effusions that appear in earlier chapters:
Spring had come once more to Green Gables—the beautiful, capricious, reluctant Canadian spring, lingering along through April and May in a succession of sweet, fresh, chilly days, with pink sunsets and miracles of resurrection and growth. The maples in Lovers’ Lane were red-budded … 56 Whenever the lane is mentioned in Anne of Green Gables, the maples are close by. For example, when Anne and Diana walk up the lane to school, “under the leafy arch of maples,” Anne remarks that “maples are such sociable trees … they’re always rustling and whispering to you.” With its glimmering beech and maple woods the land was a space of stillness and peace. “I like that lane because you can think out loud there without people calling you crazy,” Anne explains to Marilla. Maud must have chuckled as she wrote that sentence, for she was the one talking out loud to herself in her lane, composing her novel.57
“Lover’s Lane of course was my Lover’s Lane,” Maud would later write in her journal with a curious proprietary emphasis.58 And yet Anne admits that she and Diana discovered the name in a book: “Diana and I were reading a perfectly magnificent book and there’s a Lover’s Lane in it. So we want to have one, too. And it’s a very pretty name, don’t you think? So romantic!” 59 Lover’s Lane was found in many places, and that was part of its emotional power. Maud could tap into the emotions readers felt about their own romanticized lanes, the ones they had been walking along as children or lovers. Enabling romantic identification, the landscape and architecture of Avonlea and Green Gables were a unique blend of the personal and the borrowed, literary and popular, local and global, Canadian and American.
“How shall I ever be able to live without it?” Maud wailed in her journal about her Lover’s Lane, less than a year before she would leave Prince Edward Island for good.60 The question, like the answer, was rhetorical. By memorializing her home and the lane, she found a way of not only taking it with her, but also transporting Lover’s Lane and Green Gables, across space and time and borders—between the covers of a book.
Just as the beloved homestead was dying a slow death, so Maud perceived Prince Edward Island’s geography as marked by the passage of time. In her August 23 letter to George MacMillan, she describes rapid crumbling of the soft red rock of Prince Edward Island.61 Similarly, its forests were disappearing at an alarming speed. The Reverend Robert Murray wrote in 1899,
“There was a time when the maple was so abundant that the people made from its sap most of the sugar they required, but that time has vanished like the golden age.”62 The youth of Cavendish—Maud’s own generation—were also vanishing. Maud felt depressed by the outward migration that left her isolated in Cavendish beginning in the 1890s. Nate Lockhart, Jack Laird, Hattie Gordon, Ed Simpson, and many others who belonged to the Island’s best and most educated had left to find careers and livelihoods in the Canadian west or in the United States (a trend that continues today). “All Maritime province ambition turns to Boston,” Maud later commented in an interview. “The farmer’s daughter is educated for a teacher or trained for a nurse and goes to Boston. The fisherman’s daughter goes to Boston to get high pay in housework.” She further emphasized that a large percentage of the professional men of Massachusetts were “natives of our Maritimes” and that when Maritime people went on a long trip, it was more likely to be to Boston than to Montreal or Toronto.63 In Anne of Green Gables the Acadian farm boys go to the States to work in the lobster canneries. In Marian Reeves’ story “On her Sixth Birthday: A Leap Year Story,” two homesick Acadian maids return from service in Boston to Prince Edward Island, “homeward to a north-shore Acadian village.”64
One of the old traditions on Prince Edward Island is Old Home Week, celebrated annually with exhibitions showcasing livestock and homemade arts and crafts. The year of 1905, in fact, marked the first Old Home Week. It was an attempt to lure back the many Island expatriates. Its preparation had been discussed for months and was front-page news in the Charlottetown newspapers during the year Maud was busy writing Anne. On the night of July 24, the railway was thronged with homecomers. The Olivette brought seventy-one passengers from Boston, the Princess over one hundred, and more were expected. They were welcomed with renderings of Home Sweet Home and God Save the Queen. There were horse races at the Charlottetown Driving Park and evening theatricals, exactly the type of events that Maud evokes in her novel.65 Maud immediately incorporated Old Home Week into the novel, blending it with the Charlottetown Exhibition of September 1905, in the latter part of the novel, where rural meets urban.
In fact, readers of Anne may remember Anne’s first trip to the provincial capital in chapter twenty-nine, “An Epoch in Anne’s Life.” “Charlottetown was thirty miles away,” the narrator remarks about this
pleasant ride along the harvest-shorn fields in September with Diana Barry. Anne exults in the long journey to town. Diana’s aunt in Charlottetown, Miss Josephine Barry, takes the two girls to the Exhibition Grounds (still operating today in the Charlottetown Driving Park as a harness racing track and exhibition grounds). In the Market Place, horses, flowers, and fancy work are on display. Prizes are given for the most impressive apples, pigs, painting, and homemade cheese, and “there were thousands of people there.”66 There are horse races. A man going up in a balloon. And a concert at the Academy of Music. Anne enjoys the excitement and adventure, yet echoes Dorothy, in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), when she says: “I’ve had a splendid time … . But the best of it all was the coming home.”67 Just as Maud preferred to stay put in Cavendish, resisting the lure of New York, Boston, and Halifax, so Anne concludes that she was not born for city life. Later in the novel she reiterates that her identity is linked to her home: “I’m quite content to be Anne of Green Gables.”68
The myth of the home associated with Prince Edward Island has “connotations of the rustic, the premodern, the traditional, the authentic, the quaint, the pastoral, and the picturesque,”69 writes Shauna McCabe in her doctoral dissertation on the topic of “Representing Islandness.” Although such values may seem contrary to modernism, in fact, they are an integral component of the changes that swept over the country and continent in the early twentieth century. Although there had been little in the way of a tourist industry when Maud was growing up, by the time she began writing her novel the Island was a favorite destination. In 1899, for example, there were an estimated seven thousand tourists, many of them American.70 So many Americans purchased or built summer homes on the Island that its land and real estate was advertised in New York and Boston. In 1896, Cincinnati oil magnate Alexander McDonald built an enormous, Queen Anne-style summer home, with many gables and dormers, on the north shore of the Island. He named it “Dalvay” after his boyhood home—a gesture that reinforced the image of Prince Edward Island as a place where one might return to simpler, more innocent times. Today Dalvayby-the-Sea is a summer resort hotel. It appears in the Anne of Green Gables and Road to Avonlea television series as the White Sands Hotel.
In the novel, the White Sands Hotel is the site for the concert for the benefit of the Charlottetown hospital for which Anne Shirley has been
selected to recite in the last third of the novel.71 The novel suddenly moves from the old-fashioned, mellow oil lamps of Green Gables to the blazing electric lights in the White Sands Hotel. The contrast could not be any more striking. The tourists are stock characters. For Anne and her girlfriends, the bejeweled and stout pink lady, wife of an American millionaire, represents the lure of a better life in Boston or New York. “I just wish I was a rich American and could spend my summer at a hotel and wear jewels and low-necked dresses,” says Jane Andrews. “I’m sure it would be ever so much more fun than teaching school.”72 In fact, Maud’s own cousins Clara and Stella Macneill settled in Boston and Los Angeles respectively, although by no means marrying millionaires, as the nice but talentless Jane Andrews eventually does when she marries a Winnipeg millionaire in Anne of the Island.
For Anne Shirley, it is but one of the temptations to be sampled and resisted, as she recognizes the value of home and youth and family. In a world experiencing rapid change, fiction accommodated modernization by emphasizing the need to restore mental and physical health, and by upholding the pastoral ideal. Maud’s longing for home and community was emblematic of a nostalgic undercurrent rippling through an entire era of transition from the Victorian to the modern.
Maud’s loyalty to home also extended to Canada. Specific, yet unobtrusive, references to Prince Edward Island and Canada make it possible to claim Anne of Green Gables as a Canadian classic even though the novel was published in Boston, then the capital of Prince Edward Island’s outward migration. Because the Charlottetown Conference of 1864 paved the way for Confederation in 1867, Prince Edward Island is often regarded as the birthplace of Canada. The “Confederation” label has been inscribed across the Island on major landmarks such as the Confederation Bridge (which links the Island with the mainland), the Confederation Trail, and the Confederation Centre of the Arts. Ironically, however, it was not until 1873, just one year before Maud’s birth, that Prince Edward Island actually
joined the Canadian Confederation. Confederation would prove a mixed blessing for Canada’s smallest province, creating a culture of dependency. Political delegations from the United States had been courting the little province energetically. Should Prince Edward Island have favored a Maritime Union, an alliance of the Eastern provinces with the Eastern United States? The question continues to be asked on Prince Edward Island, even as the re-enactment of “The Fathers of Confederation” has become an important annual ritual performed in front of Province House for summer tourists.
By far the most iconic political presence in Anne of Green Gables is that of the first Canadian prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, who appears in chapter eighteen, “Anne to the Rescue.” Although he is not named, Marilla provides a caricature of Macdonald after having attended his “monster mass” election rally in Charlottetown: “Such a nose as that man had! But he can speak. I was proud of being a Conservative.”73 Sir John A., as he was known, did have a prominent nose, as Canadians knew well, and by alluding to him in her novel, Maud commemorated her own meeting with the legendary prime minister. On August II, 1890, the fifteen-year-old Maud had taken her first train ride ever, and what a ride it was. At the Kensington train station, she boarded the special train carrying the prime minister. Her grandfather, Senator Montgomery, who was hobnobbing with Sir John A., introduced her, and she accompanied the prime minister (“spry-looking”) and his wife (dressed “dowdily,” said fashionista Maud) to Summerside.74 In the city’s Market Place, Sir John A., a passionate advocate of the nationalist cause, gave an eloquent and memorable speech to a large crowd, an event Maud transformed into a “monster mass” rally in the novel (somewhat unrealistically, as it would have been unlikely for any prime minister to venture to Prince Edward Island in January). Sir John A.’s message was patriotic. The Dominion had made great progress since 1867, and the provinces were connected by the Canadian Pacific Railway. He was smart and witty in his remarks to the ladies, as The Journal-Pioneer reported, reminding them that he had introduced a clause in the franchise act that would have given women the right to vote, but had to drop the clause for fear of being defeated by the men. But if the ladies would stand by him, he said, the Island would do so too.75 The speech was followed by a storm of applause, and Maud was impressed by the prime minister’s eloquence. His
appeal to the women later inspired the episode in which those two formidable ladies of Avonlea—Marilla and Mrs. Lynde—go off to the political meeting, while Matthew stays home and Thomas Lynde looks after the horse. Just a few months after the Summerside speech, on May 29, 1891, Canada’s first prime minister suffered a massive stroke, passing away a week later. His cameo in Anne of Green Gables was the memorializing of an important Canadian figure, albeit in humorous form.
That Marilla should insist on adopting “a born Canadian” in the first chapter of Anne of Green Gables is a patriotic proclamation.76 The novel includes numerous Canadianisms, referring to the Ottawa government and to learning Canadian history, but generally avoids loud expressions of patriotism.77 Grits (Liberals) and Tories (Conservatives) are mentioned, but neither political party is given preference. Matthew votes Conservative, but Gilbert’s father is a Liberal. The references would be easily recognized by Canadian readers, but would not alienate readers from elsewhere. “At the turn of the century, Canadian political and cultural commentators debated the question of Canada’s national and political existence,” writes Janice Fiamengo in her study of the novel’s landscape, suggesting that Anne of Green Gables was part of a national literature that helped Canadians to possess their homeland imaginatively. As the Vancouver native confesses, as a child she was prompted by Anne’s example to name herself “Janice of Emerald Firs.”78
On the weekend of October 14, Frede Campbell visited, and her presence was “an unspeakable comfort” to Maud.79 The tone of Maud’s unpublished journal entry of Sunday evening, October 15, is elusive and fascinating. It is clear that Maud had shared delicate confidences with Frede, and her friend would have listened with sympathy as they shared confidences in bed until the early hours as they always liked to do. However, she did not give any details of their discussion in her journal, other than to confess that she was sadhearted and lonely. The quarrels with Uncle John and her own uncertain situation were weighing on her. A tongue-in-cheek reference to Dickens’
novel Martin Chuzzlewit, with its greedy family members, makes it clear that she was referring to the quarrels with Uncle John. Even Dickens’ eternally cheerful Mark Tapley, she writes, would not be able to keep up his spirits under the current circumstances.
Perhaps it was a walk with Frede in Lover’s Lane that prompted the memory of her long ramble in the woods a week before. She had spent an entire afternoon in the woods. It was an exquisite experience but for the fact that her worries made for such “a dour companion.” The trees, presumably the maples of Lover’s Lane, were red. The winds rustled softly in the leaves. “I wished that I might lie down there among the bleached ferns and fall into a pleasant dream that might have no ending and no return to unrest and anxiety. Oh, those dear old woods and fields! I love them with all my heart and have found in them fullness of joy in all my years.”80 The fantasy of the ultimate escape, the wish to merge with the landscape, indicates both her despair during this period and her romantic, escapist way of dealing with problems.
“I bade them farewell very sadly for I do not expect ever to have a garden here again,” Maud continued in a sad farewell to her flower garden. “I do not feel welcome even to so much soil as would suffice for a flower plot. It is very bitter to think of giving up my garden—my one sole pleasure apart from books and pen.”81 As she headed into the final stretch of writing Anne, her world was shrinking. She felt herself slowly starved and deprived of the oxygen of life—her beloved garden, which she was forced to give up. She was suffocating. Maud passionately loved the old house and garden but Uncle John must have claimed the land. Here was a loss that would be hard to digest for someone whose life was tied to the garden.