ELEVEN

Red Hair, Puffed Sleeves, and the Rituals of Growing Up

“ … I cannot imagine that red hair away. I do my best. I think to myself, ‘Now my hair is a glorious black, black as the raven’s wing.’ But all the time I know it is Just plain red, and it breaks my heart. It will be my lifelong sorrow … .”

—Anne Shirley to Matthew Cuthbert¹

Even though the words “adolescent” and “teen-age” were not yet in common use during Maud’s era, precocious Anne has the classical adolescent temperament. Like a modern-day teenager, she is constantly reinventing and testing herself—inhabiting countless roles that add to the reader’s delight, suggesting both a fantasy of unfettered freedom and a coming to terms with a distinctive personal identity that is also carefully negotiated with respect to its social context. Like her author, Anne is able to play a myriad of roles, even contradictory ones. Thus she experiments with hairstyles (Anne’s hair changes color and goes from long to short) and clothing (witness the dramatic changes from gray aprons to modern dresses). She also showcases her performance talents as an actress (Elaine), an amateur model (Dawn of Hope), and stage performer. Like Maud, who tried out a number of different pseudonyms (Maud Cavendish, Joyce Cavendish, Maud Eglinton, Belinda Bluegrass, Cynthia, J. C. Neville),² so Anne plays at renaming herself (Geraldine, Cordelia, Elaine). As Anne of Green Gables, she also gives herself a noble connection to a place like the famous medieval redhead and free spirit, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

The self-defining female child is an adolescent myth, in addition to being a powerful myth in Canadian literature and culture: “For this story of the sensitive young woman who doesn’t somehow ‘belong’ in the environment into which she has found herself situated, who must somehow refuse to be limited by her birth-identity who creates for herself a new identity more appropriate to her ‘finer’ qualities, occurs again and again in Canadian writing after Anne of Green Gables.”³ We find an exuberant pattern of female reinvention in the work of Maud’s literary daughters including Canadian icons such as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Margaret Laurence. In fact, there may be a trajectory from Anne Shirley to the Honorable Kim Campbell, who also renamed herself, rejecting her birthname Avril Phaedra (though her fame as the first woman prime minister of Canada was short lived, unlike the enduring popularity of the Island redhead). As for Anne Shirley’s compelling journey into selfhood, she is equipped with tools she shared with her author including a highly developed sense of fashion, a talent in performance, and a dynamic personality. Her multiple roles suggest that the story of Anne is at heart a fable of identity.

The Art of Beauty

Beginning with Anne’s focus on her red hair to her love of puffed sleeves and flowers in her hair, Anne of Green Gables is laced with the philosophy and principles found in the Victorian fashion bible The Art of Beauty. Based on British feminist author Eliza Haweis’s popular column, her 1878 book formulates the era’s fashion principles. Dress, Haweis theorizes, “bears the same relation to the body as speech does to the brain; therefore dress may be called the speech of the body.”⁴ As a philosophy of fashion, the book transcends the simple instructive morals of other advice columns. Haweis writes that “The Plain Girl” is in the very best category of girlhood. The “Stupid Girl” or “The Uneducated Girl” cannot be made witty, she argues, but the ugly flower, or the ugly building, or the ugly face all exhibit a certain “crooked beauty” of their own. “There is a ‘beauté du diable,’ stricken with imperfection, but with its own charm,” Haweis writes, anticipating the exact same wording that Maud used to describe her friend Frede’s unusual beauty. In fact, numerous cross-references can be found in Maud’s journal and fiction and she must have been familiar with Haweis’s fashion philosophy, although she never mentions this book.

Anne, Emily, Pat, and Jane—all of Maud’s major heroines are painted with the charm of physical imperfection. With her serious expression and red, tousled hair, Anne Shirley is a perfect physical specimen of the Pre-Raphaelite ideal. This art movement favored natural, long-haired, disheveled, soulful, and untraditional beauties. William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and other Pre-Raphaelite painters had made redheads fashionable, as Haweis noted: “Red hair—once, to say a woman had red hair was social assassination—is the rage.”⁵ It is from this Victorian fashion adviser that the narrator in Anne of Green Gables derived the rule that Anne is “forever debarred” from wearing the pink rose in her red hair. “Pink,” Haweis had stipulated, “is suitable for most young faces, especially the fair, except when the hair inclines to red.”⁶ Iconoclastic Haweis encouraged women to discard artificial flowers for headdresses and use real flowers in hair and hats. Thus she also anticipated the photograph of Evelyn Nesbit and Anne’s pagan wildflower get-up for church.

With her love of wildflowers and celebration of beauty for beauty’s sake, Anne is an aesthete. Could she possibly be a spiritual kin of Oscar Wilde, who famously carried a sunflower or lily on his walk down Piccadilly, or other beauty devotees who placed Madonnas in pagan and underworld settings in paintings and stained-glass church windows in London and Berlin? The cult of youth was very much part of this fin-de-siècle movement. In fact, Wilde, the Irish pope of aestheticism (the pursuit of beauty for its own sake), stopped in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, on his tour to America, on October II, 1882. Dressed in a light traveling suit and wearing knee-breeches, he had come to deliver his gospel of beauty—a lecture on the Decorative Arts. In the Market Place, the so-called “Butcher Market,” where the air was thick with the smell of cheese and butter and cabbage, Wilde had preached the gospel of beauty to an enthusiastic Prince Edward Island crowd. He said that, as summarized in the Examiner, “we could get along very well without philosophy if we surrounded ourselves with beautiful things.” Wilde concluded that “Art is the perfect praise of God, being the exemplifications of his handiwork.”⁷ The self-cherishing parts of Anne’s character are at home in this tradition. Maud, who was seven going on eight years old when Oscar Wilde visited Charlottetown, would probably not have been allowed to attend the lecture, and so we should perhaps not make too much of this connection, but she certainly flirted with ideas of aestheticism and placed her heroine in that tradition through the distinctive tint of her hair.

Fiery Red

When people asked Maud why she gave Anne red hair, she said, “I didn’t. It was red.”⁸ Growing up among Scots and Irish folk, Maud took great pleasure in teasing and stereotyping redheads, but she was also fascinated by this vibrant hair color and its potential to evoke a distinctive personality. All she remembered about one of her early teachers, Mr. Lamont, was his red hair and red whiskers.⁹ Even as an adult, she poked fun at Artie Moffat’s red hair “dazzling up in the air off to one side” and distracting her during a church service.¹⁰ But she admired the auburn-haired beauty of Penzie whose rich tint she likened to the wildwood rose. “Little freckled Maud McKenzie with her elfin head of short silky red curls and ‘cute’ face is a nice little thing,” Maud noted about one of her Bideford students.¹¹ No doubt she was the model for the post-shingled, short-haired Anne Shirley (and may have been the model for another redhead, Sarah Maud, of whom we shall hear more later).

As a fable of identity, Anne of Green Gables is a journey toward coming to terms with her distinctive fiery red hair—a symbol of Anne’s uniqueness and queerness that does not always fit into the social order smoothly. In the course of the novel, the depiction of her hair changes from “carroty” to “auburn” to “Titian red,” each with increasingly positive connotations. In fact, in October 1905, just around the time that Maud would have been writing about Anne’s “Titian” hair in the novel, Modern Women featured an article titled “The History and Hygiene of Hair,” detailing that “Titian” hair had always been admired by painters. Just so, Anne’s “splendid Titian hair” attracts the attention of an artist at the American concert who promptly expresses a desire to paint her face.¹² Presumably, it is not the actual hair color that changes, but rather, the perceptions of those who are judging Anne.

Though despised by Anne, her hair color links her with the red clay roads of Prince Edward Island. The iron contained in the island soil has turned the roads a distinctive red. In fact, red sandstone is everywhere in the novel, and the reader makes the connection before Anne does. Red hair causes its owner to stand out. Anne’s red hair also marks her as the creative thinker and trendsetter among the conformists and followers who surround her. After the novel was published, Maud was inundated with fan mail from red-tinted girls, for Anne had also inherited all of the inflictions of redheads. “Her temper matches her hair,” as Mrs. Lynde remarks.¹³

The red of Anne’s hair is part of her ambivalence, part of the divided self that is pulling in different directions and providing glimpses of the many diverse facets that make up her dynamic character (a topic to which we shall return in chapter twelve of this volume). When Anne of Green Gables was translated into Japanese in 1952, the color was emphasized in the title Akage no An, Red-Haired Anne. The popular media during Maud’s era were fascinated by red hair. “Red Hair and Genius” read the title of an article in New York’s The World newspaper in March 1901. “Red hair is an indication of ardor, passion, intensity of feeling and purity of character and usually goes with a sanguine temperament,” writes the author who cites Sappho, Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth, Helen of Troy, Joan of Arc, and even Shakespeare and Caesar as redheads.¹⁴ But western literature and culture also features a slew of red-haired villains, including Charles Dickens’ Fagin in Oliver Twist and Judas Iscariot, who was represented with red hair in medieval paintings. Red-haired women such as the biblical Mary Magdalene or William Thackeray’s Becky Sharp are often portrayed as lascivious or mischievous. Anne herself has absorbed the stereotype regarding redheads.

With her adolescent drive to transform and reinvent herself, Anne decides to dye her hair raven black, but succeeds only in coloring her red locks a ghastly green. “Dyed it! Dyed your hair! Anne Shirley, didn’t you know it was a wicked thing to do?”¹⁵ Marilla is horrified—again. In earlier literature girls cut and sold their hair to help others—think of Jo in Little Women or the heroine in O’Henry’s story “The Gift of the Magi.” Anne’s dye job is the classical act of adolescent defiance, self-assertion, and reinvention. Modern readers, in particular, will empathize with Anne given the current popularity of hair coloring. The episode was purely imaginary, Maud said, ¹⁶ but readers will be intrigued to learn that she may also have had a personal stake in the dramatic matter of hair dyeing.

Proud of her thick hair, Maud wore it pinned up with a little curly bang that flattered her high forehead. Just a year or two before she wrote Anne of Green Gables, she had suffered her own hair tragedy. One morning, she had found the first gray hair. Looking closer, she found more. Devastated by the prospect of going gray before she was settled for life, before she had published her book, she cried all night. In the novel, as readers know well, the gray strands in Marilla’s dark hair serve as a sober reminder of middle age. Marilla twists her hair up into a hard little knot; the two wire hairpins that she “aggressively” inserts are the bitter marks of old-maidenhood.¹⁷ But help was on the way, or so it seemed. For earlier that year, in June, Mr. Crewe had delivered Modern Women, which besides containing Maud’s other little redhead, “By the Grace of Sarah Maud,” a precursor to Anne, as we shall see, also featured an attractively illustrated advertisement for “Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer. Always restores color to gray hair.” The fine print advertised the dye for whiskers and moustaches: “It colors instantly a rich brown or a soft black.”¹⁸

The illustration showed the “Queen of Hair Tonics” wearing a royal robe and a crown; her luxuriant and youthful dark hair ripples over her shoulders. Hair coloring ads were often written in fine print and bashfully hidden like the ads for underwear or “hygienic belts.” They were taboo like the shameful act of coloring itself. Hall’s “Sicilian Hair Renewer,” in contrast, was prominently and attractively displayed and ran over several months. It’s only a short imaginative leap from the Hair Renewer to the Italian peddler whom Marilla suspects sold Anne the wicked hair dye. Of course, any method of coloring long hair was an uncertain experiment that could lead to disaster, publicly exposing the woman who tried to cheat nature—and Maud interestingly had an uncanny eye for those who did. When she met her former teacher and friend Hattie Gordon Smith in 1927 in Toronto, not only was Hattie divorced, but Maud noticed disapprovingly that Hattie had bobbed her hair and perhaps tried to alter her natural color. The once attractive golden hair had “faded to a neutral brown—less beautiful than if it had become gray”¹⁹ Maud was certainly in the know as far as the vanity and vexation of the spirit were concerned, and as always held strong opinions. No doubt she was captured by the fantasy of rejuvenation.

The matter of freckles was also one that preoccupied the beauty columns of women’s magazines. Earlier in January, the Delineator’s “Good Looks” column had declared “freckles” as a “great mystery of the human skin.” Freckles were discussed as a blemish, in the same category as moles, birthmarks, warts, liver spots, and “port-wine marks.” The column suggested that freckles be treated with iodine. “Apply the iodine to each freckle with a camel’s-hair brush or, better, by means of a swab made by wrapping a wisp of cotton around a toothpick.”²⁰ Another way to make freckles fade was to apply lemon juice. As for Anne, she has her own, much easier way of making unwanted freckles disappear. “I can imagine them away,” she confides to Matthew.²¹ In Anne of Avonlea, however, she will in fact dye her nose scarlet when trying to remove the freckles with what she thought was a lotion advertised in a magazine.

Being Elaine

Like an actress, Anne can change roles and identities, and like Maud in the pages of her journal, she also occasionally veers toward melodrama. From the time we first meet her, Anne fantasizes about starring as the unlucky heroines Cordelia or Geraldine. When she dabbles in story writing, she is true to her motto, “It’s so much more romantic to end a story up with a funeral than a wedding.”²² The pale, tear-stained face, the piercing shrieks, the clasped hands; these are the gestures of grand opera. Our red-haired heroine frequently bursts into tears, like her creator. There is also a surprising amount of violence and disaster—always embedded in stories, such as Anne’s history of abuse and neglect, the death of Mr. Thomas, or Gilbert’s recitation, in which he assumes the character of a soldier dying in Bingen on the Rhine. The ups and downs, the exuberant highs and tragic lows that characterize Anne Shirley’s personality correspond to the mood swings that gave birth to the novel. “‘The trouble with you, Anne, is that you’re thinking too much about yourself,’” says pragmatic Marilla, “hitting for once in her life on a very sound and pithy piece of advice.”²³ In passages such as these, the author—who could be as self-involved as her heroine in her own sorrows—serves up a stiff dose of self-irony and self-mockery, as Maud’s own addiction to emotional drama is played out on the pages of her journal.

In chapter twenty-eight, “An Unfortunate Lily Maid,” Anne is inspired, after studying Tennyson’s poem “Lancelot and Elaine” in school, to dramatize Elaine, the fair and lovable lily maid of Astolat. It is a classic melodramatic plot that Anne would fall in love with. In the poem, when Elaine realizes that Lancelot can never love her, she resigns herself to die. Elaine arranges for her body to be taken down the river to Camelot, with a letter in her hand explaining her love and death. Anne throws herself into the role with gusto, while spurning Mrs. Lynde’s dire warning about the wickedness of playacting. With her short and silky curls, an old piano scarf of yellow Japanese crepe, and an iris in place of a lily, Anne lies down in the old flat and begins to float down the river. As readers of Anne know well, her journey comes to an abrupt end, however, when the flat begins to leak. Clutching to a bridge pile for dear life, Anne suffers the humiliation of being rescued by Gilbert Blythe. This scene parodies the popular Victorian tales of love and sacrifice that Anne has been reading and, as one scholar has written, “the boat (weighted down, perhaps, by too many romantic aspirations) is sinking.”²⁴

So far, so familiar. Yet there is an untold story behind the brilliant parody that also highlights Maud’s fascination with role-playing and performance as metaphor for life and personal identity. Consider the intriguing and not so coincidental fact that just a few months earlier, in April, renowned music historian and critic Gustav Kobbé wrote in the Delineator about American actress Annie Russell and her popular role as Elaine. Simply called Elaine, the play was adapted from Tennyson’s poem “Lancelot and Elaine” and performed in the Madison Square Theater in New York City. The scene required the actress to lie in the funeral barge simulating death for eighteen minutes.²⁵ So involved did Annie Russell become in her portrayal of the dead Elaine that on several occasions, she became unconscious on stage and had to be rescued. As an actress she had to remind herself of “the demarcation line” between the imaginary and the real: that she was not Elaine but Annie Russell.²⁶ The successful actor, explained Kobbé, has a “dual personality,” constantly communicating by “wireless” with the character he projects on the stage. Kobbé described this ability to merge the self into another personality an “emotional technique.” ²⁷ Kobbé’s remarks concerning Annie Russell’s performance apply equally well to the way in which Anne Shirley blurs the demarcation line between real and imaginary.

What happens when real-life dangers arise during a performance—the situation Anne faces during her portrayal of the Lily Maid? The true actor “will try to save not himself, but the play,” says Kobbé.²⁸ In professional lingo this is described as “swallowing the file.” Anne, of course, prefers life and is rescued, albeit reluctantly, by her favorite foe, Gilbert Blythe. And yet, the entire episode is recounted with relish, giving Anne another opportunity to perform and dramatize the scene for the pleasure of Mrs. Allan. Maud, who no doubt read Kobbé’s piece, endows her heroine with the talents of an actress, the “emotional technique.” But she cannot and does not allow for the possibility that Anne might pursue a professional career on the stage. Even though Anne’s face was inspired by that of a model and actress, it is out of the question that Anne might become a professional performer, for the simple reason that Maud herself was unable even to imagine such a possible future for herself.

The September 1903 Metropolitan containing the picture of Evelyn Nesbit also featured an autobiographical essay by American actress Corinne Parker. Parker discussed the hardships of a stage career for a woman with few means. Parker, who was sixteen years old when she took to the stage in New York, describes a life of self-denial and danger, exposed to predators and exploitative theatre managers.²⁹ In contrast, Maud, who was herself an avid amateur actress, restricted her heroine to the safety of the amateur stage. Maud’s contract with her reader is clear. She may put Anne in a leaking boat, she may have Anne fall from a rooftop and break her ankle, but she will not expose Anne to the dangers of the professional stage. It was as unthinkable as it would have been for her to send her heroine to work as a domestic helper in Toronto or Boston. It is here that Maud’s class boundaries are clad in stone. She has all the Macneill pride and prejudice. That Anne has the dramatic talent and temperament to pursue a career as an actress, or as a model, is made evident in the episode where Anne recites at the Hotel Concert and the American artist recognizes her potential as a painter’s model. But Maud is firm. Anne is to live her life at home, in Avonlea, Prince Edward Island, not under the footlights or in an artist’s studio in some faraway American city. Ultimately, for Maud, the performance of self takes place in everyday life, and she imported the metaphors of the stage into her shaping of Anne’s identify. Just as she built her own identity in her journal on such performances of self, so Maud gave her heroine a nimble flexibility to operate within the constraints of society while also maintaining an important measure of freedom.

Puffed Sleeves

Anne’s love of fashion is central, and the fashion symbol that may stand out the most in the reader’s memory is the glorious puffed sleeved dress, which is invested with all of Maud’s love and nostalgia but also with a good dose of humor. “Stuff me in,” the Dalhousie college girls would say to each other in the mid-nineties when fashion dictated sleeves so ridiculously large that the girls had to assist each other when they put on their coats.³⁰ The fashion plates of the Victorian era tended to exaggerate the giant ballooning arms. This point is alluded to in Anne of Avonlea, where the blunt Mr. Harrison refers to an overdressed Charlottetown lady, “She looked like a head-on collision between a fashion plate and a nightmare.”³¹ Although Maud had carefully consulted her scrapbook earlier in July 1905, the puffed sleeves were more than inhabitants of those dusty pages; they were also the latest Edwardian style. Exhibited in the February 1905 issue of the Delineator, puffs had, ironically, appeared on the same page that featured the new sleek fashion for automobile outings. There were detailed sewing instructions for “full puffs,” “deep puffs,” and “double puffs” made by means of a line of shirrings near the elbow. “The popularity of automobiling is responsible for many innovations in women’s dress,” the Delineator fashion editor noted.³² While the streamlined motoring look avoided fancy decorations that might have interfered with the increased speed of the car, the puffed sleeves satisfied longings for old-fashioned ornament. This explains the amicable co-existence of the fashion symbols of modernity with the symbols of Victorianism. Fashion is the arena in which social contradictions are both encoded and negotiated, and Maud’s comedy takes pleasure in exploiting fashion as a domain for both arbitrary rules and for breaking those rules and celebrating self-expression.

One of the novel’s most humorous and brilliant episodes occurs when shy Matthew Cuthbert ventures on his quest to buy fabric for Anne’s puffed sleeves dress. In the immensely satisfying chapter twenty-five, “Matthew Insists on Puffed Sleeves,” the comedy relies on both Cuthberts inadvertently violating the strict gender boundaries of the Victorian period. As the narrator makes clear, pragmatic Marilla is blind to the feminine fashion faux pas she commits in dressing Anne in gray and dowdy aprons. “A happy medium may be found between silly extravagance and excessive economy in dress,” the January 1905 Delineator had advised in a piece entitled “A Girl’s Personal Appearance and Dress.”³³

It was Matthew who, after much smoking and “cogitation,” recognized that something was amiss in the picture of Anne “so plainly and soberly gowned” among a group of girls “all gay in waists of red and blue and pink and white.”³⁴ It was Matthew who understood Anne’s hankering after puffed sleeves, thus becoming the unlikely instigator for the sartorial revolution at Green Gables. In August, two months after Maud had published a story in Modern Women, a piece appeared in the magazine entitled “Man’s Humiliation,” in which columnist Charles Battell Loomis dramatized, tongue-in-cheek, the sad spectacle that ensues when an otherwise competent male, sent on a shopping errand by his wife, is reduced to a sack of fright and incompetence as soon as he steps over the threshold and into the store:

… [he] shuffles into the store, meek-eyed and diffident and going up to the spool counter (after wandering all over the store looking for it) says ‘Give me some of that,’ and pointing at the paper shoves it at the young sales-woman. And she looks at him with pitying eyes as a poor fool and reading the directions, hands out the goods.

He goes home with them and ten to one they are wrong but he is safe.³⁵

The columnist’s hapless male may have inspired the hilarious scene in which Maud sends Matthew shopping for Anne’s puffed-sleeve dress. Who can forget the picture of Matthew, helpless and harassed, having to confront Samuel Lawson’s young saleswoman in her pompadour and clacking bracelets, losing his composure and common sense, and returning home in the middle of December with no dress, but with brown sugar and a garden rake. The desired dress must then be secured with the help of a woman, Mrs. Rachel Lynde. And yet, Matthew’s journey into the nether world of feminine fashion brings healthy excitement to his life. Where braver men have failed, he eventually triumphs, securing the puffed sleeves for Anne. Much of the pleasure of Anne of Green Gables relies on such subversive ironies.

Gloria, the evocative name of the fabric of Anne’s lovely and glossy dress, is not very well known today. Curious readers can take a look at the Edwardian umbrellas in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, for gloria was used chiefly for umbrellas and parasols during the era. “It’s tightly woven so obviously waterproof enough to use as umbrella cloth, and not pure silk but silk mixed with worsted (which is a fine wool cloth) or cotton, which might possibly make it less expensive than pure silk,” explains Alison Matthews David who teaches at the School of Fashion at Ryerson University in Toronto.³⁶ Like denim, gloria featured a diagonal twill weave but would have been a fine rather than a thick, heavy cloth. Today it is no longer obvious that Maud’s color choice sprang from the era’s fashionably earthy color palate. This same palate was also a reaction to the technological era. “The popular colors are brown in all its shadings, with cinnamon, perhaps, in favor,” the January 1904 Delineator had proclaimed,³⁷ providing the answer to the mystery of the dress’s seemingly subdued hue. From chocolates to a pearl necklace, Matthew continues to shower Anne with the choicest gifts for the modern girl, listed in the magazines contemporaneous with the writing of the novel. Suffused with sensuous detail, the dress and accessories were the fulfillment of Anne’s desires and an important element in articulating the different dimensions of her identity. Nowhere is the pull between her distinct individualism and her desire to belong to a group better exemplified than in the realm of fashion—in her yearning for puffed sleeves.

Coming of Age

In Maud’s era, fashion in dress and hair also presented important markers for growing up, and fashion-loving Maud indulged this interest by using fabrics and styles to show how they transform Anne into a young lady with new responsibilities and expectations. A threshold was crossed when the two school friends put up their hair in pompadour style. They were suddenly adults. During a “delicious” dressing ceremony in Diana’s upstairs room,

Diana did Anne’s front hair in the new pompador [sic] style and Anne tied Diana’s bows with the especial knack she possessed; and they experimented with at least half a dozen different ways of arranging their back hair. At last they were ready cheeks scarlet and eyes glowing with excitement.³⁸

This is a coming-of-age ritual, in which hair and dress are symbols of the girls’ maturation. By putting up her hair and taming her tousled tresses, the girl suddenly appears as an adult and is treated thus. Even today people change their hair styles to mark important events such as career changes, marriage, or divorce; although today the boundaries of age are much more fluid and hair styles are no longer clear signposts of growing up. Maud’s book supplies a nostalgic pleasure in such rituals. Anne and Diana’s new identities are staged in public concerts and recitals, before the damsels regress into silly girls, racing and jumping onto Aunt Josephine Barry’s bed in the Barrys’ spare bedroom.

In her journal Maud fondly recalled how Frede, an eight-year-old freckled urchin, would sit on Maud’s bed in her den, watching her doing her hair, combing and curling, preening and primping herself. Frede was fascinated by the ritual and thought Maud very pretty. A continual source of happiness, these memories fueled the pleasurable bonding of the bosom friends in numerous intimate grooming scenes. Fashion was an inspiring subject during the era, and these fashion pleasures also reveal what was on Maud’s mind at the time of writing Anne. Theodore Dreiser explored the forces of desire inherent in fashion in his 1900 novel Sister Carrie, Edith Wharton understood fashion as a finely calibrated class indicator in her 1905 The House of Mirth and in 1920’s The Age of Innocence, but Maud understood that fashion is a powerful rite of female bonding. “You are not really friends if you haven’t gone shopping together for clothes,” says Alison Matthews David, who, in rereading Anne, could not help but be struck by the myriad of dress references and be moved by the nostalgia embedded in these fashion references.³⁹

“‘Put on your white organdy, by all means, Anne,’ advised Diana decidedly.” The dress, “soft and frilly and clinging,” suits Anne better than the stiff muslin, and is just the thing for the concert at the White Sands Hotel.⁴⁰ The lightweight organdy is, according to pragmatic Marilla, “the most unserviceable stuff in the world.”⁴¹ It is also the very same fabric and style Maud herself wore as the bridesmaid at her friend Bertha MacKenzie’s wedding on December 25, 1905, close to the time when she would have written the scene above. A rare wedding photo shows Maud clearly upstaging the bride in her fluffy organdy dress, decorated with little flowers and with puffed sleeves and frills. Meanwhile, pragmatic Marilla’s words seem to apply more to Maud swathed in organdy in cold December than to Anne during the warm summer. Organdy is a fabric that was advertised for weddings as in the June 1905 “Weddings and Brides” column of Modern Women, and so also signals something about the expectations of adulthood.⁴² The beautiful fabric softened the social pressure encoded in the symbol. Girls were expected to turn into responsible women, wives, and mothers, making the period of maidenhood all the more precious as a phase when the girls could still be girls.

Maidenhood

The Romantics and fin-de-siècle aesthetes celebrated youth as the ideal age. Maidenhood was the life stage that followed the onset of menstruation and preceded motherhood. Womanhood was the age of care, compromise, and adult responsibility. For Maud, on the verge of such responsibility, there was a deeply personal threshold that was being crossed. The “strange temperamental change” that came over her school chum Amanda Macneill “at the threshold of womanhood” was to Maud one of the mysteries of life, as she would later remember.⁴³ Her relationship with several girlfriends also mysteriously collapsed, as we shall see. The flow of time and change eroded what she had regarded as perfect “bosom” friendships. The anxiety and bewilderment Maud felt about these processes can be felt in the rapid, jolting way in which Anne develops into a young maiden.

In June 1901, there had appeared in The Household, a Boston family magazine to which Grandmother Macneill subscribed after Godey’s Lady’s Book folded, a full-page spread devoted to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Maidenhood.”

Standing, with reluctant feet,
Where the brook and river meet,
Womanhood and childhood fleet!⁴⁴

The illustration depicted a girl holding a lily and wearing a flower wreath in her hair, surrounded by a frame in the shape of a cathedral window. “Bear a lily in thy hand,” Longfellow commanded, as if it were the young girl’s talisman against pitfalls that would inevitably entangle the adult woman: “Life hath quicksands,—Life has snares! / Care and age come unawares!” In November 1904, The Ladies’ Home Journal devoted an entire page to W L. Taylor’s illustration of “Maidenhood,” depicting an adolescent girl in a white dress and flower garland with caption: “Standing, with reluctant feet,/ Where the brook and river meet.”⁴⁵

Given the poem’s wide proliferation at the time, contemporary readers of Anne of Green Gables would immediately have understood the title of chapter thirty-one, “Where the Brook and River Meet.” The chapter hints at physiological changes without ever naming them. A doctor’s order sends Anne out-of-doors to prolong the time of dreaming, walking, and making merry before she must focus on studies, entrance exams, and leaving home. In Longfellow’s poem, the maiden nostalgically mourns the passing of her childhood with a “shadow” in her eyes, just as Marilla is conscious of “a queer sorrowful sense of loss” in seeing fifteen-year-old Anne grow up and change.⁴⁶ Menstruation cannot be mentioned either in the poem or in the novel. Instead, natural, physiological change is encoded in images of liquid and fluidity. Longfellow’s poem describes streamlets, swiftly advancing brooklets, gliding streams; the novel refers to brook, river—and a doctor’s visit. Meandering through the novel, the brook links together the episodic chapters and connects the novel’s conclusion to its commencement.

In later years Maud would always say that she did not want Anne to grow up. She wanted to leave Anne in carefree childhood, so she did not have to adjust to the realities of life. Anne should never have to compromise. And yet, in the last third of the novel we see Anne begin her process of transformation into adulthood. In the novel’s first two thirds, time moves so slowly as if to come to a near standstill—suspended beyond time. The age of youth ends abruptly in chapter twenty-six, however, when Anne turns thirteen. Suddenly time speeds up. It moves through the years at a quick pace. “For Anne the days slipped by like golden beads on the necklace of the year,” the narrator comments in November, the author’s own birth month.⁴⁷ The final chapters rush Anne through her teens—in chapter thirty, she is almost fourteen; by chapter thirty-one, fifteen, and by the end, sixteen. By now Anne has changed from a gangly girl to an elegant miss. Readers similarly want Anne to stay true to her addled and unpredictable ways, a desire perhaps best expressed in Anne of Green Gables—The Musical. Its theme song is “Anne of Green Gables, never change.”⁴⁸ And yet change has crept into her personality as it did her room, which is now decorated with a velvet carpet, a low white bed, and the fragrance of white lilies. The last third is the story of the transition from childhood to adulthood. Reliving her own pleasures, Maud was also releasing her own anxieties about growing up.