The most successful and best-loved1 of Montgomery’s twenty novels has been her first, Anne of Green Gables (1908). In creating the story of the irrepressible redhead, Montgomery also established the pattern for all her novels and their heroines: the love for/creation of home and the exploration/declaration of self are themes Montgomery pursues in the eight Anne novels as well as with Kilmeny, the King children, Emily, Valancy, Marigold, Pat, the Dark and Penhallow clans, and Jane. At their best, Montgomery’s heroines outface misunderstanding and underestimation; they learn to follow their own voices; they challenge constraint and expectation; they strive to distinguish between false and genuine (though not necessarily liberating) romance. Yet since Montgomery was not a radical, and herself chose to fit into respectable society and take on the responsibilities her culture designated for her, she created heroines who also embrace traditions. Anne Shirley rebels, but only up to a point.
Montgomery’s heroines may resist cultural repression, but they ultimately choose to accept many of the roles and attitudes they have apparently earned the right to defy. Anne Shirley’s story is retold in many different ways during Montgomery’s career. Anne’s vocal self-dramatizations and spontaneity charm the stodgy establishment of Avonlea, but then, having won her right to speak, Anne gives up passionate articulation in favour of a conventional, maidenly dreaminess and reserve. Without her exuberance at the outset readers would not have cared about Anne; yet without her restraint at the end of the book, there could be no promised romance with Gilbert. Readers who insist on conventional romance are especially eager to believe that Anne is responsible for as well as satisfied with her own choices. These readers have no problems reconciling Anne’s original, fiercely independent spirit with her later willingness to conform.
No matter how we respond to the cultural pressures on Anne or Anne’s evident capitulation to them, we can enjoy the ways Montgomery’s novels call into question and play the concepts that continue to shape the female of the 1990s as much as the female of the turn of the century: sense of self, love of/quest for home, power of romance.
The delightful, young Anne Shirley is a self with a most distinctive voice; in fact, the whole of Anne of Green Gables is charged with the rhythm and energy of Anne’s voice and personality. Anne’s determined romanticism enriches her own spoken language and informs/complements the narrator’s nature descriptions. Appropriately, important events in beauty-loving Anne’s life are marked by nature descriptions that reflect her own rapture over her surroundings. We become a part of the world of Avonlea as the powerfully imaginative Anne sees and loves it. Seeing with Anne’s eyes and hearing her voice, we too are heroines as we read the novel.
But before we hear Anne, we hear the narrator, and the narrator prepares us for Anne’s energy and also for the quality of world Anne will herself intensify, explore, and join. In the very first sentence of the novel, the narrator, supposedly describing Mrs Lynde and the course of a brook in Avonlea, invites us to engage with Avonlea life. The brook has personality and conscious will – and knows how to regulate its rushing and murmuring to evade the community busybody, Rachel Lynde. Montgomery pairs up nature and human emotions so that we take sides: it’s the brook against Rachel Lynde, just as it will soon be Anne Shirley against unimaginative-ness. Even before we meet Anne, we too have experienced how the guardians of Avonlea expect conformity and quiet from Avonlea inhabitants – be they brooks or people – and we suspect that defying such vigilance will be great fun. As we accept the restraint and the secrets of the brook, we are really entering into a complex arrangement between reading about and participating in Anne’s story. Look at how Montgomery encourages the reader to respond to (at least) four different positions in reading the first sentence of Anne of Green Gables. Here is the sentence:
Mrs Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof. (1–2)
The energetic one-hundred-and-forty-eight-word-long sentence,2 divided by three semi-colons, involves several viewpoints and sets of values: (1) Rachel Lynde and her demand for propriety and knowledge, (2) the brook’s secret, free, and then regulated movements and its consciousness of Mrs Rachel’s vigilance, (3) the narrator’s view of Mrs Rachel’s demands on the brook and inhabitants of Avonlea and the brook’s and inhabitants’ apparent conformity, (4) the reader’s invited understanding of Mrs Rachel’s vigilance, the brook’s apparent conformity, and the narrator’s amusement over Mrs Rachel, the brook, and the inhabitants who conform with or defy Mrs Rachel Lynde. Thus in one loaded, laughing sentence Montgomery’s narrator introduces the expectations of the Avonlea establishment and at the same time suggests both the delight of rebelling against such conformity and the satisfaction of living in a community where conformity and independence have places and seasons.
This very first sentence, with its introduction of different points of view, is itself a lengthy imitation of the twists of the road and stream it describes and also a mimicry of Rachel Lynde’s relentless questionings and vigilance. More than half the sentence pretends to be about the brook that runs by Mrs Lynde’s place, but is also a comic imitation of Mrs Lynde’s projected self-image: she believes that all in Avonlea should behave – in front of her at least – with ‘decency and decorum,’ whatever they may do beyond her ken. Much of the first chapter of the novel plays with Mrs Lynde’s way of thinking. The narrator and Mrs Lynde even use some of the same words, as though the narrator’s imitation of Mrs Lynde’s mental rhythms is almost identical with Mrs Lynde’s own speech. Notice, for example, how the phrase ‘to be sure’ is used in a summary of Mrs Lynde’s thoughts (given by the narrator) and then repeated in Mrs Lynde’s own words. First the narrator describes Mrs Lynde’s going to Green Gables: ‘Accordingly after tea Mrs Rachel set out; she had not far to go; the big, rambling, orchard-embowered house where the Cuthberts lived was a scant quarter of a mile up the road from Lynde’s Hollow. To be sure, the long lane made it a good deal further’ (3–4, emphasis added). In the very next paragraph, Mrs Lynde is evidently talking to herself about Matthew and Marilla: ‘I’d rather look at people. To be sure, they seem contented enough’ (4, emphasis added). This kind of echoing between the narrator and a character invites the reader to hear in the narrator’s words an extension of the character’s thoughts.
A blurring of the borders between imitation and commentary here in chapter one with Mrs Lynde encourages the reader, in chapter two, to recognize Anne’s perspective in the narrator’s poetic interpretations of sky and landscape. The narrator continues throughout the novel to use playful echoes between commentary and speech with characters other than Anne. With Anne, the fun is of a different kind, and the imitations of Anne’s thinking are the serious, poetic descriptions of nature. Any fun the narrator wants to have with Anne is done with direct comment, ironic interjection, or comic chronicle – any imitation of Anne’s tone of mind is offered as seriously as Anne would want herself to be taken (and, by obvious extension, as Anne’s participant-readers would also want to be taken). In other words, every role the narrator plays in the novel enhances the focus on Anne and appreciation of her; other characters may be mimicked comically, but Anne belongs either with serious poetry or with straightforward comedy where she is an actor.
Apart from the comic tension the narrator establishes between vigilance and rebellion in the initial sentence of the novel, we also know from the opening descriptive phrases that the ‘eye’ of the story is an appreciator of beauty. The road ‘dipped’ into a ‘hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops’; back in the woods we imagine the brook’s ‘dark secrets of pool and cascade.’ Clearly the narrator of the story will note the beauties of nature while sharing with the reader the comic struggles between those who would regulate behaviour and those who would be free.
Before Anne is introduced, in chapter two, the narrator treats us to two apparently fanciful descriptions of nature. In both, the narrator is describing the pleasures of the June day. In Mrs Lynde’s kitchen: ‘The sun was coming in at the window warm and bright; the orchard on the slope below the house was in a bridal flush of pinky-white bloom, hummed over by a myriad of bees’ (2). On Matthew’s trip to Bright River: ‘It was a pretty road, running along between snug farmsteads, with now and again a bit of balsamy fir wood to drive through or a hollow where wild plums hung out their filmy bloom. The air was sweet with the breath of many apple orchards and the meadows sloped away in the distance to horizon mists of pearl and purple’ (10). The ‘bridal flush’ of the orchard, the ‘snug’ farms, the hollows where wild plums shyly ‘hung out their filmy bloom’ all suggest the welcoming personality of the countryside and the season; Anne is due to arrive in a world that is more than ready for her. We will shortly find out that she belongs here – she belongs (as does the reader) because she can see and feel the loveliness around her.
With Anne, the narrator is frequently a careful stage director. It is easiest to appreciate this directing by looking closely at Anne’s five confession/apology scenes, ranging from the early fury with Mrs Lynde, to the last embarrassed thank-you to Gilbert Blythe. In each, the narrator quietly bolsters sympathy with Anne and Anne’s voice. When Anne apologizes to Mrs Lynde, the narrator concentrates on Marilla’s dismay and Anne’s obvious sincerity. When Anne makes up a story about the amethyst brooch, since Marilla told her she must confess, the narrator does not tell us Anne is innocent – we should have learned to trust Anne already – but the narrator tells us that Anne confesses ‘as if repeating a lesson she had learned’ (105). Anne’s apology to Mrs Barry about accidentally giving Diana currant wine instead of raspberry cordial is a failure, and we judge Mrs Barry by the narrator’s cue: ‘Her face [Mrs Barry’s] hardened. Mrs Barry was a woman of strong prejudices and dislikes, and her anger was of the cold, sullen sort which is hardest to overcome’ (137). Miss Josephine Barry capitulates to Anne’s charm when Anne apologizes to her, and the narrator describes the change in Miss Barry’s eyes. The scene focuses on Anne’s speech, but the narrator tells us that Miss Barry’s eyes were initially ‘snapping through her gold rimmed glasses’ (167); then Anne talks, and ‘Much of the snap had gone’ (167). When Anne finishes explaining, ‘All the snap had gone by this time’ (168). The narrator’s small touches complement Anne’s energetic speeches.
At the very end of the novel, we find the fifth confession. When Anne thanks Gilbert for giving up the Avonlea school for her so that she can board at home with Marila, she also has to confess that she has long ago forgiven him and was sorry for her earlier stubbornness. The narrator’s role here is to suggest Gilbert’s delight and Anne’s pleasure in becoming friends. The narrator tells us that with ‘scarlet cheeks’ Anne thanks him and extends her hand; ‘Gilbert took the offered hand eagerly’ (328). After Gilbert speaks, ‘Anne laughed and tried unsuccessfully to withdraw her hand,’ and the reader sees that instead of being offended by Gilbert’s warmth, it prompts Anne to confess: ‘I’ve been – I may as well make a complete confession – I’ve been sorry ever since’ (328). The small scene is meant to tie together the last of the novel’s threads and prepare the way for a romance between Anne and Gilbert. As the expected culmination of the novel’s preoccupation with romance, the scene will work only if the comic rejection of romance used throughout the book is here displaced by the narrator’s gentle but insistent revelation of Anne’s discomfort and pleasure.
In each of the five confession scenes the narrator describes others’ motivations or changes, but Anne’s own words are the primary stimulators of reader sympathy. We will probably remember Anne’s – not the narrator’s – own persuasive, colourful language: ‘I’m a dreadfully wicked and ungrateful girl, and I deserve to be punished and cast out by respectable people for ever … Oh, Mrs Lynde, please, please, forgive me. If you refuse it will be a lifelong sorrow to me. You wouldn’t like to inflict a lifelong sorrow on a poor little orphan girl, would you, even if she had a dreadful temper?’ (78); ‘I never took the brooch out of your room and that is the truth, if I was to be led to the block for it – although I’m not very certain what a block is’ (102); ‘Oh, Mrs Barry, please forgive me. I did not mean to – to – intoxicate Diana. How could I? Just imagine if you were a poor little orphan girl that kind people had adopted and you had just one bosom friend in all the world. Do you think you would intoxicate her on purpose?’ (138); ‘Have you any imagination, Miss Barry? If you have, just put yourself in our place. We didn’t know there was anybody in that bed and you nearly scared us to death. It was simply awful the way we felt. And then we couldn’t sleep in the spare room after being promised. I suppose you are used to sleeping in spare rooms. But just imagine what you would feel like if you were a little orphan girl who had never had such an honour’ (168); ‘I want to thank you for giving up the school for me. It was very good of you – and I want you to know that I appreciate it … I forgave you that day by the pond landing, although I didn’t know it. What a stubborn little goose I was’ (328). In the first four of these, when Anne is still a young girl, we hear her self-dramatization in the confession. She pictures herself as the heroine of a glamorized story of her own orphanhood – or as willing to be led to the block for honour and truth. Anne creates herself as the romantic heroine of her own adventures, and the narrator provides the setting and reinforcement for her self-drama.
The narrator helps to orchestrate a book-length, comic deconstruction and reconstruction of romance. While Anne’s own notion of romance is carefully deflated or inverted, another form of romance is created from the substance of what is supposed to be real life. The story of Gilbert’s interest in Anne and hers in him is the conventional plot-line version of romance. In the book itself this one kind of romance is a far less prominent feature of Anne’s discovery of self, and of her sense of home, than is Anne’s own exploration of beauty and harmony and her consequent rejection of exaggeration and impossible intensity.
Catherine Sheldrick Ross says that the whole of Anne of Green Gables plays with romance and that Montgomery turns Anne’s notion of romance on its head while at the same time creating in Avonlea a place every bit as romantic as anything Anne has imagined. Thus while readers laugh at Anne’s unreal concept of the romantic and the ideal, they are encouraged to accept the beauties of Avonlea with all the breathlessness and wonder that romance invites. Further, Anne is encouraged to reject the unreal romantic stories she reads, while all the while her own attachment to Gilbert is developing for the reader into a species of romance. Ross sees Montgomery’s novel as a very sophisticated handling of genre and an inversion and restoration of genre (43–58). Certainly what Ross describes can be heard in Anne’s own voice and seen in the nature descriptions that we are encouraged to believe are often offered from Anne’s perspective.
Anne creates herself the heroine of a romance she discovers to be false, while the reader sees Anne as a genuine heroine of a romantic world that the book conspires to make us believe is real. Anne’s imagination may need curbing, but Anne’s perception of and joy in her surroundings is romantic enough for any of Anne’s readers. Prince Edward Island itself is a part of Anne’s identity, the bedrock of her love of home, and the romance surrounding its beauties is powerful enough to make the passages describing them stand apart from and yet related to Anne’s most ingenious and delightful speeches. Montgomery’s/Anne’s/the narrator’s love affair with Prince Edward Island is what counterbalances Anne’s self-conscious speeches and what offers us hope that even a mature Anne, who has dropped the endearing verbal eccentricities of her childhood, will have a loving vitality great enough to sustain continued reading about her.
Anne’s own words show us how thoroughly romantic she is, how she has been shaped by early reading of sentimental and chivalric poems and stories. Her very first words to Matthew, on the Bright River platform, show how she has learned to imagine herself as the heroine of her own continuing private fiction, created to counteract the dullness or harshness of the real world around: ‘I had made up my mind that if you didn’t come for me tonight I’d go down the track to that big wild cherry-tree at the bend, and climb up into it to stay all night. I wouldn’t be a bit afraid, and it would be lovely to sleep in a wild cherry-tree all white with bloom in the moonshine, don’t you think? You could imagine you were dwelling in marble halls, couldn’t you?’ (13). Rea Wilmshurst points out that ‘dwelling in marble halls’ is probably an allusion to the popular romantic song ‘I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls’ from Alfred Bunn’s sentimental The Bohemian Girl (17). In any case, the image and the picturing of herself in a romantic setting is clearly what has sustained the orphan Anne Shirley in her neglected eleven years. She tells Matthew that she spent time in the orphanage creating stories for her otherwise dismal life: ‘It was pretty interesting to imagine things about them – to imagine that perhaps the girl who sat next to you was really the daughter of a belted earl, who had been stolen away from her parents in her infancy by a cruel nurse who died before she could confess’ (14). We recognize in this hackneyed plot a host of popular (and often inferior) romances and Gothic tales of the kind Henry Fielding parodies with such zest in Joseph Andrews. Anne has been reading romances and has learned their addictive appeal: creating yourself the heroine makes all the adventures your own (Brownstein). Anne continues to tell herself stories about her surroundings, even insisting on giving human names to plants and places since they, too, have personalities and parts in her ceaseless internal drama. (Certainly the personification in Montgomery’s opening sentence and in the nature descriptions seems a ready-made part of Anne’s drama.) Though she is enraptured with the real surroundings of Avonlea, Anne feels that the predictability of life in general could still use help from her romantic story-telling and retelling. She acknowledges on her first morning at Green Gables, when she thinks she will have to return to the orphanage, that romances don’t exactly square with life and are not really preferable to it: ‘It’s all very well to read about sorrows and imagine yourself living through them heroically, but it’s not so nice when you really come to have them, is it?’ (36).
Nevertheless, once established at Green Gables, she continues to embroider life with romance, and usually comes to grief in the process. She imagines herself a raven-haired beauty, and dyes her hair – green, by accident; she pictures herself a nun, romantically renouncing life and taking the veil, and forgets to cover the pudding sauce so that a mouse drowns in it; she imagines herself dishonoured in front of Josie Pye, accepts a dare to walk the ridge-pole of the Barry kitchen, falls, and breaks her ankle. Even her separation from Diana, whom Mrs Barry believes Anne has made drunk deliberately, is turned into a romantic and ‘tragical’ beauty: ‘“Fare thee well, my beloved friend. Henceforth we must be as strangers though living side by side. But my heart will ever be faithful to thee.” … Then she turned to the house, not a little consoled for the time being by this romantic parting. “It is all over,” she informed Marilla … “Diana and I had such an affecting farewell down by the spring. It will be sacred in my memory forever. I used the most pathetic language I could think of and said ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ ”’ (141–2). When a distraught Diana comes to Anne to rescue her baby sister from an attack of croup, Anne, who shows great practicality in remembering to take the ipecac with her, is actually transported by excitement: ‘Anne, although sincerely sorry for Minnie May, was far from being insensible to the romance of the situation and to the sweetness of once more sharing that romance with a kindred spirit’ (151). A sense of chivalric bravery uplifts her when she faces Miss Barry and being her to forgive her for jumping on her in the spare-room bed. And, as we have seen, it is this bravery and Anne’s quaint phraseology that win Miss Barry’s heart, just as sincere melodrama had won Mrs Lynde’s earlier when Anne apologized to her for losing her temper.
Anne’s imagination seriously betrays her twice, and as a result of these two incidents, she recognizes a need to change her attitude to romance, though she is not sure until later what such a change will mean. Anne gets carried away imagining gruesome creatures, and the innocent spruce grove becomes the sinister Haunted Wood with a vengeance. When an unsympathetic Marilla makes Anne walk through the wood in the dark, Anne learns that she must constrain her imagination. Nevertheless, we find that Anne’s reading continues to feed her morbid fancies, until Miss Stacy makes her promise to give up Gothic horror. Nearly eighty pages after the Haunted Wood episode, Anne confesses to Marilla:’ She found me reading a book one day called, “The Lurid Mystery of the Haunted Hall.” It was one Ruby Gillis had lent me, and, oh, Marilla, it was so fascinating and creepy. It just curdled the blood in my veins. But Miss Stacy said it was a very silly, unwholesome book, and she asked me not to read any more of it or any like it’ (257). Obviously Anne has not made the connection between reading material and development of imagination that the reader of Montgomery’s book is encouraged to make at every turn in the understanding of Anne.
The second episode in which Anne’s imagination betrays her – indeed, threatens her very life – is with the game based on Tennyson’s ‘Lancelot and Elaine,’ a book in the epic-length Arthurian poem Idylls of the King?3 Anne and her friends have studied Tennyson’s romantic poem in school, and it is certainly a perfect example of the blighted-love and pure-sacrifice story Anne’s childhood reading and imagining have prepared her to embrace. Montgomery’s use of the poem is a brilliant stroke in the novel. When Elaine/Anne’s barge/dory springs a leak, Anne is truly in need of rescue, and, as life would have it, the boy to do this knightly deed is none other than Gilbert Blythe for whom Anne has sworn eternal enmity. In this one comic inversion of romance, Tennyson’s idealized story is overthrown and the prosaic Gilbert rescues Anne in his father’s dory (Ross 46–8). Quick to see romance almost anywhere but in Avonlea, and certainly not with Gilbert as the hero, Anne scorns Gilbert’s attempt at reconciliation. With truly queenly dignity she rejects him – and thus Montgomery brings into clash the imagined romance of the story with the real-life romance of Gilbert’s timely rescue and eager appeal. A sucker for book romance (and natural beauty), Anne cannot recognize a new kind of romance behind school rivalry or even behind friendship and camaraderie. (Interestingly, Anne dotes on the pathetic Elaine, who can only choose to die when Lancelot will not love her, and yet finds satisfaction in her own powers to reject a potential suitor.)
The nearly fatal imitation of Tennyson reminds us how thoroughly Anne has been indoctrinated by literary romances. The scanty catalogue of her early childhood reading suggests the quality of contrivance, exaggeration, and idealization Anne has revered. She has been tutored in heroic battle and in (hopeless) loves: Thomas Campbell’s ‘The Battle of Hohenlinden’ and ‘The Downfall of Poland,’ William Edmonstoune Aytoun’s ‘Edinburgh after Flodden,’ Thomson’s The Seasons, Henry Glassford Bell’s ‘Mary Queen of Scots,’ Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake and later Marmion and Rob Roy, Mrs Hemans’ ‘The Woman on the Field of Battle.’ Anne early tells Marilla, ‘I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ (42) and does not realize she is quoting from Shakespeare, evidently lumping Romeo and Juliet together with many other tragic love stories. Anne’s early speeches especially are liberally sprinkled with archaisms, romantic clichés, or quaint turns of phrase (‘depths of despair’ [28], ‘My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes’ [40]), and we learn to recognize in her outlandish sentences (‘ am well in body although considerably rumpled up in spirit, thank you, ma’am’ [90]) products of a romance-fed imagination and an instinctive ear for poetry. It is this instinct for the grand or beautiful turn of phrase, after all, that makes so effective the combination of Anne’s perspective and the narrator’s words.
But Anne gradually outgrows the odd language and self-dramatization, even if she has more trouble reconciling herself to a world shorn of its earlier romantic glory. Anne grows to value the beauty around her and understands better than Diana why Avonlea is preferable to Charlottetown, or why an artificial romance is inferior to consciousness of belonging to a world of solid values and lasting but humble pleasures. When Miss Barry asks Anne which place she would prefer, the city or the country, Anne thoughtfully replies: ‘It’s nice to be eating ice-cream at brilliant restaurants at eleven o’clock at night once in awhile; but as a regular thing I’d rather be in the east gable at eleven, sound asleep, but kind of knowing even in my sleep that the stars were shining outside and that the wind was blowing in the firs across the brook’ (250). Having learned the true romance of nature and belonging, Anne is almost ready to give up the artificial speech that before separated her from an uncaring environment. Miss Barry herself notices a change in her own response to Anne’s spirit: ‘But Miss Barry found herself thinking less about Anne’s quaint speeches than of her fresh enthusiasms, her transparent emotions, her little winning ways, and the sweetness of her eyes and lips’ (251).
Everything in the novel conspires to make us hear Anne’s voice and to understand her point of view. We watch her as she has ‘pruned down and branched out’ (293), and we come to identify her with the broader, thoughtful view of the narrator’s descriptions, just as we hear in their poetry her rapture with beauty. Anne’s self-deluding reliance on romantic stories may have to give way, but Anne’s love of beauty will be a lifelong romance Montgomery constantly supports.4
Montgomery’s nature descriptions are full of poetry. She uses the conventions of poetry – appeal to the senses, personification, simile, metaphor – and chooses her words with the intention of transporting the reader both into and beyond the elements she describes. As in her poems, in the prose-poetry Montgomery favours flowers both as subjects and for comparison (skies of crocus or saffron or rose or marigold or violet); she delights in precious stones, metals, or wood largely for their colour and shine (crystal, pearl, diamond, emerald, sapphire, amethyst, ruby, gold, silver, ebony); she loves brilliant colours of all kinds (particularly scarlet and yellow) and especially enjoys the qualifiers ‘misty’ ‘filmy’ ‘ethereal’ in front of colours (notably purple and green); she has a passion for sunsets and twilight just after sunset. Despite the obvious preoccupation with colour, Montgomery’s descriptions also appeal to touch and hearing and taste and smell – the’ satin-smooth roads with the snow crisping under the runners’ (162), the spicy scent of ferns, the fragrance of trampled mint, and the tang of the sea are never far away. Montgomery celebrates the four seasons, the wind in the leaves and boughs of trees, sunshine, shadow, starlight, moonlight. The sea does not play a prominent part in the descriptions, and there is probably more emphasis on sky than on earth; on flowers and trees than on fields.
What characterizes all the descriptions is their humanness, their invitation to participate in a kind of communion. The descriptive passages are not just vivid ornaments to the narrative, but are instead expressions of attitude, indexes of the observers’ ability to join the spirit of love and the pursuit of beauty that characterize Anne’s quest for identity and home. The humanness of the descriptions is evident not only in personification (as we saw in the opening sentence of the novel), but in the tenderness of appreciation (young ferns are not just young ferns, but are ‘little curly ferns’ [170] struggling to grow). Enjoying the descriptions involves accepting or at least entertaining a way of being in relationship to the world around. And when we realize that three-quarters of the novel’s nature descriptions (by my count, twenty-six out of thirty-five descriptions) are offered as though through Anne’s eyes, we see that Montgomery was using poetry as a means to initiate the reader into a way of seeing the world, to express Anne’s delight in beauty, to suggest the hidden possibilities for seeing and feeling in the most commonplace of things, to celebrate the feeling of ‘coming home’ that a communion with beauty offers to all who share in it, and to punctuate Anne’s story with appropriate reminders of her spirit’s capabilities and growth.
Shortly after Anne is introduced and we hear her nimble imagination startling the shy Matthew with insight and story, we find the narrator’s words and Anne’s point of view joined together. Anne is staggered by the blossom-embowered lane she later names the White Way of Delight, and the narrator provides a description of what Anne’s otherwise undaunted tongue cannot utter. Mid-sentence Anne breaks off and the narrator takes over: “‘ – oh, Mr. Cuthbert! Oh, Mr. Cuthbert! ! Oh, Mr. Cuthbert!!!” … 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’ (19). We find that for the rest of the book, when the narrator describes the beauty of nature, Anne is usually looking at it, and we are thus encouraged to read the words as though they capture her feelings. In those few times when Anne is not present, we still hear (or are free to hear) Anne’s quality of mind, for the narrator and Anne share the same spirit.
Within four pages of Anne’s rapture over the White Way of Delight, the narrator reinforces this identification between Anne’s mind and narrative words. She has just confessed to Matthew a ‘pleasant ache … just to think of coming to a really truly home’ (20–1) when she looks out over Barry’s Pond. Anne calls it ‘pretty,’ and then the narrator launches into a description that is quintessential Montgomery – full of colour, personification, metaphor, and simile:
They had driven over the crest of a hill. Below them was a pond, looking almost like a river so long and winding was it. A bridge spanned it midway and from there to its lower end, where an amber-hued belt of sand-hills shut it in from the dark blue gulf beyond, the water was a glory of many shifting hues – the most spiritual shadings of crocus and rose and ethereal green, with other elusive timings for which no name has ever been found. Above the bridge the pond ran up into fringing groves of fir and maple and lay all darkly translucent in their wavering shadows. Here and there a wild plum leaned out from the bank like a white-clad girl tip-toeing to her own reflection. From the marsh at the head of the pond came the clear, mournfully-sweet chorus of the frogs. There was a little gray house peering around a white apple orchard on a slope beyond and, although it was not yet quite dark, a light was shining from one of its windows. (21)
This rhapsody of light, colour, and sound is the poetic wish-fulfilment of the beauty-starved, love-starved orphan. It is also an invitation to the reader to ‘come home,’ as well. In responding to the images, as Anne responds to the scene itself, we participate in the lush beauty of ‘home,’ a place where the commonplace is revealed to be compounded of the richest colours and the miracle of sentient trees and houses. The elements of the place belong together, interact in harmony with each other, and the charm Montgomery offers her readers – through the narrator and Anne – is that we, too, belong whenever we can see and feel the power of this beauty.
In the narrator’s description of Barry’s Pond, we feel the humanness of the landscape (wild plums ‘tip-toeing’ to their own reflections; a house ‘peering around a white apple orchard’), and on the very next page, Anne says to Matthew about the Lake of Shining Waters: ‘I always say good night to the things I love, just as I would to people. I think they like it. That water looks as if it was smiling at me’ (22). We are encouraged to believe that the girl who considers the feelings of water would be the one to imagine wild plum trees looking at their own reflections. The joining of Anne’s fancy and the narrator’s fanciful descriptions is completed within a few pages of our introduction to Anne.
Interestingly, the narrator’s romanticizing of the general landscape translates into very specific appreciations: of Anne Shirley and Prince Edward Island. Montgomery’s generic elements – sand, trees, water, lights – seem to be special because they are on Prince Edward Island, not simply because they are beautiful in themselves and can be appreciated elsewhere in the world. After all, Anne herself has come ‘from away’ (as local P.E.I., dialect dubs it) to this place; she was starved for beauty when she was not on P.E.I. Evidently, the whole novel conspires to convey, Prince Edward Island is an enchanted place where orphans suddenly find the home they have longed for and beauty and magic fairly leap from the sky and earth and sea. Children of all ages have long loved islands, and Montgomery gives us an island that is geographically undeniable and is at the same time almost incredibly, exquisitely lovely. The mixture of magic and fact is personified in Anne herself – we can believe in Anne the girl with the vivid imagination and heightened awareness because Anne is also prone to mishap and full of temper. In other words, Montgomery’s use of a real place, P.E.I., helps us to believe in the beauty of it, just as Anne’s normal problems and conflicts help us to believe in the powers of her imagination. Eventually, with the constant reinforcement of the identification of narrator and Anne, we identify Anne herself with Prince Edward Island and with all the enchantment of its moods and features.
The novel’s thirty-odd other descriptive passages broaden our view of Prince Edward Island and enrich our understanding of Anne. And even when the narrator speaks about Anne and not as though (partly) through her eyes, the scene described merely confirms our faith in what Anne sees. For example, when the narrator describes the Birch Path that Diana and Anne use to walk to school, we know that though Anne is not looking at it at this particular moment, she has seen all of what the narrator is describing: ‘Other people besides Anne thought so [that it was the ‘prettiest place in the world’] when they stumbled on it. It was a narrow, twisting path, winding down over a long hill straight through Mr. Bell’s woods, where the light came down sifted through so many emerald screens that it was as flawless as the heart of a diamond. It was fringed in all its length with slim young birches, white-stemmed and lissom boughed; ferns and starflowers and wild lilies-of-the-valley and scarlet tufts of pigeon berries grew thickly along it; and always there was a delightful spiciness in the air and music of bird calls and the murmur and laugh of wood winds in the trees overhead’ (113). The humanness, the metaphor using emerald and diamond, the joyous luxuriance of the very plants and trees, all work together to affirm our view of Anne as the incarnation of and the interpreter within a fecund and benign natural world. Anne’s energy is reflected in and is charged by nature even when Anne is not there.
Montgomery also uses the nature descriptions to mark events in Anne’s life. Montgomery’s favourite image in the novel is sunset; splendid sunsets celebrate or herald changes. Elizabeth Waterston and Mary Rubio draw our attention to the first sunset passage (quoted above), where Anne is struck dumb by the beauty of the White Way of Delight; in their analysis, sunsets and roses are bound together in the novel to suggest Anne’s transformation and maturity (Afterword 312). In all, there are some eleven sunset or just post-sunset descriptions in the novel, and each of these punctuates some important event: the recognition of beauty almost beyond words (mentioned above 19); the first sight of Barry’s Pond and the setting for Green Gables (21,23); after Anne rescues Minnie May and Mrs Barry relents (‘Afar in the southwest was the great shimmering, pearl-like sparkle of an evening star in a sky that was pale golden and ethereal rose over gleaming white spaces and dark glens of spruce’ 155); the celebration of Diana’s birthday before the catastrophic jumping on Miss Josephine Barry (‘There was a magnificent sunset, and the snowy hills and deep blue water of the St. Lawrence Gulf seemed to rim in the splendour like a huge bowl of pearl and sapphire brimmed with wine and fire’ 162); Anne’s triumphant tea with Mrs Allan, the new minister’s wife who is both role model and kindred spirit (Anne ‘came home through the twilight, under a great, high-sprung sky gloried over with trails of saffron and rosy cloud, in a beatified state of mind and told Marilla all about it happily, sitting on the big red sandstone slab at the kitchen door with her tired curly head in Marilla’s gingham lap’ 191); after Anne’s sobering lily-maid episode with Gilbert Blythe and just before Diana tells her they have been invited by Miss Barry to come to Charlottetown for the Exhibition (‘It was a September evening and all the gaps and clearings in the woods were brimmed up with ruby sunset light. Here and there the lane was splashed with it, but for the most part it was already quite shadowy beneath the maples, and the spaces under the firs were filled with a clear violet dusk like airy wine’ 243); relishing the thought of home after the dissipations of the Exhibition (‘Beyond, the Avonlea hills came out darkly against the saffron sky. Behind them the moon was rising out of the sea that grew all radiant and transfigured in her light’ 251); the pass list is out for the examinations (‘The eastern sky above the firs was flushed faintly pink from the reflection of the west, and Anne was wondering dreamily if the spirit of colour looked like that’ 279); just before her recitation at the White Sands Hotel (‘twilight – a lovely yellowish-green twilight with a clear blue cloudless sky. A big round moon, slowly deepening from her pallid lustre into burnished silver, hung over the Haunted Wood’ 281); preparing for the final examinations at Queen’s (Anne looked out on ‘the glorious dome of sunset sky and wove her dreams of a possible future from the golden tissue of youth’s own optimism’ 305); at the very end of the novel, just before Anne apologizes to Gilbert (‘Beyond lay the sea, misty and purple, with its haunting, unceasing murmur. The west was a glory of soft mingled hues, and the pond reflected them all in still softer shadings’ 328). In many of Anne’s key moments, we are invited to share the intensity of nature with her and to equate beauty with the multiple experiences of being, discovering, and reading.
In each of the sunset-marked experiences Anne learns something about herself and grows. Anne and the descriptions themselves change as Anne’s story develops. The quality of poetic images is consistent throughout the novel, but the quality of perspective changes as Anne becomes more mature. Two-thirds of the way through the novel, in the chapter entitled ‘Where the Brook and River Meet,’ when Anne is fifteen, we see that the girl Anne has become the young woman. Marilla notices that ‘You don’t chatter half as much as you used to, Anne, nor use half as many big words. What has come over you?’ (271). Anne’s reply marks the end of the child’s most spontaneous and whimsical speeches, and suggests a new conformity and consciousness of restraint: ‘Anne coloured and laughed a little, as she dropped her book and looked dreamily out of the window … “I don’t know – I don’t want to talk as much,” she said, denting her chin thoughtfully with her forefinger. “It’s nicer to think dear, pretty thoughts and keep them in one’s heart, like treasures. I don’t like to have them laughed at or wondered over. And somehow I don’t want to use big words any more”’ (271). After this there is a subtle change in the narrator and an obvious change in Anne. Anne goes off to Charlottetown to get a teacher’s licence, and the narrator makes room for more of Anne’s own comments on her surroundings. The childhood exuberance is now replaced by more mature (and, alas, far less interesting) comments made to her friends or even to herself. For example, in the sunset scene that includes the penultimate quotation given above, where Anne and her friends are preparing for examinations at Queen’s, Anne makes the first observations about the sunset sky and then the narrator kicks in and completes the description, the commentary, and the chapter. Anne says, rather sententiously, to Josie and Jane and Ruby: ‘Next to trying and winning, the best thing is trying and failing. Girls, don’t talk about exams! Look at that arch of pale green sky over those houses and picture to yourselves what it must look like over the purply-dark beechwoods back of Avonlea’ (304). The three other girls, understandably, ignore Anne’s sky and her abjuration and begin to talk about fashions; but Anne herself, with clasped hands, gazes out the window and the narrator offers the ‘glorious dome of sunset sky’ (305) as what she sees. We have only to think back to the first sunset description to realize how different Anne is now. There the narrator offered the rose window of the cathedral and shortly after described Barry’s Pond and the setting for Green Gables; here Anne characterizes the scene in her own words, and the narrator offers a brief, somewhat philosophical postscript. As with the earlier passages, we recognize in the narrator’s description Anne’s own vision, but now Anne’s words are actually echoed by the narrator.
Because of the blurring between Anne’s consciousness and the narrator’s and also because of this newer development of the echoing of Anne’s words by the narrator, it is hard to say who is responsible for a quotation from Tennyson in the last sunset scene in the novel. Since Anne has been an avid reader of Tennyson, as the lily-maid episode illustrates, she could herself be thinking of Tennyson’s phrase when she is admiring the tranquil beauty of the countryside just before she meets up with Gilbert Blythe. But the Tennyson quotation is ironically appropriate to the situation, too, in a way Anne could not possibly have realized – since she did not know she was going to meet Gilbert – and so the irony of the words seems also to be a product of the omniscient narrator’s broader view of the significance of Anne’s determination to be friends with Gilbert.
Let us look at the passage itself and see what use it makes of Tennyson’s famous phrase from ‘The Palace of Art’:
She lingered there [at Matthew’s grave] until dusk, liking the peace and calm of the little place, with its poplars whose rustle was like low, friendly speech, and its whispering grasses growing at will among the graves. When she finally left it and walked down the long hill that sloped to the Lake of Shining Waters it was past sunset and all Avonlea lay before her in a dreamlike afterlight – ‘a haunt of ancient peace.’ There was a freshness in the air as of a wind that had blown over honey-sweet fields of clover. Home lights twinkled out here and there among the homestead trees. Beyond lay the sea, misty and purple, with its haunting, unceasing murmur. The west was a glory of mingled hues, and the pond reflected them all in still softer shadings. The beauty of it all thrilled Anne’s heart, and she gratefully opened the gates of her soul to it. (327–8)
In the context of the passage, and to anyone not familiar with Tennyson’s poem, the phrase ‘a haunt of ancient peace’ seems innocently descriptive, and could belong to either Anne or the narrator; troubling to make the distinction between the two points of view would seem like hair-splitting. And, indeed, perhaps Anne and/or the narrator merely liked the phrase out of its context and thought of it where its words, not irony, suited. But to ignore the original context of Tennyson’s phrase makes no more sense here than it does in Anne’s final quotation of the novel (only one page later) ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world’ (329). This final line is from Browning’s verse drama Pippa Passes, which Anne would surely have read in its entirety. In it the young factory girl Pippa, unaware that there is a plot afoot to abduct her on this one day’s holiday and sell her into prostitution in Rome, passes through the streets of the village of Asolo, singing about love and kindness and, ironically, working against evil simply by being so cheerful and innocent herself. The line is often quoted as though it is a purely ecstatic expression of well-being – and it is – but it is meant to be appreciated in the context of the danger around the unsuspecting Pippa. The line is a reminder to readers and to those who hear Pippa within the poem that good may be powerful, but it is constantly threatened by evil. To those who know Browning’s poem (as Montgomery did) and his complex suggestions, Anne’s quotation expresses Anne’s determination as well as her happiness. Anne is choosing to believe in harmony and joy, not just chirruping over a pretty evening. A knowledge of the original work enriches our understanding of Anne’s spirit.5 And so it is here, too, with Tennyson’s phrase from the allegorical debate ‘The Palace of Art.’ In this early poem, Tennyson shows the futility of art’s trying to live separate from people, from human life. At the outset of the poem the artist determines to build a palace high on a crag, to be the dwelling place of his soul (called ‘she’). Each room is furnished for a different mood, and each mood suggests some place on the earth – among others, a rock-bound coast with violent waves, a broad moonlit sandshore where a solitary figure walks,
And one, an English home – gray twilight poured
On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep – all things in order stored,
A haunt of ancient Peace. (85–8)
Tennyson’s lines suggest the quality of peace and tranquillity Anne has just been experiencing by Matthew’s grave and in the mellow afterglow of the sunset. But Anne is not meant to live forever in appreciation of scenery and tranquillity alone; she is destined to interact with many others, and most intimately with Gilbert Blythe. In the poem, the palace of art becomes a prison, and the soul eventually is horrified by the isolation and self-centredness she before thought to be contented seclusion. The soul ‘shrieked’ (258) in her agony and later fled down to a ‘cottage in the vale’ (291) where she could learn to live with others. Similarly, Anne decides that enmity against Gilbert Blythe has separated her from a richer, fuller life. When, a few moments later, she meets him on the hill, she extends her hand in friendship and puts behind her forever a mistaken loftiness and self-sufficiency.
Knowing the context for Tennyson’s line, as Montgomery did, suggests a subtle and ironic depth to the choice of it in this description of twilight. Whether it is the narrator’s or Anne’s there is irony involved – though not quite the same irony – and either way Montgomery’s choice of the phrase offers a wonderful subtextual commentary on the pastoral serenity of Avonlea life and on Anne’s preference for a peopled rather than a peopleless landscape. Sadly, of course, there is the further (unconscious?) suggestion that Anne has indeed forsaken the palace of art when she accepts Gilbert’s friendship. Perhaps the covert suggestion is that in deciding to explore a friendship with Gilbert, Anne has chosen to live in a conventional emotional and intellectual ‘cottage’ when her nature has fitted her for variety and experiment on a far more splendid scale. Tennyson’s soul’s dilemma is very like the dilemma of the intelligent and artistic woman of Montgomery’s own time (his choice of female gender for the soul has never seemed accidental). But, of course, this subversive subtext is well below the surface, and what most obviously greets the reader with the choice of Tennyson’s phrase is a pleasant consciousness of a lovely line used to grace a lovely scene.
The Tennyson quotation and the Browning one are, at least superficially, consistent with Anne’s language throughout the novel. Their unexamined use might also be consistent with Anne’s earlier love of romance and could suggest that the narrator and Montgomery are using Anne’s uncritical identification with the poems to comment ironically on the incompleteness of Anne’s self-knowledge. In any case, as with the sunset passages, these late allusions remind us to reconsider the novel’s revaluing of romance.
Romanticized nature and romantic allusions are parts of Anne’s identity, self-discovery, and love of home and of the novel’s overall preoccupation with romance. Anne’s own language, after all, is shown from the first to be saturated with romance. Free though the young Anne’s imagination seems to be, it is actually constrained by the expectations of romance, honour, and chivalry. And yet the older, supposedly wiser Anne is probably equally constrained by a different kind of romance. In giving up ecstatic identification with Tennyson’s Elaine and the other romantic poems and stories of her childhood and adapting to ‘real’ male-female relations, Anne may merely be conforming to a romanticized stereotype of her times. Anne’s quieting down, two-thirds of the way through the book, suggests her tentative leanings towards the stereotypical image of womanhood that favours reserve, tolerance, self-sacrifice, domesticity, and dreamy-eyed abstraction. A reader of the 1990s may well wonder if Anne puts aside her early love of romance fiction only to take on a fiction her culture creates, one that includes rigid gender roles and the promise of happily-ever-after family life.6 In thinking about Anne’s early self-dramatizations and Montgomery’s later imposition of a conventionally romantic ending on Anne’s story, we may uncover in the text and in ourselves startling assumptions about love and roles and alternatives. We may come to recognize Anne’s dilemma as a useful warning against any form of romance that sentimentalizes, restrains, diminishes, or subordinates.
The conventional, audience-pleasing end of Anne of Green Gables suggests that the way has now been cleared for Anne to get on with the real romance – the loving of Gilbert. Yet while Montgomery may even have believed such a union to be good, she did not let Anne succumb to all the conventions and stereotypes at once. We read through two more novels – six years of Anne’s life – before Anne recognizes her love for Gilbert. Anne goes to college and graduates and then, faced with Gilbert’s possible death, realizes her love for him. Anne does not instantly swap the old tortured, chivalric romance ideal for the equally prescriptive romance of love and marriage, nor does she immediately bury her identity in Gilbert’s. That immolation comes, but Montgomery delays it for as long as she can.
And perhaps the love story was inevitable, as was the eventual marriage and possibly the disappearance of Anne, considering the time in which and the audience for whom Montgomery wrote.7 But providing the expected conclusion does not mean Montgomery erased Anne’s possibilities at the end of this novel. What Gilbert and perhaps the reader see as romance, Anne still chooses to interpret as friendship. Readers truly ‘akin to Anne’ can choose to imagine that a continuing independence and self-knowledge will take Anne to a happy self-sufficiency.8 That is, until they read Anne of Avonlea.
No matter how we are tempted to read beyond the ending of Anne of Green Gables, what we do find in the book itself is an undeniably ‘real’ girl and young woman whose speech and thoughts encourage us to re-examine, even yet, our public and private voices and values, and our complex involvements with romance.