When the L.C. Page Company accepted Anne of Green Gables, it requested a sequel immediately. Under enormous private pressure from her grandmother and from her life in the community, Maud Montgomery blocked out her story and then wrote doggedly, suffering a form of nervous breakdown when she had finished it. She was surprised at the popularity of this sequel, Anne of Avonlea (1909), because she felt that the second book was unequal to the first.
Fans didn’t seem to notice – so long as they got more of Anne they didn’t care how the patterns of Anne of Green Gables were exploited or distorted or even undercut. In the second book they were gratified to find Anne’s enthusiasm and occasional outspokenness; there is even a flash of red temper in the very first chapter. Anne wins as a teacher and tests her theories about life and people against experience. She feeds her imagination with reading and is always on the look-out for kindred spirits. The books seemed similar enough to satisfy fans’ passion to have more of Anne. But there are huge, disturbing differences between Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea. Montgomery was gloomy while writing the book (Journals 1: 333–4), and, as Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston point out, the new novel ‘suggested Anne’s lingering immaturity, and showed resentment over male/female roles … ’ (Afterword 280).
L.M. Montgomery capitulated to reader expectation at the end of Anne of Green Gables and gave Anne’s story a conventionally romantic resolution. What was she to do with Anne in a sequel? Would she show Anne as a romantic heroine, and concentrate on the budding love between Anne and Gilbert, or would she restore Anne to the common-sense world of Avonlea and share with readers some comic reversals of romance? Montgomery did not choose either of these options. Instead she struck a middle course that takes more of the weaknesses than the strengths from the alternatives. Anne does not actually dwindle into a romance heroine, but falls into stereotype of another kind and cherishes a domestic world she believes is fairy tale in camouflage. Correspondingly, Avonlea is not the believably conservative place it was in Anne’s earlier days. Instead, despite the setbacks of the Avonlea Village Improvement Society, Avonlea conspires to support Anne’s belief in romance.
Romance takes over – not necessarily in the prominence of the love story of Anne and Gilbert, but in the very foundations of Avonlea. Montgomery reinforces cultural stereotypes about male/female differences and in so doing relegates Anne to domesticity and fairy tale. Gone is much of the delicious, thoughtful irony of Anne of Green Gables.
Anne of Green Gables is about being and seeing; Anne of Avonlea is about doing and reacting. More importantly, the Anne of the first book is an individual noticeably different from those around; the Anne of the second book wants to fit in with everything and everybody. The mottoes for the two novels suggest these differences. The motto for Anne of Green Gables is taken from Browning’s ‘Evelyn Hope,’ a eulogy on a sixteen-year-old who was all innocence and beauty. The short poem is about Evelyn Hope’s spirit, just as the novel itself is about Anne’s personality and our growing knowledge of her and her surroundings. On the title page of Anne of Green Gables we find Browning’s two lines: ‘The good stars met in your horoscope, / Made you of spirit and fire and dew.’ The motto for Anne of Avonlea is taken from Whittier’s poem ‘Among the Hills’: ‘Flowers spring to blossom where she walks / The careful ways of duty, / Our hard, stiff lines of life with her / Are flowing curves of beauty.’ Whittier’s poem describes a city man’s chance look at a graceful, cultured woman who has chosen to marry a farmer and live a life of frugal pleasures in the hills. The obvious lesson of the poem is that grace and beauty in the contented woman will enrich her surroundings and elevate the spirit of those with whom she has chosen to live. The woman is not so much a person as an instructive symbol – her activities teach others to accept their lot. As this motto suggests, the novel is about Anne’s actions, her daily (but day-dream glamorized) round of school and home and community duties. Anne of Green Gables is about Anne; Anne of Avonlea is more about what Anne does.
Many children like this second Anne book because ‘a lot happens.’ They like the stories woven into the narrative itself; they like the eccentric minor characters such as Charlotta the Fourth with her face-splitting smile and enormous blue hair bows. They like the fact that Anne sells Mr Harrison’s cow, dyes her nose red, falls through a roof-top, whips Anthony Pye, and discovers two enchanted gardens within walking distance of Green Gables. They like Davy, who relishes mischief, and they dislike his twin, Dora, who never does anything wrong, and they especially like the fact that Anne and Marilla both like Davy better than Dora, too. As a general rule, they dislike Paul Irving and share Davy’s jealousy of Anne’s treatment of Paul. They enjoy the outings and the trials of the Avonlea Village Improvement Society. With so much activity going on, they can ignore the speeches by Anne and Gilbert about their ambitions, and they can follow the fairy tale of Lavendar Lewis’s rescue by a middle-aged prince charming, without wondering how these square with Anne’s own realizations about truth and romance in the earlier story. In other words, as an active frolic that continues the good times of Anne of Green Gables, the sequel is a success; as an exploration of Anne’s development and thinking, the book is a qualified failure.
So Anne of Avonlea is busy. Its first chapter suggests the hustle of the whole story. In those opening pages we are introduced to all the main story lines and treated to liberal dashes of Mr Harrison’s and Rachel Lynde’s peppery speeches. We are riveted to hear Mr Harrison call Anne a ‘red-headed snippet’ (7) and amused to hear Mrs Lynde characterizing new neighbors: ‘his wife is a slack-twisted creature that can’t turn her hand to a thing. She washes her dishes sitting down’ (II). Anne daydreams about distant greatness for some imagined male student of hers (evidently having decided, as the novel’s motto suggests, to shed warmth and light without stepping out of the round of duty and routine herself), but such dreaminess is quickly interrupted by Mr Harrison’s ‘irruption into the yard’ (2). The narrator is an independent and lively commentator on all around, and we suspect that Anne’s point of view will not be the one we see with in the story as a whole. And it is not. The story is given to us by the narrator and quantities of characters. The encouraged participation with long descriptive passages we enjoyed in Anne of Green Gables is not a big part of this novel. Here Anne Shirley is a quirky, engaging adolescent in a whirl of other people and their comings and goings and sayings. Her voice is not even the most interesting one we hear. Anne’s doings are the substance of the book, but her thinking? Her ambitions? Her visions? What has happened to them?
Though it is a far less meditative book than Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea spends much time preaching and teaching. The narrator seems to have caught Manila’s disease from the first novel – one Marilla herself has lost here – and inculcates morals wherever she can. The irony of the first chapter, when discussing Mr Harrison’s eccentricity (‘Mr Harrison was certainly different from other people … and that is the essential characteristic of a crank, as everybody knows’ 3), becomes lesson-giving shortly afterwards in summing up a debate between Anne and Jane on corporal punishment: ‘Gilbert, having tried to please both sides, succeeded, as is usual and eminently right, in pleasing neither’ (36).
In fact, everything seems bent on teaching, though not necessarily learning, in this novel; it is even dedicated to one of Montgomery’s teachers. Anne teaches Davy about being a gentleman; Mr Harrison teaches Anne not to trust appearances; Mrs Allan tries to instruct Anne about friendship and love; Mrs Morgan’s fictional heroines teach Anne and Diana how to behave in crises. Anne is Paul Irving’s teacher but, interestingly, Paul teaches Anne the lore of fairy tale all over again. Miss Lavendar looks upon Anne as a friend but teaches her (as Mr Harrison does) that life is not what it seems – is, in fact, far more romantic than it appears. The whole book conspires to teach the reader that romance is all around, but disguised. So much instruction is bound to wear on the reader even if Montgomery is skilful enough to season the lessons with humour.
The narrator’s comments, asides, and little nudges eventually lead to an incredibly pedantic and moralizing stance about male and female and the powerful image of the Good Girl. Gilbert evidently keeps himself out of the ‘fast set’ where he teaches by holding up the image of Anne to himself. As he plans his future life, with Anne in the picture, he wants to be sure he keeps himself ‘worthy of its [the future’s] goddess’ (220–1). The narrator steps in. In the earlier book a line or two would have sufficed to cap Gilbert’s feelings and to suggest Anne’s response, but in this second novel about the teacher, the narrator moralizes to reinforce all the cultural stereotypes of Montgomery’s time: ‘She held over him the unconscious influence that every girl, whose ideals are high and pure, wields over her friends; an influence which would endure as long as she was faithful to those ideals and which she would as certainly lose if she were ever false to them’ (221). One would like to think that this is a gratuitous piece of preaching and is not supported in Anne’s conscious development of attitude, but it comes, in fact, as a narrative echo and moral embellishment of Anne’s discussion of her own life’s ambition.
At the end of Anne of Green Gables, when she has given up the Avery scholarship and is determined to teach in Avonlea and keep up with her own studies, Anne is still full of zest and direction, though the novel’s concluding romantic overtones may make some of this direction doubtful. Early in their teaching days, Anne shows that she has now, like Whittier’s heroine, embraced a domesticated romance instead of her former bold striving for excellence. Gilbert has decided to be a doctor so that he can add to knowledge and thus ‘get square with his obligations to the race’ (70). Anne’s reply shows how far Montgomery has gone in squeezing the independence and individuality out of her spirited redhead. Anne sounds like a romantic guiding spirit rather than a flesh-and-blood adolescent: ‘“I’d like to add some beauty to life,” said Anne dreamily. “I don’t exactly want to make people know more … though I know that is the noblest ambition … but I’d love to make them have a pleasanter time because of me … to have some little joy or happy thought that would never have existed if I hadn’t been born’” (70). The narrator follows up with an appreciative Biblical allusion: ‘Anne was one of the children of light by birthright’ (70). In keeping with her first-page day-dream of inspiring some male pupil who will later recall and praise her, Anne’s life ambitions have become quiet and small and harmless and the narrator invokes the Bible (Luke 16:8) to applaud Anne’s circumscription.
Notice how Montgomery here reinforces traditional gender roles and their strict separation: Gilbert is a man; Gilbert chooses real, serious work that will contribute to world development and address the destiny of the race. He expects to strive and struggle in the great world. Anne ‘chooses’ the small, the pleasant, the pretty. She as much as admits that she is frivolous and decorative. She doesn’t aspire to create knowledge; she just wants to be lovely and shower blessings. Montgomery seems to be endorsing the culturally approved, inevitably repressive oppositional thinking (that Jonathan Culler describes so well throughout On Deconstruction) where one thing is pitted against another and subordinated to another. Gilbert stands for what is supposedly superior: the world, work, knowledge, struggle, advancement, honour, strength, action, male; Anne stands for their supposedly inferior opposites: domesticity, pleasure, feeling, effortlessness, complacency, self-indulgence, weakness, reaction, female. Montgomery’s largely unchallenged stereotypes are at the root of the book’s problems because prescriptions and conventional romance seem so often to go together. If conventional romance did not require such rigid boundaries for gender, Gilbert and Anne could together explore the collective values they here split unevenly (see Moi 172–3).
Six-year-old Davy’s attitude to male privilege is evidence that the divisions and confinements of the sexes are fostered in the young. Davy scorns what he perceives as feminine weakness – saying of Dora’s response to his hair pulling, ’she just cried ‘cause she’s a girl.’ He then tells Marilla that she should let him drive the buggy, ‘since I’m a man’ (77). Towards the end of the book, When Mr Harrison’s wife has sought him out (and while we are wondering over Miss Lavendar’s romance), Davy gives a child’s-eye view of the division of power in marriage. He is discussing Mr Harrison’s having left his wife: ‘I wouldn’t leave my wife for anything like that. I’d just put my foot down and say, “Mrs Davy, you’ve just got to do what’ll please me ’cause I’m a man.” That’d settle her pretty quick I guess’ (290). In the story no one responds to Davy’s philosophy – and we are free to laugh at it as a childishly simple misunderstanding of the complexity of things, or, perhaps, we see that Montgomery is using a child to voice the views of the presiding culture.1 Perhaps we are encouraged to see Davy’s attractive, free, bad-boy behaviour and his proud self-image as essential parts of the culture that promotes conventional romance. Certainly the conception of romance the book favours seems supportive of Davy’s view of things. There would be little clash of wills between wife and husband, woman and man, if each accepted her or his sphere as Anne and Gilbert seem eager to do.
Anne-the-teacher is a confirmed romantic whose world affirms her romanticism. The inverted comedy of much of Anne of Green Gables is given the lie. Whereas in the young Anne’s career we are encouraged to see that exaggerated romanticism leads to mishap and embarrassment, in the adolescent Anne’s world, Prince Charming (even called that) arrives to take his bride from the enchanted palace that has not changed since he left it twenty-five years before. Lavendar Lewis’s story, one of the most appealing in the book, of the stone house and its elfish echoes and Wonderland housemaid and Lady of Shalott-like prisoner of shadows suggests that Anne’s belief in romance is supported by the actual world of Avonlea and environs. Similarly, the story of Hester Gray and her splendid, secluded garden tells us that Avonlea has its own secret romances. Hester, like the woman in Whittier’s poem, gave up city life to marry a simple man and glory in the rustic beauty and wholesome toil of a backwoods homestead. Her early death from consumption makes her sound like a heroine of one of the stories Anne wept over as a child. Anne finds the romance around her – not because her active imagination manufactures it, but because it is there to be discovered. Anne is an interpreter, not a creator, of romance. Even the apparent woman-hater, Mr Harrison, turns out to be married to a loving wife. The Harrison reunion proves that virtually everything in Avonlea supports mating and pairing and some form of romance.
Towards the end of the book even Marilla wonders if Anne’s poetic view of life isn’t preferable to her own prose. When Marilla and Anne compare versions of the Lewis-Irving romance, Anne ‘wins.’ The old established Avonlea would be tempted to see the story much as Marilla does at first: ‘I can’t see that it’s so terribly romantic at all … In the first place two young fools quarrel and turn sulky; then Steve Irving goes to the States and after a spell gets married up there and is perfectly happy from all accounts. Then his wife dies and after a decent interval he thinks he’ll come home and see if his first fancy’ll have him. Meanwhile, she’s been living single, probably because nobody nice enough came along to want her, and they meet and agree to be married after all. Now, where is the romance in all that?’ (349–50). This commonsensical way of looking at the ‘romance’ is exposed as cynical, bald, and inadequate by the descriptions and dialogue in the Lewis story. But it is Anne who makes Marilla doubt her common-sense version with her response to ‘where is the romance in all that?’: ‘“Oh, there isn’t any, when you put it that way,” gasped Anne, rather as if somebody had thrown cold water over her. “I suppose that’s how it looks in prose. But it’s very different if you look at it through poetry … and / think it’s nicer …” Anne recovered herself and her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed … “to look at it through poetry”’ (350). This argument is ingenious. It is perfectly consistent with Anne’s early idealism and romanticism, and at the same time affirms that the way of interpreting actually determines what is there. Anne does not try to argue with Marilla, but prefers her own interpretation because it is ‘nicer.’ This statement of preference is virtually unarguable – Anne is not denying any truth; she is making a choice about interpretation. This preference for poetry argues in favour of the entire book’s support of fairy tale – the narrator reinforces Anne’s bias for the poetic.
After Anne declares her allegiance to poetry, Marilla, that incarnation of plain truth, capitulates: ‘Marilla glanced at the radiant young face and refrained from further sarcastic comments. Perhaps some realization came to her that after all it was better to have, like Anne, “the vision and the faculty divine” … that gift which the world cannot bestow or take away, of looking at life through some transfiguring … or revealing? … medium, whereby everything seemed apparelled in celestial light, wearing a glory and a freshness not visible to those who, like herself and Charlotta the Fourth, looked at things only through prose’ (350). Manila’s love for Anne suddenly gives her faith that there is another way to see the world – a way foreign to her, but evidently uplifting to Anne. Since Marilla cannot ever be expected to see poetry herself (we are certain here that the narrator, not Marilla, is echoing Wordsworth2 in describing the sudden shift in Manila’s thinking), this expression of faith is the closest the book can come to declaring Avonlea’s unqualified endorsement of Anne’s perception.
Even though Anne loves and talks about her love for poetry in this novel, we actually find less poetry here than in the first book. Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea do have roughly the same number of poetic descriptions, but the length and quality of the descriptions is markedly different. The poetic descriptions in Anne of Avonlea are often shorter than those in Anne of Green Gables, and they rely on catalogues of things and careful use of verbs rather than on vivid images and colours. Often Anne herself will supply the quality of expression that the narrator used in the early parts of Anne of Green Gables. The role reversal and role sharing between character and narrator (discussed in the previous chapter), which began at the end of Anne of Green Gables, are continued in Anne of Avonlea in the descriptive passages. But here while the narrator subsides, she also moralizes. Notice this early description and the lesson it offers:
A September day on Prince Edward Island hills; a crisp wind blowing up over the sand dunes from the sea; a long red road, winding through fields and woods, now looping itself about a corner of thick set spruces, now threading a plantation of young maples with great feathery sheets of ferns beneath them, now dipping down into a hollow where a brook flashed out of the woodland into them again, now basking in open sunshine between ribbons of golden rod and smoke-blue asters; air athrill with the pipings of myriads of crickets, those glad little pensioners of the summer hills; a plump brown pony ambling along the road; two girls behind him, full to the lips with the simple, priceless joy of youth and life. (51)
Notice how ‘blowing,’ ‘winding,’ ‘looping,’ ‘threading,’ ‘dipping,’ ‘basking,’ ‘flashed,’ ‘ambling’ dominate the mood. Glad activity characterizes the scene – but the narrator is sure to point the lesson that youth and life are precious things to be grateful for. And then it is Anne herself who takes up the fancifulness we before expected from the narrator or from the narrator and Anne together: ‘“Oh, this is a day left over from Eden, isn’t it, Diana?” … and Anne sighed for sheer happiness. “The air has magic in it. Look at the purple in the cup of that harvest valley, Diana. And oh, do smell the dying fir! … Bliss is it on such a day to be alive; but to smell dying fir is very heaven. That’s two thirds Wordsworth and one third Anne Shirley”’ (51–2). Here we find the favourites of the Anne of Green Gables narrator – purple and cup and poetic allusion – used by Anne herself.
There are some places in the book where Anne picks up directly where the narrator leaves off in a description and gives a fanciful embellishment, perhaps a quotation. Watching a sunset, following Davy’s question ‘where is sleep?’, Anne is inspired to quote from Poe’s romantic ‘Eldorado’: ‘Anne was kneeling at the west gable window watching the sunset sky that was like a great flower with petals of crocus and a heart of fiery yellow. She turned her head at Davy’s question and answered dreamily,” Over the mountains of the moon, / Down the valley of the shadow’” (197). The familiar flower imagery reminds us of the younger Anne, and the quotation from Poe suggests her continuing love of the romantic and dreamy.
We see another type of embellishment of the narrator by Anne just before Anne and Diana stumble onto Miss Lavendar’s romantic stone house. The girls are enjoying the ramble: ‘the following afternoon they set out, going by way of Lover’s Lane to the back of the Cuthbert farm, where they found a road leading into the heart of acres of glimmering beech and maple woods, which were all in a wondrous glow of flame and gold, lying in a great purple stillness and peace.’ As though speaking aloud what she had only moments before thought silently, Anne picks up the colours and says, ‘It’s as if the year were kneeling to pray in a vast cathedral full of mellow stained light, isn’t it? … I just want to drink the day’s loveliness in … I feel as if she were holding it out to my lips like a cup of airy wine and I’ll take a sip at every step’ (239). The favourite images of cathedral window and cup of colour work to remind us that this is the same Anne Shirley we have known since the Bright River train left her on the station platform, but now it is Anne who gives the similes.
At other times, when we see the parts echoing or interchanging, the narrator’s may be the more familiar: ‘Early oats greened over the red fields; apple orchards flung great blossoming arms about the farmhouses and the Snow Queen adorned itself as a bride for her husband. Anne liked to sleep with her window open and let the cherry fragrance blow over her face all night’ (272). Anne picks up the joyous strain: ‘Thanksgiving should be celebrated in the spring … I think it would be ever so much better than having it in November when everything is dead or asleep. Then you have to remember to be thankful … I feel exactly as Eve must have felt in the garden of Eden before the trouble began. Is that grass in the hollow green or golden? It seems to me, Marilla, that a pearl of a day like this, when the blossoms are out and the winds don’t know where to blow from next for sheer crazy delight must be pretty near as good as heaven’ (273). The use here again of the garden of Eden reminds us of Anne’s earlier speech about September (quoted above) and, of course, reinforces the paradise quality of Prince Edward Island itself.
The echoing back and forth between narrator and Anne is a standard feature of Anne of Avonlea, but the voice of the narrator is not always or even usually the voice or the perception of Anne. Primarily the narrator instructs. Notice, for instance, how the narrator combines in this passage allusion and paraphrase and then tacks on a moral. Anne is responding to Paul’s fancies, and he has just asked her if it is not splendid to be one of the ones who can see imaginary people:
‘Splendid,’ Anne agreed, gray shining eyes looking down into blue shining ones. Anne and Paul both knew
‘How fair the realm
Imagination opens to the view,’
and both knew the way to that happy land. There the rose of joy bloomed immortal by dale and stream; clouds never darkened the sunny sky; sweet bells never jangled out of tune; and kindred spirits abounded. The knowledge of that land’s geography … ‘east o’ the sun, west o’ the moon’… is priceless lore, not to be bought in any market place. It must be the gift of the good fairies at birth and the years can never deface it or take it away. It is better to possess it, living in a garret, than to be the inhabitant of palaces without it. (167)
Either Anne or the narrator could be responsible for the quotation and for the virtual medley of allusions,3 but the narrator alone insists on the moral at the end. In changing from child to adolescent Anne may have lost something of her irreverent spontaneity, but the narrator has become positively preachy.
Yet even the narrator is never so preachy as Anne is herself in the one dreadful chapter of this book, ‘A Golden Picnic’ Anne’s behaviour is distressingly precious, and the narrator seldom interjects to counterbalance her. She leads a picnic expedition into the woods and fields, insisting that she should be able to celebrate her birthday in blessed June since it is not her fault she was born in chilly March. The decidedly prosaic Diana Barry and Jane Andrews are there to offer a flattering contrast for the whimsical Priscilla Grant and the entirely fanciful Anne Shirley. Montgomery strains to reproduce realistic conversation of girls in their late teens while also endorsing Anne as special teacher. The episode begins poorly. Trusty friend Diana, who has usually been the happy chorus for Anne’s schemes, here sounds like a miniature Marilla. She thinks Anne’s idea for a picnic sounds good, but she feels ‘distrust of Anne’s magic of words’ (133) and is not enthusiastic. Since the days of abusing the imagination with the Haunted Wood nightmares, Diana has been a little afraid to share Anne’s flights, but she has never been so stodgy as this. When all four girls are together, Anne gushes, ‘Oh, girls, girls, see that patch of violets! There’s something for memory’s picture gallery’ (134). This is not so bad, perhaps, until Priscilla adds, ‘If a kiss could be seen I think it would look like a violet.’ Anne ‘glow[s]’ and exclaims; ‘I’m so glad you spoke that thought, Priscilla, instead of just thinking it and keeping it to yourself. This world would be a much more interesting place … although it is very interesting anyhow … if people spoke out their real thoughts’ (134). Is this the girl who told Marilla in Anne of Green Gables that she had learned to keep dear thoughts to herself like treasures (AGG 271)?
Perhaps we are meant to feel that with friends Anne should be able to be herself. But the trouble is that Anne does not let the others be themselves. She actually commands them to be fanciful, is dismayed by their-lack of poetry, and generally shows herself to be condescending. In this same scene, practical Jane objects to speaking out real thoughts – ‘It would be too hot to hold some folks’ (134) – and Anne sets her straight by moralizing and commanding: ‘I suppose it might be, but that would be their own faults for thinking nasty things. Anyhow, we can tell all our thoughts to-day because we are going to have nothing but beautiful thoughts. Everybody can say just what comes into her head. That is conversation. Here’s a little path I never saw before. Let’s explore it’ (134–5). When they come to a little pool Anne insists they dance around it ‘like wood-nymphs’ (135), but, the narrator tells us mildly, their rubbers come off and they give that up. When Anne makes them select names for the little pond she is aghast at the unimaginativeness of Diana’s choice, ‘Birch Pool.’ (We remember that it was Diana who named Birch Path in Anne of Green Gables – would she really be so repetitive? Well, perhaps that is the point.) Jane’s ‘Crystal Lake’ also fails to please. Anne ‘implore[s] Priscilla with her eyes not to perpetrate another such name,’ and Priscilla comes up with ‘Glimmer-glass,’ while Anne herself contributes (a fairly dull) ‘The Fairies’ Mirror.’ When ‘Crystal Lake’ is chosen from the hat, the narrator tells us Anne probably ‘thought that chance had played the pool a shabby trick’ (136).
Anne’s offences go on. Perhaps most revealing is Anne’s editing of her wishes. When asked to tell what each would wish for, Anne obviously violates her own rule for the day that they speak their thoughts. Jane wants to be ‘rich and beautiful and clever’ and Diana ‘tall and slender’ and Priscilla ‘famous,’ but ‘Anne thought of her hair and then dismissed the thought as unworthy. “I’d wish it might be spring all the time and in everybody’s heart and all our lives”’ (137). So much for honesty and originality! Can this missish tyrant be the same Anne Shirley who spoke so freely in most of Anne of Green Gables! Even Anne’s subsequent words about wearing pink dresses in heaven cannot fully offset the high tone she has taken with her friends. If Montgomery were showing this older Anne to be a heroine of her own inner drama, a drama we are supposed to see as misguided and self-deluding, we could perhaps sympathize with Anne’s immaturity. We could believe that the older girl/woman has chosen mistakenly a new kind of romance to replace the equally misguided courtly one of childhood. Instead, the contrasts with the other girls seem to support the narrator’s belief in Anne’s high-minded-ness. The book suggests that there is nothing comical or wrong in Anne’s criticism of others or in the self-editing of her ideals. Maybe this is the fault of the book in a nutshell: it does not laugh at itself enough.
At the end of the chapter we have another concentration of Anne’s voice. First Anne instructs Jane and Diana about poetry and the narrator conspires to make the two literal-minded girls seem almost dim-witted compared with Anne. When Anne cries out ‘Look, do you see that poem?’ Diana and Jane look around ‘expecting to see Runic rhymes on the birch trees’ and Anne patiently corrects. Notice Anne’s consciously instructive and poetic ‘athwart’: ‘There … down in the brook … that old green, mossy log with the water flowing over it in those smooth ripples that look as if they’d been combed, and that single shaft of sunshine falling right athwart it, far down into the pool. Oh, it’s the most beautiful poem I ever saw’ (143). Jane objects that poetry is written in ‘lines and verses,’ but Anne dismisses her easily: “The lines and verses are only the outward garments of the poem and are no more really it than your ruffles and flounces are you, Jane’ (144). A short while later Anne and Priscilla discuss the colour of souls, and Diana and Jane are clearly mystified by such an imaginative flight. We are encouraged by the narrator, unkindly I think, to feel that Jane and Diana are laughable because they cannot see what Anne and Priscilla see. Would the Anne Shirley who knew how much it hurt to be misunderstood and excluded really treat her dearest friend so insensitively?
The narrator does not desert us entirely in the chapter, however, and we are invited to be amused by one of Anne’s excesses: ‘Anne had brought glasses and lemonade for her guests, but for her own part drank cold brook water from a cup fashioned out of birch bark. The cup leaked, and the water tasted of earth, as brook water is apt to do in spring; but Anne thought it more appropriate to the occasion than lemonade’ (143). We can smile at Anne’s insistence on drinking earthy water, and yet even our amusement here is qualified. Is there not a touch of conscious superiority in Anne’s choice – and in the fact that she does not even try to persuade her less discerning friends that spring water is more ‘appropriate’ to the occasion than lemonade? The moralizing narrator of the rest of the book and this complacent Anne evidently share values.
The climax of ‘A Golden Picnic’ is the finding of Hester Gray’s garden, that romantic overgrown Eden where Hester was happy and died. The narrator we knew in Anne of Green Gables sets the tone for the discovery of the garden: ‘Past the spruces the lane dipped down into a sunny little open [sic] where a log bridge spanned a brook; and then came the glory of a sunlit beechwood where the air was like transparent golden wine, and the leaves fresh and green, and the wood floor a mosaic of tremulous sunshine’ (138). The other three exclaim out loud at the beauty, but ‘Anne only gazed in eloquent silence’ (139). The fact that the prosaic Diana tells the story of Hester Gray is meant to confirm what the whole book seems bent on showing – that Anne’s brand of romance is evident in the actual world around Avonlea. Having Diana speak here is rather like having Marilla corroborate Anne’s preference for poetry in the interpretation of Lavendar Lewis’s story. Anne’s faith in romantic love stories is supported by the narrative.
Anne of Avonlea is a busy story, almost as though Montgomery is trying to distract us from the fact that Anne is not learning or growing or really thinking. We welcome the activities of other characters. It’s more fun to listen to Mr Harrison and his parrot and to Mrs Lynde, or even to Davy, than it is to listen to Anne.4
Yet even though Anne’s intense energy is refracted into minor characters and into subplots, there is enough of Anne’s enthusiasm and sense of wonder to glue the book together and let it pass as a story about her. The main story with Anne is the love story with Gilbert, and this thread runs through the narrative as a whole. Inevitably, this story is linked to the other romances of the book and to the novel’s overall privileging of sentiment over thought. While the narrator in Anne of Green Gables encourages our recognition of Anne’s misguided idealization of chivalry, in Anne of Avonlea the narrator establishes Gilbert as a knight. Trying to have it both ways – highlighting romance and fairy tale and at the same time suggesting that Anne could settle for a real young man of her own community – is a neat narrative trick. The story of Lavendar Lewis is a handy reinforcer of romance and works at the same time to suggest that romance lives in the everyday world if you know how to look for it because Lavendar Lewis is intelligent and clear-sighted about herself and her situation. Lavendar Lewis is fond of verbal quips, plays with biblical passages in ironically characterizing her own isolated life,5 and is even prone to depression – and yet she is the princess of a fairy tale. The romance of the stone house is a miniature, fanciful prefiguring of Anne’s own story with Gilbert Blythe. Montgomery very cleverly uses Anne’s and the narrator’s words together to fuse the two stories and to bring her own novel to its formula conclusion.
The narrator interprets or rather transcribes for us Anne’s thoughts about Steven Irving’s request through Anne to meet with Lavendar Lewis. In a chapter entitled ‘The Prince Comes Back to the Enchanted Palace,’ Anne and Irving meet and Anne responds thus: ‘Yes, this was romance, the very, the real thing, with all the charm of rhyme and story and dream. It was a little belated, perhaps, like a rose blooming in October which should have bloomed in June; but none the less a rose, all sweetness and fragrance, with the gleam of gold in its heart’ (339). At the very end of the novel after the Lewis-Irving wedding, Anne waits in Lavendar Lewis’s garden for Gilbert to return. The enchanted garden is the obvious place for Anne to reconsider how she feels about Gilbert. A question from Gilbert elicits a comment from the narrator and then a transcription of Anne’s thoughts. The narrator’s words here echo Anne’s earlier thoughts about the late-blooming rose: ‘Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music; perhaps … perhaps … love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath’ (366). Into this one passage Montgomery has distilled the message of her book and, in a sense, excused the apparent support of fairy tale by suggesting that real life is better than fairy tale. We recognize in the image of the ‘gay knight riding down’ Anne’s younger passion for Lancelot6 and her stated preference here for a lover-friend. The rose, as the symbol of passion and romance, is associated in Anne’s mind with the fairy-tale of Miss Lavendar and her own changing friendship with Gilbert. While Anne apparently eschews courtly, chivalric romance in favour of real life, she is merely turning away from medieval romance (or a Victorian version of it) and towards the traditional romance of which the rose is the emblem. If we thought Anne at the end of Anne of Green Gables had moved beyond chivalry, we are told here at the end of Anne of Avonlea that Anne only now sees that perhaps the knight is not so powerful as the friend. And, at the same time, friendship-love is given the very emblem associated with courtly and passionate love. To add to this mixing of reversals and apparent reversals, we find on the last page of the novel, in what appears to be a transcription of Gilbert’s thoughts, Gilbert’s identification of himself as a knight errant winning a princess: ‘Gilbert wisely said nothing more; but in his silence he read the history of the next four years in the light of Anne’s remembered blush. Four years of earnest, happy work … and then the guerdon of a useful knowledge gained and a sweet heart won’ (367). The poetic, archaic ‘guerdon’ aligns Gilbert with Camelot, with the chivalry and romance of quest and reward. Whether or not Montgomery intends the echoes and reversals to be ironic, we do know that she is cleverly conforming to the dictates of her genre (domestic romance) and yet at the same time withstanding pressure for a complete, stereotypical capitulation of the yielding damsel to the worthy knight. She has saved Anne’s reconsideration, as she did in Anne of Green Gables, until the very last pages of the book.
The closing of the novel is a fascinating instance of Montgomery’s care to stay within her chosen prescriptions and yet to flirt with reversals of the expected. If Anne can give up the image of the knight and turn to a friend-lover, how will Gilbert feel if he has imagined himself a knight winning a guerdon? Could Montgomery just possibly be hinting at the confusion of expectations and roles we experience when we insist that the script of our inner private drama is really the script of another’s drama? In any case, the novel’s repeated play with poetry versus prose is an indication that Anne’s hidden and divulged scripts for her own drama will continue to be liberally glossed with romantic images and expressions. Anne’s preference for poetry over prose ensures that she will continue to find romance in life just as she found romance in the woodland pool. The repetition of the very word ‘athwart’ suggests a persistent romanticism. Here, the narrator says, ‘some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart’ (366) the prose will show the poetry of life in the apparently commonplace, just as Anne earlier saw in the pool the ‘single shaft of sunshine falling athwart’ (143) an old log and making poetry out of nature. At this very late stage in the narrative, the narrator and Anne together return to the book-length lesson of Anne of Green Gables: the real world is the place of beauty and romance.
Perhaps this echo of Montgomery’s earlier book and the repetition here of the possibility that Anne will see Gilbert differently help to make Anne of Avonlea sound as though it is not really unlike Anne of Green Gables. And to a remarkable extent Montgomery was able in Anne of Avonlea to tap the energy and fun that made the first book vibrate with life. If ‘A Golden Picnic’ is jarring, there are still chapters such as ‘An Adventure on the Tory Road’ that capture the ‘old’ Anne flavour right down to the quality of mishap and the interaction of Diana and Anne.
In truth, Anne of Avonlea is a chequered book. But Montgomery is a skilful writer, and she eventually turns a fairy-tale subplot into a touchstone for the romantic possibilities of everyday life. If Anne’s voice is sometimes irksome it is also at other times genuinely entertaining; if the narrator’s moralizing is irritating, the descriptions of Charlotta the Fourth and the episodes at the stone house are related with superb comic timing. The apparent book-length endorsement of stereotypical divisions between male and female is undercut at the end, perhaps, by the fact that Gilbert and Anne will set off to college together. The book lacks ease and assurance, but Montgomery manages to keep even very critical readers wondering what sort of dream world that ‘red-headed snippet’ will perceive in Kingsport.