Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery - Frank Davey (essay date 1999)
Frank Davey (essay date 1999)
SOURCE: Davey, Frank. “The Hard-Won Power of Canadian Womanhood: Reading Anne of Green Gables Today.” In L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture, edited and with an introduction by Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly, pp. 163-82. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
[In the following essay, Davey addresses the ways in which Montgomery's Anne continues to reflect women's feelings of social estrangement and prefigured contemporary Canadian literary explorations of the subject.]
L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables played an ambiguously progressive role in various turn-of-the century ideological conflicts concerning religion, child rearing, and opportunities for women. In its strategic focus on an orphan it linked itself to a textual formation that had already seen such works as Dickens's Oliver Twist (1839) and Great Expectations (1861), Twain's Huckleberry Finn...
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