[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 (1885), Kipling's Kim (1901), and—in a less complex way—Frank L. Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) deploy this figure to interrogate social practices. In her invocation of the orphan figure, Montgomery, like the nineteenth-century authors who preceded her, was using a sign of considerable psychological and cultural power—including the power to outlast any specific social issue a novel might engage. For orphanhood and feelings of orphanhood, whether caused by separation, migration, family conflict, parental death, or rapid social change, are conditions that cultures repeatedly create, despite and because of changing material circumstances.

In her specific deployment of a female orphan Montgomery was launching a figure that would play a extremely prominent role in Canadian writing later in the century. Montgomery's Anne was both an actual and metaphorical orphan—a young girl who had not only lost her parents but who had come to experience herself as radically estranged from society generally. In compensation, she finds alternate realities—those of nineteenth-century popular and literary romance (including Campbell's ‘The Battle of Hohenlinden,’ Scott's The Lady of the Lake and Rob Roy, and Heman's ‘The Woman on the Field of Battle’) and those she can create herself, at first in her construction of imaginary companions and later in her writing of her own romance narratives.

This pattern of a young girl's social estrangement leading her into fantasy creation and eventually into literary creation has recurred in several of the most important, and popular, works of fiction in recent Canadian literature: Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, Margaret Laurence's A Bird in the House and The Diviners, and Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle and The Robber Bride. In somewhat less obvious form it has also appeared in fiction like Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic and Gail Scott's Heroine. Undoubtedly there is much more at work here than the continuing influence of a 1908 novel much-read and much-loved by generations of young Canadian women readers, including Munro. In constructing her orphan and this orphan's sense of the oddness of the family, church, and educational institutions she encounters, Montgomery had somewhat vaguely identified a mismatch between the possible dreams of women and the opportunities society would allow them—a mismatch that would become increasingly visible as the century unfolded.

SOCIAL CREATIVITY AND SOCIAL STABILITY

As Elizabeth Epperly, Genevieve Wiggins, and others have noted, Montgomery's overt ideological emphases in her novel concern social creativity and social stability, and often do not appear to be gender marked. These emphases are signalled by the image of the brook with which the novel opens, by the kinds of characters it gives prominent roles to, and by the numerous dichotomies it develops. The novel begins by presenting a brook that has ‘its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place.’ This brook ‘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’ (7). The image prepares the way for various contrasts that are to follow: between the eccentric Cuthberts, with their farmhouse set an unconventional distance from the road, and relentlessly orthodox Rachel Lynde; between the dark and somewhat secret past of the orphan girl Anne Shirley and the open predictability that most of the villagers in Avonlea prefer; between Anne's complexity and ‘headlong’ passions and the self-discipline and quietness Avonlea claims to expect of its children; and between Anne's self-celebrated ‘imagination’ and the rules, dogmas, and authority of church and school.

The major characters the novelist creates for Anne to relate to all play some part in the conflict between convention and spontaneity that the brook image delineates. Good-hearted but verbally inhibited Marilla Cuthbert, unable throughout most of the book to articulate her feelings toward Anne, is moved in the penultimate chapter to declare her love for her openly and explicitly. Her early preference to adopt a child who will be ‘useful’ to her and her aging brother, Matthew, contrasts with Matthew's quickly developing preference for a child who is ‘interesting’ (56). Rachel Lynde, who at the opening appears to be a suspicious and mean-spirited busybody, is by the end a kind neighbour who makes clothes for Anne, offers her practical advice, and has totally reversed her opinion on the wisdom of the Cuthberts' adopting her. Her early advice to Marilla to discipline Anne ‘with a fair-sized birch switch’ (75) contrasts with Marilla's belief that she could not ‘whip a child’ (76), as well as with Matthew's reluctance to see Anne subject to any form of punishment. Miss Rogerson's rigid style of teaching Sunday school, a style that allows only her to ask questions, contrasts with the approach of her successor, Mrs Allan, of allowing the children to ask any questions they like. Mr Allan's interesting sermons contrast with the long and doctrinaire ones of the previous minister, Mr Bentley. Anne's comment about the latter, ‘I didn't think he was a bit interesting,’ leads Marilla to the chapter-ending observation that her own ‘secret, uncluttered, critical thoughts had suddenly taken visible and accusing shape and form’ (93) in a small girl's words. The repetition of ‘secret’ here from the earlier passage about the brook is only one of numerous devices that serve to foreground the novel's repeated suggestion that a gender-neutral orthodoxy (shared by Mr Bentley, Miss Rogerson, and Mrs Lynde) is being critiqued through a juxtaposition with ‘imagination’ and complexity.

However, a male-female binary that poses questions of women's social roles is also concurrently developed by Montgomery. Without the mistake in communication that brings the elderly Cuthbert siblings a girl instead of the ‘useful’ boy they had requested, Anne's story could not begin. ‘You don't want me because I'm not a boy! I might have expected it,’ exclaims an indignant Anne in the third chapter when a surprised Marilla complains to Matthew about the sex of the child he has brought home (31). This scene poses the issue of a woman's value. Is she to be ‘useful’ only as domestic labour—a kind of labour of which Marilla has no need—or can she be useful at productive labour outside the home? This question is returned to at numerous points within the narrative, with the argument that women are at best only of domestic use usually associated with Rachel Lynde, and the argument that a girl can be ‘fitted to earn her own living’ (262) associated with the pragmatic Marilla.¹

SCANDALOUS QUESTIONS

Yet despite the clarity with which Montgomery delineates such gender issues and suggests progressive and perhaps—in her time—‘scandalous’ positions on them, the extent of her novel's progressiveness is arguably ambiguous. The novel risks asking ‘scandalous’ questions such as why women cannot occupy a church minister's position of authority, but carefully qualifies and contains them. This particular question concerning female clergy is placed by Montgomery in the context of Anne's childish garrulousness—a characteristic that can elsewhere produce quite a mixture of naive, mundane, and penetrating observations. Here Anne's simplicity becomes immediately apparent when she follows her question with the suggestion that the dogmatic Rachel Lynde could have been a minister—that Mrs Lynde can pray as well as the school superintendent, Mr Bell, and could likely learn to preach as well.²

Moreover, although the novel allows Anne some years of education, and qualification as a public school teacher by the time she is sixteen, in the overall structure of the novel this attainment is not exactly progress. She has done no more than attain the position that her mother had held some twenty years before. If she should eventually marry her suitor, Gilbert Blythe, who has also qualified as a school teacher, she will have replicated her mother and father's status as school teachers, and in a sense returned her family to the occupational standing it had far in the past. The Anne that the novel develops is not someone who necessarily wishes to lead a life greatly different from that enjoyed briefly by her parents, or lived by Marilla. Although she speaks often about her imagination, what she seems to desire most deeply is a home, and people who will want and care for her. Yet on the other hand the issue of textual production by a woman has been broached—an issue that sixty years later will see another literary orphan, Morag Gunn, leave her very conventional husband, Brooke Skelton, for her own career as a novelist.

Another sign of the novel's ambivalence about the women's capabilities is its handling of the competition between Anne and Gilbert Blythe for top academic honours at the village school and later at Queen's school in Charlottetown. In the early stages of this competition the novel repeatedly emphasizes the key role that Gilbert's teasing of Anne (his calling her ‘Carrots’), and the rage and bitterness she feels toward him in response, is playing in motivating her to compete. Here Gilbert is often portrayed as not especially motivated, and as earning the high grades he would have earned no matter what the circumstance, while Anne is portrayed as driven by her anger toward him to perform at a level higher than she would have otherwise attained. ‘The rivalry between them,’ Montgomery's narrator reports when the competition begins, ‘was entirely good-natured on Gilbert's side; but it is much to be feared that the same thing cannot be said of Anne, who had certainly an unpraiseworthy tenacity for holding grudges. She was as intense in her hatreds as in her loves’ (151). Yet despite this tenacity, Gilbert appears to top the class at least as often as Anne.

Later, as public school graduation nears, the narrator tells us that Anne's anger toward Gilbert has faded, but not her determination to defeat him, and that Gilbert's competitiveness has increased. ‘There was open rivalry between Gilbert and Anne now. Previously the rivalry had been rather one-sided, but there was no longer any doubt that Gilbert was as determined to be first in class as Anne was’ (264). Throughout their final exams ‘Anne had strained every nerve … So had Gilbert’ (280). This is the period in which Anne has the greatest success, tying Gilbert for the highest grades in the province. Toward the novel's end, during their last competition for grades at Queen's, Montgomery suggests that another change has occurred in Anne. ‘Her rivalry with Gilbert was as intense as it had ever been … but somehow the bitterness had gone out of it. Anne no longer wished to win for the sake of defeating Gilbert; rather, for the proud consciousness of a well-won victory over a worthy foeman’ (305). Without the bitterness, however, Anne apparently cannot win. Gilbert earns the medal for first place in the class, while Anne wins only the Avery Scholarship for top standing in English.³

There are a number of implications here. One is that Anne may have been performing above her abilities when motivated by bitterness. Another is that her talents may be concentrated mostly around ‘imagination’—something associated in the novel elsewhere with women and the arts—and may not range, as Gilbert's seem to do, across the more ‘useful’ areas of history and mathematics. A third—latent in the ease with which Anne and others accept Gilbert's victory—is that it is normal or natural for a male to win. This imbalance between Gilbert and Anne is reinforced by Montgomery when they look for employment. Gilbert is the Avonlea board's first choice to teach at their school. Anne gets this board's position only because Gilbert, conscious that the power he thereby has over her—‘I was pleased to be able to do you some small service’ (328)—is also a power to be generous, declines its offer and signs a contract with a nearby district. Interestingly there are few outstanding scholars among the later female Canadian literary ‘orphans,’ and several who are presented as having their academic work severely compromised by their sex. Munro's Dell Jordan in Lives of Girls and Women believes her final high school exams have been ‘sabotaged by love’—her brief but ill-fated liaison with Garnet French. Atwood's Joan Delacourt in Lady Oracle, writing her final exams while losing more than a hundred pounds and discovering the perils of being an attractive young woman, knows that she's ‘failed at least four papers’ (135).

Yet another way in which the novel signals its ambivalence about its various progressive propositions is through its gentle characterization of Rachel Lynde, and the credence it assigns to many of her pessimistic or narrow observations. Although the woman who unfeelingly and gratuitously insults a relatively defenceless eleven-year old Anne in the ninth chapter eventually comes to see her as ‘a real smart girl’ (268) and ‘a credit to [her] friends’ (283), and to admit that she had made ‘a mistake in judging’ her (268), she never abandons her conservative views about corporal punishment or women's education. Yet a year after her cruelty to the orphan, when Anne, after engaging in a humiliating classroom altercation with Gilbert, refuses to return to school, it is Rachel whom Montgomery chooses to give Marilla the shrewd advice to allow Anne to stay away from school as long as she wishes. That January, when a tour by the Canadian prime minister increases Avonlea's interest in politics, it is Rachel whom Montgomery chooses to raise the question of women's suffrage; ‘Mrs. Lynde,’ reports Anne, ‘says if women were allowed to vote we would soon see a blessed change’ (155). A year later, after being approached by Matthew to help him give Anne a fashionable dress with puff sleeves and having generously volunteered to sew one, Mrs Lynde is shown by Montgomery producing the extremely non-doctrinaire proposition that ‘there's no hard and fast method in the world that'll suit every child’ (216). As well, on many occasions Rachel's narrower comments are allowed by Montgomery to become touchstone proverbs for Anne. When her teacher Mr Phillips resigns from her school, Anne says to Marilla ‘Dear me, there is nothing but meetings and partings in this world, as Mrs. Lynde says’ (182). When various candidates for the church ministry are being interviewed, she on several occasions cites the authority of Mrs Lynde's appraisal of the soundness of their theology. She cites Mrs Lynde as an authority of the health of church ministers (187), on the quality of baking powder (188), and on original sin (196). ‘We can't have things perfect in this imperfect world, as Mrs. Lynde says’ (263), she exclaims in order to comfort herself when she and her best friend Diana Barry are separated in school by their curricular choices. When Anne is nearly fifteen and growing rapidly, she agrees with Mrs Lynde that once she has had to ‘put on longer skirts I shall feel that I have to live up to them and be very dignified’ (267). When she is nervously awaiting the results of her final school exams she again comforts herself with one of Rachel Lynde's aphorisms, ‘If you can't be cheerful, be as cheerful as you can’ (276-7).

Montgomery mixes these moments during which something Rachel Lynde has said becomes of use or comfort to Anne with others in which a Rachel Lynde comment disturbs her, as when Rachel criticizes Mr Allan for ‘worshipping the ground’ his wife ‘treads on,’ and Anne objects to her friend Diana that ‘even ministers are human.’ The overall effect of this mixture, however, together with various generous comments by Marilla (such as that although Rachel's nagging of people to do good often makes them wish to rebel, she is nevertheless ‘a good Christian woman and she means well. There isn't a kinder soul in Avonlea’ [271]), is to blunt the novel's overall criticism of authoritarianism and dogmatism.

In fact, Anne of Green Gables is a novel that has no characters of any importance, including Rachel Lynde, who would have been read in 1908, or can be read today, as antagonistic or malevolent. Potential conflicts between good and evil, arrogance and modesty, cruelty and kindness are either dissolved by Montgomery into ambiguities like those of Mrs Lynde's characterization, or allowed to disappear from the novel along with the negatively portrayed character. The two troubled families that take Anne in immediately after the death of her parents indeed abuse her, but occupy little space in the narrative. The ‘sharp-faced, sharp-eyed’ (53) Mrs Blewett, about whom ‘fearsome tales’ circulate regarding ‘her temper and stinginess’ (52), appears only in the sixth chapter. Members of the Pye family, who in Marilla's view ‘can't help being disagreeable’ (320), serve to annoy or disappoint Anne, but appear infrequently and have little power to distress her. The more prominent characters who react negatively at some point to Anne—Mrs Lynde, Mrs Barry, and the elderly Miss Barry—are all helped by Anne's insouciant hopefulness to reveal themselves as more flexible and more sensitive than they have previously demonstrated. The most potentially unpleasant characters in the novel are presented as changeable or redeemable by the catalyst of Anne's combination of trust and optimism. If they are not so changeable, they become—like Josie Pye—minor parts of the narrative.

THE ORPHAN AS TOUCHSTONE FIGURE

Overall, there is much evidence in Anne of Green Gables of a rather delicate negotiation of conflicting ideological positions—a negotiation that results at some times in the excising of problematic characters and issues and at others in a softening of potentially offensive portrayals. There is almost no evidence of poverty, for example, or of the dehumanizing effects of poverty, except in the fifth chapter. Here we learn that after the infant Anne was orphaned, she was taken in by Mrs Thomas, who was ‘poor and had a drunken husband’ (47). After the latter's death when Anne is eight, she is taken as a servant by Mrs Hammond, the wife of a sawmill worker, who has eight children and lives ‘in a little clearing among the stumps’ (48). When the millworker dies, the wife is so impoverished that she must ‘[divide] her children among her relatives’ (48). These scenes of abject poverty, however, are contained not only by being confined to two pages of one chapter, but also by being retrospectively narrated by Anne from the Cuthbert buggy amid the ‘lovely’ and ‘wonderful’ landscape of Avonlea. In Avonlea itself, there are no further such scenes—the houses Montgomery lets us see are warm and decently furnished, and children comfortably and often fashionably dressed.

Similarly, potentially negative characterizations are softened, sometimes through humour and sometimes through the sudden and heart-warming appearance of redeeming qualities. Anne's first schoolteacher in Avonlea, Mr Phillips, who is careless and unfair in his discipline, and who neglects many of his teaching duties because of his infatuation with the comely sixteen-year-old Prissy Andrews, is constructed by Montgomery as humanized by this infatuation, and forgivable because of it. (A late-twentieth-century reader is more likely to consider him guilty of sexual harassment.) And positive presentations of characters who are sensitive and generous are qualified often in a much different way by Montgomery's pointing out areas in which they are conventional and reliable. Mr Allan, for example, may give ‘interesting’ sermons and ‘[pray] as if he meant it’ (185), but it is still important to stress that Mrs Lynde considers his theology sound. Convention and authority in the novel can teased and tweaked, but not discredited.

The various narrow or dogmatic characters who are the most softened in the book are the ones who, like Marilla, Mrs Lynde, or old Miss Barry, are moved by Anne's influence to greater generosity to others and consequently to greater happiness for themselves. What is interesting here is that these are all characters who are materially comfortable, and who have the means to be generous without great inconvenience to themselves. There is a subtle association in the novel of potential personal worth with a level of material security. Marilla, Mrs Lynde, and old Miss Barry are all landowners, with either money or a source of income. This status, it would seem, has something to do with their being redeemable as human beings. There are noticeably no impoverished characters whose lives are improved by Anne's optimism and innocence.

Yet in some sense this emphasis on the comfortable conditions in Avonlea is produced by the structure of the orphan figure. The literary orphan is typically a part of only two situations: one of poverty and abuse (Oliver Twist's life with Bumble); or one of unaccustomed comfort or hopes of wealth (Pip's life as a student in London, and his hopes of Miss Havisham). In Harold Gray's comic strip Little Orphan Annie, Annie—another red-headed orphan—bounces forever between periods of comfort with Daddy Warbucks and ones of poverty on the streets. Montgomery's narrative repeatedly emphasizes the refreshingly comfortable side of this figure, and the stability and age of an Avonlea that in the nineteenth century is already old and with history.

When the novel opens, Anne is about to be brought to the ‘old Cuthbert place’ (7), a farm and house that were built by a Cuthbert who is long dead, and whose children, Matthew and Marilla, are already greying and only a few years away from decline and death. The farm is so old it has been ‘embowered’ by the shrubbery that has grown around. Nearby, Montgomery writes, are numerous ‘snug farmsteads’ (28), and ‘the “Avenue,” … a stretch of road four or five hundred yards long, completely arched over with huge, wide-spreading apple-trees, planted years ago by an eccentric old farmer’ (24). It is this long-settled landscape, with its fruit trees in blossom, that so overwhelms Anne with ‘beauty’ when she first sees it from the front seat of Matthew's buggy—first the tree-lined lane, which she christens ‘the White Way of Delight,’ and then, situated beside a bridge, the Barry's pond, which she names ‘Lake of Shining Waters.’

Montgomery lets the reader see this settled and humanized landscape through the eyes of the orphan girl, and graphically so when she first sees—among more ‘snug farmsteads’—Green Gables.

She opened her eyes and looked about her. They were on the crest of a hill. The sun had set some time since, but the landscape was still clear in the mellow afterlight. To the west a dark church spire rose up against a marigold sky. Below was a little valley and beyond a long, gently-rising slope with snug farmsteads scattered along it. From one to another the child's eyes darted, eager and wistful. At last they lingered on one away to the left, far back from the road, dimly white with blossoming trees in the twilight of the surrounding woods. Over it, in the stainless southwest sky, a great crystal-white star was shining like a lamp of guidance and promise.

(28)

This Christmas-card scene with its repetitions of warm words—‘mellow,’ ‘snug,’ ‘blossoming’—and its guiding star quickly and not unexpectedly evokes from Anne the word ‘home’—‘as soon as I saw it,’ she tells Matthew, ‘I felt it was home’ (28). Beauty here is linked to fruitfulness and prosperity—a plausible enough understanding of beauty in an orphan. Later, Anne will reveal herself willing to have her impetuousness and impulsiveness subjected to numerous restraints in order that she can be accepted and approved by this home and its community.

The impression of age and stability in this scene, linked to other signs of duration and permanence—to vegetation, agriculture, and the church—marks the positive extension of the orphan figure, the orphan's relief at the onset of comfort. One could argue the continuing power of this figure on archetypal grounds, positing its source in Biblical stories of exile and promised land. My own inclination is to argue its power in terms of the material uncertainties and insecurities that the novel itself proposes, and in terms of the new or continuing manifestations of these in the late-twentieth-century cultural context in which one now reads Montgomery.

One of these uncertainties is the continuing and unequal conflict between rural and urban, the beginnings of which are evident throughout Montgomery's text, from the building of the new railway line from Carmody to Avonlea midway through the novel, to Anne's exclamation to Marilla on having first visited Charlottetown. ‘I came to the conclusion, Marilla, that I wasn't born for city life and that I was glad of it. 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’ (254-5). Throughout, the novel resists the urban, at times linking it to almost apocalyptic images of ugliness, alienation, and estrangement: ‘Anne knew [in Charlottetown] that outside her window was a hard street, with a network of telephone wires shutting out the sky, the tramp of alien feet, and a thousand lights gleaming on stranger faces’ (299). It resists the urban nowhere more strongly than at the end when Anne chooses to stay at Green Gables, with Marilla, and teach near Avonlea, rather than continue her studies in Halifax. Her budding relationship with Gilbert, with its potential to allow her to recreate her parents' marriage of two rural schoolteachers, serves also as a sign that you can go home again, that what one once had can be regained. Yet the power of the urban at this very point in the novel is also presented as large and irresistible—as large and irresistible as death. For the urban, constituted in terms of banks and investment instruments, has precipitated Matthew's fatal heart attack. In his hand when he collapses is a city newspaper containing ‘an account of the failure of the Abbey Bank,’ (315), and with it all of his and Marilla's savings (315).

Anne's subsequent rescue of Green Gables from having to be sold, however, together with the promise of her relationship with Gilbert to regain for herself her parents' circumstances before her birth, allows the novel to stand for contemporary readers as a sign that the urban can be resisted. In addition to the nostalgia that the novel's warm descriptions of snug farmsteads produces (or which the lush panoramas of the novel's recent television adaptation produce), the narrative constructs a complex and most likely inaccurate statement that, with the right combination of duty and sensitivity, the rural world and its values can be retained, despite the changes that continue to threaten it.

Another continuing manifestation of uncertainty involves rules and practices—the struggle to get things ‘right,’ whether in order to pass a nineteenth-century examination or to retrain today in some new ‘information technology’ skill. One of the strongest features of Anne of Green Gables—and this despite its numerous heart-warming scenes—is the high level of anxiety that permeates Anne's speech. It is as if only Anne knows how uncertain life can be, and what unpleasant surprises change can bring. From her recurrent fears during her first years in Avonlea that Marilla may send her back to the orphanage, to her fear that she will fail her examinations and disgrace her adoptive family, Anne is plagued by uncertainty. Her anxiety is signalled in part by the numerous invocations of authority in her speech: phrases like ‘as Mrs. Lynde says,’ ‘as Mrs. Allan says,’ ‘as Miss Stacy says’ at times punctuate every second of her sentences. It is signalled by her terror of not getting things ‘right’—her fear that she will break rules of etiquette when she is invited to visit Mrs Allan, or that she will fail to be a ‘model student’ at school.

The notion of rules and methods and models both terrifies and fascinates Anne—as it does lower-middle-class Avonlea—because it promises both the disaster of failure and the security of getting things punctiliously correct. Her anxiety is signalled most visibly by her garrulousness, her nervous habit of talking on about a matter by covering all its possibilities, and all views of it, as if terrified of omitting the single ‘right’ one. This anxiety signals the undoubted power of convention and conformity in Avonlea, and the limits these impose on the power of Anne's energy and so-called imagination.⁴ It signals also the extent to which Anne's desire for the security of ‘home’ recurrently overpowers any desire she has for independence and creativity.

A third area of uncertainty and change that has continued from 1908 to the present concerns the situation of women. Almost all of the recent critical work on Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables has been initiated by women—by Elizabeth Epperly, Genevieve Wiggins, Elizabeth Waterston, Mary Rubio, and Mavis Reimer. Much of this work has focused on contextualizing Montgomery's writing within turn-of-the-century writing by women and on relating it to the difficulties her sex brought to her own life. Much has focused also on the preponderance of women speakers in Anne of Green Gables, on the particular discourses available to them, and on the young Anne's infatuation with the discourses of popular and literary romance. Here the nineteenth-century women's issues of employment and suffrage have segued into a late-twentieth-century feminist effort to revise understandings of the literary canon and of literary issues in order to give greater prominence to writers such as Montgomery within literary history. The women scholars who write on Montgomery in the 1990s are in a sense Anne's inheritors, most of them having made in their own lives bargains with institutional orthodoxy similar to those made by Anne in her journey from orphan to schoolteacher. In fact, because Montgomery has Marilla insist that Anne become ‘fitted’ to earn her own living, the novel has become increasingly relevant to Canadian women's lives as the percentage of women in the Canadian workforce has risen.

ANNE AND PERSONAL IDENTITY

A fourth area in which uncertainties evident in Anne of Green Gables engage those of the present is that of personal identity. The late twentieth century has made identity one of its major cultural issues—particularly through various feminist and right-wing resistances to post-structuralist theories of the role of cultural construction in individual identity. For example, proponents of charter schools and home-education have attempted not only to ‘take charge’ of their own lives but to diminish the cultural influence of public education on their children. From very different ideological positions, advocates of various ‘consciousness-raising’ techniques to diminish the effects of sexist, racist, or other ideologies have extended the hope that individuals can reshape who they are and thus gradually change society.

Anne of Green Gables is above all else a story about identity. Anne comes to Avonlea not liking who she is—her thinness, her freckles, her grey eyes, or her red hair. ‘I'm so homely nobody will ever want to marry me,’ she tells Matthew when they first meet (20). She has learned to accept accusations that she is ‘wicked,’ and despairs of ever being ‘divinely beautiful’ or ‘angelically good’ (24). She particularly does not like her identity as an orphan, nor the name that reminds her of her orphanhood. When Marilla asks her for her name, she replies ‘Will you please call me Cordelia?’ (32). Marilla responds by suggesting that she should not be ‘ashamed’ of her own name.

‘Oh, I'm not ashamed of it,’ explained Anne, ‘only I like Cordelia better. I've always imagined that my name was Cordelia—at least, I always have of late years. When I was young I used to imagine it was Geraldine, but I like Cordelia better now. But if you call me Anne please call me Anne spelled with an e.’

‘What difference does it make how it's spelled?’ asked Marilla …

‘Oh, it makes such a difference. It looks so much nicer … A-n-n looks dreadful, but A-n-n-e looks so much more distinguished.’

(33)

Anne's sense that ‘Ann’ looks dreadful echoes her belief that her appearance—her freckles, grey eyes, and red hair—is dreadful. She is determined to change herself by renaming herself—a reader never learns in fact whether her birth name was Ann or Anne and whether or not she may be renaming herself at that very moment. Her preference here for the Shakespearean name of Cordelia seems on the surface an attempt to counter her orphanhood by linking herself to social and literary history. But it also, with some irony, reasserts the issues of orphans and parents and parental responsibility: in Shakespeare's play Lear's disowning of Cordelia leads both to her death and to his reacceptance of her, and in a general way highlights the precariousness of the orphaned child.⁵

Two chapters after her exchange with Marilla over her name, Anne will clearly rename herself. After attempting to imagine that her name is ‘Lady Cordelia Fitzgerald,’ she goes to the mirror and looks at her ‘pointed freckled face and solemn gray eyes’ (69). Although Montgomery casts this moment as one in which Anne gives up some of her fantasies in order to connect herself to actuality, it is also readable as a moment in which Anne manages to acknowledge actuality without giving up her desire for upper-class identity and standing. ‘“You're only Anne of Green Gables,” she said earnestly, “and I see you just as you are looking now whenever I try to imagine I'm the Lady Cordelia. But it's a million times nicer to be Anne of Green Gables than Anne of nowhere in particular, isn't it?”’ (69). Anne's desire to be something other than she has been born to (the orphan state of being from ‘nowhere in particular’) is paralleled in the novel by Marilla's desire to change her—to ‘train’ her out of having ‘too much to say’ (50), to train her to be ‘useful’ (56), and to teach her to pray devoutly and appropriately.

Yet when Anne does appear to have greatly changed, Marilla experiences nostalgia for the insouciant child she first took in. ‘The child she had learned to love had vanished somehow and here was this tall, serious-eyed girl of fifteen, with the thoughtful brows and the proudly poised little head, in her place. Marilla loved the girl as much as she had loved the child, but she was conscious of a queer sorrowful sense of loss’ (273). When she expresses these feelings to Anne, however, Anne protests that her identity is still the same: ‘I'm not a bit changed—not really. I'm only just pruned down and branched out. The real me—back here—is just the same. It won't make a bit of difference where I go or how much I change outwardly; at heart I shall always be your little Anne, who will love you and Matthew and dear Green Gables more and better every day of her life’ (296). Interestingly, the stable identity that Anne rather unconvincingly asserts here—or that Montgomery unconvincingly asserts through her—is not necessarily the one she brought to Avonlea. The identity she claims is an Anne defined by her relationship to the Cuthberts and Green Gables. But it is also not necessarily an Anne formed by Marilla, who has in this formulation contributed mostly by ‘pruning.’

Overall, there is a extremely strong argument in the novel that Anne discovers who she is, or can be, at the Cuthbert farm, and that she—through her earnestness and optimism—changes Marilla, and influences Marilla's parenting, at least as much as Marilla changes and influences Anne. The novel also implies that Marilla's eventual mellowness (‘Marilla Cuthbert has got mellow,’ announces Mrs Lynde in the last chapter [327]) has also been latent within her since the opening chapters when she first experiences sympathy for Anne or finds herself amused by her naive candour. Ideologically, the novel's claim that Anne is ‘not a bit changed’ asserts that the wild brook of the opening paragraph has not been channelled, that Anne's impetuous imagination has continued to triumph over social orthodoxy. But of course this is not the case. In the unfolding of the novel Anne has learned many times over not only to reconcile herself with social orthodoxy but on occasion to embrace enthusiastically its practices and genres.

ANNE AND KIM CAMPBELL

In my 1993 book on then Prime Minister Kim Campbell, Reading ‘KIM’ Right, I suggested that it was Anne's authority-challenging candour, her attempts to control and name her own identity, and the impression of unconventionality her orphanhood gave her, that most connected the public image of the once red-haired, self-renamed, and mother-deserted Campbell to the little girl in Montgomery's novel. Perhaps most important of these to Campbell's public image were the images of independence and convention-disturbing candour—images disastrously subverted when, as the 1993 election campaign unfolded, she seemed increasingly to resemble other politicians. Many of the difficulties Campbell faced in the campaign paralleled those encountered by Montgomery's Anne. In Fragrance of Sweet-Grass Epperly observes how the entertainment value of Anne's various confessions and apologies on several occasions leads to her being forgiven because she has been ‘interesting’ or charming, but how later in the novel the need to prove herself a serious person causes her to adopt a direct and less endearing way of speaking (Fragrance 17-38). Campbell, like many contemporary women, found herself in a society that similarly enjoyed viewing the melodramatic self-exhibiting woman, but mistrusted her seriousness. Her quick evolution in public perception from ‘candid Kim’ to merely another Tory politician—‘a Mulroney in skirts,’ as Sheila Copps quipped—closely parallels Anne's evolution from ‘original, fiercely independent’ orphan (Epperly, Fragrance 18) to hard-working and conforming student. Campbell's unsuccessful struggle in the 1993 campaign for a stable and complex image that contained both fierce independence and institutional credibility suggests that the contradiction in Anne of Green Gables' world between ‘interesting’ women and trustworthy women remains very much with us.

Part of Kim Campbell's difficulties arose from her relationship to the institutional history and practices of the Conservative Party and the recent history of the Mulroney government in which she had served. The conventionality of such institutions can offer a useful backdrop to the unconventionality of the disruptive individual (as when Campbell marched into the 1986 British Columbia Social Credit leadership convention behind a lone piper), but ultimately imposes upon anyone who seeks institutional success. For a woman, a good deal of this conventionality consists of the norms of patriarchy, where even to be female constitutes departure or disruption. In Anne of Green Gables this disruption begins when Anne arrives as a girl occupying a space on the Carmody railway platform which the Cuthberts expected would be occupied by a boy.

Anne's complex relationship to institutional practices is apparent in the way in which her early lack of schooling and discipline has helped make her different from other children, and for the most part has given her a potential advantage over them. But this advantage can only be realized within the containment of conventions and education offered by Avonlea and the Cuthbert home. Anne's red hair, passionate temper, and unquenchable hopefulness all represent entertaining and at times even socially useful disruptions of the routines of Avonlea, but are nevertheless presented by Montgomery as needing the discipline of regular bedtimes, curfews, and schedules, sound theology, and conventions of etiquette in order to be productive. Matthew and Marilla's sedate and narrow lives are enriched by this disturbing child, as they acknowledge, but the child herself would have had little chance of happiness or success without them. Similarly, Kim Campbell's refreshing difference from other politicians could be productive only within male-dominated political institutions that valued predictability and sameness. She successively joined the Social Credit government of Bill Bennett in British Columbia and the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney in Ottawa and constructed herself as an irreverent and unpredictable voice within those parties.

Also implicit, but difficult to notice, in the novel is the role that the rigidity of society plays in Anne's early difficulties, and the extent to which she must adjust to its expectations and hypocrisies in order to receive its approbation. The extent of this adjustment, and Anne's awareness of it, is signalled by the prominence the novel gives to the theme of performance. Very early on, Anne learns the usefulness of melodrama, and of people's willingness to accept its fulfilment of social norms. She masters the genres of confession and apology, impressing even Marilla with her invented confession of having lost the amethyst brooch, and triumphing in her apologies to Rachel Lynde and Miss Barry, largely through her grasp of what the genres require. She experiences the same challenge with praying, having to learn the genre in order to avoid scandalizing Marilla and, presumably, God. Her early schooling, done largely on her own, has consisted mostly of memorizing poems, including most of Thomson's The Seasons. This learning of other people's scripts continues at school, where she must eventually master the genre conventions of final examinations and produce acceptable answers. Her major triumph at Avonlea before leaving for college is a recitation, ‘The Maiden's Vow,’ that she gives at the hotel concert. The genre of recitation—so important to the culture of this time—can be read as a metaphor for what has been demanded of Anne since her arrival in Avonlea: the mastery of scripts and roles, including apologizing, confessing, praying, cooking, studying, and entertaining. Far from resisting the mastery of these and other genres, Anne eagerly acquires them, as part of the bargain she wishes to make for acceptance in a home. Interestingly, in investigating Kim Campbell's early life, I found a similar passion for theatrical production. In her history were stories of her having staged impromptu can-cans for her grade 8 classmates, organizing skits for high-school assemblies, and, during her first marriage, taking the female lead in impromptu performances of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.

In nineteenth-century Avonlea society, of course, someone like Anne would indeed be unlikely to survive unless she had the ability to learn, recite, and mimic such scripts. In our own time women have numerous scripts to master in order to produce identities acceptable to the various parts of society they encounter, a requirement foregrounded in contemporary fiction such as Gail Scott's Heroine or Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle. Anne's growing success at performing a variety of scripts—and the way in which the novel, through Marilla's, Matthew's, Mrs Lynde's, and Anne's own expressions of pleasure at these accomplishments, leads a reader to interpret this success as a good thing—masks the extent to which the scripts are coming to control her disruptive and ‘imaginative’ aspects.⁶ Anne may claim that her identity is unchanged, but by the end of the novel she has become a trusted agent of the society that her red hair and passions once disrupted. In effect, the novel that appeared to have been endorsing the ‘headlong’ brook of its opening paragraph concludes by implying that the brook could survive only in the decorous channels of the Lynde farm.

CONCLUSION

In the final chapters Anne makes two decisions that further clarify the novel's ideological emphases and further modify the meaning of the image of the headlong brook. One is to give up her scholarship to Redmond College in order to stay at Green Gables with the rapidly aging Marilla. While this is readable as a choice of the rural over the urban, and of gratitude over ambition, the novel also suggests two other readings. One is that it is a choice of security and ‘home’ over opportunities for change and adventure. By her decision Anne's Avonlea home, the farm of Green Gables, will be saved from having to be sold. Her announcement of this decision to Marilla continues the ‘snug farmstead’ image of home and links it to family companionship and happiness: ‘You sha'n't be dull or lonesome. And we'll be real cozy and happy’ (324). The narrator's comment that ‘Anne's horizons have closed in’ and that ‘the path set before her’ was now ‘to be narrow’ but bordered by ‘flowers of quiet happiness’ (330) suggests that the once headlong brook may be better off in narrower and more decorous channels.

Her second decision is to make peace with Gilbert, extending her hand to him, thanking him for having given up the Avonlea school position, and offering a ‘complete confession’ of her regret that she had not made peace with him long ago. As well as reinvoking the genres of apology and confession, ones Anne has learned well, this scene, with its distant echoes of Austen's Pride and Prejudice, reverses the relationship between passion and decorum offered at the novel's beginning. It is by giving up her passion—her passionate indignation toward Gilbert—and by approaching him with the conventions of good manners that Anne opens the way to a relationship with him.

Anne's last words in the novel reassert the security and stability her recent actions have moved her toward. ‘God's in his heaven, all's right with the world,’ she cites Browning's song from Pippa Passes ‘softly’ (330). Perhaps all is right, from her sixteen-year-old perspective, and on this particular night, with her world—although I suspect that few contemporary teenage readers, in this time of shrinking employment and ecological decay, would be as sanguine about theirs. Anne is again safely in the home she has wanted since first seeing Green Gables from beside Matthew in his buggy, and with reasonable expectation of being able to continue living in it. Oh that the rest of us should be similarly fortunate. The narrator clearly intends some irony here, as Browning did in Pippa, but one that appears directed more against a young woman's continuing optimism than against the stability for which she yearns.

Notes

1. Mrs Lynde believes that the appointment of the first female teacher in Avonlea, Miss Muriel Stacy, may be ‘a dangerous innovation’ (197), and later condemns Miss Stacy's introduction of physical culture exercises as the ‘goings-on’ that come ‘of having a lady teacher’ (205). She is especially upset when Anne asks why a woman cannot be a church minister, replying that such would be ‘a scandalous thing’ (270), and later expresses relief when Anne decides not to attend college. ‘You've got as much education now as a woman can be comfortable with. I don't believe in girls going to college with the men and cramming their heads full of Latin and Greek and all that nonsense’ (325).

2. Perhaps not yet knowing how well the job of minister can be done (Mr Allan has only recently been hired), Anne unwittingly produces a double-edged praise of Mrs Lynde. Her example of a woman who might do the job appropriately is also an example of one who might do so only because her talents resemble those of Mr Bell, someone whom Anne has already appraised as long-winded and uninteresting (91). The irony of this is evident to Marilla, who then undercuts Anne's suggestion by remarking ‘drily’ that Mrs Lynde could indeed learn to preach. ‘She does plenty of unofficial preaching as it is. Nobody has much of a chance to go wrong in Avonlea with Rachel to oversee them’ (270).

3. While Montgomery seems to have arranged events here once again to balance Anne and Gilbert's accomplishments, as she did before when arranging for them to tie for the highest public school grades in the province, and indeed presents Anne and the Cuthberts as being as pleased by the scholarship as they would have been by the medal, the suggestion of equivalent performance is illusory. Gilbert has received the higher honour, for grades across the curriculum, while Anne has excelled only in English.

4. Even Anne's ‘imagination,’ however, as a possible ground of her independence and creativity, is suspect in the novel. Almost all of its images are taken from the clichés of gothic romance. The conflict that Montgomery appears to characterize initially as one between Anne's imagination and Rachel Lynde's orthodoxy is textually a conflict between two sets of conventions—those of popular romantic literature and those of a nineteenth-century Prince Edward Island village.

5. Anne's final attempt to imagine Cordelia and Geraldine may have served as a basis for one of the central episodes of Margaret Atwood's novel Cat's Eye. This is Anne's fantasy story in which Cordelia, spurned by Bertram de Vere in favour of Geraldine, pushes the latter off a bridge into a stream, causing both her death and that of Bertram, who drowns in an attempt to save her. Afterward ‘Cordelia … went insane with remorse and was shut up in an insane asylum’ (210). In Cat's Eye, Elaine's friend Cordelia pushes her into a stream below a bridge, and she is ‘rescued’ by her vision of a madonna-like woman on the bridge. Years later she finds Cordelia confined to an insane asylum.

6. In this regard it is noteworthy that the several crises of the novel, in which a reader is led to fear that Anne may be rejected by the community she so wishes to belong to, all involve incidents in which the community may come to believe that Anne has not truly exchanged her impetuousness for the community's conventions of honesty, politeness, and thoughtfulness. On each occasion—Anne's talking back to Rachel Lynde, Marilla's loss of her brooch, Diana's accidental drunkenness, and Anne and Diana's disturbing of Miss Barry's sleep—Anne must demonstrate that she indeed has accepted the community's conventions.