SOURCE: Wiggins, Genevieve. “‘Born of True Love’: Anne of Green Gables.” In L. M. Montgomery, pp. 19-42. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.

[In the following excerpt, Wiggins discusses major themes in Anne of Green Gables and Montgomery's personal affection for the book.]

After eight years of growing success in writing for periodicals, Montgomery, in her own words, “went to work and wrote a book” (Weber, 51). In the spring of 1904, she began her account of a red-haired orphan girl adopted by an elderly couple, intending to use the story as a short serial for a Sunday-school periodical. Her central character soon became so real to her that she decided to follow a long-standing ambition and make the adventures of Anne the basis for a full-length novel. Written during the evenings at her grandmother's home in Cavendish, the work was completed in October 1905,¹ the handwritten manuscript typed on her secondhand machine that refused to print clear capitals and would not print a w at all (Alpine Path, 75). She submitted the novel to an Indianapolis publishing house, which promptly returned it.

After receiving rejection slips from four other publishers,² Montgomery put the manuscript away in an old hat box. About a year later, she took it out, reread it, found it still “rather interesting” (Journals I, 331), and sent it away again, this time to the L. C. Page Company of Boston. A letter of acceptance was received in April 1907, the book was published in June 1908, and the history of a phenomenal best seller began.

Montgomery found the idea for Anne in a brief entry in an old notebook where she had jotted down possible story plots: “Elderly couple apply to an orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent them” (Alpine Path, 72). This slight theme does not seem a harbinger of literary success, but as the admirers of Anne well know, the girl who came to Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert by mistake was no ordinary girl.

After discovering her central idea and character, Montgomery felt that an acceptable book might result if she could “spread it out over enough chapters” (Alpine Path, 72). Such a plan indicates an episodic plot, a type of structure that strongly appeals to young readers. The incidents through which Anne matures and comes to terms with her environment, however, result in a plot that is more carefully structured and that has greater unity than may at first be apparent.

The book opens with a situation of interest and introduces the major themes. The first sentence contains a metaphor for Anne's life in her new environment: the brook near the main road of Avonlea “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.”³ The tempestuous Anne who bursts on the scene in chapter 2 is impulsive and untamed: by the end of the book she has accepted the social mores of Avonlea and been accepted by that community.⁴

The first character the reader meets is Rachel Lynde, who typifies the strong work ethic of this rural Canadian community at the turn of the century. Mrs. Lynde is renowned for her efficiency as a housewife, and when cleaning and cooking are finished, she knits “cotton warp” quilts, awing her neighbors by completing 16 such masterpieces. In the Scotch Presbyterian community centered around the church, Mrs. Lynde is not only prominent in the Sewing Circle and the Sunday school but is “the strongest prop to the Church Aid Society and Foreign Missions Auxiliary” (AGG, [Anne of Green Gables] 1). Moreover, Mrs. Lynde observes her neighbors closely and finds suspect any unusual activity, such as Matthew Cuthbert's riding out of Avonlea dressed in his best suit on a work day. Such interest in neighbors, typical of this closely knit community, can be both comforting and restrictive. This is the society that Anne is about to enter.

When Mrs. Lynde learns of the Cuthberts' decision to adopt an orphan, she expects the worst—houses set on fire and wells poisoned by strychnine. Although Anne brings no such catastrophes, she is indeed an element of disorder in the staid community.⁵

Another feature of the community, its insularity, is seen in Mrs. Lynde's distrust of any outsider. Marilla must reassure her that “Nova Scotia is right close to the Island. It isn't as if we are getting him from England or the States. He can't be much different from ourselves” (AGG, 7). This statement ironically foreshadows Anne's “difference” from her neighbors.

Thus, in the first chapter, Montgomery uses the time-honored method of the dramatist who establishes setting, whets curiosity, and prepares the audience for a character who will disturb the status quo (Rubio, 1985, 176). After this chapter, Anne appears and is immediately seen to possess qualities not valued or trusted in Avonlea—imagination, lack of emotional restraint, preference for beauty over usefulness, and power of self-expression. Five chapters present minor tensions between Marilla and Anne and a conflict between Marilla and Matthew, who is charmed by the very qualities that Marilla denounces and who wants to keep the “interesting little thing.” This conflict is resolved in the sixth chapter when Marilla decides to accept Anne as her “duty” and to give her an upbringing that will teach her to conform with Avonlea expectations.

The following adventures of Anne extend episodically through 23 chapters and present intensified conflicts, such as Anne's outburst to Mrs. Lynde, the episode of the amethyst brooch, and the hair-dyeing venture. Through all these events, we see Anne develop and have a salutary effect on the adults around her. Gradually, as Anne becomes more restrained, the adults become less restrained, not only accepting but even appreciating her role in their lives.

Anne next achieves success in the world beyond Avonlea in seven chapters that describe her academic achievements and her career at Queen's College. In the final two chapters, Matthew dies, and Anne decides to remain with Marilla and save the family home, a commitment that makes her completely a part of her society, truly Anne of Green Gables.⁶ Many incidents are self-contained and lend themselves to leisurely reading. As Susan Drain writes, contrasting the structure of the book with that of the television production, unity in the novel is “chiefly on the level of theme and character rather than plot.”⁷

Some readers express dissatisfaction with the novel's ending, regretting the loss of the independent nonconformist who stamped her foot at Mrs. Lynde and cracked her slate over a schoolboy's head. But the ending is thematically appropriate. An orphan has sought and achieved a sense of belonging; such security demands both giving and receiving. The rebel has conformed to the expectations of her society, but conformity is now less important to her than the responsibilities of mature conduct.

Although Anne's decision to place home and family before education for a career may not be the choice of most women of the late twentieth century, it is consistent with the view of women's role prevalent during the period in which Anne lived. Moreover, denying self-interest to promote another's happiness remains a viable option, even today. Also, Anne's decision is not seen as final (Rubio, 1985, 186). The metaphor of the stream in the opening chapter is balanced in the final chapter by the metaphorical “bend in the road.” Anne explains to Marilla that the road that is her life no longer seems uncomplicated, leading directly to the fulfillment of her ambitions, but contains a bend that can only make her progress more interesting. The novel closes with Anne, rather than Mrs. Lynde, sitting by a window (Waterston and Rubio, 1987; AGG, 313), contemplating a world enriched by security and quiet happiness.

AN APPEALING HEROINE

Of her first book Montgomery wrote, “There is plenty of incident in it but after all it must stand or fall by ‘Anne.’ She is the book” (Journals I, 331). Her judgment was correct, for, whatever strengths or weaknesses the novel may possess, it is chiefly the vibrant personality of the heroine that has made this story a favorite with children and adults for more than three-quarters of a century. What qualities of Anne have caused readers to take her into their hearts?

Anne has one of the greatest of all gifts, an enchantment with the beauty surrounding her, what Rachel Carson (and Coleridge before her) has called “a sense of wonder.”⁸ As she drives with Matthew toward Avonlea, she reacts with delight and awe to the blossoming trees and the shifting hues of the lake waters. Not even the disappointment of being rejected because she is not a boy can keep Anne from appreciating the “radiantly lovely” cherry tree blooming outside her window. Throughout the novel, Anne rejoices in the beauty of orchards, woodlands, flowers, brooks, sunsets, and the blue waters of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Like Wordsworth, Anne not only knows the “dizzy raptures”⁹ inspired by the beauty of the world around her but finds nature comforting and healing. She can forget, for a time, her anxiety over entrance examinations by drinking in “the beauty of the summer dusk, sweet-scented with flower-breaths from the garden below” (AGG, 262). Her grief after Matthew's death is assuaged by the healing influence of “sunrises behind the firs and the pale pink buds opening in the garden” (AGG, 297). It should be noted that, in accordance with the philosophy of Wordsworth, it is usually the more mature Anne who looks to nature for solace and healing rather than for merely sensuous pleasure.

Anne not only responds to beauty but encourages others to share her delight. Marilla, Matthew, and Mrs. Lynde have been too occupied with scrubbing kitchens, sowing turnip seed, and knitting cotton warp quilts to notice the miracles of sunsets, white cherry trees, and fields of clover. Anne's rapturous flow of words may irritate or amuse the adult world, but her language points the way to a new vision and turns the commonplace into the beautiful. Avonlea has previously been satisfied with such names as “the Avenue” and “Barry's Pond”; Anne renames these sites “The White Way of Delight” and “The Lake of Shining Waters,” not only articulating her own perception but reshaping the perceptions of those who hear her. Allan Bloom writes that “a new language always reflects a new point of view.”¹⁰ Anne instinctively recognizes that one interprets reality by naming it, as she says, “I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it. I don't believe a rose would be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage” (AGG, 38).

The trait that Anne most values in herself is imagination, but she is unaware, of course, of the distinction between fancy and imagination made by the Romantics, chiefly by Coleridge. To the Romantics, what Anne terms imagination is really fancy or fantasy, the playful association of elements held in the memory to create in the mind situations that the inventor recognizes as unrealities, since fancy is controlled by the will.¹¹ When Anne “imagines” that her plain, serviceable dresses have frills and puffed sleeves, she is associating the glamorous garments that she admires with her own unadorned apparel, knowing full well that the two are not the same, that she will “just have to depend on Marilla” (AGG, 79) for any real change.

Anne's flights of fancy are her means of extending her experience. Her need for friendship is supplied by the fantasy that her reflection in the glass door of a bookcase is a real companion, and her longing for romantic adventure is partially satisfied by fancying herself a character in one of the melodramatic situations she reads about in popular fiction. Such inventions are comforting and generally innocuous, although they result in minor mishaps in the real world when she neglects to put flour in a cake or to report that a mouse has drowned in the pudding sauce. They are harmless and even enriching, as long as Anne realizes that she is imagining “things different from what they really are” (AGG, 55). She fails to make such a distinction when she becomes terrified by the fearful beings in the Haunted Wood, products of her own fancy. That incident helps her learn to maintain the boundary between fantasy and reality.

Anne's fanciful inventions endear her to children and adults who have had imaginary playmates or have dreamed of dwelling in marble palaces arrayed with velvet carpets and silk curtains. But Anne also has the more important gift of imagination in the sense in which the term was used by Coleridge. Through her imagination, she interprets the perceived world as filled with beauty and goodness and feels a vital kinship with that world. It is the “shaping spirit”¹² of her imagination that transforms an unexceptional rural village into a land of delight. As already noted, the language Anne uses to describe her surroundings is a part of her imaginative perception. Montgomery knew the transforming power of the imagination, writing in her journal of her grandparents' home, the Cavendish farm, as being “invested with a fairy grace emanating from my own imagination” (Journals I, 121). Anne's invention of fanciful unrealities is appealing, but her imaginative creation of her own reality most enriches her life and the lives of those who know her.

A part of Anne's imaginative perception is her belief that the world is peopled with “kindred spirits,” and she goes about seeking those to whom she may offer her love. She looks beyond Matthew's paralyzing shyness and verbal inadequacy to sense that he shares her love of beauty. She perceives that the honesty and loyalty of the mundane Diana outweigh any lack of imagination and intellectual distinction and make her a “bosom friend.” Even Mrs. Lynde is eventually valued as a kindly soul capable of understanding Anne's desire for puffed sleeves. Not least among Anne's attractive qualities, then, is her loving heart.

Hungry for affection, Anne instinctively knows that the key to receiving love is to offer it, and so initiates loving relationships. It is Anne, of course, who suggests the “solemn vow and promise” (AGG, 84) that binds her in friendship to Diana. She impulsively kisses the sallow cheek of Marilla in spite of that dour lady's objection to “kissing nonsense” (AGG, 91). Even her mad leap into what she thought was an empty spare-room bed wins her the affection of the vinegary Miss Josephine Barry. But because Anne is a real child and not a paragon of virtue spreading unalloyed sweetness and light, she never succeeds in liking Josie Pye and nurses a wounded vanity that results in a long and unreasonable rejection of the proffered friendship of Gilbert Blythe. We love Anne for her virtues, but we love her even more because the author has allowed her some faults.

Although love may be strongly felt but uncommunicated, human beings need to be told that they are loved, and the ability to express the feelings of the heart is a mark of emotional maturity.¹³ One of the several valuable lessons that Anne teaches the adults of Green Gables is that love can and should be expressed. Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, products of a Calvinistic upbringing, have been trained to practice emotional restraint, to be as economical with words as with other resources. Their deep affection for each other is apparent but unspoken.¹⁴ Marilla's first criticism of Anne is aimed at her outspokenness: “I don't like children who have so much to say” (AGG, 29). Although by nature more taciturn than Marilla, Matthew breaks the barrier of silence more easily. After Anne's performance at the school concert, Marilla admits to her brother, “I was proud of Anne tonight, although I'm not going to tell her so,” to which statement Matthew replies, “Well now, I was proud of her and I did tell her so” (AGG, 264). Only the trauma of Matthew's death can bring Marilla to confess to Anne, “I love you as dear as if you were my own flesh and blood” (AGG, 297). Indeed, Marilla never learns the lesson of “a love that should display itself easily in spoken word and open look” (AGG, 238), but she has told Anne what Anne needs to know, a landmark in both their lives.

In a society bound by convention, Anne is a disrupting influence. She is the rebel, the nonconformist, the independent spirit who appeals to the child reader who chafes at adult strictures or to the adult who sometimes feels restricted by society's expectations. Because Anne wishes to belong to Green Gables and Avonlea, she is not consciously a rebel but, usually with the best intentions, manages to defy the narrow code of that society. Her garrulity offends those conditioned to believe that “children should be seen and not heard.” Although Avonlea society, typified by Mrs. Lynde, considers acting “abominably wicked” (AGG, 222), Anne leads her playmates in an enactment of the fate of Tennyson's Elaine. In the Puritan society that distrusts novels, she delights in reading fiction and writing melodramatic stories of her own. She defies the temperance code of the strict Scotch Presbyterians when she unwittingly “sets Diana drunk” (AGG, 127). In a society that judges women on the basis of whether they are “good housekeepers” (AGG, 170), she flavors a cake with anodyne liniment and starches Matthew's handkerchiefs.

Marilla attempts to train Anne to conformity, saying, “All I want is you should behave like other little girls” (AGG, 85). The grateful Anne generally tries to comply, although it is “very discouraging work” (AGG, 160), and deliberately resists her society's mores on only three occasions. When Mrs. Lynde, who believes that it is permissible to say to children what one would not say to adults, criticizes Anne's appearance, Anne casts aside the pattern of the unfailingly respectful child and indignantly labels her critic “a rude, impolite, unfeeling woman” (AGG, 65). Well aware that any cosmetic alterations of the appearance are considered sinful vanity, she “counts the cost” before she deliberately dyes her hair, saying, “I thought it was worth while to be a little wicked to get rid of red hair” (AGG, 216). Rebelling against her teacher's unjust treatment, Anne refuses to return to school and play the model pupil. In most cases, however, she attempts to exhibit acceptable behavior, but her mind is her own kingdom.

Anne's ideas are often unorthodox according to Avonlea standards, and she expresses them honestly. In a society centered around the church and where ministers are sacrosanct, she finds the Reverend Bentley's sermons long, dreary, and unimaginative. Echoing Montgomery's own feelings, Anne questions the custom of public prayer, silently forming her own brief and sincere prayer of gratitude instead of listening to Mr. Bell's long petition and answering Marilla's protest with, “But he wasn't talking to me. … He was talking to God, and he didn't seem to be very interested in it, either” (AGG, 81).

Observing the stern, joyless approach to religion taken by faithful churchgoers, Anne feels that religion should be “a cheerful thing” (AGG, 171). She wonders why women cannot be ministers, questioning Mrs. Lynde's pronouncement against such a “scandalous” Yankee innovation (AGG, 251). The Puritan preference for utility over beauty¹⁵ has little effect on this lover of the beautiful, who says of the road arched by blossoming apple trees, “Other people may call that place the Avenue, but I shall always call it the White Way of Delight” (AGG, 18). Marilla's ideas about plain, serviceable clothes, in sober colors and without an inch of material wasted, do not keep Anne from dreaming of flounces and puffed sleeves, and if thinking about clothing is “sinful” (AGG, 231), she is an unrepentant sinner.

Adults who wish children to believe that adults are always right and that their opinions should be unquestioningly adopted by children may find Anne of Green Gables, along with many other classics of children's literature, a “subversive” book.¹⁶ Anne's fierce independence may even have political implications, for Elizabeth Waterston and Mary Rubio have recorded that authorities in occupied, postwar Poland attempted to ban the book (Waterston and Rubio, 1987; AGG, 308).

SETTING

Eudora Welty believes that “feelings are bound up in place” and that “fiction depends for its life on place.”¹⁷ The charm of Heidi is inevitably linked to that of the Alps, and the Yorkshire moors to The Secret Garden. Not only did Montgomery create an appealing heroine, but she placed her in a clearly realized setting. Anne moves in her own special environment, a rural Prince Edward Island community located on a small peninsula extending into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Montgomery skillfully inserts details of the community's appearance, its inhabitants, and their way of life into the narrative, so that the reader takes them into consciousness and acquires a strong sense of place. Marilyn Solt, in “The Uses of Setting in Anne of Green Gables,” collects a number of these details.

The first character we meet, Rachel Lynde, lives where the main road of Avonlea dips down “into a little hollow” crossed by a brook (AGG, 1). She lives closest to Green Gables, a farm located a quarter of a mile up the road at the end of a long “grassy lane bordered with wild rose bushes” and “barely visible” from the main thoroughfare (AGG, 3). The neat backyard of Green Gables is bordered on one side by willows and on the other by Lombardies. The house is “orchard-embowered,” with cherry trees on the left and an apple orchard on the right (AGG, 3). Also on the right is a garden and beyond it a field that slopes down to a hollow with white birches and a brook. To the left, the sea may be glimpsed by looking across the fields that lie beyond the barns. Steps lead up to the front door, which, when open, is held back by a “big pink conch shell” (AGG, 298). By the door is a stone bench where Mrs. Lynde sometimes deposits her “substantial person” to share the latest gossip (AGG, 305). At the kitchen door is a red sandstone slab. Below the orchard, a lane that stretches “far up into the woods to the end of the Cuthbert farm” is used to drive the cows to and from pasture and to haul wood home in winter (AGG, 105-6). Dubbed by Anne “Lover's Lane,” this path is a favorite place where one can “think out loud without people calling you crazy” (AGG, 106).

The only portion of the Green Gables interior described in detail is Anne's bedroom in the east gable, but the narrative provides readers with enough description of the inside of the farmhouse to visualize the life that goes on there. The kitchen, a sunny room with windows looking east and west, is the center of family life. Here meals are cooked and eaten, and, in the evening, Matthew sits on the kitchen sofa to read the Farmer's Advocate while Anne studies her lessons at the table. Warmth in winter comes from the Waterloo stove. Across the hall from the kitchen is the sitting room, which contains a jam closet where Marilla stores the raspberry cordial and currant wine that result in Diana's drunkenness. Between the two windows of the sitting room hangs a “rather vivid chromo” entitled “Christ Blessing Little Children” that causes Anne to have speculations that are “positively irreverent” according to Marilla (AGG, 56). Also on the ground level is the parlor, reserved for special occasions. Here tea is served to the minister and his wife and, near the end of the novel, Matthew lies in his coffin.

Matthew's bedroom is a small room off the downstairs hall. Upstairs are Marilla's bedroom, the imposing spare room, and Anne's bedroom in the east gable. When Anne first enters that room, it has “painfully bare” whitewashed walls, a “dark” four-poster bed, a table with a “hard” pincushion, and a window with an “icy” muslin frill (AGG, 27). Four years later the bare floor is covered with matting, curtains “soften the window,” and the stark walls are covered with “dainty apple blossom paper” (AGG, 265), indicating both Anne's development into a young lady and her softening effect on the rigid life at Green Gables.

Anne walks past Mrs. Lynde's house to the church, center of community life. To reach Diana Barry's home, Orchard Slope, Anne walks down the sloping field to the east of Green Gables, over the brook by a log bridge, and through a spruce grove that she thinks of as the Haunted Wood. She and Diana walk to school by way of Lover's Lane and the Birch Path through Mr. William Bell's woods. The school is a one-room, whitewashed building with old-fashioned desks, each seating two pupils and “carved all over their lids with the initials and hieroglyphics of three generations of schoolchildren” (AGG, 107). Also in walking distance of Green Gables is the post office, which Anne and her friends “haunt” when the “pass list” is to be published in the Charlottetown newspaper.

Surrounding settlements are, like Avonlea, given fictitious names except for Charlottetown, capital of Prince Edward Island, located 30 miles from Avonlea, a half-day's journey by horse and buggy. When Anne first comes to the island, she is met by Matthew at the train station at Bright River, eight miles from Avonlea. On their memorable ride they go through Newbridge, a “bustling little village” (AGG, 18) where Anne first encounters the White Way of Delight. Apparently there are no stores in Avonlea, for the Cuthberts shop at William J. Blair's establishment in the small town of Carmody, which is a long walk or a short buggy ride from Avonlea. Five miles away by the shore road lies White Sands, which boasts a hotel with electric lights where American tourists sponsor concerts and have dinner in the evening, an unusual custom since dinner is the midday meal in Avonlea.

Avonlea is an agricultural community where Matthew plows in April, sows late turnip seed in June, and hauls potatoes “to the vessel” (AGG, 122) in October. Apple picking is another important fall event. Since idle hands are the devil's workshop, when women finish household chores they busy themselves with handwork: Marilla knits, Mrs. Lynde makes quilts, and Anne sews patchwork, although she prefers reading romantic stories.

The strong sensory appeal comes largely from visual images, but poplar leaves are “rustling silkily” (AGG, 22), frogs are “singing silverly sweet in the marshes about the head of the Lake of Shining Waters” (AGG, 161), clover fields are fragrant in June, and the “tang of the sea” is always present (AGG, 237). Anne tastes “yellow nuts of gum” (AGG, 114) gathered from the spruce grove near the schoolhouse and the “unromantic” dinner of boiled pork and greens (AGG, 101), and the abundant delicacies provided for the minister's tea, including Marilla's “famous yellow plum preserves” (AGG, 172). Montgomery tends to rhapsodize on sunsets, trees, and flowers, but in this book, most of the narrator's descriptions are brief and Anne's effusions are used as a means of characterization.

HUMOR

Anne of Green Gables, then, has an appealing heroine and a clearly established setting. It is also a very funny book. Anne's loquaciousness, Mrs. Lynde's curiosity, and Matthew's shyness are exaggerated qualities associated with the “humour” characters of Elizabethan drama. Montgomery uses another favorite technique of the comic dramatist that is related to the Bergsonian theory of the mechanization of the human—repetition by characters of their own stock phrases, such as Anne's “scope for the imagination,” Matthew's “well now,” and the “that's what” with which Mrs. Lynde closes her emphatic statements.

Not only is Anne's talkativeness extreme, but her bookish expressions are precocious and incongruous for the situations in which she finds herself. Her “highest ideal of earthly bliss” is to own a white dress (AGG, 16), and her red hair is a “lifelong sorrow” (AGG, 16). The discovery that she has come to Green Gables by mistake plunges Anne into the “depths of despair” (AGG, 26), but by the next morning she is ready to announce that, although her “brief dream is over,” she has become “resigned” to her “fate” (AGG, 34). Anne's conversation is liberally sprinkled with such phrases, drawn from her reading of sentimental fiction.

The young Montgomery came from a family with “literary tastes” (Alpine Path, 15) and was an avid reader of the Bible, poetry, any novels she could procure, and melodramatic stories found in such publications as Godey's Lady's Book. Anne, however, spent her formative years with poor, uneducated families, was constantly occupied with housework and the care of younger children, and attended school regularly for only four months at the orphan asylum, where reading material was confined to schoolbooks. Anne, with her keen intelligence and retentive memory, has undoubtedly made the most of her limited opportunities, but her bookishness remains implausible in an otherwise credible story. Despite this problem of credibility, Anne's expressions are highly amusing, as is the bathos, or comic anticlimax, that occurs when Diana's or Marilla's matter-of-fact comments follow Anne's romantic outpourings.

Anne's speeches also provide dramatic irony when she misunderstands the language of others, as when she prefers one beau “in his right mind” to Ruby Gillis's desired host of suitors “all crazy about her” (AGG, 140). She is too ingenuous to use verbal irony intentionally, a technique reserved for the narrator, who inserts such gems as, “Mrs. Rachel was one of those delightful and popular people who pride themselves on speaking their mind without fear or favor” (AGG, 64). The phrase “without fear or favor” occurs in Kipling's “Christmas in India” and shows how Montgomery adapts quotations for comic effect, applying them to situations less heroic than those of their original context. For example, Hamlet's view of the world as “flat, stale, and unprofitable” is transferred to Anne's return to ordinary life after the glorious occasion of the school concert (AGG, 205). This device of the adapted quotation is used only occasionally in this book but becomes increasingly prominent in later works.

Montgomery is frequently criticized for her tendencies toward sentimentality and didacticism, and her first novel remains her most successful partly because she allows her characters to employ, for comic effect, exaggerated sentiment and fondness for moralizing, thus satirizing her own melodramatic tendencies. Anne, not the author, rhapsodizes over nature, and Anne sentimentalizes her situation as a “poor little orphan girl” in her amusingly dramatic apology to Mrs. Lynde (AGG, 73). Marilla indulges in excessive didacticism, being “as fond of morals as the Duchess in Wonderland” (AGG, 58).

Anne's expression “an epoch in my life” has been used by T. D. MacLulich as an example of Montgomery's satirizing of stereotyped and extravagant language.¹⁹ “Epochs of our life” appears in Emerson's essay on “Spiritual Laws” and may well have been suggested to Montgomery by this source since she studied the essays and wrote of her admiration, with reservation, for Emerson (Journals I, 75). It is likely that the phrase also occurred frequently in popular literature. MacLulich notes its use by the narrator in Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, a book with many resemblances to Anne of Green Gables and one that Montgomery may well have read since it was a popular publication of 1903. In Wiggin's book, Rebecca's first public prayer marks an “epoch in her life”; Anne uses the expression to denote her visit to the Charlottetown Exhibition. Thus, the phrase is used seriously in Rebecca but with humorous effect in Anne (MacLulich, 1985, “Heroine,” 11).

Characters often find themselves in comic predicaments, which usually contain the irony of their frustrated expectations: Anne expects to realize her dream of raven-black tresses by dyeing her hair but produces a hideous green; Matthew expects to purchase material for Anne's new dress but comes home with a garden rake and 20 pounds of brown sugar; Anne expects to impress the minister's wife with her culinary ability but flavors a cake with liniment instead of vanilla. Mary Rubio has noted resemblances between Montgomery's use of ironic situations and Mark Twain's. In both Tom Sawyer's whitewashing the fence and Anne's apology to Mrs. Lynde, the child turns punishment into pleasure by outsmarting an adult.²⁰ Anne's apology to Mrs. Lynde results in the child's confinement to her room for truthfulness, while a few chapters later she is given the same punishment for supposed untruthfulness in the affair of the amethyst brooch, an inconsistency that makes an ironic comment on Marilla's child-rearing practices. In fact, throughout the book, the implicit question of just who is being “brought up” is raised, since Marilla changes more than Anne.

Not least among the treasures brought by Anne to Green Gables is the gift of laughter. Marilla is not without a sense of humor, but she believes that the world is “meant to be taken seriously.” She is even “slightly distrustful” of the sunlight beaming through the window of her orderly kitchen (AGG, 4), a foreshadowing of the light that Anne is soon to bring to Green Gables. When Anne arrives, discovers that a boy was expected, and pronounces the mistake a “most tragical thing,” a reluctant smile, “rusty from long disuse,” mellows momentarily the “grim” countenance of Marilla (AGG, 69).

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS

L. M. Montgomery was reared by dour Scotch Presbyterians, but, unlike Anne, she was unable to alter their rigid ways. Her Grandmother Macneill, she wrote, loved her but without the “slightest saving grace of understanding” (Journals I, 302), and her cranky grandfather bore little resemblance to Matthew (Journals I, 75). Yet the temperament and some of the experiences of the young Maud were much like those of her famous creation. Like Anne, she was sensitive to natural beauty, used her imagination to make “a fairyland” of her surroundings (Alpine Path, 47), and was fond of naming things, calling a geranium “Bonny” (Journals I, 1) and assigning names to favorite trees. She was also sensitive to language, thrilling to the phraseology of the paraphrases she was required to memorize, and composed several “lugubrious” stories in which “almost everyone died” (Alpine Path, 57). The adult laughter provoked by her use of big words remained a “bitter remembrance” of her childhood (Journals II, 40). A lonely child, she had an imaginary playmate, “Katie Maurice,” who resided in the glass door of the bookcase in her grandparents' sitting room (Alpine Path, 74). Like Anne, she attended a one-room, whitewashed school surrounded by spruce trees. The “Haunted Wood” was a grove “in the field below the orchard” of the Macneill farm (Alpine Path, 74-75). The Avonlea locale was modeled on Cavendish “to a certain extent” (Alpine Path, 73), and Anne's year at Queen's, where she obtains a teacher's licence, resembles the author's year at Prince of Wales College. Montgomery's name, however, was fifth rather that first on the “pass list” for entrance into the Charlottetown college, and she won no university scholarship (Journals I, 91).

Montgomery, like Anne, was inclined “to rush to extremes in any emotion” (MacMillan, 19) but lacked Anne's resilience and became increasingly subject to periods of depression. Her strong sense of duty may be compared with Anne's, and she gave up her teaching career and postponed marriage in order to stay at home with her widowed grandmother. She did not, however, accept her duty with Anne's optimism but felt herself placed in an “awkward and unpleasant” position (Journals I, 221). The author clearly drew from many of her own experiences in creating Anne, of which she wrote, “Were it not for those Cavendish years, I do not think Anne of Green Gables would ever have been written” (Alpine Path, 52). But her disposition was darker than her brain child's, she suffered more from strictures against which she dared not rebel, and she had less effect on unsympathetic relatives and neighbors. Anne is the girl Montgomery would have liked to be.

THE ORPHAN IN POPULAR FICTION

Anne joins the ranks of female orphans who must make their way in an unfriendly world. This literary type may be traced back at least as far as Goody Two-Shoes (1766), the first significant book written especially for children.²¹ Other examples of female orphans in best-selling fiction include Ellen in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), who lived in the country with a brusque aunt; Gerty of Maria Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854), a mistreated child of the Boston slums; and, of course, the heroine of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), victimized by her cruel Aunt Reed. The latter has plenty of spunk, but most nineteenth-century heroines are remarkably obedient, and their stories contain strong religious elements, as in the stories about motherless, if not fatherless, Elsie Dinsmore, whose adventures began to be told by Martha Finley in 1867.

Although struggling orphan girls consistently remained favorite heroines, there were, according to Frank Luther Mott, two major “out-pourings” of such novels, the first in the mid-nineteenth century and the second in the first decade of the twentieth century, when Anne was written.²² By the turn of the century, public taste wanted realism rather than religiosity, and charming, if not perfect, waifs converted their associates through their personalities rather than through quotations from the Bible. Shortly before the publication of Anne came Lovey Mary by Alice Hegan Rice (1903) and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin (1903). Other lovable orphans later appeared in Jean Webster's Daddy Long-Legs (1912) and Eleanor Stratton Porter's Pollyanna (1913).

T. D. MacLulich has shown that Anne also belongs in the popular trend of the “literary heroine” that began with Jo March of Little Women (1868). Literary ambition, says MacLulich, was often used as a sign of the heroine's originality and her unwillingness to submit to all of society's restrictions. Although Jo March and her most notable successors, Rebecca Rowena Randall and Anne Shirley, are outspoken, unconventional, and impulsive, they learn to curb these traits, assume nurturing roles, eventually marry, and confine their unconventionality largely to their writing (MacLulich, 1985, “Heroine,” 7-10). They maintain the conservative domestic roles assigned to them.

Marilla belongs to the tradition of the rigid, crusty spinster who in most examples of the tradition is the heroine's aunt. Matthew is the kindly, taciturn figure (Avery, 17) who befriends the heroine. Mrs. Lynde is the stock busybody. These stereotypes are sufficiently individualized to have their own distinctive lives, however, and the lack of originality in the basic plot is compensated for by appealing humor and a strong sense of place.

INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM

An instant success, the L. C. Page edition of Anne went through four printings in three months, and by the time of the author's death in 1942 there had been 69 printings. The initial royalty check, received by Montgomery six months after the June 1908 publication, amounted to ＄1,730, at that time a sizeable sum for the writer of a first novel. Since the author received 9 cents from the wholesale price of 90 cents, the sum indicates the early sale of almost 2,000 copies. Continued popularity is indicated by the fact that the Bantam paperback, first issued in 1976, had gone through 22 printings by 1986.

Montgomery reported to Ephraim Weber the receipt of copies of 60 reviews, all but five laudatory (Weber, 71). She was particularly pleased by the complimentary review of the London Spectator and was thrilled by a letter from Mark Twain, who pronounced Anne to be “the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice.”²⁴ Modern critics cannot deny the book's continuing appeal. For example, Sheila Egoff, while consigning Montgomery to the “heavily sentimental ‘sweetness and light’ school of writing for children,” admits that “to denigrate the literary qualities of Anne of Green Gables is as useless an exercise as carping about the architecture of the National War Memorial. Anne arrived and she has stayed.”²⁵

From the Canadian Maritimes, Anne has crossed national boundaries to become an international best seller. Five English editions had appeared by May 1909; by 1912 Anne had been translated into Swedish, Dutch, and Polish; and the book now appears in at least 16 languages other than English.²⁶ Astrid Lindgren, the Swedish author of Pippi Longstocking, has acknowledged her debt to Montgomery,²⁷ and Anne has enjoyed tremendous popularity in Poland. First appearing there in 1912 when Poland was divided between three world powers, Anne was warmly welcomed as a book that stressed qualities needed by the Poles in order to survive as a people.²⁸ Its continued popularity is vouched for by its appearance in 1965 on a list of favorite books of students in Polish secondary schools and by the selection in 1982 of L. M. Montgomery by a magazine for adolescents as the second-favorite author of Polish youth. Between 1948 and 1982 the books about Anne appeared in 39 editions in Poland with the number of copies sold totaling over 2 million (Wachowicz, 17-22). A stage production of Anne of Green Gables has enjoyed the longest continuous run of any play in the history of Polish theater. A 90-year-old Polish woman writes of being sent to Siberia as a young girl when her family was suspected of participation in the underground independence movement. She took with her into exile her three “most precious” possessions: photographs of her dead parents, a book by Adam Mickiewicz, and her copy of Anne of Green Gables (Wachowicz, 26).

Since 1952, when Anne was first translated into Japanese as Akage no An (Anne of the Red Hair), at least 16 editions have been produced by Japanese publishers, who have also furnished cookbooks and handicraft books with the Anne motif as well as books about Prince Edward Island. Yuko Katsura reports that Anne, which has sold over 1 million copies in Japan, is particularly popular with Japanese girls of junior-high-school age, many of whom continue to read Montgomery books into adulthood, becoming lifelong devotees.²⁹ The largest Montgomery fan club, “Buttercups,” has a membership of over 300. Tours to Prince Edward Island, arranged by Japanese publishers, attract thousands of participants annually.

Several possibilities may be advanced as reasons for this tremendous appeal in Japan. Japanese women, living under strict conventions in a male-dominated environment, find Anne's independent spirit attractive but, at the same time, are drawn to her love of home and family, a quality particularly important in Japanese society. Charmaine Gaudet feels that in possessing these two traits Anne perhaps embodies “both what the Japanese are and what many wish they could be.”³⁰ Anne also loves natural beauty, as do the Japanese, and her life in a pastoral setting allows readers a vicarious escape from crowded, industrialized Japan. Doubtless Anne's success in school is valued by young people in a society that emphasizes academic achievement, and her troubles with geometry may comfort those experiencing problems with the demanding Japanese curriculum. That Anne becomes a leader in Avonlea, makes her guardians proud of her, and does as well as Gilbert in school, all in spite of the fact that she is not the expected boy, pleases young girls everywhere but perhaps especially Japanese females. At any rate, a young Tokyo publisher, Jichio Kondo, writes that “the way many Japanese feel about Anne, Montgomery, and the island is almost a religion. In this religion, Anne is the saint, Green Gables the cathedral, and the trip (to P.E.I.) is a pilgrimage” (Gaudet, 10).

Not only has Anne crossed national boundaries, but she has bridged the generation gap. Montgomery was herself amazed by the interest adults displayed in Anne. To her cousin Murray Macneill she wrote, “It has been a great surprise to me that Anne should have taken so well with ‘grown-ups.’ When I wrote it I thought is would be an amusing and harmless tale for Sunday School libraries and ‘kiddies,’ but I did not suppose it would appeal to older readers.”³¹ Children are captivated by Anne's humorous adventures and identify with the child who, in spite of good intentions, finds herself embroiled in difficulties that shock the adult world. The fairy-tale element of the story in which an ugly duckling becomes a swan also has a special attraction for the young. Adolescents identify with Anne's rebellion against social restrictions, her intense response to experience, and her desire to belong while maintaining her own identity (Rubio, 1985, 173). The suggestion of a future romance with Gilbert is satisfying to adolescent readers who are both intrigued and frightened by sexuality (Waterston, 1975, 25). Anne's role reversal, in which she nurtures Marilla, enacts a fantasy that, according to Freud, is common to adolescence, a period when the young seek to assume active rather than passive roles.³²

Young readers enjoy the tension between child and adults, but mature readers appreciate the full significance of the struggles between beauty and utility, imagination and strict practicality, truth and propriety, and love and obedience. The adult who has not forgotten childhood identifies with and rejoices in Anne, but, at the same time, understands the loneliness of Marilla's and Matthew's convention-bound existence and their need for Anne's insights. It is significant that the point of view in the novel is more often that of Marilla than of Anne.

ANNE ON STAGE AND SCREEN

Anne has also gone beyond the print medium to the stage and to both the large and small screen. Within the author's lifetime, the novel became the basis for two three-act plays and two movies. After a lawsuit against L. C. Page in 1915, Montgomery agreed to a settlement of ＄17,880, losing the rights to her first seven novels. Page then sold the screen rights to Anne for ＄40,000. Not only did the author receive no profit from the adaptations, but she had no control over their content. The 1919 silent film she judged “well photographed” but found Mary Miles Mintner not “gingery” enough for Anne and resented the lack of Prince Edward Island atmosphere, especially the appearance in the film of an American flag and a skunk, an animal then unknown to the island. She fumed at such “crass, blatant Yankeeism” (Journals II, 373).

She was more pleased with the 1934 “talkie,” which she saw four times, but still had reservations. Two scenes were filmed on Prince Edward Island, but the remainder was “pure California.” Anne Shirley, who had changed her stage name from Dawn O'Day to that of the title character, was rather good but lacked a certain “elfin charm,” and Diana and Gilbert were unsatisfactory. Helen Westley would have been better cast as Mrs. Lynde than as Marilla, and the blending of Mrs. Lynde and Mrs. Barry into one character was a puzzling innovation (MacMillan, 179). It is surprising that the author accepted the R.K.O. production as well as she did, considering the drastic changes made in the plot and in the protagonist. Anne is older, 14, when she arrives at Green Gables, and the major emphasis is placed on the romance with Gilbert, with whom Anne flirts rather shamelessly, offering to kiss him rather than spurning him in the scene in which he rescues her from the sinking barge. The hair-dyeing episode is omitted, along with certain other escapades, and a complication is invented in which Marilla and Matthew oppose Anne's alliance with Gilbert because Gilbert's father robbed Matthew of the girl he loved. This situation is sentimentally resolved by Gilbert's securing a renowned doctor to save the life of the ailing Matthew.

The popularity in Poland of a dramatic version of Anne has already been mentioned. A musical written and composed by Don Harron and Norman Campbell was first performed at the opening of the Charlottetown Confederation Centre for the Arts in 1965; it has since toured Canada and abroad, received the Musical of the Year Award from London critics in 1969, and been part of Canada's contribution to the World Exposition in Japan in 1970. Now in its twenty-sixth year, the musical plays to capacity audiences every summer in Charlottetown.

An award-winning television miniseries, produced by Kevin Sullivan for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and subsequently aired in the United States and 39 other countries,³³ has resulted in renewed and wider popularity for Canada's most renowned heroine. The television film has strong visual appeal; Megan Follows is believable, if a bit too impudent, as Anne; and Colleen Dewhurst blends austerity and humor in her superb portrayal of Marilla. Structural changes, however, give the film a different focus from that of the novel. The book begins by emphasizing the community of which Anne is to become a part, whereas the film opens with Anne's hard life as a foster child and as an orphanage inmate, thus sentimentalizing her plight far more than is the case in the original work. After Anne's arrival at Green Gables, her film adventures are divided into two major sections: first, the trial period, which promotes suspense through the uncertainty of Anne's acceptance by Marilla; and, second, the love story, in which a series of conflicts between Anne and Gilbert culminates in their happy relationship.

In the novel there is no lengthy trial period, for Anne is told that she may stay at Green Gables on the second day after her arrival; it is not her literal but her psychological acceptance that is in question, a more complex problem. After the trial period, comprising approximately one-third of the film, the focus shifts to the Anne-Gilbert relationship. Far more prominent than in the novel, Gilbert plays a part in several episodes from which he is absent in the original. For example, he appears at the Sunday School picnic in athletic rivalry with Anne; the hair-dying episode is placed immediately after the scene in which he calls Anne “Carrots,” so that he becomes the motivating force behind the disaster; and it is his taunting presence that causes Anne to accept the dare to climb the ridgepole. While a few episodes, such as Anne's attempt at a Christmas dance to show her control over Gilbert, are inventions of the screenwriters, most events are drawn from the novel but adapted to the romance theme. Thus, in the film Gilbert becomes a unifying element for the novel's episodic plot, but the result is a sacrifice of complexity and depth. Susan Drain, who has provided a detailed analysis of the television adaptation, concludes: “Beautiful and moving as it is, the film is yet a lesser accomplishment. It succeeds by reducing to predictability the leisurely complexities of character development and the gradual accommodation of individual and community that are the deeper patterns of Montgomery's original. … The film is exquisite romance, but the novel is a Bildungsroman” (Drain, 1987, 64, 72).

Anne of Green Gables has several levels of appeal. It is a story of a child's progress toward maturity, of an isolate's search for belonging, of the shaping power of the imagination, and an appealing child's power to transform. It contains mythic and fairy-tale elements, is rich in humor, and, through its portrayal of Canadian rural life at the turn of the century, is valuable as social history. It offers immediate appeal to children and adolescents and continues to delight adults. It is also a specimen of Montgomery's “real style” (MacMillan, 44), since she wrote this book solely to please herself, not to cater to public taste. In August 1907, before the appearance of the published work, she wrote in her journal: “The book may or may not sell well. I wrote it for love, not money—but very often such books are the most successful—just as everything in life that is born of true love is better than something constructed for mercenary ends” (Journals I, 331).

Notes

1. The Alpine Path, 72. In a journal entry for 16 August 1907, Montgomery gives a later date for the beginning (May 1905) and completion (January 1906) but may be referring to the revisions made before sending the manuscript to Page. Biographers have accepted the dates given in The Alpine Path.

2. Again, there is a slight discrepancy between the account given in the autobiography and in the journals. The autobiography gives the number of rejections as five, whereas the journals mention only four.

3. Anne of Green Gables (New York: Bantam, 1976), 1; hereafter cited in text as AGG.

4. Jon C. Stott, “L. M. Montgomery,” in Writers for Children, ed. Jane M. Bingham (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1988), 418; hereafter cited in text as Stott.

5. Mary Rubio, “‘Anne of Green Gables’: The Architect of Adolescence,” in Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children's Literature, Vol. 1, ed. Perry Nodelman (West Lafayette, Indiana: Children's Literature Association, 1985), 176; hereafter cited in text as Rubio, 1985.

6. Elizabeth Waterston and Mary Rubio, “Afterword,” in Anne of Green Gables (New York: New American Library, 1987), 312-13; hereafter cited in text as Waterston and Rubio, 1987; AGG. Although I have made minor alterations, I am indebted to the plot outline by Waterston and Rubio.

7. Susan Drain, “‘Too Much Love-Making’: Anne of Green Gables on Television,” The Lion and the Unicorn 11.2 (October 1987): 64; hereafter cited in text as Drain.

8. Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 43.

9. William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” 1.85.

10. Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 141.

11. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, XIII.

12. Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode,” 1.86.

13. Susan Drain, “Community and the Individual in Anne of Green Gables: The Meaning of Belonging,” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 11.1 (1986): 19.

14. Carol Gay, “‘Kindred Spirits’ All: Green Gables Revisited,” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 11.1 (1986): 11.

15. Muriel A. Whitaker, “‘Queer Children’: L. M. Montgomery's Heroines,” Canadian Children's Literature 1.3 (Autumn 1975): 51; hereafter cited in text as Whitaker.

16. Alison Lurie, Don't Tell the Grown-ups: Subversive Children's Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990). Lurie contends that most classics of children's literature tend to be “subversive” in the sense that they criticize adult conventions and pretensions.

17. Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” in The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (New York: Vintage, 1979), 118.

18. Marilyn Solt, “The Uses of Setting in Anne of Green Gables,” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 9.4 (Winter 1984-85): 179, 180, 198. I am indebted to Solt for calling attention to several of the details used in my discussion of setting but have omitted some of those in her essay and added a few of my own.

19. T. D. MacLulich, “L. M. Montgomery and the Literary Heroine: Jo, Rebecca, Anne, and Emily,” Canadian Children's Literature 37 (1985): 11; hereafter cited in text as MacLulich, 1985, “Heroine.”

20. Mary Rubio, “Satire, Realism, and Imagination in Anne of Green Gables,” Canadian Children's Literature 1.3 (Autumn 1975): 31.

21. John Rowe Townsend, Written for Children (London: Penguin, 1974), 34; hereafter cited in text as Townsend.

22. Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1947), 216.

23. Gillian Avery, “‘Remarkable and Winning’: A Hundred Years of American Heroines,” The Lion and the Unicorn 13.1 (June 1989): 17; hereafter cited in text as Avery.

24. The letter from Twain (3 October 1908) is partially quoted in a letter to Weber (Green Gables Letters, 80) and is frequently cited by biographers and critics.

25. Sheila Egoff, The Republic of Childhood: A Critical Guide to Canadian Children's Literature in English (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967), 249, 252.

26. Ruth Weber Russell, D. W. Russell, and Rea Wilmshurst, Lucy Maud Montgomery: A Preliminary Bibliography (Waterloo, Ontario: University of Waterloo Library, 1986), 10. Some sources give the number of translations as considerably higher than 16. An editorial note in the Bantam edition of Further Chronicles of Avonlea states that there have been 36 translations.

27. Jonathan Cott, “The Astonishment of Being,” New Yorker, 29 February 1983, 57.

28. Barbara Wachowicz, “L. M. Montgomery: At Home in Poland,” Canadian Children's Literature 46 (1987): 9; hereafter cited in text as Wachowicz.

29. Yuko Katsura, “Red-haired Anne in Japan,” Canadian Children's Literature 34 (1984): 58.

30. Charmaine Gaudet, “Why the Japanese Love Our Anne of Green Gables,” Canadian Geographic, February/March 1987, 13; hereafter cited in text as Gaudet.

31. Quoted in Gillen, 1983, 79. This letter from Montgomery to Murray Macneill, dated July 1909, is in the possession of John Macneill of Cavendish.

32. Jacqueline Berke, “Mother, I Can Do It Myself: The Self-sufficient Heroine in Popular Girls' Fiction,” Women's Studies 6.2 (1979): 197; hereafter cited in text as Berke.

33. Brian D. Johnson, Barbara MacAndrew, and Ann Shortell, “Anne of Green Gables Grows Up,” Maclean's, 7 December 1987, 47.