[In the following essay, Weiss-Town argues against the classification of Anne of Green Gables as a sexist book meant to teach girls how to be proper women.]

A municipal draftsperson by trade, an interior designer by education, and a student of children's literature by interest and inclination, I am quite honestly impressed by the essays and ideas of writers such as Alan Garner and Virginia Hamilton, or educators and literary scholars such as Perry Nodelman and Carol Gay, that appear in the Quarterly. I learn a great deal from them. But sometimes I learn more from the articles and opinions that impress me less than they annoy me. It is in disagreeing with an idea that I'm forced to think about it in greater depth, particularly when the idea comes from a respected source and I can't just dismiss it as foolishness. This essay is about that sort of idea—a comment made by Perry Nodelman during a class in the children's literature course I took from him which is a perfect illustration of this sort of mental catalyst.

We were studying L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, as an example of a “girl's book”. Apparently it had evolved amidst a history of series books about wonderful girls, such as the Pansy books the Elsie Dinsmore books, and Heidi, that were intended to confirm certain ideals of feminine behaviour. They were written at a time when it was generally believed that women were different from men and that women should ideally be impractical but imaginative, loving but not gruff, and so on. “Anne of Green Gables is one of the most definitively sexist books I know of,” Nodelman said, “because Anne becomes an ideal woman at the end of the book: she never stops being a child.”

Well, I don't claim to be a feminist. But, I am a woman, working in a traditional male environment and like most women in the eighties, I do have a feminist conscience of sorts. I had enjoyed Anne of Green Gables both as a child and again reading it as an adult. My feminist conscience was livid! How could Nodelman say that the book I took such pleasure from was sexist?

In fact I was convinced that Anne of Green Gables is not a sexist book. Anne herself is not stereotypically female, with stock female weaknesses and sex-linked characteristics. She undoubtedly acts within a female framework, but many of her character traits, were they classified stereotypically, would be decidedly unfeminine.

Anne is aggressive. The things she wants and dreams of most in life, she goes after. She gives of herself to become and get a “best friend”. She works hard for her academic achievements. She even goes to great lengths to create an elaborate confession for Marilla, in order to be allowed to go to the church picnic and taste her first ice-cream. This is not a passive child. She dreams, but she tries very hard to make those dreams come true.

Anne is independent. She still acts within the inherent, day-to-day restrictions of dependency that all children must, but beyond that she has a certain independence of spirit. Her thoughts on such significant topics as religion, life, and ways of viewing the world, are her own, coming from her own life experiences, and she will not easily give them up unless she is ready. “Other people may call that place the Avenue, but I shall always call it the White Way of Delight” (Montgomery 18).

Anne is practical. If imagination is stereotypically female and action is stereotypically male, then Anne's response seems to me ultimately more practical than a “male” reaction might be. Anne is an orphan, with no home, no means of support. A male protagonist would presumably react to a life with which he was dissatisfied by action; by running away: creating a new and better life. But practically, the life available to an eleven or twelve year old boy, on his own, in the Maritimes, would be limited. Employment opportunities in a conservative, rural setting, distrustful of outsiders (Marilla doesn't even trust the local French boys) would be slim at best. Given the parameters of her existence and the unlikelihood of surviving on her own, Anne does the practical thing. She accepts the world as it is, seeing and being aware of its imperfections, and at the same time tackling the problems of life with a profound optimism.

And when her optimistic outlook is not enough, Anne has another very real resource for personal strength. Paradoxically, that resource is her imagination.

“I did hope there would be a white one with puffed sleeves,” she whispered disconsolately. “I prayed for one, but I didn't much expect it on that account. I didn't suppose God would have time to bother about a little orphan girl's dress. I knew I'd just have to depend on Marilla for it. Well, fortunately I can imagine that one of them is snow-white muslin with lovely lace frills and three-puffed sleeves.”

(Montgomery, p. 79)

Therein lies Anne's power. Her use of her imagination to make her world a better one may be described quite literally as wish fulfillment fantasy, but it is a real power, precisely because Anne controls it. She knows her imaginings are just that—imaginings; but they help her to cope with the world as it is given to her. It is a peculiar power, a power for the powerless, if you like, but it works for Anne.

Anne's power comes from within. Hers is a strong personality. She doesn't become immersed in finding her perfect boyfriend as the protagonists in some of the more current “girl's” stories do—take the currently popular “Silhouette Romances” as an extreme example. Anne knows that, although men are important, they don't define who she is; she does that for herself. “Ruby Gillis thinks of nothing but young men, and the older she gets the worse she is. Young men are all very well in their place, but it doesn't do to drag them into everything, does it?” (Montgomery 239) Anne's reaction to Gilbert Blythe is not romantic adoration, although it does become a more romantic attraction in later books, nor is it a sense of personal inferiority. Her feelings for Gilbert find their outlet in an intense academic rivalry. She meets and competes with Gilbert on an equal footing.

During our class on Anne, another student suggested that the book's setting, a dominantly female atmosphere in which Gilbert and Matthew could be described as the only important male figures (and both are sympathetic to Anne), gives a slanted, female bias to the story, a bias which might itself be considered sexist. But if it is true, as some feminist literary critics assert, that there is a “female” way to read a story, outside or different from the “male” way of reading which a predominately male-oriented society teaches most of us, then perhaps the female atmosphere in Anne of Green Gables is merely a vehicle for steering the reader towards a “female” reading of the story. In searching for a feminist viewpoint that might help me clarify my own impressions, I came across Carol Gay's article in the ChLA Quarterly (Winter 1982), which suggested, “A re-reading of Anne of Green Gables in light of Lerner and Showalter, for instance, will, surprisingly, perhaps, reveal a quite distinct woman's world existing within a dominant patriarchial society” (Gay 33). So I went to Lerner and Showalter to explore the possibilities.

Showalter, I discovered, broke feminist criticism into two modes, one concerned with the feminist as reader, the other with feminist as writer. The feminist reading, or feminist critique as Showalter terms it, offers readings “which consider the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism, and women-as-sign in semiotic systems. … But in the free play of the interpretative field, the feminist critique can only compete with alternative readings, all of which have the built in obsolescence of Buicks, cast away as newer readings take their place” (182).

It struck me that my attempts to describe Anne as beyond the stereotypes of the female had that same “built in obsolescence”. Nodelman's readings of the book, which may include female stereotypes, was just as valid as my own readings negating those stereotypes. I would, I supposed, have to explore further, using Showalter's second feminist mode; that of woman as writer. But a passage further on in her discussion sent me in a different direction entirely:

Many forms of American radical feminism also romantically assert that women are closer to nature, to the environment, to a matriarchal principle at once biological and ecological. Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology and Margaret Atwood's novel Surfacing are texts which create this feminist mythology.

(201)

Anne has much to do with the idea of people being romantically close to nature but the people are children, not women. It began to dawn on me that Anne of Green Gables probably had more in common with Treasure Island, a boy's book, than with Surfacing, a woman's book; and I will get back to that thought later.

My examination of Lerner similarly sent me in an unexpected direction. I was drawn, not to Lerner's analysis of the female historical perspective, but to this entry in Louisa May Alcott's diary:

Fruitlands

March, 1846—

I have at last got the little room I have wanted so long, and I am very happy with it … My work-booklet and desk are by the window and my closet is full of dried herbs that smell very nice. The door that opens into the garden will be very pretty in summer, and I can run off to the woods when I like.

I have made a plan for my life, as I am in my teens, and no more a child. I am old for my age, and I don't care much for girl's things. People think I'm wild and queer; but mother understands and helps me. I have not told anyone about my resolutions, and written sad notes, and cried over my sins, and it doesn't seem to do any good. Now I'm going to work really for I feel a true desire to improve, and be a help and comfort, not a care and sorrow to my dear mother.

(Lerner 10)

This excerpt from Louisa's diary at age 13 struck me as a very Anne-like passage. Anne's vision of life was not as unique as I had first thought. Alcott and Montgomery, raised as children during roughly the same time period, shared a similar viewpoint. Lerner says of Louisa's father, “Bronson Alcott believed in treating children kindly and respecting their reason, considering them to be not damned, but blessed … but the direction of their education was the same: girl's were to acquire patience, self-discipline, and the virtues of obedience” (6). Surely these are some of the same virtues Anne struggles to acquire.

Perry Nodelman was probably correct to suggest that I should realize how much Anne was a cliché, that I should be aware of nineteenth-century concepts of childhood. Presumably, Bronson shared in this view that children were somehow closer to nature, to God and to Truth; that they were somehow blessed and therefore their viewpoint was to be respected, even envied. Perhaps Alcott and Montgomery did too.

Heaven lies about us in our infancy
Shades of the prison house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy
As a man this dies away and life becomes common.

(Wordsworth 354)

Life is certainly not common from Anne's viewpoint. And it is very easy to envy Anne her carefree, ecstatic viewing of the world, where everything is still alive with hope and endless possibilities. It is easy to envy her innocence.

But having understood that, I suddenly realized that, for all my reading, research and contemplation of feminist analyses, I had been missing out on the key issue entirely. I had let my own feminist defenses lead me down the proverbial garden path.

When I try to argue that Anne is not like a child but like a woman, and a non-stereotypical woman at that, I give more credence to Nodelman's statement about her than it deserves. “Anne becomes an ideal woman at the end of the book: she never stops being a child.” I've been arguing in a manner that accepts the very premise that upsets my feminine conscience most: the premise that eternal childhood is a valid, desired feminine state. Obviously it is not.

Upon reflection, I believe that Nodelman's controversial statement was intended purely as a catalyst for classroom discussion and exploration. In my case, obviously, it worked, but it also threw me a little off track. I had been looking for sexist evidence from an adult perspective, forgetting that this is not an adult book.

Anne of Green Gables moves to a close with Mrs. Lynde observing, “There's a good deal of the child about her yet in some ways.” “‘There's a good deal more of the woman about her in others,’ retorted Marilla”. (Montgomery 307) Anne, of course, is not a child at the end of the book, though many of her childhood traits are still with her. But she is not entirely an adult either, because this is not a woman's novel, it is a children's novel. As Perry Nodelman himself had said to my class, “One of the key elements of children's literature is that it is written from a position of innocence. There is usually no real character growth until the end of the book. That is not what the book is about. The book is about that period of innocence before you start to become an adult”—or words to that effect. Anne of Green Gables is not a sexist book. But it is a girl's book; at least L. M. Montgomery saw it as a girl's book. “I thought girls in their teens might like it but that was the only audience I hoped to reach,” she wrote, astounded at the book's instant success when it was published in June 1908. (Gillen 26).

In fact, Anne has the sort of plot usually found in girls' books, a plot quite different from a boy's book like Treasure Island. The girl's book occurs, basically, in a safe, domestic setting; the boy's book is an adventure, set against a backdrop of action and violence. But despite this gender difference, they both operate as wish fulfillment fantasy for children. The child in each book has the capability or power to change the lives of the adults they touch.

Anne can't help but affect those she touches for the better. Her ecstatic buoyancy and nature-loving spirit melt the heart of even Marilla; a person, we are told, “always slightly distrustful of sunshine, which seemed to her too dancing and irresponsible a thing for a world which was meant to be taken seriously” (4). Anne's imagination not only enriches her own life, but helps others to see the world in a new and better light. Anne is a nurturer. She enriches the lives of those around her emotionally and spiritually. The nurturing role is traditionally an adult female role.

If Anne's role is that of the nurturer, Jim Hawkins of Treasure Island acts as a protector and provider for the adults in his life. You would expect that as the only child in Treasure Island, amidst cut-throats and pirates, Jim would require the protection, but no so. It is Jim who overhears the pirate's mutinous plans. He is the one who finds Ben Gunn, without whom, they would never have found the treasure; and in the end it is Jim who singlehandedly recaptures the ship. All that Jim does seems to somehow point him and their tiny group away from trouble. Most often his actions are instinctive, with little or no thought beforehand:

I had scarce time to think—scarce time to act and save myself. I was on the summit of one swell when the schooner came stooping over the next. The bowsprit was over my head. I sprang to my feet and leaped, stamping the coracle under water. With one hand I caught the jib-boom, while my foot was lodged between the stay and the brace; and as I still clung there panting, a dull blow told me that the schooner had charged down upon and struck the coracle and that I was left without retreat on the Hispaniola.

(Stevenson, 148)

Jim is responsible, because of his actions, for the safety and well being of the captain, the squire and the doctor. He is, in a sense, their protector. He is also responsible, more than anyone perhaps, for their finding the treasure which provides each of them with a handsome financial reward. He is, therefore, their provider. The adult male member of a household is traditionally the protector and provider.

In a peculiar way, both Anne and Jim's innocence and youth are precisely the characteristics which allow them to obtain these adult roles. Were Anne an adult, she would be considered a frivolous scatterbrain. Those same characteristics which are so endearing in the young Anne, appear quite foolish in an adult. Were Jim an adult, he would never have been able to abandon the group: helping himself to food and pistols, to steal over the wall and eventually recapture the ship. As a child he can get away with it. “But as I was certain I should not be allowed to leave the enclosure, my only plan was to take French leave and slip out when nobody was watching, and that was so bad a way of doing it as made the thing itself wrong. But I was only a boy, and I had made my mind up” (134).

Anne and Jim, as children, share a common, innocent and romantic way of viewing their respective adventures. Though both are touched by death, neither is ultimately damaged by it. In fact they see death quite romantically. When Jim discovers that the pirates have taken over the block house with no sign of his friends, “I could only judge that all had perished, and my heart smote me sorely that I had not been there to perish with them” (168). There's a certain romance in dying bravely with your friends. Or in Anne's case, dying bravely for your friends:

I was thinking the loveliest story about you and me, Diana. I thought you were desperately ill with smallpox and everybody deserted you, but I went boldly to your bedside and nursed you back to life; and then I took the smallpox and died and I was buried under those poplar trees in the graveyard and you planted a rosebush by my grave and watered it with your tears; and you never, never forgot the friend of your youth who sacrificed her life for you.

(309)

Anne and Jim each represent a delicate balance: they are both children with the power of adults and the security of being children. Anne can be a nurturer; Jim can be a protector and provider. But when the story is over, they both go back home, as all children do, because home is, after all, where security lies for most children. They do go home changed, but there is no real sense that their childlike sense of innocence about the world has entirely vanished.

Anne of Green Gables is not, then, a sexist book. It is merely a typical children's book. As with most children's storybook heroes and heroines, there may be some sense of Jim and Anne having reached maturity at the end of the story; but we are still left with that ambiguous mixture of part child and part adult. When Anne returns to Green Gables to care for Marilla, she accepts her adult responsibilities, but “nothing could rob her of her birthright of fancy of her ideal world of dreams” (309). Anne of Green Gables is a “girl's book”, as Treasure Island is a “boy's book”. But surely, to the reader willing to ignore those “sexist” classifications, there are elements in both books to be enjoyed and understood by the androgynous aspects of all our characters, young or old.

References

Gay, Carol. “From the ‘Other’ to ‘Us’, A Review of The Female Experience: An American Documentary.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 7 (Winter 1982): 20-22.

Gillen, Mollie. The Wheel of Things: A Biography of L. M. Montgomery, Author of Anne of Green Gables. Don Mills, Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, 1975.

Lerner, Gerda. The Female Experience, An American Documentary. Indianapolis, Indiana: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1977.

Montgomery, L. M. Anne of Green Gables. New York: McClelland and Stewart-Bantam Limited, 1983.

Showalter, Elaine. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” Critical Inquiry Winter 1981: 179-205.

Stevenson, Robert, Louis. Treasure Island. New York, New York: Signet Classics, 1981.

Wordsworth, William. “Ode Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood” The Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Ed. Andrew J. George. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932.