SOURCE: Rubio, Mary. “Anne of Green Gables: The Architect of Adolescence.” In Such a Simple Little Tale: Critical Responses to L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, edited by Mavis Reimer, pp. 65-82. Metuchen, N.J.: Children's Literature Association and Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1992.

[In the following essay, Rubio discusses Montgomery's attention to Anne's process of psychological maturation and the complexity of her portrayal of adolescence.]

When Anne of Green Gables was first published in 1908, the terms “teenage” and “adolescent” were not in common use. Yet Anne caught—and continues to catch—the salient elements in teenage experience: yearning, rebellion, intense response to beauty, difficulty in accepting community standards, desire for an identity, friends, clothes, and popularity—all parts of an often difficult transition from childhood to maturity.

Anne of Green Gables was written by thirty-year-old Lucy Maud Montgomery, a woman living in a small rural community in Prince Edward Island, Canada's smallest province. Before 1908, L. M. Montgomery had published many short stories and poems, but Anne was her first full-length novel. She was to become a prolific writer: twenty-two books of fiction, a book of poetry, a serialized version of her life, 494 individual poems, and 497 short stories are listed in the Russell and Wilmshurst bibliography. At the time of her death in 1942, Robertson Davies, then a newspaper editor and now a don of Canadian letters, wrote:

Nations grow in the eyes of the world less by the work of their statesmen than by their artists. Thousands of people all over the globe are hazy about the exact nature of Canada's government … but they have clear recollections of Anne of Green Gables.

(4)

This statement was true in 1942, and it is even truer now. Anne of Green Gables has become one of the immortals of children's literature. The appeal of L. M. Montgomery seems to be universal, going beyond the confines of the English language and the Western hemisphere.

Today, the island that L. M. Montgomery made famous is a summer mecca for tourists, who come from all over the world to see the landscapes that Montgomery used as the settings for that novel and its seven sequels, as well as for other works. Anne has been translated into numerous languages. There have been two movies: the first a silent film in 1919 and the second a “talkie” in 1934; and a third, a television movie produced by Sullivan Films, now has been made. In Canada, a very successful musical version of Anne has been playing since 1965 in Charlottetown, P.E.I., and it has toured across Canada and abroad. In Poland, according to Barbara Wachowicz, Montgomery was selected as the second most popular author for young readers of the magazine Plomyk; Krystyna Sobkowska reports that a Polish stage play based on Anne of Green Gables has been seen by over a quarter-million people since 1963. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has made a documentary drama of L. M. Montgomery's life, and “Anne” is big business in P.E.I., as well as in Japan, where innumerable dolls, businesses, and other spinoffs capitalize on her name. As Yuko Katsura reports, the Japanese publishers even arrange air tours to P.E.I. for Anne aficionados to visit the island in the summers. They can see the real town of Cavendish, on which the mythical “Avonlea” is based, the house upon which Green Gables is modeled, and the haunts that Montgomery loved and named. Seeing Anne's island, readers can connect with their own first experience of Anne.

Anne of Green Gables has been an unusually enduring novel. Few books listed in Frank Mott's Golden Multitudes, an early study of American best-sellers, are still popular as Anne is over seventy-five years after publication.¹ Some of the classics like Huckleberry Finn still enjoy large sales, but these are assisted by their being staples in literature courses. Anne's popularity is based on no such extraneous factors—it sells well because generation after generation relates to the age-old conflicts that it embodies.

Statistics underline what a phenomenon Anne really is. In the ten years between its publication and 1919, when L. M. Montgomery sold her rights to it, Anne of Green Gables sold 311,273 copies. By the time that Montgomery sold the copyright to the Page Company (after a bitter lawsuit), she calculated in her “Book Sales Book” that Anne of Green Gables, as a single title exclusive of its sequels, had brought her ＄22,119.38. In a time and a place where, according to the Canadian census book for 1921, a woman could expect to earn around ＄300 a year from gainful employment—in fact, Montgomery notes in her journal entry of September 15, 1895, that she had earned a salary of ＄180 from her first year of school teaching in 1894—Anne did very well indeed. And of course her other books, including sequels to Anne, sold very well also: by 1921, according to her “Book Sales Book,” she had made a total of ＄97,552.56 from her writing, and that was only at mid-career.

L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables has enchanted other writers as well as the general public. Mark Twain was one of the first to praise the novel: “In Anne of Green Gables you will find the dearest and most moving and delightful child since the immortal Alice.” Writers as far afield as Astrid Lindgren, the Swedish author of the immensely popular stories about the little red-haired Pippi Longstocking, also tell of their affection for “Anne.” Lindgren says,

And then, of course Anne of Green Gables—oh, my unforgettable one, forever you will be riding the cart with Matthew Cuthbert beneath the flowering apple trees of Avonlea! How I lived with that girl! A whole summer my sisters and I played at Anne of Green Gables in the big sawdust heaps at the sawmill. I was Diana Barry, and the pond at the manure heap was the Dark Reflecting Waves.

(Cott 46)

Jean Little, the well-known contemporary Canadian author of children's books, says,

L. M. Montgomery was a major influence on me—I read and reread her books. During my childhood Anne Shirley was more than a beloved character in a book; she was a member of our family. … Whenever I was told I had a great imagination I was proud because it linked me with Anne.

That writers and children who have loved Anne of Green Gables never outgrow their love for the book is perhaps explained by Jane Cowan Fredeman, who sees in the “fairyland” that Montgomery's characters speak of “a metaphor both for the golden days of childhood and the font from which creative artists, separated from the common run, continue to draw their imaginative powers.” Montgomery speaks of this fairyland both in her journals and in the following quotation from The Story Girl:

There is such a place as fairyland—but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realize what they have lost and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth they must dwell in the common light of common day. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again, and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where once we sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and storytellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.

(165-66)

If writers of the last seventy-seven years have read and appreciated Montgomery, she herself was a writer steeped in the works of authors who came before her. Montgomery knew her Shakespeare very well—indeed, there are allusions to at least four of his plays in Anne—and she follows a pattern in Anne that Shakespeare uses in his plays: the novel begins with a situation of order, moves to disorder, and concludes with a superior new order. This is a traditional, simple, and perennially satisfying structure.

Avonlea, an invented name suggesting both Shakespeare's River Avon as well as King Arthur's Avalon, is Montgomery's mythical and peaceful little village in rural Prince Edward Island, in the early 1890s when the book begins.² It is a village filled with Scots-Presbyterians—staid, hard-working, emotionally suppressed and judgmental, but eminently good folk. Their lives are spent in the orderly transactions of the day and they have no interruptions from the outside world—until little Anne Shirley arrives. The entrance of an alien force into a settled community is a classic way to upset the status quo.

Little red-haired, freckle-faced, skinny Anne is an eleven-year-old waif from an orphanage. Sent by mistake to an elderly brother and sister, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who ordered a boy to help them on the farm, Anne displays every surface quality from which the community shrinks: in a place where children should be seen and not heard, she is a child with a never-ceasing tongue and a boundless imagination to keep it going; in a community that suppresses all signs of emotion or feeling, she is passionate and given to emotional outbursts. She comes from an unsettled past and longs to find a permanent home. As soon as she sets eyes on Avonlea she thinks her dreams have been answered—but then she discovers that the good folk of Avonlea do not want her.

L. M. Montgomery uses the “prepared entrance,” a typically Shakespearean technique, in order to arouse the reader's curiosity and to heighten the drama before Anne arrives. Other characters discuss what “the orphan” will be like before Anne arrives, and the dialogue, as well as the imagery and symbols, makes the readers anticipate that something threatening to the stability of the community is going to present itself when she appears.

The Cuthberts have a neighbor, the inestimable Mrs. Rachel Lynde, whose house overlooks the road that all must pass who enter or leave Avonlea. Mrs. Lynde is the watchdog and the conscience of Avonlea, as well as the prime mover of most of its religious-cum-social events. As the novel begins, Mrs. Lynde sits making a patchwork quilt (a symbol of order). Symbolically, even the natural landscape succumbs to order around Mrs. Lynde. A small brook which begins in “dark secrets of pool and cascade” becomes a quiet, well-conducted little stream by the time that it flows past the house and judgmental eyes of Mrs. Lynde. Even the names of the vegetation around her house suggest her overriding influence on the environment: “alders” and “ladies' eardrops” grow nearby whereas cherry trees and wild roses grow elsewhere in Avonlea. This Mrs. Lynde looks out of the window (a symbol of her restricted vision) to see the departing old Matthew Cuthbert, dressed in his best suit (a sign to her that something is wrong), rattling out of town in a buggy—an extraordinary event, for Matthew never goes anywhere. Mrs. Lynde, her solid two hundred pounds buttressed by the full weight of her prejudices and opinions, flies up the road to Marilla's house for an explanation about Matthew's journey. Her all-seeing eye refracts the entire small Scots-Presbyterian community: religion, order, and decorum prevail in all aspects of the residents' lives, and they all resist change.

Mrs. Lynde tells Marilla that taking in orphans is both foolish and dangerous. Images of disorder are connected with Anne, of course. Red hair has a long association with witchcraft and fairies in medieval literature. Anne's greenish-gray eyes and little pointed chin suggest kinship with Celtic fairies, and Marilla soon becomes suspicious of Anne's power to enchant. Anne seems partly magical because she uses her imagination as a passport to fairyland; and the fairyland provides either a haven from or a visionary vantage point from which to view the real world. Mrs. Lynde's forecast that she may become a demonic force—like other orphans she has heard about who have burned houses and put strychnine in wells—supports this imagery. Thus, it seems a foregone conclusion that Anne will be incorrigible when she has a temper outburst. During the rest of the book Anne gets into one scrape after another, but she also learns to conform to the social and behavioral expectations of Avonlea, and she slowly matures, taming down her passion and imagination, until she is a beloved member of the community at the end. In the process of growing up, she in turn exerts a strong humanizing influence on the whole community. Most important, she gives Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert a much fuller and happier life than they had before.

Montgomery carefully takes Anne through three stages of growth to maturity. First, she must win the affection of those in her immediate environment—Matthew, Marilla, and Mrs. Lynde. (Mrs. Lynde becomes Anne's advocate once she is won over.) Second, she must win the acceptance of the wider Avonlea community, including other children, parents, and visiting relatives. Third, Anne must mature and change enough that she will be capable of taking on the world outside Avonlea and of developing a mature love relationship with a young man. Her own needs for love and a home are so well met as a child that she in turn is able to give love not only to her surrogate parents, Matthew and Marilla, but also to the community, as a teacher. The unpromising little waif of chapter one, who was given to all kinds of excesses, grows into a balanced young woman whose imaginative inner life is guided by acceptable social values.

In the process of teaching the Avonlea folk to feel joy in living, to appreciate beauty in nature, and to express love to those held dear, Anne enlarges not only their experience of life, but also their philosophical concept of duty. When she enters Avonlea, the women enact their narrow concept of duty by keeping spotless houses, by sweeping their lawns until they are immaculate, by ensuring that their children are well catechized and do not play with undesirables, and by watching their husbands and neighbors to make sure that everyone does the proper thing. In her outspoken innocence, Anne debunks their sacred cows. Her comments serve as social commentary which gives the adults new perspectives, and, even more unstabilizing, makes them laugh. L. M. Montgomery liked laughter and disliked the attitude that found fun and laughter inimicable to religion. She was also very skeptical of the narrow way in which many people practiced religion, and she gives to the shy inarticulate Matthew one of the most important lines in the book. It at once sets events into motion and articulates a broad sense of duty that shames the others who call themselves religious. When Marilla asks what good a little girl would be to them, Matthew replies: “We might be some good to her” (31).

The collision between the child perspective and the adult one makes Anne of Green Gables a perennial favorite with children. There are few children who do not at some point feel thwarted by adult conservatism and restraints. The resolution appeals at a deep level to boys as well as to girls. They, too, need to move from excesses of rebellion and nonconformity towards acceptance of societal expectations. While Anne is primarily a book read by girls, both girls and boys can respond to Montgomery's representation of this, even though it is set in another time or place.

Or perhaps it is precisely because Anne is so firmly rooted in another time and place that it is so successful. If Anne rings true as an idyll of childhood, it may be because it comes right out of L. M. Montgomery's own world and childhood, replete with authentic emotions, attitudes, and social practices. L. M. Montgomery left ten volumes of personal journals which cover the entirety of her life, and these show how many elements in Anne have their origin in the psyche and actual experience of the child, Maud Montgomery.

First, L. M. Montgomery knew exactly what it was to feel like an orphan. Her own mother had died when Maud was twenty-one months old, and her father had gone West to remarry and to establish a new life. The baby Maud was left to be raised by her maternal grandparents, Alexander and Lucy Macneill. They had already raised six children of their own, and clearly found their granddaughter's liveliness and precociousness a taxing proposition. They were austere in their manner, inflexible in their beliefs, and harsh in their judgments. By contrast, little Maud was volatile, imaginative and independent-minded. They cared for her physical needs dutifully, but she grew up without any real emotional closeness or psychological support. Later in her life, L. M. Montgomery says that, although she knew that her grandparents had loved her, she regretted that they had been so poor at showing their love; she says that their words often bruised her childish feelings. They did not remember what it was like to be a child, nor did they have the flexibility to comprehend her sensitive nature. They simply demanded the behavior they wanted, and if she protested, they reminded her that she owed them obedience, since they were giving her a good home when her father wasn't.

Their method of discipline predictably made her feel abandoned and unwanted, like an orphan. She could therefore write with great feeling about how Anne wanted a place where she belonged, a place that was her own, one where she would be loved and valued. It is significant that the Matthew and Marilla of the novel are the age of Maud's own grandparents and that at the beginning of the book they obviously share with her grandparents the quality of being emotionally remote. In real life, Maud's grandparents grew more rigid with age, but in Anne Matthew and Marilla grow younger and more human as the result of their contact with Anne. The adult Montgomery also wrote in her journal on January 2, 1905, that her aunts and uncles arrogated to themselves the right to chastise her—a right that she thought belonged only to her grandparents—and that her lack of parents to protect her against the detailing of her faults in family conclave left her with a permanent sense of insecurity.

L. M. Montgomery lived in a time and a community where people believed that children should be seen and not heard. Children's feelings were simply not considered important. Montgomery knew well what it was like to have adults discuss her as if she were not present, and the well-known scene in which Mrs. Lynde tells Marilla that Anne is ugly and has “hair as red as carrots” (69), while Anne stands listening under her disapproving gaze, is written with such force because Montgomery had experienced similar situations. In real life, Maud would never have dared stamp her foot like Anne and shout “I hate you—I hate you—I hate you!” It must have given her an enormous emotional release to do so in fiction.

Montgomery also knew what it was like to be forced to apologize to someone without feeling the remorse attendant upon the apology. Many children have been in the same situation—if they don't apologize there will be no dessert, no overnight friends, no trip to the park—and thus insincere apologies are wrung from them. Anne wins friends among young readers because she turns the table on adults with her apology to Mrs. Lynde: her apology is supposed to be a humiliation, but she transforms it into a joy. She so loves stringing together impressive sounding words that she gets caught up in her own rhetoric and gives an apology which is, in fact, a splendid dramatic performance. Marilla is left in the impossibly awkward position of feeling that she should scold Anne because Anne has apologized too well.

Such are the types of psychological situations around which L. M. Montgomery builds Anne. Like Anne and all children, whether orphans or not, Maud wanted to be taken seriously and loved for what she was, not for what she should have been. In real life Maud Montgomery was close to what Anne is—a very bright and temperamental child who reads on the sly and loves big words and purple passages. Thus, bookish, bright children usually recognize themselves in Anne. And like Anne, Maud was also uncommonly sensitive to the beauty of the landscape, and she gave things names just as Anne does: “The White Way of Delight,” “The Lake of Shining Waters,” and “Lovers Lane” were real places in Maud's personal landscape that have embedded themselves in the psychic landscape of countless children the world over.

Maud looked out on the same landscape that her grandparents did, but she saw a different world. Their world was a practical place where one got on with the serious business of living. Like Anne, the little Maud in the journals sees a world covered with romance, and peopled with fairies, nymphs, and beautiful heroines. The emotional isolation forced on her by her grandparents' remoteness drove her into herself, into whatever books she could get hold of, and into creating her own imaginative world. By the time she was writing Anne in 1905, she was thirty and living a very lonely life caring for an eighty-one-year-old grandmother who was becoming senile. She knew, as Matthew warns Anne, that people must not give up all their “romance”: to deny one's imaginative faculties and batten down to a totally practical existence is to kill one's soul. Montgomery believed that the words one puts on the world to some extent create the reality or, to be more precise, the world that people perceive as reality. Anne says that she has read that “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” but that she has never been able to believe “a rose would be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.” This theme runs throughout the book, as well as in Montgomery's journals. It is only through Anne's imagination that she introduces a new vitality to all of Avonlea. She looks at its landscape and people through fresh eyes, finds new words to describe it, and creates a new reality for the people who live there. Though only a child, Anne plays the role of an artist in a culture: she gives people a new vision of themselves and a myth through which to live. Her purple passages and mellifluous phrases make them smile at first, but they eventually adjust their flat colorless vision until they see some of the color and glory that she showers over things.

In addition to its themes, many of the actual incidents in Anne also have their origin in fact. For instance, Anne wants fashionable puffy sleeves to be like the other girls; in real life, little Maud wanted to go barefoot to school like the other children, but had to wear proper button-shoes. Anne develops a fierce hatred for a boy who called her “Carrots”; Maud wrote a poem about a boy, entitling it “The Boy with the Auburn Hair,” and this classmate was angry at her for weeks. Anne pours liniment into a cake instead of flavoring; a friend of Maud's did the same. And the list goes on and on. When Montgomery herself talks about the relationship between fact and fiction in her journals, she points out many of the superficial similarities between events and places in her own life and those in Anne of Green Gables. What she does not talk about, and perhaps did not even see, is that she bears so many psychological similarities to Anne. Yet, it is the fictional capturing of her own tensions—those between age and youth and between personal freedom and the restrictions of society—that fuel the fire that makes Anne still glow.

It took a child of great sensitivity, a woman with a near total recall of childhood (but helped, of course, by journals kept since she was young), and a mature writer with unusual narrative skill to make Anne of Green Gables the classic that it is. Had L. M. Montgomery lived a happier, fuller life, the tensions which created the book might not have surfaced. And had she had less sense of the comedy that occurs when human beings take themselves too seriously, or lose sight of the fitness of things, the book would be less charming.

Humor is one of the features of Anne of Green Gables which helps endear it to generation after generation. The particular skill of Montgomery lies in the fact that no person or age group is diminished either through her humor or her satire. The two chief characters, Anne and Marilla, represent extremes in both cases. Anne is an uncommonly impulsive child, and Marilla is an unusually strict and practical adult. Children can always identify with Anne because they see some of their own characteristics and feelings in her many faceted character; they can likewise identify traits in Marilla that they have seen in other adults. Likewise, adults find part of their lost childhood in Anne, and they can sympathize with Marilla's position. What Montgomery does not do is to play off either the child's or the adult's views against each other to the point that either is made to look ridiculous. She instead lets them co-exist in a humorous counterpoint, until each wears the other down and the two points of view begin to coalesce. As this happens, the comedy in the book lessens and a more serious mood take over.

When the novel begins, Anne's extremes are those of a child who acts primarily by impulse and feelings. Marilla's are those of an adult who has extremely rigid beliefs about how a child should act—beliefs which she probably derived from her own childhood and which have been reinforced by the strict community in which she lives. Anne is a hyper-excitable child and her tongue has no trouble keeping up with her brain. But her overblown diction sounds ridiculous in plain old Avonlea, in Marilla's spare and well-swept kitchen. Anne prattles on, to Marilla, paragraph after paragraph, in this vein:

The world doesn't seem such a howling wilderness as it did last night. I'm so glad it's a sunshiny morning. But I like rainy mornings real well, too. All sorts of mornings are interesting, don't you think? You don't know what's going to happen through the day, and there's so much scope for the imagination. But I'm glad it's not rainy today because it's easier to be cheerful and to bear up under affliction on a sunshiny day. I feel that I have a good deal to bear up under. It's all very well to read about sorrows and imagine yourself living through them heroically, but it's not so nice when you really come to have them, is it?

Marilla retorts, “For pity's sake hold your tongue. You talk entirely too much for a little girl” (36). But Anne does not hold her tongue—she is irrepressible. She goes on talking about trees and flowers. She christens a geranium “Bonny” so that it won't have its feelings hurt by being nameless (like an orphan), and she names the blooming cherry tree outside her window the “Snow Queen.” Marilla can only mutter, “I never in all my life saw or heard anything equal to her,” as she beats a retreat down to the cellar after potatoes.

Anne's language is derived from the same sources as the youthful Maud Montgomery's: from nineteenth-century sermons, from “Bible literature,” from the King James Bible itself, from women's magazines, from popular novels and poetry, and from classical writers like Shakespeare. Montgomery had a liking for epigrammatic phrases and mellifluous passages. She memorized with great ease and let echoes of her wide reading flow as allusions into her writing. Furthermore, she lived in an age and a culture where the memorization of set pieces was encouraged. Not only did children recite them at school concerts, but literate and well-read adults, such as Montgomery's relatives, recited them to each other in social gatherings. Anne had no trouble speaking endlessly and glibly out the pastiche of phrases, images and cadences from the religious and popular literature reverberating in her creator's memory bank. The result is comic—Anne's verbal excesses, so inappropriate to her everyday life, are clearly traumatic for the ears of practical, plain Marilla, who is a woman of limited experience and narrow sensibilities.

Many of the elements of human nature and religious practice that L. M. Montgomery satirizes are those which were also satirized by Mark Twain. But there are notable differences. Twain had a much more romanticized view of childhood than did Montgomery. He depicted childhood as a time of innocence which was in contrast with the rigid and often corrupt adult society. Twain did not attempt to reconcile the two: Huck merely “lit out” for new territory at the end of Huckleberry Finn. By contrast, Montgomery's adult society has its share of selfish, nosey, and hypocritical people, but her children are not “noble savages”: they are filled with imperfections. But faults that she has notwithstanding, a child like Anne infuses her community with warmth and life. There is accommodation operating between the child's and the adult's world: Anne has too much imagination and the town has too little. But in the process of bridling her imagination, her warmth and fanciful flights revitalize all she associates with. This gives Anne of Green Gables a realistic element that Huckleberry Finn does not have.

Like Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, Montgomery satirizes the way that religion is interpreted and practiced in a small Presbyterian community. One of Marilla's initial shocks is in the discovery that Anne doesn't pray regularly. Anne's explanation horrifies Marilla: “Mrs. Thomas told me that God made my hair red on purpose, and I've never cared about Him since” (54). Prompted to pray “properly,” Anne declaims her prayer with rhetorical flourishes and concludes with a sincere if inappropriate closing to God: “Please let me be good-looking when I grow up. I remain. Yours respectfully, Anne Shirley” (55). She immediately asks Marilla if she did the prayer right and adds: “I could have made it more flowery if I'd had a little time to think it over” (56). Marilla concludes, indeed, that this child is “next door to a perfect heathen,” and she resolves to begin Anne's religious education. This consists of teaching Anne always to tell the truth and to go to Sunday School. Later, when Marilla asks Anne how she has liked Sunday School, Anne is only too truthful: “I didn't like it a bit. It was horrid.” She goes on to explain that she has nevertheless behaved very well through it all, imagining all sorts of splendid things instead of actually listening to the minister's sermon, which droned on and on. When Marilla tells her that she should have been listening to the prayer, Anne protests, “But he [the minister] wasn't talking to me. He was talking to God and he didn't seem to be much interested in it, either. I think he thought God was too far off to make it worthwhile” (86). This is satire as deft as Twain's on the same subject. Montgomery has already shown how a child's sincere prayer, delivered with rhetorical flourishes, seems insincere to an adult; next she shows how a highly ritualized adult prayer seems insincere to a perceptive child. In her journals, Montgomery speaks of her dislike of the institution of public prayer, and in Anne of Green Gables she clearly satirizes it with enjoyment. It is interesting to reflect that at the very moment she is writing Anne, she is being courted by the minister whom she will later marry in spite of considerable misgivings.

On a deeper level, Montgomery gently satirizes the incongruity between religious teaching and practice. Avonlea is full of good religious folk. We learn in chapter one that the worthy Mrs. Rachel Lynde, conscience of all the community and capable manager of her own and others' affairs, is the “strongest prop of the … Foreign Missions Auxiliary” (2). In the latter function, Mrs. Lynde may devote tremendous energy to helping send missionaries to save the heathen in China, but her charity does not reach to saving the “heathen” at home. She cautions Marilla not to take in an orphan once she finds out that they have decided to: “You don't know a single thing about him nor what his disposition is like nor what sort of parents he had nor how he's likely to turn out” (18). The community is not only uncharitable towards orphans, but it is deeply prejudiced against the French and a lot of other groups, including those who don't come from “good families.” Americans, Germans, and Irish are all objects of prejudice in Avonlea. Montgomery herself shared some of the prejudices in real life, but she also saw their innate hypocrisy, and hence their potential for satire in literature.

Likewise, Montgomery enjoys poking fun at the Presbyterian tendency to see the black side of everything and to forecast doom and gloom. For instance, when Anne first looks out the bedroom window at a beautiful world which includes a tree in bloom, her eyes sweep over the whole scene and she exclaims: “Oh, isn't it wonderful?” Marilla, seeing only the tree and its blooms, but not its beauty, replies: “It's a big tree and it blooms great, but the fruit don't amount to much never—small and wormy” (34). According to Montgomery's diaries, taking a dim and negative view of things was a widespread trait in her Cavendish community.

Other elements of small town behavior also come under attack. Montgomery is skillful at showing how people watch each other and sit in judgment on others' actions. The opening scene with Mrs. Lynde showing her curiosity over Matthew's departure is a tour de force in caricaturing a busybody. Mrs. Lynde's forceful personality, and her disapproval of any actions taken without her advice, create much of the tension and the comedy in the first part of the book.

There is subtle satire on the ways in which Rachel and Marilla dominate their respective menfolk, Thomas Lynde and Matthew Cuthbert. Thomas is merely known as “Rachel Lynde's husband” (2), but Matthew, the shyest and most inarticulate man in Avonlea, manages to hold his own and get his way: he just won't argue or talk. Marilla finds this exasperating: “I wish he was like other men and would talk things out. A body could answer back then and argue him into reason. But what's to be done with a man who just looks?” (39). The internal ironies in such speeches probably escape most children, but they give the novel a depth that adults enjoy. Nor would many children note how the characters manipulate and interact with each other, but adults can appreciate that too. The richness of the novel is responsible for the fact that so many children who loved Anne reread it again as adults and say that they enjoy it each time.

Some adults who reread Anne feel that Anne's decision to stay with Marilla and accept her “duty” at the end of the novel presents a poor role model for contemporary girls. Without debating the question of whether society is richer or poorer for our changing attitudes towards the care of the elderly, or determining whether any evaluation of literature on the basis of the role models that it provides is another form of didacticism, one can still justify the conclusion of Anne of Green Gables for many reasons.

First, Anne must choose to stay with Marilla at Green Gables because the themes developed throughout the novel as well as its overall structure demand it. If Matthew did not die, and if Anne did not have to make the choice between duty to Marilla and self-fulfillment in an outside career, the novel would lack the power that comes from its thematic resolution. Montgomery builds the novel around Anne's human needs and her sense of place: when young, she needs a home and she needs love. Matthew and Marilla's gift of love to her as a child makes her into a whole person as an adult, and her maturity can only be illustrated by showing that she can reciprocate, giving the gift of love to them, and a home to Marilla. This ending may appear sentimental to some people, but it is both thematically and structurally consistent.

Second, Anne's choice is realistic because the novel is a period piece and her decision was inevitable in the context of the 1890s in rural P.E.I. Life sometimes forces choices on people which put them in “damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't” situations, and when Montgomery herself (just like Anne) gave up the possibility of a career to keep house for her aging grandmother, she did it knowing that she really had no choice: if she abandoned her grandmother, her own conscience would give her no peace. But if she stayed with her grandmother, life might indeed pass her by.³

It is worth emphasizing, however, that L. M. Montgomery does not make Anne's choice final: it does not limit her future. In the final page of the novel, Anne sits at her bedroom window, just as Mrs. Lynde sat at her window as the novel opened. Whereas Mrs. Lynde saw an image of disorder on the road beyond, Anne sees “the bend in the road,” an image representing the unknown elements in the future. She does not feel alarm, as did Mrs. Lynde, because Anne knows she is equal to whatever the future may hold. “The bend in the road” is a powerful and poetic symbol and those concerned with role-modeling might well argue that Anne provides the model for delaying gratification in the interests of duty and responsibility.

At any rate, it is not fitting that we censure historical novels (or domestic novels with a definite historical setting) for accurately reflecting the time in which they are set. Instead, classroom teachers and parents can discuss with young people how attitudes and social practices have changed. Left to their own devices, young people reading a novel like Anne of Green Gables today are likely to find the stable family life and caring community that it presents a consoling alternative to the descriptions in many contemporary adolescent novels of lonely children who live in single parent or nuclear family situations and who face life in a disorderly society. Like the child Maud Montgomery, as well as later writers like Astrid Lindgren and Jean Little, some contemporary children may anchor themselves in life through their imaginative friends in books.

Whatever readers in the past and readers in the future will make of Anne of Green Gables, the novel has proved to be a classic in the fullest sense: it operates on many levels simultaneously. It is a simple story about a child's most basic needs for a home, love, friendship, and acceptance. It is a complex psychological study of the way adults and children think, act, and interact. It is a period study about a rural Canadian community in the 1890s, and, as such, is filled with sociological and cultural realism. Last, it is a novel utilizing acute observation, high comedy, gentle satire, and some of the conventions of romance. Anne of Green Gables operates successfully on many levels from the simple narrative to the mythic, and provides a rich literary experience for readers of all ages. It is not a novel that people outgrow.

Notes

1. Anne of Green Gables is classed with the “overall best-sellers.” Mott states that Anne of Green Gables had sold between 800,000 and 900,000 copies by 1947. To be a best-seller, a book had to sell in numbers equal to 1 percent of the population of the continental U.S.A. in the decade in which it was published.

2. Using references to clothing, furniture, and social and political events, Virginia Careless, a social historian with the British Columbia Provincial Museum, has established the dates of the Anne stories.

3. At his death, L. M. Montgomery's grandfather left the house that he and his wife had lived in all their lives (where they raised Lucy Maud) to his son, John, with the provision that his wife be allowed to live out her natural life there. John did not get on well with his mother, and he tried to force her out of the house so that his own grown son could live there. Because of the constant pressure to oust her grandmother from the house, L. M. Montgomery could not consider hiring someone to live with and care for her grandmother.

Works Cited

Cott, Jonathan. “The Astonishment of Being.” New Yorker (28 Feb. 1983): 46+.

Davies, Robertson. “The Creator of Anne.” Peterborough [Ontario, Canada] Examiner, 2 May 1942: 4.

Fredeman, Jane Cowan. “The Land of Lost Content: The Use of Fantasy in L. M. Montgomery's Novels.” L. M. Montgomery: An Assessment. Ed. John R. Sorfleet. Guelph, ON: Canadian Children's Press, 1976. 60-70.

Katsura, Yuko. “Red-haired Anne in Japan.” Canadian Children's Literature 34 (1984): 57-60.

Little, Jean. Personal Interview. 1 June 1985.

Montgomery, L. M. Anne of Green Gables. 1908. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1968.

———. “Book Sales Book.” L. M. Montgomery Collection. U of Guelph, Guelph, ON. (A bound ledger in which Montgomery kept records of all her sales statistics from book titles until her death.)

———. The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery, Volume I: 1889-1910. Ed. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1985.

———. The Story Girl. 1910. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1966.

Mott, Frank. Golden Multitudes. New York: Bowker, 1947.

Rubio, Mary. “Satire, Realism, and Imagination in Anne of Green Gables.” L. M. Montgomery: An Assessment. Ed. John R. Sorfleet. Guelph, ON: Canadian Children's Press, 1976. 27-36.

Russell, Ruth Weber, D. W. Russell, and Rea Wilmshurst. Lucy Maud Montgomery: A Preliminary Bibliography. Waterloo, ON: U of Waterloo, 1986.

Sobkowska, Krystyna. “The Reception of the Anne of Green Gables Series by Lucy Maud Montgomery in Poland.” Diss. U of Lodz (Poland), 1982-83.

Twain, Mark. Letter to L. M. Montgomery. 3 Oct. 1908. L. M. Montgomery Collection. U of Guelph, Guelph, ON.

Wachowicz, Barbara. “L. M. Montgomery: At Home in Poland.” Canadian Children's Literature 46 (1987): 7-36.