[In the following essay, Santelmann explores the details of women's lives that are portrayed in Anne of Green Gables and the ways in which the novel advances the female literary tradition.]

In A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter discusses the lack of a female literary tradition, and she begins by quoting a male critic—G. H. Lewes. In an 1852 essay entitled “The Lady Novelist” Lewes remarked, “hitherto … the literature of women … has been too much a literature of imitation. To write as men write is the aim and besetting sin of women; to write as women is the real task they have to perform” (qtd. by Showalter: 3). The problem, says Showalter, is not so much that women fail to write about their own experiences, but that they seldom consider that these experiences “might transcend the personal and local, assume a collective form in art, and reveal a history” (4).

Lewes' calling for women to write about their own experiences is in itself evidence of the way that women's writing has failed to become part of literary history. By 1852, the year of Lewes' essay, English women novelists such as Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë had all provided novels containing details about women's lives from a woman's perspective. Lewes had obviously not valued the specifics within these texts. Even Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, passes over the particulars about women which these novels contain when she says:

What one wants, I thought—and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it?—is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; what was her house like, had she a room to herself; did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant?

(A Room of One's Own 47)

Not until feminist critics began to examine the broader spectrum of women's writings and to give works outside of the major canon some serious attention have the details within the texts of these novels been seen as transcendent and part of a collective history. Lucy Maud Montgomery is one of the writers to receive such attention; her entire body of work but especially her enormously popular first novel, Anne of Green Gables, is being given a great deal of critical examination.¹ It has proven to be a work which can survive exploration of both its quality and its significance; indeed, it is through this novel that I believe Montgomery can be most advantageously placed within the Anglo-American female literary tradition.

In Anne, Montgomery demonstrates her ability to “write as women write,” as she records and observes women's experiences within a specific community. What was her house like? Who did the cooking? Did she have a servant? Woolf's questions are the very things we learn about women's lives as we learn the larger story. Montgomery both identifies and calls into question the beliefs and prejudices of the community she portrays, and it is part of the genius of the book that she places Anne in so specific a time and place that the reader experiences the daily lives of the people, particularly the women, as the author develops the themes which have made the work endure.

Through the variety of characters within the novel, Montgomery shows us how the women of this small Canadian community ordered their world, how they gained and exercised power over it. Rooted firmly in the personal and local, Anne of Green Gables is more than a catalogue of the social history of Prince Edward Island during the late nineteenth century; it is an exploration of a number of themes of special significance—to mature men and women as well as to adolescent girls. I have chosen three of these themes as a focus for placing Montgomery within the female literary tradition. They are community values, intelligence and learning, and the power of female speech.

The significance of community is explored by Professor Susan Drain in her essay, “Community and the individual in Anne of Green Gables: the Meaning of Belonging.” Drain sees Montgomery's development of the theme of community as a series of contrasts between interdependence and tension. This is true for the adolescent Anne, seeking to grow up and “become her own person” (120). Montgomery also uses this theme to dramatize and comment upon the values of the community she portrays, achieving the larger goal through her choice of narrative events and through her use of the narrator.

The voice we remember from the novel is the voice of Anne, but the voice we hear first is the voice of the omniscient narrator. This narrator knows the inmost thoughts, the major characteristics of everyone in Avonlea, and tells us what we need to know to understand the values of the community. She sets the tone of the novel with her wry description of Mrs. Rachel Lynde. We learn not only about Mrs. Lynde's insatiable curiosity, but about her formidable skill as a housekeeper and the value of that accomplishment in establishing her reputation within Avonlea. The narrator tells us,

There are plenty of people in Avonlea and out of it, who can attend closely to their neighbor's business by dint of neglecting their own, but Mrs. Rachel Lynde was one of those capable creatures who can manage their own concerns and those of other folks into the bargain. She was a notable housewife; her work was always done; she ran the Sewing Circle, helped run the Sunday School and was the strongest prop of the Church Aid Society and the Foreign Missions Auxiliary.

(1-2)

The community value of good housekeeping runs through the novel. Marilla is an excellent housekeeper as well, and when she agrees to keep Anne, she sees her duty toward Anne as twofold: to teach her religion, and to teach her to keep a well-run house. In the housekeeping events we find particularity of both place and class. The heroines in English novels don't talk about learning to cook or clean. Washing the dishes and scrubbing the floors, baking and preserving are the work of servants. Jane Austen's most memorable fictional mother, Mrs. Bennet, is careful to announce that her daughters know nothing about cooking; they are gentlewomen. Acceptance of domestic chores as an honourable responsibility demonstrates that the women of Avonlea are not English gentlewomen, even though the settled community of PEI likes to think of itself as civilized in the English manner. In Avonlea, respectable women do their own work, and Marilla does for Anne what a good mother in an agricultural community would do for her daughter.

Anne acknowledges her shortcomings and accepts Marilla's authority in all things to do with the house. With respect to Marilla's second duty, to teach her religion, Anne has something to say. The narrative events which centre around the church reveal what the community of Avonlea considers spiritual values. Anne goes by herself to church. That she adorns her hat with real flowers, in contrast to the artificial flowers of the other girls' hats, implies that these events will set up an opposition between the real and the artificial in matters to do with church. Anne's choice of the real does not set well within that community.

Anne describes to Marilla both the church service and the Sunday school and makes distinctions between faith and façade, between “saying prayers” and “praying”:

‘The sermon was awfully long too. I suppose the minister had to match it to the text. I didn't think he was a bit interesting. The trouble with him seems to be that he hasn't enough imagination. I didn't listen to him very much. I just let my thoughts run on and I thought of the most surprising things.’

Marilla felt helplessly that all this should be sternly reproved, but she was hampered by the undeniable fact that some of the things Anne had said, especially about the minister's sermons and Mr. Bell's prayers, were what she herself had really thought deep down in her heart for years, but had never given expression to. It almost seemed to her that those secret, unuttered, critical thoughts had suddenly taken visible and accusing shape and form in the person of this outspoken morsel of neglected humanity.

(80-1)

Marilla's recognition of the truth of Anne's remarks convinces the reader that Marilla shares Anne's honesty of vision, even though the two are so unlike in other ways; Marilla is a kindred spirit in things that truly matter.

The adoption narrative portrays a number of community values. The fortunate mistake in transmitting the message for a girl instead of a boy overshadows the casual nature of so important an act. For all of its casualness, however, it is a credible event and part of North American social history. Both American and English Home Societies (keepers of orphanages at that time) sent orphaned or abandoned children to America. The rationale for the Home Societies was the same as Marilla's: the children were to be trained properly and to be given a Christian education.²

The rationale which Marilla offers for not checking out the choice discloses prejudice against the French-speaking Canadians. If she and Matthew don't take the orphan, they'll have to use a French-Canadian boy to help. The orphan boy they plan to get from the orphanage, she tells Mrs. Lynde, is an English-speaking Island boy. “He can't be much different from ourselves” (7). This prejudice of the English speakers against the French population occurs again when Anne puts liniment in the cake. Marilla announces it not fit to feed anybody, not even [the French-Canadian] Jerry Buote. It surfaces again when Anne nurses Minnie May Barry through the croup:

Young Mary Joe, a buxom broad-faced French girl from the Creek, whom Mrs. Barry had engaged to stay with the children during her absence, was helpless and bewildered, quite incapable of thinking what to do, or doing it if she thought of it.

(139)

The particularity of the prejudice and the provinciality of Avonlea is one of Montgomery's achievements, for through that particularity we find significant implied commentary. When Diana visits Anne at the famous tea party, she recounts the doings at the Avonlea school, since at that time Anne has given up going to school under Mr. Phillips. Montgomery uses the quarrels of the children to reflect the quarrels of their elders:

Sam Boulter had ‘sassed’ Mr. Phillips in class and Mr. Phillips whipped him and Sam's father came down to the school and dared Mr. Phillips to lay a hand on one of his children again, and Marie Andrews had a new red hood and a blue crossover with tassels on it and the airs she put on about it were perfectly sickening; and Lizzie Wright didn't speak to Mamie Wilson because Mamie Wilson's grown-up sister had cut out Lizzie Wright's grown-up sister with her beau …

(120)

Diana is a child, and her reaction to the red hood and crossover tassels implies the nature of the adults' reactions as well, but the use of humour does not soften the perspective.

The death of Matthew, and along with it, the demise of Anne's immediate hopes of college, introduce the community value of taking responsibility. Here we find no wry implications by the omniscient narrator, only Marilla's matter of fact recounting of the bleakness that faces the old when the money is gone and health is failing. Montgomery does not linger on these realities; nevertheless, their introduction serves notice that the adult world Anne is about to enter will not be as comfortable or consoling as the sheltered world she has found at Green Gables.

The second theme of importance is that of intelligence and education. We learn of Anne's intelligence at first meeting. The little eleven-year-old's thought patterns have been formed by wide and random reading in the romantic poetry of the nineteenth century. These are reading habits of a child of unusual intelligence. Those who are “taken with” Anne's strange way of speaking recognize her intelligence, and they value this quality in Anne. Marilla is attracted to Anne because she seems “smart … and quick to learn” (52).

A love of reading is not a universal community value. Diana's mother is not overly fond of books and does not want Diana to read too much. Mrs. Lynde, ever opinionated, believes that too much education is unhealthy, and she expresses relief when Anne, in the final chapter, decides to forego Queens. The Pye family, ignorant and vulgar, do not educate their daughters, since they have enough money to support them without further education. Thus we discover who are kindred spirits and who are not by their attitude toward both intelligence and learning.

Other women authors besides Montgomery have explored this theme: the Brontës wrote passionately about their thirst for knowledge; George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver yearned for the education wasted on brother Tom but denied to her because she was a girl.

Montgomery's American contemporaries and immediate predecessors, although often working with similar settings, do not emphasize the value of education or intelligence. Sarah Orne Jewett is an example of an American author with whom Montgomery shares similarities of time and place. Both Montgomery and Jewett portrayed the life of women in small, coastal villages at the turn of the century. Jewett makes no mention of their education. Her novella, The Country of the Pointed Firs, describes the authority enjoyed by the women in a Maine fishing village, but the two women, mother and daughter, who figure prominently in the novella, derive their authority and power from intuition and female lore, not traditional learning. Her short story “A White Heron,” portrays a sensitive, imaginative girl, Sylvia [“Sylvey”], who, like Anne, is being raised by an older woman on an isolated farm. Nature is a source of wonder and enjoyment for the child. Like Anne, Sylvey has a “pale face and shining gray eyes” (164), but Jewett's theme concerns maintaining the pristine wilderness and Sylvey's childhood innocence—keeping the adult world out. Sylvey, as her name tells us, is a child of the forest; Anne a child of community, where education is essential if one is to function successfully.

American women writers were working with issues different from Montgomery's, as their fiction indicates. Although in both Canada and the United States, education through the eighth grade was available to both boys and girls, the attitude toward education and learning differed. Barbara Welter describes the predominant nineteenth-century American attitude toward education in her essay, “Anti-Intellectualism and the American Woman”:

Nineteenth-century textbooks stressed masculine authority and feminine submission and inferiority. Female academies trained her not for the learned professions but to be the companion of her husband. … The pragmatic function of female education was stressed by Charles Butler in An American Lady. ‘The chief end to be proposed in cultivating the understanding of women is to prepare them for the practical purposes of life.’

(Dimity Convictions 75)

American women authors rebelled against this assumption of masculine authority but seemed to accept American pragmatism. [Not until the 1930s does Laura Ingalls Wilder write about the country school teacher at the turn of the century, but Wilder's sensibility is different. She writes about teaching, but not about learning.]

It is Lucy Maud Montgomery's concern with education along with a sense of joy in the life of the mind which provides a point of comparison with the English female literary tradition. She foreshadows the concerns expressed by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own, whose sentiments she anticipates by about a quarter of a century.

The account of Anne's schooling also provides some social history of the education available to women at that time. In 1908, country schooling was the norm for both boys and girls, since farming was the customary occupation. Local school boards determined all matters of schooling. Quality varied with the teacher, who was hired at times for reasons that had little to do with teaching ability. Anne experienced both good teachers and bad. We also learn the specifics of their school activities, and the subjects they studied. After being promoted to the fifth class, Anne and Gilbert were “allowed to begin studying the elements of ‘the branches’—by which Latin, geometry, French, and algebra were meant” (133). Montgomery is referring to “branches” of the quadrivium and trivium of the medieval curriculum, which focused on the Seven Liberal Arts. This is not the education needed to raise potatoes, yet the important people in Anne's life, the ones whose opinions matter, see this kind of learning as important for a young girl, just as much as for the boy, Gilbert.

Along with intelligence comes responsibility to develop it. Anne is a scholar:

Mr. Phillips might not be a very good teacher; but a pupil so inflexibly determined on learning as Anne was could hardly escape making progress under any kind of teacher.

(133)

Her determination to excel contrasts with what has been written about the contemporaneous American sensibility. Welter quotes a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier which is especially appropriate as a contrast to what Anne was doing in her school days:

“IN SCHOOL DAYS”

He saw her lift her eyes; he felt
The soft hand's light caressing
And heard the tremble of her voice
As if a fault confessing.
‘I'm sorry that I spelt the word
I hate to go above you,
Because,’—the brown eyes lower fell,—
‘Because, you see, I love you.’

(qtd. by Welter, 75-6)

Anne studies hard because she is “determined not to be outdone in any class by Gilbert Blythe” (133). For his part, he admires her intelligence and her competitive spirit, and at novel's end is verified as a worthy suitor through the question he puts to Anne: “You are going to keep up your studies, aren't you? So am I” (299).

The theme of the assumption and exercise of power through speech is one of the most interesting themes in the novel. Speech is the coin of power, and women demonstrate their possession of it by the freedom and frankness of their speech. While Mrs. Lynde prides “herself on always speaking her mind” (6), her husband is not even granted his own name; we learn what Mrs. Barry is like from hearing her talk, but Mr. Barry is never heard from; we do not hear a word of the minister's sermon, only Anne's and Marilla's opinions about it. In the schoolhouse Mr. Phillips' few words are foolish; Miss Stacy's wise and memorable. Gilbert Blythe, after uttering that one fateful word, tries to speak, but he is never listened to until Anne meets him at the bend in the road, and by her apology, gives him permission to speak.

That the men do not speak does not mean that they have no power; Matthew, for example, displays what Cindy Carlton-Ford, in her 1987 dissertation, Conversation, Gender, and Power, has labelled “the power of tacit preference” (7). Men's power, and their exercise of it, lie outside the concerns of this novel. The adult women, comfortable in their community roles, demonstrate their authority by speaking their minds.

Anne is a child, and her speech functions in a different, more significant way. It is through her speech that she achieves her goals. When Anne gets off the train at Bright River, she is without overt power—a child, with no family background, or friends, or any adult to oversee her safety. She is, in fact, even more vulnerable than she knows because she is a girl.

She does have the gift of powerful speech, however, as the reader, and Matthew, quickly learn. Her response to the natural beauty of Prince Edward Island changes what had been a familiar landscape into an aesthetic experience for Matthew; her descriptions of her imaginings, her openness about her hopes and fears, show him what a lonely child she is. She is living for the most part within her imagination, a natural response to the life she has led. Montgomery captures the naïvete and impulsiveness of childhood in Anne's romantic notions, the derivative vocabulary of a voracious reader, the tenaciousness of a fantasy life which a child so emotionally deprived would have sought refuge in. She has had no love, no companionship, only the world of nature as an outlet for her aesthetic longings.

Anne reveals all of this as she chatters on to shy and silent Matthew, altering Matthew's perception of his surroundings and winning him over. It is because he encourages her to talk that she decides they are “going to get along together fine” (15):

It's such a relief to talk when one wants to and not be told that children should be seen and not heard. I've had that said to me a million times if I have once. And people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas, you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?

(15)

Marilla sees the power of Anne's speech at once: “Matthew Cuthbert, I believe that child has bewitched you!” (27). When Anne reveals her longing for a home: “You don't know how delighted I was. I couldn't sleep at all last night for joy” (24), and her grief at being rejected: “How can you call it a good night when you know it must be the very worst night I've ever had?” (26) Marilla herself cannot resist, and thus Anne gains the home she needs.

Anne's speech changes not only her life but the lives of the people she meets. When she first describes the particulars of her imaginary life, Marilla scolds her.

‘Do you never imagine things different from what they really are?’ asked Anne, wide-eyed.

‘No.’

‘Oh’! Anne drew a long breath, ‘Miss—Marilla, how much you miss!’

(54)

The unguarded response penetrates to the centre of Marilla's experience—how much she has missed, how much of her imagination has been closed off. Marilla understands it, too, and her transformation is underway.

Anne's ability to use speech to defend herself also bears comparison to Austen's and Brontë's most well-known heroines, Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre. The young Jane confronts Mrs. Reed, who has ultimate power over her: “People think you are a good woman but you are hard-hearted. You are deceitful” (Jane Eyre 31).

Anne also confronts and counterattacks the powerful Rachel Lynde. Rachel has previously criticised the decision to adopt an orphan, and Marilla has responded carefully, but when Mrs. Rachel launches a direct attack on Anne's sense of self worth through her patronizing directives and derogatory remarks, Anne is not careful at all:

How dare you call me skinny and ugly? How dare you say I'm freckled and redheaded! You are a rude, impolite, unfeeling woman.

How would you like to have such things said about you? How would you like to be told you are fat and clumsy and probably hadn't a spark of imagination in you?

(63-4)

Her establishment of self, along with her willingness to apologize, enables her to forge a genuine connection with Rachel Lynde as both acknowledge their faults to one another and set things straight between them.

In her forceful retaliation against unwelcome male attention she resembles Elizabeth Bennet, who puts the high-born Darcy in his place. The diction is formal but the emotions are as heated as Anne's when Elizabeth accuses Darcy of interfering in her sister's romance with Mr. Bingley:

I have every reason in the world to think ill of you. No motive can excuse the unjust and ungenerous part you acted there. You dare not, you cannot deny that you have been the principal, if not the only means, of dividing them from each other, or exposing one to the censure of the world for caprice and instability, the other to its derision for disappointed hopes, and involving them both in misery of the acutest kind.

(Pride and Prejudice 188)

Anne's response to Gilbert Blythe's teasing has the physical impetuosity of an eleven-year-old child, but the challenging word, “dare” is also present: “You mean, hateful boy! How dare you?” (108). Her actions astonish her schoolmates but win her a place among them; her subsequent refusal to forgive him is evidence that Anne is still a child; thus her eventual apology becomes evidence of her achievement of maturity.

The frankness of Anne's speech, like that of the Austen and the Brontë heroines, serves her well, but it is Anne's imagination, and her willingness to share it that gives her power within her circle of friends. She brings experience to life through her description of it: she tells Diana at first meeting that they are going to be “bosom friends,” and then explains what a “bosom friend” is. Diana's friendship and love are her reward: a reward Anne calls, “a ray of light” (125). “Why, Diana, I didn't think anybody could love me. Nobody has ever loved me since I can remember” (125).

Secure within the framework of home and friendship Anne reaches out to the larger community. No event goes by undramatized: the picnic, the school days, the fateful tea party, and the subsequent heroic rescue of Minnie May. Anne shares her enthusiastic and romance-tinged reactions with Marilla, and with her friends. The omniscient narrator, however, never allows the reader to forget the ordinary side of life. Whenever Anne romanticizes too strongly, as in the matter of the haunted woods or the Lily Maid of Astalot, the narrative events bring her quickly and humorously back to reality. Montgomery both establishes the tone of the novel and sets up and maintains what Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination calls “a dialogue with the social environment of its origins” (274).

As Elizabeth Rollins Epperly points out in The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, Montgomery's work is categorized as domestic romance and Anne is typical of Montgomery's novels in that “we see several forms of romance at work simultaneously and continuously” (11). However, through her implied commentary, Montgomery subverts the genre even as she uses its conventions. In so doing, she is performing a particularly female act. To portray the tension between the daily and the romantic is, indeed, to write from women's experience and thus from women's point of view.

Notes

1. See Barbara Carman Garner and Mary Harker, “Anne of Green Gables: An Annotated Bibliography.”

   Two of the most recent books of Montgomery criticism are The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass: L. M. Montgomery's Heroines and the Pursuit of Romance and Such a Simple Little Tale.

2. The practice of placing homeless children in North American homes began early. The children listed in Early Child Immigrants to Virginia 1619-1642 were “vagrant children roaming the streets of London,” according to information in Crossroads 20 (Summer 1992): 10. The Orphan Trains of America were a late manifestation of the same practice and operated from 1854 until as late as 1929. Originating on the east coast, they brought orphaned or abandoned children to the midwestern United States. The trains stopped at small towns and the children got off and stood on the platform or, in some instances, were brought to a sponsoring church to be looked over and chosen or not chosen. Churches, both Catholic and Protestant, sponsored these orphan trains.

   People adopted in this manner are recording their experiences even today in publications like the “Orphan Train Heritage Society of America” [OTHSA]. As the following account from the OTHSA newsletter Crossroads demonstrates, Montgomery's adoption narrative reflected a typical nineteenth-century mind-set: “Mr. and Mrs. Homer N. Gremillion were married in June, 1906, and a year and a half later they were still childless. In those days, they did not have the money or the technology to seek medical advice as to why they were childless.

   They heard about the Orphan Trains and decided to travel the 10 or so miles to the town of Mansura to inquire about the Orphans, and request one on the next trip.

   Well, it so happened that William was left standing there with a tag around his neck with the name “Descant” on it. Someone by that name had requested a child, but did not show up. Whoever was in charge asked the Gremillions if they minded taking him since it was such a long trip back to New York.

   They said, ‘Yes’ so that is how little William Reilly Gremillion got a family.” Crossroads 20 (Summer 1992): 5.

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. Ed. Donald J. Gray. New York: Norton Edition, 1966.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. ed. Carol Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1848. New York: Norton Edition, 1971.

Carlton-Ford, Cynthia. “Conversation, Gender and Power: Dialogue in the Nineteenth Century Novel.” Diss. U of Minnesota, 1987.

Drain, Susan. “Community and the Individual in Anne of Green Gables: The Meaning of Community.” Such a Simple Little Tale: Critical Responses to Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. Ed. Mavis Reimer. Metuchen, NJ: The Children's Literature Association and The Scarecrow P, 1992.

Epperly, Elizabeth. The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass: L. M. Montgomery's Heroines and the Pursuit of Romance. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992.

Garner, Barbara Carmen, and Mary Harker. “Anne of Green Gables: An Annotated Bibliography,” CCL 55 (1989): 18-41.

Jewett, Sarah Orne. The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories. 1896. New York: Doubleday. Anchor Press Edition, 1956.

Montgomery, Lucy M. Anne of Green Gables. 1908. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1935.

Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton U P, 1977.

Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. London: London U P, 1976.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929.