SOURCE: Foster, Shirley, and Judy Simons. “L. M. Montgomery: Anne of Green Gables.” In What Katy Read: Feminist Re-Readings of ‘Classic’ Stories for Girls, pp. 149-71. London: Macmillan, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Foster and Simons consider the ways in which Anne of Green Gables circumvents archetypical girls’ literature.]

In August 1907, a few months after Anne of Green Gables had been accepted for publication, Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote joyfully in her Journal:

Well, I've written my book. The dream dreamed years ago in that old brown desk in school has come true at last after years of toil and struggle. And the realization is sweet—almost as sweet as the dream!¹

The novel, which appeared in June 1908, was, like most of the other books discussed in this study, an overnight success, despite its modest beginnings. As Montgomery herself explains:

Two years ago in the spring of 1905 I was looking over [my] notebook in search of some suitable idea for a short serial I wanted to write for a certain Sunday School paper and I found a faded entry, written ten years before:—“Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent them.” I thought this would do. I began to block out chapters, devise incidents and “brood up” my heroine … Then the thought came, “Write a book about her.”

(I, 330)

Initially, the expanded story seemed doomed to failure: after it had been rejected by four publishers in succession, Montgomery put the manuscript in an old hat-box, intending at some later date to cut it back to its original proportions. But she changed her mind when she rediscovered the forgotten work in the winter of 1906, and decided to try it out once more. This time she offered it to L. C. Page & Co. of Boston, who not only accepted it, but immediately suggested that “if you are not otherwise at work, it might be a good idea to write a second story dealing with the same character.”² The novel straightway established itself as a best-seller: by mid-September 1908 it had gone through four imprints and through another two by the end of November. It was published concurrently in England, and had reached a fifth English imprint by May 1909, justifying the enthusiastic early review in the Montreal Herald which applauded it as ‘a book which will appeal to the whole English speaking world’.³ Its huge success continued: in May 1914 it reached its thirty-eighth American imprint, and since then it has been constantly reissued both in Britain and the United States, as well as being widely translated and adapted for stage, screen and television.

The novel's extensive popularity is partly due to its combined adult and adolescent appeal. But like so many women writing in this genre, Montgomery underplayed the status of her work, specifically categorizing it as one of her many ‘juvenile yarns’ (I, 236). She was amazed and gratified by the unexpected triumph of what she considered such an unpretentious work:

My strongest feeling seems to be incredulity. I can't believe that such a simple little tale, written in and of a simple PEI farming settlement, with a juvenile audience in view, can really have scored out in the busy world.

(I, 339)

With a self-deprecation characteristic of many children's writers, she was anxious to point out the book's limited scope. To Ephraim Weber, her pen-friend in Alberta, she declared:

It is merely a juvenilish story, ostensibly for girls … I did not dream it would be the success it was. I thought girls in their teens might like it but that was the only audience I hoped to reach.⁴

She reiterated her amazement to George MacMillan, her other long-standing pen-friend in Scotland—‘I am surprised that they [the reviews] seem to take the book so seriously—as if it were meant for grown-up readers and not merely for girls’⁵—and expands on her ‘surprise’ in a letter to her cousin, Murray MacNeill, in July 1909:

It has been a great surprise to me that Anne should have taken so well with “grown-ups”. When I wrote it I thought it would be an amusing and harmless little tale for Sunday School libraries and “kiddies”, but I did not suppose it would appeal to older readers.⁶

Montgomery's professed amazement may have been justified: certainly, it might have seemed unlikely that a story about an orphan girl in the rural Canadian Maritimes would capture a large adult public. The figures, however, proved the contrary. The novel's admirers included Earl Grey, the Governor General of Canada, and two English Prime Ministers, Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald. Mark Twain also enjoyed it, though it is significant that his delight in Anne herself—‘the dearest, and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice’⁷—foregrounds the work's juvenile quality. It was this aspect of the book that invited the patronizing responses of other of Montgomery's adult readers. Damning with faint praise, her former Literature professor at Dalhousie College, for example, considered that:

The … book just misses the kind of success which convinces the critic while it captivates the unreflecting general reader … The conclusion to be drawn from Miss Montgomery's achievement is that the great reading public on this continent and in the British Isles has a great tenderness for children, for decent, and amusing stories, and a great indifference towards the rulings of the critics.⁸

Nearly fifty years later, the critic A. L. Phelps echoes this judgement in a deceptively bland appraisal of the novel's merits—‘The unpretentiousness and innocence may be the kind of honest simplicity that does have life and even art in it.’⁹

Such attitudes are exemplary of the kind of critical stance frequently taken towards juvenile literature, especially from the later nineteenth century onwards when the generic separation between writing for children and that for adults became more marked. As with many of the other novelists examined here, Montgomery's fiction was produced in the context of a literary world in which it was impossible to be both a ‘serious’ and a ‘juvenile’ author. Her disclaimers of merit and her artistic devaluation of her work are, therefore, not surprising, though they may sound suspiciously disingenuous. They may indeed be self-protective strategies, a means both of forestalling hostile criticism and of coming to terms with a system which persisted in narrow and rigorous definitions of artistic excellence. As her biographer stresses, and as her Journals reveal, Montgomery was in fact extremely ambitious and confident of her ultimate literary achievement: ‘I have … a belief in my power to succeed (I, 249) … never, at any time had I any real doubt that I would succeed at last … deep down, under all discouragement and rebuff I knew I would “arrive” some day’ (I, 261), she asserts. Moreover, she certainly wanted to enter the ranks of more sophisticated writers. Not only did she find the writing of sequels to Anne very tedious (the heroine became to her ‘that detestable Anne’, settling on her like an incubus¹⁰), but she attempted to break new ground with The Story Girl (1911), a novel representing ‘a step on the way toward the more “mature” books she still hoped to write.’¹¹ She also knew how easily a novelist could become generically stereotyped, as her comments on another new story, Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910), indicate:

[It is] a love story with a psychological interest—very different from my other books and so a rather doubtful experiment with a public who expects a certain style from an author and rather resents having anything else offered it.

(I, 362)

The fact remains that Montgomery's reputation rests on her Anne and Emily books; indeed the bulk of her fiction is directed primarily to a young female audience, even though she takes both of these heroines into wifehood and motherhood in later works in each series. She wrote only two novels specifically for adults, The Blue Castle (1926) and A Tangled Web (1931) (ironically, the former was republished in 1972 as a children's book), perhaps more affected than she cared to acknowledge by her early doubt that ‘I'll ever be able to write stories for mature people.’¹²

To imply, however, that Anne of Green Gables is not for ‘mature people’ is to over-simplify it. Though its major attraction may be the way in which it draws the reader into the immediacy of childhood experience, it is misleading to suggest that it is merely a straightforward and unsophisticated representation of a preadolescent world. The subtlety of the novel's narrative technique, relying on the juxtaposition of Anne's own viewpoint and a more objective voice reminding the reader that the Edenic state of girlhood is only temporary, presupposes an intellectually mature readership. The novel's width of appeal also depends on the two main impulses which inspired it: Montgomery's desire to write a story for girls, which, while drawing on earlier examples of the genre, develops away from and challenges them in various respects; and her urge to re-enact her youthful experiences, dramatizing—and fictionally transforming—a past with which she was constantly preoccupied. The former dictates a strategy of literary subversion, in which familiar patterns are deconstructed and the main character herself is allowed an iconoclastic role. The latter produces a narrative which both recreates many of the events and emotions of Montgomery's own life and socially and psychologically reassesses them. The novel thus functions on two levels, exploring contemporary ideologies of girlhood and female behaviour, and textually enacting therapeutic recall.¹³

In many ways Anne of Green Gables replicates the narrative framework of earlier girls' fiction such as The Wide, Wide World (1850), and The Lamplighter (1854), in which an orphan is cast into a seemingly unwelcoming and uncongenial environment and has to adapt to the new circumstances. Three contemporary best-sellers which exploit this motif of orphanhood—Alice Rice's Lively Mary (1903), Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), and Gene Stratton Porter's Freckles (1904)—may well have also been influential on Anne. The first two have particular elements in common with Montgomery's novel, since they deal with a young heroine who, learning to find a place in an initially alien sphere, moves towards social, moral, and psychological maturity; at the same time, she has an effect on her surroundings, producing a change of heart or outlook in those who began as her antagonists. Within this pattern, the fiction asks gender-oriented questions and offers a revisionist view of male and female roles. Anne, brought from the orphanage to Avonlea to be adopted by Marilla Cuthbert and her brother Matthew, is thrown into a world which at first seems antipathetic to her unconventionality and independence of spirit. Like Rebecca and Mary, Anne enters an adult-centred and spiritually rigidified environment whose values she cannot understand. Through her encounters with the local community, she gradually discovers new dimensions to her own life and also helps to enlarge those of her mentors and companions, awakening them to a more sympathetic attitude towards girlhood as a fragile and complex stage on the way to mature womanhood.

Montgomery, like many of the other writers in this study, exploits the archetypal model in order to subvert some of the ideologies it embodies. One of her chief strategies is literary referentiality. Anne of Green Gables is both covertly and implicitly allusive. Like her creator, whose Journals constantly express a delight in books, Anne has an obsessive love of reading which feeds her relentless demand for ‘scope for the imagination’.¹⁴ Her intensely literary romanticism is evident in her first eager outpouring to the bewildered Matthew Cuthbert on their way to Avonlea:

It was pretty interesting to imagine things about them [the other asylum orphans]—to imagine that perhaps the girl who sat next to you was really the daughter of a belted earl, who had been stolen away from her parents in her infancy by a cruel nurse who died before she could confess.

(17)

This fantasizing, a pervasive source of the novel's humour, echoes Montgomery's own avowed passion for ‘escapist’ literature (‘I would like realistic and philosophical novels in spells, but for pure, joyous, undiluted delight give me romance. I always revelled in fairy tales’ [I, 235]). It is also a characteristic shared by other heroines: Jo March, Katy Carr, and Mary Lennox are all avid readers whose literary passion transforms the mundane realities of their everyday lives. In these works, as in Anne, not only is the literary imagination empowering for the characters but through its exploitation the novelist herself is enabled to challenge codified established values.

At the most simple level of plot, Anne of Green Gables enacts its subversion by rewriting the conventional format of the moral/domestic tract-type literature offered to girls in the nineteenth century. That Montgomery found this kind of writing both compelling and absurd is clear from various Journal entries. She ironizes her early voracious appetite for the ‘Pansy’ books (stories of child life by Mrs G. R. Alder, popular during the 1870s and 80s, and all preaching the virtues of mission, temperance and prayer), for example, with the comment that, as a Sunday School teacher, ‘I did not feel at all like a Pansy heroine!’ (I, 37). She also mocks another early enthusiasm, the sickly sentimental Memoir of Anzonetta Peters,

a type now vanished from the earth fortunately—but much in vogue at that time. It is the biography of a child who at five became “converted”, grew very ill soon afterwards, lived a marvellous patient and saintly life for several years, and died after great suffering at the age of twelve.

(I, 376)

In one of her later novels, Emily of New Moon (1923), Montgomery satirically replays her own attempts to follow this saintly example when Emily tries to impress her severely commonsensical aunts by emulating Anzonetta's hymn-singing propensities.¹⁵ Despite her liking for Gothic romance, too, Montgomery is fully aware of its deficiencies: she calls Regina Maria Roche's The Children of the Abbey (1796) ‘the mushiest, slumpiest book I have ever read’, its central character

a most lachrymose heroine who fainted in every chapter and cried quarts of tears if anyone looked sidewise at her. But as for the trials and persecutions which she underwent, their name was Legion …

(I, 236)

Within Anne itself, a dual process of literary reversal and contrast both deflates the prototype and establishes a more realistic standard of girlhood behaviour. Anne is definitely not a conventional saintly heroine: thin, gawky, freckled, and red-haired, she falls far short of ideal female beauty, unlike her ‘bosom friend’, Diana Barry, who is ‘a very pretty little girl, with her mother's black eyes and hair and rosy cheeks’ (75). Neither does her conduct conform to that of the model heroine of sentimental literature. Anne is outspoken and bouncy, and, without sharing the tomboyish characteristics of Jo March and Katy Carr, she frequently demonstrates her lack of gender-specific attributes, especially in the traditionally female context of domesticity. She puts liniment instead of vanilla into the cake she makes for the new minister's wife; she serves Diana cherry-brandy in mistake for raspberry cordial, and makes her friend disgracefully drunk; she starches Matthew's handkerchiefs; and she lets pies burn in the oven. The fact that two of these disasters are due to Marilla's carelessness in forgetting to relabel the bottles only emphasizes Anne's volitionless aptitude for getting into trouble. At the same time, the mishaps are not given exaggerated significance or made the focal point of a weighty moral message as they would have been in their literary predecessors.

Montgomery also effects her literary subversiveness by offering a more humorous version of the familiar themes of loss, deprivation and isolation. An early scene in the novel in which Anne waits at the station with ‘a shabby old-fashioned carpet bag’ (16) to be collected by Matthew, both stresses her vulnerability and provides a comic perspective on it. Matthew is looking for a boy, not a girl, and he is so frightened of females that he can hardly bring himself to speak to her when he realizes she is the expected orphan. Anne, on the other hand, has already asserted her own independence by insisting on remaining outside the ladies' waiting-room. The potential pathos of the situation is thus diffused, a reminder that the experience of parental loss may not be quite as melodramatic as some fiction would have it. The ‘cruel stepmother/aunt’ pattern of earlier works is also disrupted. Marilla, though old-fashioned and set in her ways, is not unsympathetic or heartless; at first unable even to contemplate adopting a girl, she gradually warms towards Anne and learns to understand her. Under her guardianship, Anne's life is far from miserable, and indeed Green Gables becomes her true home in both an earthly and a spiritual sense.

This deconstruction of generic prototypes is reinforced by a more overt intertextuality. Anne's description of her early years of orphanhood spent with the struggling Mrs Thomas and her drunken husband naively but effectively challenges the platitudes of conventional discourse:

Do you know if there is anything in being brought up by hand that ought to make people who are brought up that way better than other people? Because whenever I was naughty Mrs Thomas would ask me how I could be such a bad girl when she had brought me up by hand—reproachful-like.

(38)

Dickens was one of Montgomery's favourite novelists and the direct reference here to Great Expectations, that classic story of orphanhood, both foregrounds the wretchedness of Anne's previous situation and puts an ironic gloss on it. There are also suggestive recalls of two of Montgomery's more recent literary ancestors. In the ironically-entitled chapter, ‘Anne comes to Grief in an Affair of Honour’, Anne is ‘dared’ at a party to walk along the ridge-pole of the kitchen roof; not surprisingly, she slips and crashes to the ground. The accident results in a broken ankle and seven weeks of inaction. Echoes of What Katy Did are unmistakable here, but the significant differences suggest that this is a deliberate reversal of Coolidge's text. Anne's injury is a minor incident in the narrative, and is not focalized as a necessary step on the way to moral maturity, as it is with Katy. Anne's own account of the minister's wife's response to her misfortune—‘“She is such a cheerful person to have visit you … She never tells you it's your own fault and she hopes you'll be a better girl on account of it”’ (158)—also functions to deflate the kind of pious moralizing which Cousin Helen offers to the prostrate Katy. Similarly, Montgomery comically rewrites a key episode in Little Women in which Anne, having turned her offending red hair green instead of black with a defective dye, is forced to have it cut off. As she says to Marilla:

This is such an unromantic affliction. The girls in books lose their hair in fevers or sell it to get money for some good deed … But there is nothing comforting in having your hair cut off because you've dyed it a dreadful colour, is there?

(182)

Montgomery was in fact an admirer of Alcott's stories, which she first read in her teens. Indeed in one of her own early tales, ‘Her Pretty Golden Hair’ (1898), the heroine, like Jo March, sacrifices her one beautiful feature to help the family finances. But later in her career, she became more critical of such sentimentalization of female virtue, and in Anne's case the incident has an iconoclastic function designed to highlight the text's realist affiliations.

In this novel, intertextuality also becomes a self-referential device. Following a tradition already established by earlier didactic writers such as Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Sewell, Montgomery ironically dramatizes the deleterious effect on an impressionable mind of reading too much highly romantic literature. Interestingly, it is not The Lurid Mystery of the Haunted Hall (which Anne's teacher, Miss Stacy, tells her is a ‘very silly, unwholesome book’ [200]) that over-stimulates her imaginative tendencies, but Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Anne and her friends act out the death of Elaine, but the former, as the ‘unfortunate lily maid’ (187), nearly drowns on the leaky flat board which substitutes for the Arthurian heroine's barge. While the novel as a whole validates the imagination as an important vivifying power, this particular incident, like the one in which Anne becomes paralysed with fear of the ghosts with which she herself has peopled the Haunted Wood, serves as a reminder that fantasy becomes absurd, even dangerous, if it is too far disengaged from the real world.

In dismantling the more absurd elements of earlier literary types, Montgomery also substitutes alternative ethical priorities. Anne of Green Gables certainly has lessons to teach, but they are neither the narrowly religious ones of Warner and Cummins, not the more secularized but still Puritan-oriented ones of Alcott and Coolidge. The shift of emphasis is made clear in Montgomery's description of how the incipient Sunday School story was transformed into a novel: ‘I cast “moral” and “Sunday School” ideals to the winds and made my “Anne” a real human girl’ (I, 331). Making Anne a ‘real human girl’ means that Montgomery validates a female goodness divorced from traditional ethical strictures. Her own dislike of the grim Presbyterianism fed to her by her grandparents, which caused her so much psychological suffering, may have inspired a resolve to permit her heroines a freer spiritual existence than she herself enjoyed. Recounting in her Journals her gradual progression from a ‘belief in the fine old hell of literal fire and brimstone’ (I, 197) and from a conviction of sin to a more transcendental and organic spiritualism, she describes her ideal of religious worship, currently impossible in her own society:

to go away … to the heart of some great solemn wood and sit down among the ferns with only the companionship of the trees and the wood-winds echoing through the dim moss-hung aisles like the strains of some vast cathedral anthem. And I would stay there for hours alone with nature and my own soul.

(I, 162)

This kind of natural religious impulse finds an echo in Anne, who shocks Marilla with her lack of biblical and doctrinal knowledge and takes a disturbingly unorthodox approach to Divine truth. For her, if Jesus is the lover of little children as depicted in the sentimental pictures, then He should not look so sad. Likewise, instinctively recoiling from the harsh doctrines and rigid discipline of church and Sunday School, her ideal mode of devotion is to ‘“go out into a great big field all alone or into the deep, deep woods, and … look up into the sky … then I'd just feel a prayer”’ (47); like her creator, she refuses to believe ‘that religion and beauty were antagonists and as far as the poles asunder’ (I, 378). Such sentiments anticipate the pantheism of Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911) in which Colin and Mary are spiritually as well as physically rejuvenated through their contact with the natural world. As with Burnett's characters, Anne's selfhood, unlike that of Ellen Montgomery and other pious girl heroines, develops from outside the narrow parameters of religious orthodoxy.

While rejecting the doctrinaire didacticism of much children's literature, Montgomery herself encountered the constraints of publication which insisted on the ethical orientation of children's literature:

I like doing these [children's stories] but would like it better if I didn't have to lug a moral into most of them. They won't sell without it. The kind of juvenile story I like to write—and, read, too, for the matter of that—is a rattling good jolly one—“art for art's sake”—or rather “fun for fun's sake”—with no insidious moral hidden away in it like a spoonful of jam.

(I, 263)

Forced to comply with this insistence, she subverts it, however, challenging what she saw as merely empty gesturings towards morality. Anne's pragmatic and humanitarian ethics, meaningful because unsullied by the justifications and codification of adult creeds, are not only sympathetically presented in the novel but actually become the means of converting others. Marilla, for instance, contrary to her imbibed conventionalism, finds herself in accord with Anne's criticisms of the local Sunday School:

… some of the things that Anne had said … 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 and neglected morsel of humanity.

(73)

This deconstruction of the typology of the pious child as moral instructor is another aspect of the novel's literary subversiveness. The saintly young heroine (Ellen Montgomery in The Wide, Wide World, Gerty in The Lamplighter, and Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin) who converts renegade adults is here transformed into the ‘freckled witch’ (19) who changes attitudes not by her piety and angelic utterances but by overthrowing the dominant social and moral orders; her ‘teaching’ is effected through her questioning and disregard of the rules by which the surrounding adult world is programmed. Importantly, too, her behaviour is neither God- nor adult-directed; unlike the earlier heroines, she has no mentor or mother to lead her in the right path, since, as has been indicated, Marilla is not the perfect guardian. The narrative thus endorses the autonomous goodness and innate moral clear-sightedness of the child state, and in this it marks a significant development from the earlier texts discussed. Whereas in The Wide, Wide World, The Daisy Chain, and Little Women, the girl is, sooner or later, forced to conform to the pattern of adulthood which surrounds her and shapes her experience, in Anne of Green Gables not only does the young heroine redeem her elders but her code of values is prioritized over theirs. The novel thus validates youthful experience more wholeheartedly than its predecessors and denotes a change in the orientation of girls' literature, granting the young reader wish-fulfilment fantasies of power within her own sphere.

Anne is, furthermore, largely untouched by the traditional creeds of sin, atonement and redemption, which even an ostensibly child-centred text such as What Katy Did traces as stages of entry to the adult world. Sin and guilt, indeed, play little part in Anne of Green Gables. Anne's own despairing abandonment of impossible standards (‘“No matter how hard I try to be good I can never make such a success of it as those who are naturally good”’ [152]) foregrounds the novel's rational approach to the nature of virtue. Even when she appears to be enacting conventional moral codes, as at the end of the novel when she gives up her college scholarship in order to stay with Marilla, now threatened with blindness and eviction from the farm, her behaviour is inspired by personal feeling, not by Divine or human command. Anne commits herself to Marilla from love of one who has been a mother to her, refusing to regard her action in terms of heroic self-abnegation:

You surely don't think I could leave you alone in your trouble, Marilla, after all you've done for me … There is no sacrifice. Nothing could be worse than giving up Green Gables—nothing could hurt me more.

(249)

Anne's iconoclastic spirit reveals itself not only in the moral sphere but also in the social one. Here particularly the novel's implicit assumptions about female independence and gender orientation are foregrounded. Despite the temporary hiatus in Anne's planned self-improvement (the third novel of the series, Anne of the Island [1915], depicts her experience at Redmond, replicating Montgomery's attendance at Dalhousie College, Halifax), the narrative never seriously questions her right to extended education. When Mrs Lynde expresses her complacent satisfaction at the ‘womanliness’ of her decision—‘“You've got as much education now as a woman can be comfortable with. I don't believe in girls going to college with the men and cramming their heads full of Latin and Greek and all that nonsense”’ (250)—Anne retorts that she is going to study for higher qualifications at home instead. The intelligent girl knows that a life of domesticity will never satisfy her, and even Marilla declares that ‘“I believe in a girl being fitted to earn her own living whether she ever has to or not”’ (201). It is never suggested, either, that Anne's fierce competitiveness in battling with Gilbert Blythe for top place in class is unwomanly or morally damaging. Unlike Ethel May, she is allowed to strive alongside her male peers, and her successes are as triumphant as theirs.

This validation of female autonomy is reinforced by the novel's gender emphases. Like many of the other texts discussed, it depicts a world in which women predominate and have control. The few men who figure in Avonlea are either psychologically destructive (Mr Phillips, the schoolmaster who treats Anne so insensitively), ego-threatening (Gilbert Blythe initially), or unable to communicate (Mr Bell, the Sunday School superintendent). The female sphere is foregrounded here; there is much emphasis on food and domestic comfort in the novel, and, as in The Wide, Wide World, Little Women, and What Katy Did, the heroine's introduction to responsibility and decision-making comes through the management of household affairs. Sisterhood is also important, especially in the strong ties between Anne and Diana, different though the two girls are. With the exception of Matthew, all the influential people in Anne's life are women—Marilla, Mrs Allen, the new schoolteacher, Miss Stacy—and it is through their examples that she progresses towards her full potential, intellectually and emotionally.

Anne herself is also empowered through her creative imagination. Central here is her manipulation of language, seen in a propensity for naming which she shares with Katy Carr. Through words, Anne reconstructs and thus reclaims for herself the surrounding environment. She transforms the prosaic into the poetic: Barry's pond becomes the Lake of Shining Waters, the Avenue becomes the White Way of Delight, and the woodland path near Green Gables becomes Lovers' Lane. Anne thus demonstrates her sensitivity to the flexible relationship between words and their signification, and, in creating her own discourse, challenges the privileging of the male Logos. She is also a story-teller: in the tradition of the female mythologist, she captivates her peers with her art of fiction-making, sharing this enabling inventiveness with earlier heroines such as Katy Carr and Jo March, and later Mary Lennox.

In prioritizing female experience and capacities, the novel also deconstructs essentialist notions of gender, and stresses how formulations of sexual identity are cultural, rather than biological. Marilla and Matthew have ‘ordered’ a ‘smart likely boy’ (11) from the orphanage, and are horrified when Anne appears instead. But they are rapidly won over by her, and Marilla's initial ‘“What good would she be to us?”’ (30) changes to a recognition of her true value. The girl in fact turns out to offer much more than a boy would have done, and, as the Cuthberts come to realize, the affection and expanded emotional horizons she brings them are far more important than mere (male) provision of labour. Through her, Marilla learns not to distrust her own capacity for love. Similarly, the cranky Miss Josephine Barry, after her initial annoyance when Anne and Diana mistakenly burst into her bedroom at night, is captivated by the girl's freshness and vitality; she becomes aware that ‘“my imagination is a little rusty—it's so long since I used it”’ (134) and realizes that ‘“If I'd a child like Anne in the house all the time I'd be a better and happier woman”’ (196). Anne, then, the substitute boy, disrupts assumptions about gendered behaviour, replacing their binary polarizations with an ideology of individual worth which emanates from a feminized perspective.

Despite its gender deconstructiveness, Anne of Green Gables is not a radical text which overtly seeks to overthrow sexual hierarchies. Anne's innocence disorients the orthodoxies on which Avonlea is built, but, unlike Jo March or even Ethel May, she herself never directly rebels against the constraints of femininity; she wants to belong and be accepted, and this desire includes identification with others of her sex. She wants to look like the other girls, and one of her greatest longings is to have a dress with puffed sleeves. Significantly, at the end of the novel the narrative positions her firmly within the domestic sphere. This apparently regressive closure can be partly accounted for by publishing criteria which demanded a conventional conclusion, but it may also reflect Montgomery's own ambivalence about women's roles. She enjoyed being the only woman on the staff of the Halifax Echo and Chronicle, for which she worked from 1901 to 1902, and questioned biologically separatist notions of function, arguing that ‘anyone's sphere—whether man or woman—is where they can be happiest and do the best work.’¹⁶ She also insisted on women's right to speak for themselves:

I do believe that a woman with property of her own should have a choice in making the laws. Am I not as intelligent and capable of voting for my country's good as the Frenchman who chops wood for me and who may be able to tell his right hand from his left, but cannot read or write?¹⁷

And though the Boston Republic reporter who interviewed her concluded that ‘she has no favour for woman suffrage; she believes in the home-loving woman,’¹⁸ her biographer comments that she was actually tougher than this presentation of demureness might suggest. On the other hand, Montgomery was not a thoroughgoing feminist. She considered the roles of wife and mother to be supreme, and in her own married life overtly deferred to ideals of womanly self-abnegation.¹⁹

If the novel's feminism is only muted, however, the work certainly does not unequivocally valorize the status quo. As recent critics have pointed out, it does not reinforce the doctrines of separate spheres or prioritize essentialist behavioural ideologies.²⁰ Thus what might be considered gender-specific qualities or roles are not tied to biological sex. As has already been shown, women are textually positioned as figures of strength, in contrast to the men, and their insertion into traditionally masculine arenas of empowerment is indicated by their involvement in the under world beyond the domestic—Marilla's participation in community affairs, Mrs Lynde's interest in politics and support for women's suffrage, and Anne's commitment to education, inspired by Miss Stacy and eventually leading to a career in teaching. In this, they replicate the women of the earlier texts who are active in the public sphere—Mrs March, Meg and Jo in Little Women and Mother in The Railway Children, for example. Conventionally feminine virtues are not the exclusive attributes of women, either. Gilbert Blythe acts out a self-sacrificial role in giving up his Avonlea teaching post to Anne, so that she need not leave Marilla after Matthew's death and the onset of the elderly woman's blindness. Matthew's womanly characteristics of gentleness and kindness make him naturally more sympathetic than Marilla to Anne's vulnerability; sensitive to the unspoken in her, he is instinctively responsive to her needs and desires, spoiling her with chocolates, obtaining for her the dress with the much-coveted puffed sleeves, and insisting that she be allowed to go to the Debating Club concert. He embodies maternal comfort rather than paternal authority (he is the one who pleads for her to be let off the punishments which Marilla imposes), and it is significant that Anne feels in close harmony with him—‘“Matthew and I have such kindred spirits I can read his thoughts without words at all”’ (120)—in a female bonding of non-verbal communication. Mocked by the community for his shyness and indecisiveness, he is in fact as much a victim of gender ideology, with its emphasis on male aggressiveness and self-assurance, as are women. Through him and the other main characters in the novel, polarities of masculine and feminine are undermined, being replaced by a more liberal and flexible vision of personal interaction.

It is therefore perhaps more helpful to read Anne of Green Gables as a revisionary rather than an ideologically radical or innovative text. This revisionary process is implemented in two main areas—the personal and the literary—which are linked in their purpose of suggesting new and more open attitudes towards girlhood. As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, Montgomery's convincing representation of a girlhood with which her readers could identify is certainly partly dependent on its creator's close personal involvement with the text. Like much of the fiction discussed here, the novel draws heavily on autobiographical experience and many details of Montgomery's own life are incorporated into it, including her school activities, her abandonment of a teaching career in order to look after an elderly relative, and her affection for her schoolmistress.²¹ There are, however, significant variations between the ‘facts’ and the fiction, suggesting that Montgomery is rewriting the past not only in order to come to terms with it but also to place it in a wider perspective of child and gender orientation.

Anne's genuine orphanhood formalizes Montgomery's own abandonment by her father after her mother's death when he left her to the unsympathetic tendance of her grandparents—an act of betrayal which the intense expressions of daughterly devotion in the Journal only foreground more starkly: ‘I love him with all my heart—better than anyone else in the whole world—dear, darling father!’ (I, 50). A pattern of absent or inadequate fathers has already been noted in many of the texts analysed in this study—a form of covert rebellion against patriarchal dominance, achieved by writing out a potential source of female oppression. In Montgomery's case, the wholesale removal of the father may have had a therapeutic value, proving more psychologically acceptable, as well as more artistically liberating, than the real-life heartlessness. She also recasts her own upbringing by narrow-minded and severe relatives—what she herself describes as an ‘emotionally and socially … starved and restricted’ (I, 377) childhood—into a fictionalized situation which challenges misconceived assumptions about familial affection and the nature of parenting. The care and genuine love which Anne receives from the Cuthberts, then, is not only authorial wish-fulfilment fantasy but a penetrating commentary on the fragile relationship between children and the adults to whom they are entrusted. The narrative is perhaps trying to write out, too, the troubled areas of developing sexuality in Montgomery's own past, particularly her disturbingly passionate (though unconsummated) relationship with Herman Leard, the son of the family with whom she boarded while teaching at Bedeque. Retreating from the psychological and social conflicts which full maturity brings, the novel keeps Anne in a prepubescent state, safely within the stasis of childhood. As Montgomery told the Republic reporter, ‘“I want to leave “Anne” just as she is forever; in her girlhood.”’²² Gilbert never becomes more than a companion to Anne (after she has ‘made up’ with him), and it is not until Anne of the Island that the question of love between them is finally confronted. In her idyllic though not entirely untroubled world, Anne is protected from the lovelessness, isolation, and traumatic sexual awakening experienced by her creator.

Such authorial closeness to the fictional material—avowed by Montgomery herself who said that ‘Anne is as real to me as if I had given her birth—as real and as dear’ (I, 332)—has invited criticism of the novel's sentimental celebration of girlhood. Despite her early personal experience of unhappiness, it is true that Montgomery seems to have viewed the child state with a large degree of romanticism. Her Journal entries are suffused with nostalgia for her own passed youth, when, in contrast to her present adult self, she was ‘a happy, light-hearted girl with any amount of ideals and illusions’ (I, 226) enjoying a Wordsworthian blessedness of being:

Then, everything was invested with a fairy grace emanating from my own imagination … all [was] radiant with the “glory and the dream.”

(I, 121)²³

The fictional enactment of nostalgic recall does not, however, necessarily mean lack of critical perspective. If Montgomery's heroine is a somewhat idealized replication of herself, she also exhibits more recognizably child-like traits than Warner's or Cummins' girl characters. As Carol Gay has commented, ‘Montgomery took the female protagonist and with the realism that Alcott had pioneered, created a worthy successor to Jo March.’²⁴ More importantly, Montgomery adopts a strategy of self-referential subversion through which the heroine herself undermines the text's potential romanticization of girlhood and female behaviour.

Anne is not only an anti-heroine in the literary sense, she is also a highly self-aware and intelligent young girl who is able to separate herself from and comment on her own conduct. The conscious actor in her own dramas, she simultaneously fashions roles and demolishes them. In this, she replicates her creator's own highly-developed sense of self as a fictional construct. Many of Montgomery's Journal reminiscences read like a novel, with herself as the central character in the narrative. Rewriting herself in a quasi-imaginary context seems to have been a kind of therapy for her, a means of formulating an identity from ‘a series of pictures and sensations, at which I could not choose but look and which I could not choose but feel’ (I, 368). Conscious self-dramatization is also one of Anne's most notable traits, enabling her both to establish a personal place in an unaccommodating environment and to reveal that environment's shortcomings.

As well as being her own critic, Anne debunks the behavioural codes of Avonlea society by exploiting them so as to expose their inadequacies. A close link with the novel's literary subversiveness can be seen here. As has been shown, many of Anne's attitudes and actions are directly inspired by the fictional world of melodrama; enacted in the real world, they reveal not only their own absurdity but also the absurdities of the social conventions which contextualize them.

The consciously parodic nature of Anne's self-representation is evidenced in scenes in which she weeps. Thematically and structurally, mid-nineteenth century women's fiction frequently foregrounds the tears of young girls, Ellen Montgomery's being probably the most notorious example. Anne, too, expresses her grief by bursting into tears. But the tonal shift in the later text can be seen by comparing two passages about weeping from Warner's and Montgomery's novels respectively. A scene from the former describes Ellen's reaction to her aunt's cavalier authoritarianism in opening Mrs Montgomery's letter to her daughter:

Her eyes had been filling and dropping tears for some time, but now came the rush of the pent-up storm, and the floods of grief were kept back no longer … Ellen was wrought up to the last pitch of grief and passion … In the extremity of her distress and despair … she sobbed aloud, and even screamed, for almost the first time in her life; and these fits of violence were succeeded by exhaustion, during which she ceased to shed tears and lay quite still, drawing only long sobbing sighs now and then.²⁵

In this extract, Ellen is shown as literally possessed by emotion, beside or rather out of her conscious self. In contrast to this is Anne's reaction to a similar injustice, when Marilla punishes her for an offence of which she is not guilty:

Anne realised that Marilla was not to be moved. She clasped her hands together, gave a piercing shriek, and then flung herself face downwards on the bed, crying and writhing in an utter abandonment of disappointment and despair … “I don't want any dinner, Marilla,” said Anne sobbingly. “I couldn't eat anything, especially boiled pork and greens. Boiled pork and greens are so unromantic when one is in affliction.”

(86-7)

Anne is genuinely grief-stricken and, at the same time, alert to the histrionic role-playing of her response; she is self-aware in a way that Ellen never is, and can thus parody her own emotional outburst. Montgomery, in recalling the sentimentalism of earlier fiction, ironizes its excesses while simultaneously suggesting that Anne has an inner controlling strength and a healthy capacity for self-ridicule.

This self-awareness, based on the recognition of the ultimate separation between the sphere of imagination and that of reality, surfaces on many occasions in the novel. Anne's adoption of the heroine role, for instance, foregrounds the melodramatic sources from which it draws its inspiration. The highly literary language by which she creates herself as Lady Cordelia Fitzgerald points up the self-posturing of such images:

I am tall and regal, clad in a gown of trailing white lace, with a pearl cross on my breast and pearls in my hair. My hair is of midnight darkness, and my skin is a clear ivory pallor.

(55)

Anne immediately deconstructs her own fantasy, telling herself, ‘“You're only Anne of Green Gables”’ and comfortably sure that ‘“it's a million times nicer to be Anne of Green Gables than Anne of nowhere in particular”’ (55). In each instance when she thus ‘others’ herself, she consciously positions her dream world alongside the everyday, and is always capable of negotiating between the various constructed selves and what she regards as the ‘real’ Anne.

The same character-centred ironic technique punctures the falsity of Avonlea's moral and social pieties. Again, comparison with The Wide, Wide World is illuminating. When Ellen bursts out in a fit of temper at her aunt, the ethical code by which she has been taught to order her behaviour causes her to feel guilt and remorse, not eased until she has acknowledged her sinfulness. When, on the other hand, Anne lets fly at Mrs Lynde for calling her ‘terrible skinny and homely’ (58), she remains defiant in the face of Marilla's horror, and agrees to apologise only after Matthew's intervention. But the exemplariness of this moral abasement is undermined by the obvious delight which Anne takes in the role of penitent. She exhibits ‘an air of subdued exhilaration’ as she ‘imagines out’ what she is going to say (65), and her ‘confession’ itself is wickedly hyperbolic:

I could never express all my sorrow, no, not if I used up a whole dictionary … Oh, Mrs Lynde, please, please, forgive me. If you refuse it will be a life-long sorrow to me. You wouldn't like to inflict a lifelong sorrow on a poor little orphan girl, would you, even if she had a dreadful temper?

(65)

A society which can be taken in by such feigned humility should, it is implied, look more carefully at its value systems.

The same kind of moral iconoclasm operates in the incident concerning Marilla's lost brooch. Convinced that Anne is lying to her, Marilla forces a confession from her—a confession which proves to be totally false, as Anne herself readily admits later:

Why, you said you'd keep me here until I confessed … and so I decided to confess because I was bound to go to the picnic. I thought out a confession last night after I went to bed and made it as interesting as I could.

(88)

Not only the deceptiveness of conclusions drawn from appearances, but also the hypocrisies of conventional ethical codes, are exposed here. Anne's honesty triumphs by exploiting and demolishing the narrow-visioned adult morality which seeks to impose on it; like Huck Finn, she acts according to a pragmatism which, without theorizing, radically questions and judges ostensible righteousness.

The subversive power of rational innocence is also shown in another of the novel's parodic replications of sentimental tract literature. During Mrs Barry's temporary absence, Anne saves the life of her three-year old daughter, seriously ill with croup; intensely grateful, Mrs Barry apologises profusely to Anne and reinstates the friendship with Diana, suspended after the disastrous inebriation. Anne herself, however, disrupts the pattern of the generic prototype in which the saintly girl valorizes the Christian/female virtues of nurturance and selflessness and wins the erring adult's eternal respect. She sees the act itself as high adventure rather than as an instance of self-negating charity:

Anne, though sincerely sorry for Minnie May, was far from being insensible to the romance of the situation and to the sweetness of once more sharing that romance with a kindred spirit.

(121)

She also takes a very irreverent attitude to Mrs Barry's admission of injustice, delighting in being in a position of moral superiority and enjoying ‘heaping coals of fire on Mrs Barry's head’ (124). Once more, the text valorizes the moral insights of disingenuousness, while avoiding a simplistic affirmation of pre-lapsarian wisdom.

Thematically and structurally, then, Anne of Green Gables positions itself between two generic literary poles—the Evangelical representation of the sinful child who achieves redemption through self-discipline and obedience to Divine teaching, and the Romantic myth of youthful innocence whose entry into the adult world is a process of corruption and disenchantment. Like many of the other texts discussed here, it offers its own version of Pilgrim's Progress (one of Montgomery's favourite books), in this case a more liberal and secularized one. Anne is not fixed in the stasis of the childhood world. She progresses to maturity, learning to control her impulses so as to harmonize more closely with her social environment. She comes to realize the illusoriness of youthful dreams, concluding ruefully that ‘the worst of growing up [is that] the things you wanted so much when you were a child don't seem half so wonderful to you when you get them’ (195). She also abandons her romance writing, a gesture which seems partly an affirmation of realism (“It was silly to be writing about love and murder and elopements and mysteries' [211]), and partly authorial recognition that in a world dominated by patriarchal and rationalist values the productions of the female literary imagination must be obliterated or suppressed.

And yet the prison bars of adulthood have not yet fully closed on Anne at the end of the novel. She remains in a kind of limbo state, sexually unawakened, and merely looking towards ‘the bend in the road’ (253) which images her wider future. In common with most of the girl heroines in this genre, she is poised on the edge of maturity. The difference here, however, is that the pattern of her later life seems less determined. Whereas with the earlier works, the narrative conclusion presupposes closure, despite apparent indefiniteness, in this novel the predominant validation of preadolescence produces a genuinely ambivalent ending. Anne will of course have to grow up, but the text refuses to formulate the inevitabilities which await her.

Notes

1. Ed. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1985), I, 331. All subsequent references to this work will be included in the text.

2. Mollie Gillen, The Wheel of Things: A Biography of L. M. Montgomery, Author of Anne of Green Gables (London: Harrap, 1976), p. 70.

3. Ibid., p. 72.

4. Ibid., p. 71.

5. Ibid., p. 76.

6. Ibid., p. 79.

7. Quoted in Gillen, p. 72.

8. Ibid., p. 162.

9. Ibid., p. 166.

10. Ibid., p. 78.

11. Ibid., p. 81.

12. Ibid., p. 165.

13. The autobiographical inspiration is even more prominent in Emily of New Moon (1923), in which a substantial amount of material is drawn almost exclusively from Montgomery's own experiences.

14. Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (London: Puffin Books, 1977), p.17 and passim. All subsequent references are to this edition and are included in the text.

15. In one of the letters which she continues to write to her dead father, Emily describes this attempt:

    Aunt Laura asked me the other day if I would like blue stripes better than red in my next winters stockings and I answered as Anzonetta did when asked a similar question, only different, about a sack,

    Jesus Thy blood and righteousness
    My beauty are, my glorious dress.

    And Aunt Laura said I was crazy and Aunt Elizabeth said I was irreverent. So I know it wouldn't work.

    (Emily of New Moon [London: Puffin Books, 1990], pp. 113-14)

16. Gillen, p. 86.

17. Ibid., p. 86.

18. Ibid., pp. 85-6.

19. Montgomery married Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister, in July 1911. Though it was a sensible match, Macdonald was a psychologically unstable man whose inner turmoils imposed a great strain on Montgomery. Moreover, as a loyal wife, she gave up dancing and other more frivolous social activities which she loved, because they would not have been approved of by the local congregation.

20. These points are made in Temma F. Berg, ‘Anne of Green Gables: A Girl's Reading’, Children's Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 4, Winter 1984-5, pp. 124-8; and Carol Gay, ‘“Kindred Spirits” All: Green Gables Revisited’, Children's Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 1, Spring 1986, pp. 9-12.

21. The model for Miss Stacy is Hattie Gordon, Montgomery's muchloved teacher at Cavendish, to whom she dedicated Anne of Avonlea.

22. Gillen, p. 85.

23. Quotations from Wordsworth's ‘Immortality’ Ode, of which there is an example here, occur throughout Montgomery's Journals.

24. Carol Gay, op.cit. p. 10.

25. Elizabeth Wetherell [Susan Warner], The Wide, Wide World (New York: The Feminist Press, 1987), p. 148.