[In the following essay, Drain discusses the pattern in Anne of Green Gables of a person becoming part of a community in order to successfully individuate and withdraw from it when necessary.]

Finding one's rightful place in the social fabric is part of the challenge of growing up, and as such, it is an important focus of many books for and about children. An entire tradition of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “orphan tales” is explicitly concerned with the problem of identifying and occupying that rightful place. In books like The Wide, Wide World (1850), Elsie Dinsmore (1867), and Pollyanna (1913), an orphaned or motherless heroine finds herself in a new and strange situation; the novel traces the course of events and adjustments which are made to ensure that the heroine takes her proper place at last. These adjustments usually work in one of two ways: either the child is subdued to the pattern of the adults, as in The Wide, Wide World (a book which is in this way not much more than a Sunday school tract), or like Elsie and Pollyanna, the child manages by the sweetness of her character and the power of her example to transform the narrow and bitter adults around her. In either case, belonging actually means conformity; the only question which remains is who is to conform to whom. The more realistic, and not coincidentally, the better-known, books in this tradition accept that the process of adjustment is a mutual one, in which both the stranger and the community are changed by their contact with each other. Adoption, in short, means adaptation.

Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables is one of these more realistic orphan tales. The very title of the book suggests how important belonging is. The heroine's identity is defined not by her deeds, not even by a name which is particularly and essentially individual, but by the name of the household of which she is a part. From its title and from its initial pattern of movement—the entrance of a stranger into a small and literally insular community—the reader may expect the novel to deserve its frequent epithet “heartwarming.” For Anne is one of those well-loved children's books, the virtues of which are obscured by the very affection in which they are held. Its popular appeal, and its reputation even among those who have not read the book, mean that it requires a strong as well as a sensitive reader to see past the expected patterns to appreciate the subtleties and complexities of the experience the book presents. Any novel, however, which begins with three successive chapters entitled “Mrs. Rachel Lynde is Surprised,” “Matthew Cuthbert is Surprised,” and “Marilla Cuthbert is Surprised” ought to alert the reader to the possibility that this novel will confound expectation as often as confirm it.

Although the novel does trace stages in the mutual adaptation of individual and community, stages by which the one comes to belong to the other, it exhibits a more complex pattern than one of moving inward, of increasing conformity and stability. Instead, an essential part of belonging is the movement outward, for it is only with the independence made possible by the security of belonging that the fullest meaning of belonging can truly be realized. Beneath its heartwarming popular image, in short, Anne presents a vision of the relation between community and individual which is complex as well as close, challenging as well as comfortable.

If the title suggests that individuality is less important than community, the first chapter of the book seems to confirm that suggestion, for it is an introduction not to the eponymous protagonist, but to the community to which she is to belong. What is important to notice about this introduction is twofold: first, it is clear that belonging to Green Gables necessarily means belonging to the larger Avonlea community, and second, it is implied that “belonging” is a more complex relationship than one might initially expect—not one of subordination, possession, or conformity, but of interdependence and tension.

Anne of Green Gables opens with a broad view of Avonlea, both its countryside and its inhabitants, and gradually narrows its focus from the community as a whole, to the Cuthberts, and finally to the as-yet-unidentified orphan on the railway platform. It is a pattern of moving inward, but though the child is the culmination of the pattern, the community is presented first. The child's place is assigned by the Cuthberts, who, in turn, have their assigned place in the community. The pattern, however, is not an orderly one of concentric circles enclosing the child.

That opening overview of Avonlea is instructive: a pattern of concentric rings can only be seen from the outside, but the novel rejects the outsider's perspective. It is through Mrs. Lynde, one of the community members, that the reader is introduced to Avonlea: the outsider is drawn in by the insider who is poised on the physical outskirts of the community:

Mrs. Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped into a little hollow … ; [she] was sitting at her window keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and … if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and the wherefores thereof.

(13)

The immediate impression from the all-seeing, all-encompassing overview is a strong sense of order: even the brook “by the time it reached Lynde's Hollow … was a quiet well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decency and decorum” (13). This orderliness is not imposed on Avonlea from the outside; although Mrs. Lynde promotes orderliness, she also embodies it and is properly respected for it:

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 and well done; she ran the Sewing Circle, helped run the Sunday School, and was the strongest prop of the Church Aid Society and Foreign Missions Auxiliary.

(13)

Even the more questionable side of her attending to her neighbors' affairs is softened by the general respect which is expressed for her undoubted industry even when apparently idle:

Yet with all this Mrs. Rachel found abundant time to sit for hours in her kitchen window, knitting “cotton warp” quilts—she had knitted sixteen of them, as Avonlea housekeepers were wont to tell in awed voices—and keeping a sharp eye on the main road that crossed the hollow and wound up the steep red hill beyond.

(13-14)

What is remarkable about this portrait of a paragon of domestic order and virtue, besides the somewhat daunting impression of Avonlea's orderliness, is that the order is not static: Mrs. Lynde's leisure is the product of her industry (“her work was always done and well done”) and is accompanied by useful activity of another sort. At a subtler level, the picture is complex: it is soft and generous in its images of abundance and cotton quilts, but beneath the comfortableness is the closely-woven texture of Avonlea life—“warp,” “knitted,” “sharp,” “crossed,” and “wound.” Avonlea's orderliness is not that of simplicity. Similarly, the orderly brook is acknowledged to have an exuberant and mysterious life: “it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade” (13). Though familiar only in its more disciplined form, that energy is not unknown to Avonlea's inhabitants (“it was reputed”). In fact, as the reader follows Mrs. Lynde through the first chapter, it becomes increasingly clear that to be part of the Avonlea community is to be part of a complex pattern.

That pattern, like Mrs. Lynde's quilts, is apparently comfortable but actually tightly knit: its calm is in fact the tension of energy and discipline, of activity and order. The order is not fixed and concentric; it is dynamic and intricate. Even the narrowing focus of the first chapter is not inexorable: the human focus is thrown off by the shifting geographical focus. That is, from Mrs. Lynde's all-seeing vantage point, the human focus narrows successively: surveying part of the community (Thomas Lynde sowing his late turnip seed, Matthew Cuthbert who should have been doing the same, and the other Avonlea folk gathered at Blair's store), penetrating to the heart of the mystery in the Cuthberts' house, and ending with a glimpse of the child at the station. The geography, however, resists narrowness. Mrs. Lynde knows what is supposed to be happening in Avonlea because she has been outside it:

Mrs. Rachel knew that [Matthew] ought [to be sowing his late turnip seed] because she had heard him tell Peter Morrison the evening before in William J. Blair's store over at Carmody that he meant to sow his turnip seed the next afternoon.

(14, emphasis added)

Similarly, the Cuthberts' “deep-rutted grassy lane” (15) leads not into the heart of Avonlea, but to a house “at the furthest edge of … cleared land” (15). Green Gables may be in the community, but only marginally. Its inhabitants are “both a little odd, [from] living away back here by themselves” (15). Finally, to bring into focus the child who is the human center of the story, the reader has to step, not only out of Avonlea altogether, but also out of Mrs. Lynde's consciousness—which is not all-seeing after all: “if she could have seen the child who was waiting patiently at the Bright River station” (20). The child is not yet identified; in fact, she does not really exist in the novel until she encounters the first representative of the community in the person of Matthew Cuthbert.

Exactly what kind of a community the child is entering is carefully introduced. The reader may expect Avonlea to be an idyllic, uncomplicated, pastoral haven, and in fact, early in the chapter, it is described as a remote and secluded place, as sheltered as its name, occupying “a little triangular peninsula jutting out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with water on two sides of it” (14). Yet however well-protected it is, surrounded by the deep and brooded over by Mrs. Lynde, Avonlea is not isolated: that first description also points out that people do go “out of it or into it … over that hill road” (14). In fact, Avonlea exists in a complex relationship with the outside world; the discussion between Mrs. Lynde and Marilla Cuthbert reveals a tension between suspicion and openness.

On first hearing of the Cuthberts' plan to adopt an orphan, Mrs. Lynde sees Avonlea's safe orderliness dissolving about her, and if Avonlea is unpredictable, so must the universe be: “Well, the world was certainly turning upside down!” (18). She rallies quickly, however, and soon is able to distinguish between familiar and orderly Avonlea and the chaos which is everything beyond, and which now threatens Avonlea. The very idea must be a foreign one—“What on earth put such a notion into your head?” (18). When she has “adjusted her mental attitude to this amazing piece of news” (18), she proceeds vigorously to inform Marilla of the dangers she is about to import in the person of a “strange child … and 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” (19). She is disturbed first, that is, by his foreignness, and second, by his lack of known identity. Only after expressing her concern about who the child is does she consider what he might do—telling harrowing stories of arson, poisoning and sucking eggs, all of which happen in the chaotic world outside Avonlea, “up west of the Island” (19) or “over in New Brunswick” (20).

Marilla, however, is more open: she does not make so sharp a distinction between here and there; she sees some middle ground between the foreign and the familiar. She reveals that the idea of adoption had originated with a neighbor: “Mrs. Alexander Spencer was up here one day before Christmas and she said she was going to get a little girl from the asylum over in Hopetown in the spring” (18). Nor is Hopetown so alien: “Her cousin lives there and Mrs. Spencer has visited her and knows all about it” (18). Marilla herself distinguishes between such near-familiar places and the entirely foreign: “And then Nova Scotia is right close to the Island. It isn't as if we were getting him from England or the United States. He can't be much different from ourselves” (19). The Island standard is clearly the one to which Marilla adheres, but she knows that familiarity does not necessarily mean safety: “And as for the risk, there's risks in pretty near everything a body does in this world. There's risks in people having children of their own if it comes to that—they don't always turn out well” (19). So it is clear that Matthew's act of going out of Avonlea to fetch the stranger in is the physical expression of the Cuthberts' mental attitude: they are, however tentatively, open to the outside.

Even this conflict between openness and suspicion is more complex than it first seems. The Cuthberts may have been open to “an unheard-of innovation” (17), but they have very narrow and quite selfish expectations of the boy:

We sent … word … to bring us a smart, likely boy of about ten or eleven. We decided that would be the best age—old enough to be of some use in doing chores right off and young enough to be trained up proper. We mean to give him a good home and schooling.

(18)

It is Mrs. Lynde, so horrified by the idea of the newcomer, who can see past the idea to the human being: “Well, I'm sorry for that poor young one and no mistake. … It seems uncanny to think of a child at Green Gables anyhow … I wouldn't be in that orphan's shoes for anything” (20).

To be adopted into the Avonlea community by the Cuthberts does not mean a comfortable sinking into conformity. Rather, the entrance of the stranger is both a challenge and a contribution to Avonlea's intricate network of relations, a network which extends outward into the world at large.

Just how closely the community of Avonlea is interwoven with the larger world is suggested in the first chapter and confirmed elsewhere. Avonlea may be pastoral, but it is not a bucolic backwater. Although it is at the end of the road, Avonlea uses its links with the rest of the Island. The railroad runs to within eight miles of Green Gables (21), and links the small communities which are spread along the Gulf shore—White Sands, Bright River, Carmody, Avonlea. There is actual as well as potential intercourse along these communities: Avonlea folk shop in Carmody, and the local entertainment is shared—Diana's cousins come “over from Newbridge in a big pung sleigh to go to the Debating Club concert at the hall” (160). Even the thirty miles to Charlottetown is not so far that it is impossible to go and return in one day (241), though such travel is made easier when “the new branch railway” (291) extends to Carmody. Avonlea residents have relatives outside the immediate area—the Barrys' great-aunt from Charlottetown descends upon her nephew's household for a month at a time (167), and Mrs. Alexander Spencer has visited her cousin in Hopetown (18). Strangers enter the neighborhood too. The hotel at White Sands is the summering-place of rich American ladies and distinguished artists. However exotic these visitors may be at first sight, their world is not entirely alien: the distinguished artist went to school with a man “that [Josie Pye's] mother's cousin in Boston is married to” (283). Moreover, the summer visitors do not merely enjoy the beauty of the Island while exploiting the local people. They are prepared to contribute to the community of which they are peripheral and temporary members: they get up a concert “in aid of the Charlottetown hospital, and [hunt] out all the available amateur talent in the surrounding districts to help it along” (275). Nor is this participation in Island life entirely condescending; although the “white-lace girl kept talking audibly to her next neighbour about the ‘country bumpkins’ and ‘rustic belles’ in the audience” (279), the overwhelming impression is of genuine kindness: “the stout, pink lady—who was the wife of an American millionaire—took [Anne] under her wing, and introduced her to everybody; and everybody was very nice to her” (281).

Part of the impression of Avonlea as an open community comes from the fact that real changes in its composition occur. Sensations may be “few and far between” in this “quiet little country settlement” (180), but Avonlea is not static. The community calls a new minister and “opened its heart to [the Allans] from the start” (181). The turnover in schoolteachers is almost brisk: Mr. Phillips is succeeded by Miss Stacy, and yet a third teacher keeps the school before it is given to Anne herself at the end of the book.

Avonlea is not only open to the larger world; it is closely bound to it. The point is made explicitly at the beginning of chapter 18:

All things great are bound up with all things little. At first glance it might not seem that the decision of a certain Canadian Premier to include Prince Edward Island in a political tour could have much or anything to do with the fortunes of little Anne Shirley at Green Gables. But it had.

(149)

The connection is not a direct one: the Premier's visit affects Anne only because he draws all the politically minded adults to town, and thus leaves Anne on her own when a crisis occurs. The necessary link is the adults' interest in politics—an interest which is not that of spectators, but of participants:

Mrs. Rachel Lynde was a red-hot politician and couldn't have believed that the political rally could be carried through without her, although she was on the opposite side of politics.

(149)

These participants relish their party ties, so that politicians are not remote or mysterious, but human beings whom ordinary Avonlea people can claim or criticize:

“Well, he never got to be Premier on account of his looks,” said Marilla. “Such a nose as that man had! But he can speak. I was proud of being a Conservative. Rachel Lynde, of course, being a Liberal, had no use for him.”

(156)

The ties of the outside world which broaden Avonlea's horizons also make it vulnerable to outside forces. The Cuthberts' security is destroyed when the Abbey Bank fails; the news is such a shock that Matthew dies of a heart attack. It is all the result of incomprehensible doings in a financial world of which Avonlea receives news only at second or third hand:

“Did you hear anything about the Abbey Bank lately, Anne?” [asks Marilla].

“I heard that it was shaky,” answered Anne.

“Why?”

“That is what Rachel said. She was up here one day last week and said there was some talk about it. … But Mr. Russell told [Matthew] yesterday that the bank was all right.”

(300-01)

This vulnerability is the more poignant for the link of trust that had been maintained on the Avonlea side at least.

“I wanted Matthew to put [our savings] in the Savings Bank in the first place, but old Mr. Abbey was a great friend of Father's and he'd always banked with him. Matthew said any bank with him at the head of it was good enough for anybody.”

“I think he has only been its nominal head for many years,” said Anne. “He is a very old man; his nephews are really at the head of the institution.”

(300)

Vulnerability is the dark side of the pattern established at the beginning of the novel, that of surprise and the confounding of expectation. This darkness had been hinted at previously—a hint made the more ominous by the several references elsewhere to Matthew's weak heart:

When Matthew and I took you to bring up we resolved we would do the best we could for you and give you a good education. I believe in a girl being fitted to earn her own living whether she ever has to or not. You'll always have a home at Green Gables as long as Matthew and I are here, but nobody knows what is going to happen in this uncertain world and it's just as well to be prepared.

(252)

Although the moment is swallowed up in Anne's exuberant reaction to the idea of going to Queen's, the darkness returns with both death and insecurity foreshadowed in Anne's separation from Diana, who is not to study for the entrance exam.

“But, oh, Marilla, I really felt that I had tasted the bitterness of death, as Mr. Allan said in his sermon last Sunday, when I saw Diana go out alone,” she said mournfully that night. “… But we can't have things perfect in this imperfect world, as Mrs. Lynde says. Mrs. Lynde isn't exactly a comforting person sometimes, but there's no doubt she says a great many very true things.”

(253)

The last main image of the book recognizes the unpredictability of human experience, but restores the emphasis to opportunity rather than foreboding, although it requires determination rather than natural optimism to see it.

When I left Queen's my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don't know what lies around the bend, but I'm going to believe that the best does.

(312, emphasis added)

The final description of Anne's situation at the novel's end describes her newly circumscribed life, but in addition to describing the consolations of that life, it maintains a link with a larger world, even if it is only one of dreams.

Anne's horizons had closed in since the night she had sat [at her window] after coming home from Queen's; but if the path set before her feet was to be narrow she knew that flowers of quiet happiness would bloom along it. … Nothing could rob her of her birthright of fancy or her ideal world of dreams. And there was always the bend in the road!

(317)

The novel resists closing in even to the very last sentence, for the cliché at the end, however sentimental, identifies Anne's newly limited life with the entire world: “‘God's in his heaven, all's right with the world,’ whispered Anne softly” (317).

That this conclusion is the opposite of Mrs. Lynde's first reaction to the news of Anne's coming to Avonlea (“Well, the world was certainly turning upside down!” [18]) is more than a neat rounding-off of the novel. It is the confirmation of a meaning of belonging which only finally becomes clear in that last chapter. Although the novel has throughout portrayed the inevitable interconnectedness of community and individual, it also demonstrates that this interconnectedness must be acknowledged, must be taken on as a willing responsibility, rather than accepted passively as part of the way things are. In making the commitment to relationship, the individual renounces isolation and attains freedom.

It appears that the pinnacle of belonging is achieved in the penultimate chapter, after Matthew's death, when Marilla explicitly acknowledges the depth of her bond with Anne: “We've got each other, Anne … I love you as dear as if you were my own flesh and blood” (305). That acknowledgment, however, is almost more significant to Marilla than to Anne, representing as it does the high point of Marilla's growth to emotional maturity. Nevertheless, Marilla's assertion of that bond is the assurance Anne needs in order to make her own affirmation of belonging. By turning down the Avery scholarship for university studies, and staying home to help Marilla and to teach, Anne acknowledges her bond to be more important than her individual plans, and confirms her place by knowingly taking on the network of responsibilities that belonging entails. “I shall give life here my best,” declares Anne, “and I believe it will give its best to me in return” (312). Indeed, that belief is justified, for Anne finds that her commitment to the smaller world does not mean a diminution or a repudiation of the larger. As she tells Mrs. Lynde, “I'm going to study Latin and Greek just the same. … I'm going to take my Arts course right here at Green Gables, and study everything that I would at college” (314). As in the very last words of the book, the larger world is comprehended by the smaller. Individuality, then, is established not in contrast to a community, but by a commitment to it, and the individual's freedom is not in the isolation of independence, but in the complexity of connection.

Work Cited

Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Anne of Green Gables. 1908. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964.