SOURCE: Berg, Temma F. “Anne of Green Gables: A Girl's Reading.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 13, no. 3 (fall 1988): 124-28.

[In the following essay, Berg revisits Anne of Green Gables as a grown woman remembering what the novel meant to her as a girl.]

While it is impossible to verify the following statement, I do believe it is true: Anne of Green Gables was the book that most profoundly influenced me as a child and young adolescent. What I remember most about my childhood reading experience of Anne is my sense of total immersion in the story. I was Anne Shirley. I, like Anne, was an orphan. Not literally of course. I had a complete set of parents, but I felt alienated in some undefined way from the world I lived in. I was a lonely, book-ridden child. I had a few friends, but I felt different from even them, and when I was among them, I usually preferred to be by myself, reading in a corner, wishing I could be curled up on a window seat like Jane Eyre. Of course, the houses my friends and I lived in did not have window seats, so I read on sofas or chairs, but I might just as well have been hidden in a window seat. I read Anne's books both because I was a reader and because they confirmed my sense of my difference and apartness. They told me it was okay to be different.

Not only did I recognize my self in Anne, but I also used the events of Anne's life as models for my own. I wanted to be as like Anne Shirley as possible. I wanted a bosom friend like Diana Barry. I picked one friend to be my “kindred spirit,” but she never seemed to be as good a friend to me as Diana was to Anne. Luckily, though, her mother and my mother did not get along very well, so they almost fit the pattern of Marilla and Mrs. Barry. However, my friend's mother never forbade me her daughter's company, so we never had to make undying vows of friendship in the face of parental opposition, probably the best stimulant for animating ordinary youthful feelings.

While I had difficulty finding a friend like Diana or turning the ones I had into an image of her, I could more easily duplicate Anne's imaginative yearnings and love of reading. I, like Anne, liked to think of myself as a heroine and having a heroine like Anne to model myself on and project myself into made it easier. Just as Anne's reading gave her models, patterns, ways to interpret her experience, Anne and her books gave me models, patterns, ways to interpret and validate my experience. Reading stoked Anne's imagination just as it stoked mine. Though I lived in the city, I used Anne's rural landscape to green my own. I tried to look at the trees along my street and the playground at the end of it through her eyes. I composed long, eloquent descriptive passages as I walked along the streets of my world as a means to enter Anne's. Both by reading the actual books and by reading my own life in their terms, I was able to enter, even if only sporadically, Anne's world.

Recently, PBS presented a four-part TV movie based on The Anne of Green Gables series, and because the TV movie seemed so faithful to and yet different from my memories of the novel, I found myself reconsidering what the novel meant to me as a child. The TV series seemed more feminist than the novel I remembered. I didn't remember the women in the novel as quite so powerful as the women in the TV show, or Marilla as quite so warm-hearted under her gruff exterior. And I didn't remember the strong-willed woman school teacher at all. Were these and other manifestations of feminist thought I noticed in the TV series—for example, the obvious comparison between Anne who sought education and her bosom buddy Diana who missed it because her mother thought book-learning was wasted on a girl—present in the novel or simply the addition of a modern screenwriter's sensibility? And, if they were in the novel, why had I not remembered them? What was the significance of that forgetting?

According to Sigmund Freud, what we do not consciously remember is what most deeply impresses itself on our unconscious. In one of the more intriguing footnotes to The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud speculates about this phenomenon:

An important contribution to the part played by recent material in the construction of dreams has been made by Pötzl (1917) in a paper which carries a wealth of implications. In a series of experiments Pötzl required the subjects to make a drawing of what they had consciously noted of a picture exposed to their view in a tachistoscope (an instrument for exposing an object to view for an extremely short time). He then turned his attention to the dreams dreamt by the subjects during the following night and required them once more to make drawings of appropriate portions of these dreams. It was shown unmistakably that those details of the exposed picture which had not been noted by the subject provided material for the construction of the dream, whereas those details which had been consciously perceived and recorded in the drawing made after the exposure did not recur in the manifest content of the dream. The material that was taken over by the dream-work was modified by it for the purposes of dream-construction in its familiar ‘arbitrary’ (or, more properly ‘autocratic’) manner. The questions raised by Pötzl's experiment go far beyond the sphere of dream interpretation as dealt with in the present volume.

(214-15n.)

I would agree with Freud's suggestion that Pötzl's experiment raises questions that go far beyond the sphere of dream interpretation. It carries, for example, a wealth of implications for reading. What does happen when we read? Are the processes that we cannot perceive more important than the processes that we can? It would seem, if we use Pötzl to understand reading, that we would have to agree that there is much more to reading than meets the eye or inner ear. Indeed, after going back and rereading Anne of Green Gables, I believe that Pötzl's experiment helped me gain a clearer understanding of my childhood reading experience of that novel. It would seem that the feminism I must just have missed—consciously—when as a young girl I read Anne's story, all the more deeply imbedded itself in my unconscious. The power of Anne of Green Gables may indeed come as a result of the subtle pervasiveness of its feminism.

The feminism of the novel is present in a variety of ways: in its portrayal of Anne as an independent, creative, and strong-willed heroine; in its emphasis on her extraordinary imaginative powers and on the way imagination can empower women; and in its forward-looking view of the dialectic that exists between men and women and within each human being.

Anne is definitely not a typical girl. She is, as Janet Weiss-Town has suggested, aggressive, independent, and practical (12). However, while I would agree with this estimation and with much in Weiss-Town's discussion of Anne, I do not agree with her assertion that Anne has more in common with boys' books than with a feminist novel like Surfacing. Anne's story is very different from a typical boy's adventure story. While the boy hero usually seeks autonomy, separation, and freedom from social restraints, Anne desperately wants to belong: “You see,” she tells Matthew on her first ride to Green Gables. “I've never had a real home since I can remember. It gives me that pleasant ache again just to think of coming to a really truly home” (18). When she sees Green Gables, she immediately feels a sense of belonging. When she learns she must leave because she is not the boy they expected, she hesitates to allow herself to grow any fonder of the place. She even refrains from going outside to play. Anne is no rebel; she is not in conflict with her society. She does not seek to engage her reader's antisocial sympathies. Anne wants to be accepted and she makes wanting to be accepted not only acceptable, but courageous and as worthwhile as it is difficult.¹

Though Anne is not a rebellious boy-child seeking to demonstrate his independence from authority and refusing to conform to the expectations of others, Anne is not, as the novel indicates over and over again, ordinary. She is unusual and one of her most distinguishing features is her imagination. Like a character in a Dickens novel Anne has her identifying phrase: she needs “scope for her imagination.” Her mental agility quickly sets her apart from everyone else in the book. Intrigued by her imagination and the unexpectedness of her mercurial musings, shy Matthew and caustic Marilla are quickly bewitched by her. They, like the reader, are caught in the trap of looking forward to what happens next, because whatever Anne does, it is bound to be unexpected. As Susan Drain so aptly put it, “Any novel … 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” (16).

There is, in Anne of Green Gables, a wonderfully complex attitude toward reading and the uses of the romantic imagination. While usually Anne's imagination and reading supply her with ways to cope with the world's cruel unfairness, at other times they cause her uneasiness. In a chapter suggestively entitled “A Good Imagination Gone Wrong,” Anne describes in detail three of her imaginative speculations and in the process learns to be wary of the power of the imagination. The first two incidents concern minor housekeeping errors—forgetting a pie and starching Matthew's handkerchiefs. Anne tells Marilla she forgot the pie because “an irresistible temptation came to me to imagine I was an enchanted princess shut up in a lonely tower with a handsome knight riding to my rescue on a coal-black steed” (159). A rather pedestrian romantic image, which leads to an equally pedestrian housekeeping mishap. Likewise, the second incident lacks serious consequences: Anne starches Matthew's hankies because she is trying to think of a name for a new island she and Diana discovered. She tells Marilla she finally settled on the name Victoria Island because they found it on the Queen's birthday.

The third example of Anne's imagination gone wrong is, unlike the preceding two instances, extremely suggestive of the extent of the negative power of the imagination. When Marilla asks Anne to go to Diana's house to bring back an apron pattern from Diana's mother, Anne protests, for, she says, she will have to go through the Haunted Wood. Unlike “Victoria Island,” an imaginative name which emphasizes female power, the name “Haunted Wood” paradoxically demonstrates both female power and powerlessness. Now that Anne has named the wood (an exercise of her power), she cannot enter it after dark for fear she will see what she has imagined: a wailing woman in white, the ghost of a little murdered child and a headless man (becoming the powerless victim of her own powerful imagination). Marilla, predictably unsympathetic, insists Anne go. She goes and learns bitterly to repent the license she had given to her imagination. Although Anne goes on to tell Marilla that she will now be content with commonplace places after this dreadful experience, she of course does not long remain so. However, she has learned a very important lesson: if using one's imagination can be salutary, it can also be dangerous.

In a later chapter, Anne proves how well she has learned her lesson when she gives up reading a Gothic novel, at her teacher's request, even before finishing it. “It was one Ruby Gillis had lent me,” she explains to Marilla, “and, oh, Marilla, it was so fascinating and creepy. It just curdled the blood in my veins. But Miss Stacy said it was a very silly unwholesome book, and she asked me not to read any more of it or any like it” (234). Though Anne finds it agonizing to have to give back the book without knowing how it ends, she does do so. She has, in other words, successfully learned to resist the incredible hold that “what happens next” has on the unwary reader. Though her own ability to wield that power may have led Matthew and Marilla to keep her at Green Gables and may keep her own reader interested in her, she now knows that such power must occasionally be resisted. Actually what Anne learns—to be a resisting reader—is the basic lesson of feminist criticism, for women readers need to be especially cautious as they assimilate and project the images that fiction gives them. Significantly, many feminist critics have focussed on the particular dangers of Gothic fiction. Imaging enthrallment, it reinforces feminine passivity.².

Though naming can sometimes get Anne in trouble, it usually empowers her. Coming to Anne after having read Jacques Lacan, I now realize just how important the power to name is. Fatherless (and motherless) Anne takes upon herself the power of the father—signification. Lucy Montgomery obviously never read Lacan, but she instinctively knew the power that comes from naming and she must have endowed Anne Shirley with that power deliberately. Even as a young naive reader, I knew that naming was a powerful act. The title Montgomery gave her book—Anne of Green Gables—was testimony to the effectiveness of that power. Though the Cuthberts might threaten to return Anne to the orphanage, because of the title I knew she was bound to stay. Naming is indeed a powerful act, both inside and outside the text.

Anne's imagination empowers not only her but others. For example, Marilla. Marilla's longstanding friendship with the town gossip, Rachel Lynde, has, it seems, depended upon Marilla's silent acquiescence before the sharpness of Rachel's tongue. However, after Anne responds with rage to Rachel's ruthlessly candid estimation of her as “skinny,” “ugly,” “freckled,” and “red-headed,” Marilla finds herself, evidently for the first time in her life, criticizing Rachel. Twice Marilla rebukes Rachel, although she is surprised at herself both times for doing it. When Anne finally goes to Rachel's house to apologize for her angry retort, she wins the woman over and, on her return home with Marilla, is so pleased with herself and her apology that Marilla again feels shaken out of her characteristic seriousness: “Marilla was dismayed at finding herself inclined to laugh over the recollection (of Anne's apology). She had also an uneasy feeling that she ought to scold Anne for apologizing so well; but then, that was ridiculous!” (73). Anne not only awakens Marilla's imagination but she goes on to awaken other dormant feelings as well: “Something warm and pleasant welled up in Marilla's heart at the touch of that thin little hand in her own—a throb of the maternity she had missed, perhaps. Its very unaccustomedness and sweetness disturbed her” (74). Likewise, when Anne goes to visit Diana's Aunt Josephine, who has always been self-sufficient and independent, the young orphan girl causes that older woman to perceive a lack where she had never felt one before:

“I thought Marilla Cuthbert was an old fool when I heard she'd adopted a girl out of an orphan asylum,” she said to herself, “but I guess she didn't make much of a mistake after all. If I'd a child like Anne in the house all the time I'd be a better and happier woman.”

(229)

Anne is a spirit that awakens and disorients. Ugly, skinny, freckled, and red-haired she may be, but she is also a powerful force of release.

When I read the book as a young girl, I don't remember that I was aware of just how much force Anne exerted, especially over Marilla:

Marilla felt helplessly that all this (Anne's satirical impressions of Sunday School) 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.

(81)

Very different from the boy heroes we are given in classical children's literature, Anne does not rebel by attacking authority—religious or educational—directly, but by bewitching others into recognizing their own covert dissatisfaction with the institutions they have always overtly abided by. A revolutionary force, Anne does not engage in useless vituperation or antagonism; she uses her imagination to arouse the sleeping imaginations of others. The imagination becomes linked in Anne with our emotional self, our repressed, hidden, often subversive unconscious. However, I cannot agree with Carol Gay that Anne's imaginative and romantic way of looking at things is distinctively “feminine” (12), although much in the novel and in current French feminist theory might confirm this speculation.³

Whether or not the force Anne represents can be defined as or confined to the feminine, certainly the feminine in Anne resists confinement. In many ways, the town of Avonlea seems to be a town of Amazons. Women play a much larger role in it than men. When the prime minister comes to town, it is the women (even if they cannot vote for him) who go off to meet him, whether to admire or condemn him. Rachel Lynde has the greatest power of observation of anyone in the town, and though Diana has two parents, Mrs. Barry is the one we keep meeting. It is she who forbids and finally readmits Anne to Diana's friendship. Likewise, the only Barry relative Anne ever meets is Aunt Josephine. When a new minister comes to town, it is his wife who draws Anne's admiration. Also, the new teacher is a woman, and she is as revolutionary a force as Anne: “(Miss Stacy) led her class to think and explore and discover for themselves and encouraged straying from the old beaten paths to a degree that quite shocked Mrs. Lynde and the school trustees, who viewed all innovations on established methods rather dubiously” (245). Both she and Mrs. Allan (the minister's wife who teaches the Sunday School) prove to be the most significant influences in Anne's life. Overall, women support, direct, and serve Anne as models throughout her life. As Carol Gay so aptly puts it, “Anne lives in a woman's world” (10).

Though in many ways Anne of Green Gables seems to be setting up separate worlds for men and women and finding the worlds of women and girls far more interesting than the worlds of men and boys, there is one plot in the novel—the story of Gilbert Blythe's relationship with Anne—which complicates any attempt to see this novel as dividing the sexes into two separate spheres. In fact, it could be demonstrated that Montgomery uses Anne and Gilbert to embody and, at the same time, seek a different solution to the problem that Carol Gilligan poses in her classic study of development, In A Different Voice. Montgomery was a keen observer of the world in which she lived, and she seems to have anticipated and, in the process, revised Gilligan. According to Gilligan, while men value separation, integrity and justice, women value interdependence, caring, and responsibility. These different values lead men and women to speak “in different voices,” which, in turn, leads to misunderstandings. Gilligan hopes that once we understand the difference, we will be able to revise some of our thinking about human development: “This dialogue between fairness and care not only provides a better understanding of relations between the sexes but also gives rise to a more comprehensive portrayal of adult work and family relationships” (174). Though Gilligan sees some lessening of the difference between men and women as they mature, the poles of the dialectic remain gender-determined. Men and women are inherently different. Lucy Montgomery, on the other hand, presents a far more radical version of this dialectic between our desire for integrity and our desire to connect with others.

While Carol Gay would seem to see Montgomery's work as confirming Gilligan's division into women's and men's worlds—“She created through her Avonlea series a world where the traditional women's values of love, warmth, sensitivity, imagination, and quiet endurance, survive and overcome (sic?) a world where kindred spirits are intuitively identified and cherished” (12)—I would like to suggest that Montgomery seeks to displace rather than validate the Victorian concept of “separate spheres.” Anne moves between both poles of the dialectic Gilligan describes. She is loving and intuitive, but she is also ambitious. She works hard to get to college and to win a scholarship once she is there: “Wouldn't Matthew be proud if I got to be a B.A.? Oh, it's delightful to have ambitions. I'm so glad I have such a lot. And there never seems to be any end to them—that's the best of it. Just as soon as you attain to one ambition you see another one glittering higher up still. It does make life so interesting” (273). Anne does win the scholarship but her desire to continue her education quickly comes into conflict with her sense of responsibility. When Marilla says she will have to sell Green Gables because she cannot care for it and herself now that Matthew is dead and her eyesight failing, Anne does not hesitate to sacrifice the scholarship she has won to stay in Avonlea and help the woman who took her in so long ago. However, Anne is not the only one to sacrifice. When Gilbert Blythe learns of Anne's decision, he gives up the teaching position in Avonlea he has been given so that Anne will get it and thus be better able to care for Marilla and Green Gables. To do so is a financial sacrifice on his part, for now he will have to pay board to take another teaching post out of town. He has, moreover, already made a sacrifice similar to Anne's and also given up a scholarship in order to stay at home and help his father. In Anne of Green Gables, if there are two poles to the dialectic, the dialectic works itself out in each individual, not between individuals. Men and women alike have to wrestle with contrary impulses.

Significantly, in the TV movie, Anne's interest in Gilbert Blythe is intensified at various points by his ostensible interest in other girls—Josie Pye, an unnamed girl at a ball, and another unnamed girl at college—and by Diana Barry's undying interest in him. However, in the book, Anne's interest in him is never a matter of sexual rivalry. Once she forgives him for teasing her about her red hair (and it takes her long enough to do that!), she seeks his friendship because he stimulates her intellectually:

There was no silly sentiment in Anne's ideas concerning Gilbert. Boys were to her, when she thought about them at all, merely possible good comrades. If she and Gilbert had been friends she would not have cared how many other friends he had nor with whom he walked.

(275)

Unlike Ruby Gillis, Anne does not seek a beau in Gilbert Blythe; she seeks a friend.

Anne does not accept conventional roles for either men or women. She sets no limits on the capacities of either group. Men are more than objects of sexual interest to her, and women, Anne tells the shocked Rachel Lynde, would make good ministers.

Though Rachel Lynde may disagree with Anne about woman's role, it is Rachel, who has the last word to say about nearly everything in Avonlea, who provides the best last word to define and demonstrate Anne's special power:

I never would have thought she'd have turned out so well that first day I was here three years ago. … Lawful heart, shall I ever forget that tantrum of hers! When I went home that night I says to Thomas, says I, “Mark my words, Thomas, Marilla Cuthbert'll live to rue the step she's took.” But I was mistaken and I'm real glad of it. I ain't one of those kind of people, Marilla, as can never be brought to own up that they've made a mistake. No, that never was my way, thank goodness. I did make a mistake in judging Anne, but it weren't no wonder, for an odder, unexpecteder witch of a child there never was in this world, that's what. There was no ciphering her out by the rules that worked with other children. It's nothing short of wonderful how she's improved these three years, but especially in looks. She's a real pretty girl got to be, though I can't say I'm overly partial to that pale, big-eyed style myself. I like more snap and color, like Diana Barry has or Ruby Gillis. Ruby Gillis's looks are real showy. But somehow—I don't know how it is but when Anne and them are together, though she ain't half as handsome, she makes them look kind of common and overdone—something like them white June lilies she calls narcissus alongside of the big, red peonies, that's what.

(241)

What better evidence of the power Anne Shirley has than this tribute by the one woman in the novel ordinarily most immune to imagination and innovation. Even she has learned to think in “flowery” metaphors!

If we define feminism as belief in a woman's power to change the world that threatens to confine her, then Anne Shirley and the books that tell her story convey a subtle but revolutionary feminism which has empowered generations of young girls. And, let us hope that they continue to do so.

Notes

1. Susan Drain suggests that one of the most important themes in Anne of Green Gables is this drive towards community: “… 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” (15).

2. In “The Gothic Mirror,” Claire Kahane offers a feminist psychoanalytic interpretation of Gothic fiction to revise the conventional view of the Gothic as the story of “a helpless daughter confronting the erotic power of a father or brother, with the mother noticeably absent” (335). Kahane substitutes for this Oedipal paradigm the possibility that Gothic fiction serves as a mirror within which the female reader can confront her feminine identity, her link with her mother, her lack of autonomy. Kahane is able to suggest ways in which the Gothic empowers the woman: “… the heroine's active exploration of the Gothic house in which she is trapped is also an exploration of her relation to the maternal body that she shares, with all its connotations of power over and vulnerability to forces within and without” (The (M)other Tongue 338).

3. Elsewhere, I have argued that the subversive imagination, the irrational unconscious, the primal and primary poetry of the dream is to be linked with the bisexuality that Freud always suspected was the ground of psychic life. See “Suppressing the Language of Wo(Man): The Dream as a Common Language,” in Engendering the Word: Feminist Essays in Psychosexual Poetics (forthcoming, University of Illinois Press).

Works Cited

Drain, Susan. “Community and the Individual in Anne of Green Gables: The Meaning of Belonging.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 11 (1986): 15-19.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Avon Books, 1965.

Garner, Shirley Nelson, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether, eds. The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Gay, Carol. “‘Kindred Spirits’ All: Green Gables Revisited.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 11 (1986): 9-12.

Gilligan, Carol. In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.

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

Weiss-Town, Janet. “Sexism Down on the Farm? Anne of Green Gables.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 11 (1986): 12-15.