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In Anne of Green Gables, is parody used and what does it add to the text?
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Anne of Green Gables is a sentimental 19th-century novel that uses parody to expose the impact Anne has on those around her. Her Romantic notions about nature are often dismissed as silly or odd, but she brings some transcendent beauty and larger-than-life experience to her family and friends with her worldview. The book was written in the Victorian Era, but Anne's imagination plays off of notions held by Romantic poets like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Anne of Green Gables parodies Romantic imagination. For Wordsworth, nature was a reflection of God, and wandering in nature was a spiritual act that could bring one closer to perfection. He believed part of the poet'Anne of Green Gables parodies Romantic imagination. The book was written in the Victorian Era, but Anne's imagination plays off of notions held by poets like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
For Wordsworth, nature was a reflection of God, and wandering in nature was a spiritual act that could bring one closer to perfection. He believed part of the poet's job was to experience nature and then write poetry that filtered nature scenes through the powers of imagination in order to help readers experience the divine. Through the character of Anne, Lucy Maud Montgomery parodies this notion of Romantic imagination and nature in the names that Anne gives to the various locations around Green Gables.
In chapter 5, Anne calls Barry's Pond "the Lake of Shining Waters." The title helps the reader to see how Anne views a simple pond. It is larger than a pond to Anne, and...
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the waters do not merely reflect the sun as waters will do, but they "shine"—as if embodying a divine essence.
As this instance shows, the parody serves to expose the impact Anne has on many of those who are close to her. Although her Romantic notions are often dismissed as silly or odd, she brings some transcendent beauty and larger-than-life experience to her family and friends with her worldview. Readers may also realize through the parody that this is what Romantic poets believed they had the power to do.
For many of the Romantic poets, this gift of coloring reality with imagination was exclusive to the Poet. Anne is a parody of this elitist notion when she discusses her names for nature in contrast to Diana Barry's name for Birch Path:
Beyond Willowmere came Violet Vale—a little green dimple in the shadow of Mr. Andrew Bell's big woods. "Of course there are no violets there now," Anne told Marilla, "but Diana says there are millions of them in the spring. Oh, Marilla, can't you just imagine you see them? It actually takes away my breath. I named it Violet Vale. Diana says she never saw the beat of me for hitting on fancy names for places. It's nice to be clever at something, isn't it? But Diana named the Birch Path. She wanted to, so I let her; but I'm sure I could have found something more poetical than plain Birch Path. Anybody can think of a name like that. But the Birch Path is one of the prettiest places in the world, Marilla."
For Diana—who is characterized by a typical Victorian perspective of nature—a simple, sentimental description of the area is enough, and Anne's Romantic names for various nature settings are perceived merely as "fancy." Diana fails to see the world as romantically as Anne, even with the poetic names Anne gives them. For Anne, the name "Birch Path" is far too simple to capture the divine essence of the scenery, and so she tells Marilla that she has condescended to allow Diana (who has called the area her home much longer than Anne) to name it.
Anne brags that she is "clever" enough to have given the path a name reflective of its supreme beauty, which also reflects a supernatural essence. In this instance, Anne's parody of the Romantic view of the poet's power of imagination is satirized as conceited and childish.
Coleridge believed that some poets were gifted with a "secondary imagination" that, when combined with the power of the personal will, could capture and recreate reality through poetry. His notions of imagination are parodied in how Anne uses poetic names to transform things. In chapter 2, Anne tells Marilla that she gives people and places "imaginative names" in order to recreate them to suit the reality she wants to experience. She says:
But they shouldn't call that lovely place the Avenue. There is no meaning in a name like that. They should call it—let me see—the White Way of Delight. When I don't like the name of a place or a person I always imagine a new one and always think of them so. There was a girl at the asylum whose name was Hepzibah Jenkins, but I always imagined her as Rosalia DeVere. Other people may call that place the Avenue, but I shall always call it the White Way of Delight.
As the quote shows, Anne believes she can imbue people and places with more meaning than they already possess with her powers of imagination. She can take in some sensory details of the world around her, process them imaginatively, and transform reality into something more tolerable.
This is also parodied when she uses her imagination to re-create her own identity and past. In chapter 2, Anne tells Marilla that she calls her life a "perfect graveyard of buried hopes" because the romantic notion brings her comfort. She also used her imagination to create friends when she was lonely and renamed herself Cordelia in order to feel more unique. Recreating her own life helps Anne to tolerate her hard reality of being an orphan with a plain name who has experienced disappointment again and again.
In this way, the parody of Romantic imagination helps the reader to admire Anne's strength of will in respect to her many hard experiences; she will not be brought permanently down into the "depths of despair," so long as she has an imagination to aid her.