Anne of Green Gables (and any subversive subtext therein)

[Pearly Di]

I had to do this.

And I hope truehobbit and Lali will come and join me.

Well, I read and adored the book when I was eleven, and I found in Anne a truly 'kindred spirit'. This fictional heroine pushed all my buttons. I was an intensely imaginative child, rather withdrawn and very introspective, and in Anne I found a voice. I loved Anne.

In fact, I read a lot of those kinds of books written in the late 1800s and early 1900s ... Frances Hodgson Burnett and E. Nesbitt representing the British side, and What Katy Did and Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder (OK, so she wrote her books in the 1930s but they're set in the late 1800s) for the Americans ... and Anne, of course, for the Canadians. All very wholesome, family-values, richly written, often with a great sense of humour ... all of them books about GIRLS and GIRL STUFF.

E. Nesbitt deserves a whole thread of her own. She was a feminist and a socialist, and wrote one of the most wonderfully wholesome and life-affirming British children's novels of all time, The Railway Children (also made into one of the best British children's films of all time, in 1970, starring Jenny Agutter as Roberta). Her wonderful fantasy novels for children were a huge influence on C.S. Lewis when he was a child and later on in life very much influenced his ideas and characterisations in the Narnia books ...

But I digress. Back to Anne.

The first book is the best (and the one that Kevin Sullivan adapted most faithfully, although I have no quarrel with his revisionistic approach afterwards.) The rest of the series ... well, as an adult I regard it less kindly. I didn't like following Anne all the way through to when she was grown up with kids of her own. That first, pristine charm was forever lost.

But what redeems the Anne books is Lucy Maud Montgomery's unerring observations of small-town gossip and small-town narrow-mindedness. This sterling quality makes me forgive her for Anne growing up and for the reactionary attitudes that creep into the final outing, Rilla of Ingleside.

Some of these late Edwardian women writers seem to have had a subversive side to them. Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder have a subtle but unmistakable feminism, God bless them for it, and yet of course they are very pro-family.

Lucy Maud was a prolific writer. I read tons of her books as a young girl. Some of them are very mawkish. I've never tried the Emily of New Moon series, many regard it as superior to the Anne books (I think Lucy Maud did herself.)

Anne herself remains as one of the most winsome girls ever created, what with her imagination, her fiery temper, her passionate affections and her sweet generosity of spirit. She, and Laura Ingalls, will always have a special place in my heart and imagination.

To kindred spirits!

[Jnyusa]

You've hit my daughters' favorite series, Pearl! We adored reading these books together and watching the miniseries when the girls were ... oh, pre-teen I guess. And if I get to feeling whimsical about my children's lost childhood, these are the books I pick up and read.

Jn

[vison]

Ah, Anne. Well, I've loved her ever since I met her, and to be honest I have no clue how old I was. 9? Somewhere around there.

L. M. Montgomery was a remarkable woman who had a very hard life, all things being considered. She, of course, was the "real Anne". There is a picture of her as a little girl in the Green Gables house in P. E. I. The picture shows a pretty child with long hair and a sad, lonely expression on her sweetly winsome little face. The face of a child starved for love and attention, just like Anne. She was brought up by her terribly stern grandparents. Few people can be as stern as the Scots, and they seemed to have been champion at it. She married a clergyman who suffered horribly from depression and Lucy Maud spent her married life covering for him and supporting the family when he couldn't. She churned out a lot of writing, just for the money, and it shows at times.

I've been to Green Gables several times. An awful lot of my fellow tourists seemed to think Anne was a real person and the house was her real house, which is a testament to something or other. "Why, look! There's the slate Anne broke over Gilbert's head!" And I saw dozens of Japanese couples get married in the garden there. Anne is enormously, unbelievably popular in Japan for some reason.

I never loved the Emily books as much as I loved Anne. Emily as a child was fine, but the weird suitor and all that sturm und drang over who Emily "really loved", etc., just got me down.

Certainly in my mind, Anne of Green Gables was her masterpiece. But a few of her short stories are quite good. Few writers, as is mentioned above, captured the gossipy nature of little rural communities as well as Mrs. Montgomery did.

To this day I read all the Anne books quite often, going on a weekend binge to do so.

And if no other writer than Laura Ingalls Wilder ever wrote about pioneer days in the US, it wouldn't matter. Her books are perfection. One of my heroines.

[Pearly Di]

L. M. Montgomery was a remarkable woman who had a very hard life, all things being considered. She, of course, was the "real Anne". There is a picture of her as a little girl in the Green Gables house in P. E. I. The picture shows a pretty child with long hair and a sad, lonely expression on her sweetly winsome little face. The face of a child starved for love and attention, just like Anne. She was brought up by her terribly stern grandparents. Few people can be as stern as the Scots, and they seemed to have been champion at it. She married a clergyman who suffered horribly from depression and Lucy Maud spent her married life covering for him and supporting the family when he couldn't. She churned out a lot of writing, just for the money, and it shows at times.

I didn't know any of that, Vision. Gosh, that explains an awful lot.

Knowing all that makes me like Lucy Maud even more. There is a strong streak of grace in her books. She writes very well about harsh, legalistic religion ... the dour Presbyterian nature of some of the P.E.I. religion certainly gets across. At the same time, there's nothing bitter about her outlook. Quite the opposite, her books convey a deep warmth and humanity and lightness of heart ... many of her principal characters seem to have a faith that they express naturally but never get preachy about.

Wow. I want to visit P.E.I. now and visit the 'real' Green Gables!!

And if no other writer than Laura Ingalls Wilder ever wrote about pioneer days in the US, it wouldn't matter. Her books are perfection. One of my heroines.

I wasn't taught US history. Everything I know about pioneer life in the late 1800s I learned from Laura Ingalls.

PS. Jn, I love the mini-series! Megan Follows was perfect as Anne.

[truehobbit]

Wow. I want to visit P.E.I. now and visit the 'real' Green Gables!!

Me too!

Thanks for starting this thread, Pearl!
And I've read everything said in here going and

(Well, I guess that's enough piccies for words for a literature thread! )

All these books you mention are hardly known at all here, we've got a different set of classics for kids and new books make a greater part in kids' literature than classics, I think.

So, I read none of the books here as a kid, my first contact with Anne of Green Gables was by watching the Kevin Sullivan series. It was instant, complete love, I've watched the video numberless times and still watch it occasionally.
I bought the books a little later (I was in England and saw them at a bookshop, all with movie tie-in covers, I'm proud to say! ), but it took me quite some time to read them. I read the first one pretty quickly, and loved it. The second was very disappointing, I thought, and I guess I didn't want to know about Anne growing up and becoming all conventional (they always do!), so I read on very intermittently. I only read the last book a year or so ago, I think, but quite liked it.

It's quite amazing that I did read up to the last book. I never did that with the German equivalent (if it can be so called), but then maybe that's different.
In German literature for girls we have two series which are similar in that they are about a girl's life from beginning to end, really. I read the first volumes of both of them as a kid, but lost interest when the heroine grew up.
(I had to look up a lot of the following info, and was surprised by what I found.)
One is Else Ury's "Nesthäckchen" (a word for the youngest child of a family, I didn't find an English equivalent for it in my dictionary), which was written between 1913 and 1925, and covers the heroine's whole life from a five-year-old to a great-grandmother, and the other is "Pucki of the Foresters" (Pucki being the heroine's nickname), written 1935 - 1941, and today only available in heavily edited form. Both series start out with amiable, imaginative children, who by the third or fourth volume have turned into obedient housewives. Both authors started out as unconventional women, Ury a Jewish academic, and Trott a feminist!
Both went back on their ideals for women, Ury in portraying the wife and mother as ultimate aim of a woman's life, and Trott in changing over to a Nazi view of womanhood (it seems her books were well-timed to replace Ury's, which were forbidden in Nazi-Germany).

Having found this info on the web, I'm rather proud that I got put off with them after three or four volumes, as soon as the heroine was growing up.

I guess I realised that Anne wasn't quite as bad, so I kept reading. Even though she does have some pretty bad moments of wifely subservience later on. And she never seems to appreciate her own children the way the reader appreciated her! Maybe it's just me, but I felt that she almost looked down at children. She humours them, but she doesn't think it's admirable that they are the way they are. It's more like an amusing deformity that has to vanish as you grow up. Like freckles.

I think the language in the books is just beautiful at times, and that keeps me interested, too.
(I also learnt a lot of words there - I remember looking up quite a few words.)

Some of the other books named here: at the same time I bought the Anne-books, I also bought some of the Little-House series, which I only knew from the TV-series (one of my all time favourites, and I still watch every re-run if I can! ). I only read the first two, though. I thought the first was well written, but not so exciting, while the second was really gripping. Still planning on reading the rest.

Nesbit's books I've heard a lot of - though never really what they were about! So I've always thought of reading them, but never felt any urgency about it.

I think this post turned out a bit depressive, when I started feeling so swooney about Anne - sorry about that!
I was very impressed with what vison posted about Montgomery's life - and like Pearl, this makes me admire her even more: I love people who remain friendly and humane even though they've known a lot of harshness in their lives!

[nerdanel]

Anne of Green Gables is a series that I believe will stay with me for the rest of my life. I remember well my first introduction to it. My mother, sister, and I had gone on our weekly excursion to the library. One of the books that my mother checked out for me was “Anne of Green Gables.” I dutifully began to read the first chapter, and was utterly bored by that nosy gossip, Mrs. Rachel Lynde, and her patchwork quilt endeavors. I took the book to my mother and told her that I wanted to return it to the library because it didn’t look very interesting. It was then that my mother invented the “three chapter rule.” I could return any book I wasn’t interested in – but I first had to read three chapters to be sure.

There followed an intense exchange of words in which I strenuously expressed my view that reading three chapters would not improve the useless book, and in which my mother remained obdurate. I dutifully trudged back to the rocker, read about how Matthew Cuthbert was surprised, and then about how Marilla Cuthbert was surprised, and made it to the end of the book before I realized that I’d sworn to read only three chapters. I wish I could say that I never again challenged my mother on anything, but

Although I’ve read and enjoyed all the books – yes, even Rilla of Ingleside with its political views – I’ve always identified most with the Anne who is my age. First, Anne of Green Gables, then Anne of Avonlea, and now Anne of the Island. Like you, vison, I revisit the books from time to time, and I’m always amazed to discover something new in them. In response to my post “On Youth and Inexperience” on b77, Ax wrote, “… the books we reread don't change, but we do, and so when we find new things in them, we are really finding new things in ourselves.” Anne of Green Gables is one of the series that his words brought to mind for me.

I just have two further thoughts for now, and then I’ll return to this thread later. Thanks so much for starting it, Pearl.

Thought 1:
Ang linked recently on b77 to a truly insightful piece, called, “The Law of Monkey.” To quote briefly:

[O]ne way or another we all have limits to our sphere of monkey concern. It's simply the way our brains are built. We each have a certain circle of people who we think of as people. Usually it's our own friends and family and neighbors and classmates and coworkers (or at least the ones in your department) and church or suicide cult. This is literally the reason society doesn't work quite right. The people who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. They're sort of one-dimensional bit characters.

For me, the “Law of Monkey” manifests as a tendency to generalize, as “one-dimensional bit characters,” people who are very different from me in circumstances or background. Anne of Green Gables challenged that tendency, strongly humanizing groups of people that I couldn’t previously identify with – particularly residents of isolated rural communities and adherents to harsh, legalistic Christianity incl. all too rigid gender roles.

Thought 2:

This thought is ill-formed in my own head, so I’ll sketch it briefly and hope someone else will understand what I’m saying.

Hobby suggested, I think correctly, that Montgomery fumbled Anne’s transition to adulthood with moments of wifely subservience, and strangely, not enabling Anne to connect to her own children in the way we’d expect based on Anne’s childhood and how we connected to her.

I wonder, is there any (tempered, subtle) feminist subtext in the earlier books – maybe even unintended – that contributes to Anne’s vivacious girlhood? Do we lose that subtext in later volumes as Anne matures and submits all too strongly to traditional wifedom and motherhood? And, if true, does it have anything to do with why we love the first volumes but have more mixed reactions to the later ones?

I need to think about this some more.

[vison]

Anne is such an old friend of mine that I have a hard time thinking back to how I might have seen her the first time. Of course, I can't. That was such a long time ago.

Yet I think that part of the "modern" perception of Anne as she was when she was a child is coloured by the movie's "version" of her. Megan Followes was a lovely Anne, but she was never "my" Anne. Mind you, I don't know if tolkienpurist has ever seen the movie, so that's probably an unfair comment.

I never saw Anne as particularly "vivacious" either, I saw her as romantic and impulsive and somewhat shy. But she was not "unconventional" at all. She sometimes gave the impression that she was, but when I think of her worst misadventures it was never a desire to be "different" that caused them, but ordinary misunderstanding and mischance.

I also never saw her as "subservient", to be honest. She and Gilbert seemed to be pretty equal partners, although she certainly led a conventional married life. It was her romantic and dreamy side that carried through, she never lost that, nor her sense of humour, which she needed! She was always regarded as somewhat of an oddball in Glen St. Mary, and yet that was just because of who she was, not that she was "unconventional" in any overt way. I guess the reality is (if we can use the word reality about fictional characters!) that Dr. and Mrs. Blythe were numbered among the aristocracy of the place.

Anne's relationship with her children seemed very "modern". She was clearsighted about them, but I always had the impression that she was a tender and devoted mother. Part of the difficulty may lie in the fact that Lucy Maud never knew her own mother and had no experience of being "mothered", and found it hard to describe. Certainly there was an odd "maternal" feeling in Marilla, now that WAS unconventional when you get right down to it.

Lucy Maud Montgomery agonized over the Great War. It was a traumatic time for her, deeply, deeply affecting her. The way she writes about it in Rilla of Ingleside is a much lighter and less horrified expression of her feelings, it was a kind of patriotic appeal, meant to hearten the reader. Yet the death of Walter Blythe at Courcelette (spe?) is painful to read about.

Yes, there was some jingoistic stuff in Rilla of Ingleside, but that was the time. I don't think it was as important to Montgomery as the sufferings caused by war.

In some of her other books, and in many of her short stories, Montgomery wrote about women whose lives were not so happy as Anne's turned out to be. There are jilted women, bitter women, angry women, peculiar women in plenty. In one of the Ingleside books, I think Rainbow Valley, she tells the story of Peter Kirk's funeral. The book is worth reading for that episode alone, in which a very, very bitter woman gets up to speak at her brother-in-law's funeral. And in the same book there is the tender and realistic love story of the Rev. John Meredith and Rosemary West.

The other thing is, that even in L. M. Montgomery's day the most progressive woman still "needed" to get married to be regarded as "normal" or "important". Montgomery didn't flout that convention herself, although there WAS a very deep romantic involvement with an entirely "unsuitable" man before she met and married her husband. Some people think it was more than just "romance", and was an actual affair, although I don't.

Her life is well worth reading about. She was a quite important literary figure in Canada, well, she still is.

[Ethel]

I always thought - and I'm just saying this quickly without reading the thread properly - that Anne of Green Gables was 'about' generosity of spirit. The generosity of spirit that allowed one to make a place for someone you don't completely understand, right here in your community. I think that's what *I* loved about it, anyway.

[vison]

I always thought - and I'm just saying this quickly without reading the thread properly - that Anne of Green Gables was 'about' generosity of spirit. The generosity of spirit that allowed one to make a place for someone you don't completely understand, right here in your community. I think that's what *I* loved about it, anyway.

That's very perceptive, Ethel, and I think both Anne and her creator would agree.

[truehobbit]

Well said, Ethel!
I think that's one of the essential aspects of the humaneness that Pearl and I talked about!

I never saw Anne as particularly "vivacious" either, I saw her as romantic and impulsive and somewhat shy. But she was not "unconventional" at all. She sometimes gave the impression that she was, but when I think of her worst misadventures it was never a desire to be "different" that caused them, but ordinary misunderstanding and mischance.

Well, she was vivacious in that she talked more than others and had a lot of ideas! In that, I think, she was unconventional among her peers.
I agree that she wasn't rebellious or wanting to be different or so - but she still was different, because of her spirit and intelligence!

And then, there's her temper, too! Yes, this is seen as something leading to much mischance, and hence probably a downside of her character - but don't you just love her for that temper? I think it just makes her so much more alive.

And that's what I meant by her not relating to her children the way we relate to her. We (or, at least, I) love her for her imagination, her ability to create and, to a certain extent, really live in a dream-world - I see it as special and precious.
But when her kids exhibit imagination and creativity, she smiles at it and seems to think this is a charming imperfection typical for children that time will cure alright.

I'm sure her treatment of the children is modern, in that she isn't too strict - she doesn't actively push her children on the stern path of her Presbytarian society - but she seems glad that she got over her girlish temper and dreaminess, and hopes that her children will, too - contrary to what I in reading the first volume (or watching the movie) would have hoped for her!

[Lalaith]

Anne!

Oh, how I love these books and this character!!! I remember my best friend introducing me to them when we were about 11 or 12. She and I both have red hair, and, if for nothing else, we would have loved Anne for that. But, of course, there was much more to love about her than her red hair.

She captured my imagination like Laura Ingalls had before her. (Yes, I love the Little House series, too. And anything by Laura, for that matter. She was a great writer.)

Anyway, I loved all of the books, though I remember not being able to finish Anne of Ingleside when I was a child. It wasn't till I was older that it was relevant to me, I guess. (Oddly enough, I read Rainbow Valley and Rilla, though.) Now I love all of the books for their own qualities. I guess I'm not a good critic of her books because they're too dear to me.

I liked the first Emily book, but, like vison, found the rest of them quite odd. Actually, I think I own every book that's ever been published by LMM. (Well, probably not every book, but quite close.) Some of her short stories are very good. As for her other books, Magic for Marigold (recapturing some of the magical qualities of Green Gables) is good, as is A Tangled Web (much more adult in content, iirc).

Anyway, Anne is the best series of all, with the first book being the best and most enrapturing. (How's that for an Anne word? ) My best friend and I would wander the woods behind her house, pretending all of the things that Anne and Diana pretended. We drew fairies and gave them names. We renamed all of the places in our yards and neighborhoods. We gave the stars new names and wrote poems to them and to our trees.

We would be late to class, dancing around outside on the first warm day of the year. We dressed like Anne and wrote love letters to the boys we loved with "fanciful" language. (LOL! Of course, we never gave them to the boys.) We wrote letters to each other, beautiful letters on the prettiest stationery we could find. It didn't matter that we saw each other every day.



I lost a lot of that as I grew older. Ironically, it wasn't until I watched and then later read LotR that I rediscovered this part of me, this true part of my soul that I had tried to forget or had inadvertently suppressed.

Anyway, I'll give more thought to some of what's been brought up here and be back later.


Lali

[vison]

Lalaith, in another forum or on another thread somewhere we were talking about friendship.

Anne and Diana's friendship was sincere and beautiful in that they were utterly loving and loyal to each other, an ideal we should all strive for.

Yet how different they were! Diana could not enter into Anne's inner life, her passions. They each recognized this, yet it did not cause them to devalue their love.

I have real life friends. One or two in particular have seen me through some very bad times, and have called on me for the same support over the years. We have shared confidences. We have never quarrelled. We have never betrayed each other.

But, to be honest, none of my real life friends would spend five minutes on Torc, or B77, or this board. Not one. This is a part of my life I never had the chance to experience before! What a gift it has been.

To be even more honest, I don't know if I could do this in "real life". I don't think I could bare my soul (at the risk of sounding too dramatic) in the way we do here in some threads. My real life friends think. . . I'm odd. Bookish. Overly. . . thoughtful. But they love me just the same, I guess.

[Lalaith]

I know what you mean about baring your soul in a way here that you can never do in real life. Though I have been blessed to have real life friends who share my inner passions, who understand the whole Anne/Tolkien thing, there is still something different about being here. Perhaps it's the fact that we communicate with the written word, which allows time for thought and careful consideration of our words. It also allows us to run with our thoughts, something that doesn't usually happen in a RL conversation because, obviously, you want the other person to whom you're speaking to speak also. (Well, polite people do!)

I've had many, many friends over the years. A few of them have been kindred spirits. It used to be hard to find them. Then I went online and, suddenly, there's a whole messageboard full of them. How utterly odd and wonderful, all at the same time.

It makes me wonder, though, in order for me to consider someone a kindred spirit, does that person have to "get" this whole imagination/fantasy thing? If that's the case, then I've had less than I thought. I'd have to say "not necessarily" but it certainly does help. And what do I do as a happily married woman who has found a kindred spirit (a true one, nearly a clone of me ) in another man? I'm not asking from the standpoint of entering into any sort of infidelity (God forbid!!), but simply from the standpoint of is it even possible to be friends with this guy or is that just asking for trouble? It's just odd. I've never met a RL guy who fit the bill, so to speak. Thoughts would be appreciated.


Lali

[vison]

I do believe a man and a woman can be friends and no more. It is not common, but it is certainly possible.

It's funny. Although I know that my internet friends are of both genders, gender doesn't really come into the picture for me. I just communicate with the person. You can do that online, but maybe it's harder in RL?

In some forums the gender of another poster is unknown, not obvious.

[Lalaith]

I find it harder in RL, unfortunately. I am a natural-born flirt and find it hard to keep that in check.

I know it's possible, just difficult.


Lali

[Lalaith]

Sorry! I killed the thread!!!

Please ignore the last few posts and resume discussing!



Lali

[vison]

Uh.....Lalaith, it's a sorta busy time in RW terms, eh?

No, me dear, you didn't kill the thread. Right now I have nothing to say, but I'm working on it.

[truehobbit]

I'm sure you haven't, Lali! Folks are just off for Christmas - the boards have been quiet for the past few days, they'll be back!

*looks at her own name in the "last post" column of quite a few threads*

At least I hope so!

She captured my imagination like Laura Ingalls had before her

This is something I've read often now, and it always makes me wonder whether kids in the US or England read a lot of old classics?
When I read something like that, I get the impression that people's main reading as kids were some traditional books, rather than stuff from the multitude of newly written material. I don't reallyknow about kids here, but I've always taken for granted that the main reading was from the new material - it certainly was for me. Well, I'm not sure whether Enid Blyton and Astrid Lindgren should be considered classics already, they are certainly much read here, but there's no universally read 19th century material for kids here (with the exception of fairy tales).

[vison]

Well, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her books in the mid-twentieth century, and Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote hers in the era around the Great War. So they aren't 19th century.

I read whatever I could get my hands on as a kid. Our school had hardly any books, but they did have a pretty complete collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs, of all things, so I read a lot of Tarzan and the Mars books. OVer and over. There were a few English boys' books, such as a collection of Chatterbox and Tom Brown's Schooldays, etc., and I read them, too. My folks didn't have many books of their own, but we went to the library quite a bit. That's where I found Laura and Ann. And millions of others that escape me now. Laura and Ann stayed with me.

I read Enid Blyton, but found them a bit twee, even as a kid. Never read Astrid Lindgren.

When I babysat at our neighbour's, the mum there read a lot and she had shelves full of John O'Hara and other adult authors, and I read them, a bit mature for me maybe, but in the end the best thing that could have happened. I read Pride and Prejudice there, and then got the rest of Austen at the library. She had Sinclair Lewis and Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, so I really got exposed to great writing.

Our high school was small and the library wasn't too great, but there were still a lot of books there I hadn't read so I more or less started at one end and kept going. I had no "taste", I would read anything. But of course, you soon can distinguish between what is "good" and what is "crap"! I read masses of late 19th century stuff, contemporaries of Louisa May Alcott, some awful tearjerkers, like The English Orphans.

Two books I recall reading then that I would like to read again: The Green Madonna, and The Dark Stranger. I have found them at ABE books and will treat myself to them in the New Year. ABE books is an online second hand bookseller, the greatest place in the world, and it's Canadian!

[truehobbit]

You spelled Anne without an "e"!

vison, thanks for the info! I remember now that Pearl said in her first post that the Wilder books were written in the thirties - they do sound a lot like older stuff, I think. As to Montgomery, I think you can count something written before WWI with the 19th century more than the 20th.

But in your case it really seems that whatever books you could lay your hands on often were 19th century.
Is it still the same today? What did others read? Or, when you buy books for your kids, do you look for Tom Brown's schooldays and Francis Hodgson Burnett or do you browse the modern literature section?

And you should read some Astrid Lindgren!