The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  “Anne is as real to me as if I had given her birth,” Montgomery wrote, revealing that her character, like Jo March, is drawn from life.34 After Montgomery’s mother died of tuberculosis, her father packed her off to live with her strict maternal grandparents while he moved to Saskatchewan and remarried. Both Alcott and Montgomery adopt a transparently autobiographical style that contrasts sharply with the detached narrative voice found in the works of authors like Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. Their coming-of-age works hint at the possibility of an identity as a professional writer in ways unusual for novels of the time.

  Like Jo, Anne abandons her dreams of becoming an author, and in the sequels that followed the first book, her writing voice is muted. Still, many later readers understood that Anne Shirley was standing before a door that had not existed before Little Women was published, and now the door opened a crack wider. If Jo and Anne give in to the twin tugs of heterosexual marriage and domesticity, they still reveal the joy that girls can derive from creativity and self-expression. And the lives of their authors predict new possibilities of professional success, even if their personal lives, Montgomery’s in particular, included some turbulence.

  Montgomery’s marriage to Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister, was, by her own account, loveless. Her husband suffered from severe bouts of depression, stemming from what he himself diagnosed as “religious melancholia,” a fear that he would not be among the Elect chosen to enter heaven. Montgomery had her own mental health to worry about (“I have lost my mind by spells”), but still she became the main source of financial support for her husband and two sons. Later in life, after achieving literary celebrity and financial success, she fell into a deep depressive state. Utterly dejected by the prospect of a second world war and the possible conscription of her younger son, she wrote: “My position is too awful to endure. . . . What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best in spite of many mistakes.”35 The official cause of her death was listed as a coronary thrombosis, but it is more than likely that Montgomery deliberately overdosed on medications for mood disorders.

  Anne of Green Gables was rejected by four publishers before being accepted by L. C. Page, a publishing company in Boston. It quickly became a bestselling book. Like Alcott, Montgomery became something of a literary celebrity, yet her work never entered the official canon of works written in English. I recall once asking colleagues in Harvard’s Department of English, as well as in the Program in American Studies, whether Little Women, a work that exists in 320 editions today in English alone, was ever taught in any courses, and the response was always a mildly amused, quizzical look, followed by a quick and definitive no. I quickly reasoned that it made no sense to follow up with the same question about Anne of Green Gables. What ranked high on the list of nineteenth-century American novels included in the curriculum? The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott’s friend and neighbor who famously explored with morbid attentiveness the shameful consequences of adultery. Anne and Jo could not form a more striking contrast with Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, yet both Little Women and the Anne of Green Gables series are dismissed as children’s literature and trivialized as popular culture lacking literary merit. Recall how Hawthorne denounced popular women writers as a “damned mob of scribbling women!”—though he may have made an exception for Louisa May Alcott, whom he described as “gifted and agreeable” even if her commercial success occasionally rankled him.36

  Anne Shirley of Anne with an E, 2017 Courtesy of Photofest

  Today, Anne of Green Gables continues to have a strong following—even the crusty Mark Twain conceded that she was “the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice.”37 Montgomery’s book has been translated into thirty-six languages and inspired a silent movie, more than half a dozen television shows, cartoons, musicals, and so on. Its contribution to the Canadian tourism industry on Prince Edward Island is not at all negligible. Who would have imagined that Anne’s story would be carried to the front by members of the Polish Resistance, turned into a television series in Sri Lanka, and included in the Japanese school curriculum of the 1950s?38 Anne won the hearts not only of Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert but of readers all over the world.

  When Lucy Maud Montgomery published Anne of Green Gables, she put reading, imagination, make-believe, talk, and writing on trial. In the relentless push-pull between Anne Shirley and Marilla Cuthbert, we discern the social pressures to which girls are relentlessly subjected as they grow up. Everything about Anne is designed to please readers of Montgomery’s novel: her “beauty-loving eyes,” her talkative nature, her lively imagination, and her love of books as well as of the outdoors. But Anne’s compulsive conversational energy fails to find favor with Marilla. “You talk entirely too much for a little girl,” she tells Anne, who thereafter holds her tongue “so obediently and thoroughly that her continued silence made Marilla rather nervous.”39 Marilla’s contempt for talk extends to the printed word as well, and she feels nothing but disdain for young readers and writers. Resolutely unimaginative and austere, she denounces the “story-writing business” to which Anne and her friends subscribe as a “pack of nonsense” and declares that “reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.”

  As for imagination, the gift that makes Anne so winning and likeable and augurs well for her future—it is turned into a liability. The “wicked nonsense” of Anne’s imagination transforms a spruce grove into a Haunted Wood filled with ghosts, skeletons, and headless men. Countless other acts of inspired fancy create an imaginative overload. When Marilla resolves to “cure” Anne of her imagination with a forced march through the woods at night, Anne repents and regrets “the license which she had given to her imagination.” She resolves to be content with the “commonplace” from then on. Even play and pantomime become taboo after Anne, taking the role of the dead Elaine in Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” runs into a “dangerous plight” as she drifts down a river in a dramatic staging of the poem with her friends.

  Domestic order, efficiency, and cleanliness are forever disrupted and undermined by Anne’s inventive disposition. Anne of Green Gables runs the risk of turning into an endless series of chapters illustrating the perils of imagination even as it cannot help but celebrate that faculty by turning the heroine into the indisputable figure of the reader’s sympathetic identification. Each chapter reads like a self-contained episode, with Anne’s imagination running wild and getting her in trouble (she will burn anything in the oven because she becomes distracted by stories) while slightly depressed grown-ups are at first shocked and then delighted by her childlike innocence and spontaneity.40 Still, the insistent positioning of imagination and all the attendant activities associated with it (daydreaming, reading, acting, playing, and writing) as imperiling the self and inflicting pain on others suggests that outgrowing an outsize imagination may not be such a terrible thing after all. It will, after all, finally end all those “irresistible temptations” to daydream, braid ribbons in your hair, or try to dye it black. Imagination is fine so long as it stays in childhood.

  If nineteenth-century classic books about boys (Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous) take us from home on a series of adventures that go from bad (home) to worse (danger) until resolution and rescue are found, books about girls (Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi) begin at home and stay there, also often hinting at a backstory so disturbing that it is only partially elaborated. The sentimental and domestic rule supreme, driving out dark, sinister elements. Submitting to the straitjacket of a “feminine aesthetic,” Montgomery prefers sentimental domesticity to the pulse-pumping excitement of adventures, quests, and journeys, with a narrative that has ornamental, effeminate elements embedded in the social world of the ordinary and everyday, presided over by women.41 There are the “puffy sleeves” that Anne cr
aves to have on her dresses, and then there is also the constant cooking and cleaning at Green Gables.

  What we have in Montgomery’s novel is a stay-at-home narrative that charts a gradual rapprochement between curmudgeonly adults in need of redemption and orphans in need of love and protection. That rapprochement risks sliding into complete assimilation into the world of adults (Anne will grow up, after all), though by no means the bleak one that Marilla once inhabited. Anne contemplates her future in the last pages of the novel, recognizing that, with Matthew’s death, her horizons have “closed in”: “But if the path set before her feet was to be narrow she knew that flowers of quiet happiness would bloom along it. The joys of sincere work and worthy aspiration and congenial friendship were to be hers; nothing could rob her of her birthright of fancy or her ideal world of dreams. And there was always the bend in the road.” No one can kill off Anne’s imagination, not even the author of her story, for whom the character took on a life of her own. Work and friendship become central to Anne’s life, though, like Alcott, Montgomery gave in to readers who preferred the romance of marriage to the life of a spinster, one of Louisa May Alcott’s “happy women” who embrace the romance of writing and good deeds.

  Montgomery delayed Anne’s marriage to Gilbert as long as possible, and she never abandoned the notion that friendship would be central in Anne’s life, even after marriage. But writing does not seem to be in Anne’s future. If it is, it will be in diminished form. “I felt so ashamed I wanted to give up altogether, but Miss Stacy said I could learn to write well if only I trained myself to be my own severest critic.” So much for The Lurid Mystery of the Haunted Hall, a story inspired by Anne’s reading of sensation fiction. Her writing club soon dissolves, and “an occasional bit of fiction” for magazines becomes her destiny, with the domestic and sentimental prevailing over mystery, romance, and melodrama.

  Anne of Green Gables celebrates imagination yet is also committed to demonstrating the inevitable diminishing of that capacity and the importance of curbing it as you grow up. The publication of the work coincided with a moment when U.S. educators were just beginning to extol imagination and fantasy as important cognitive tools. “Fairy tale outranks arithmetic, grammar, geography, manuals of science; for without the aid of the imagination none of these books is really comprehensible,” Hamilton Wright Mabie intoned in the preface to a 1905 volume entitled Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know. He argued that fairy tales should be brought into the orbit of the educational curriculum, “for the child has not only a faculty of observation and aptitude for work, he has also the great gift of imagination.”42 Just a year earlier the stage play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up had its premiere at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London, where both adults and children were enthusiastically clapping, on a nightly basis, to keep Tinkerbell alive, with the result that fantasy and imagination began making a powerful comeback on both sides of the Atlantic.

  For the better part of the twentieth century, fostering the imagination was a high priority on the educational agenda. “Do you know what the imagination is, Susan?” Kris Kringle asks a child in the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street. “That’s when you see things that aren’t really there,” she pipes up. “Well, not exactly,” says Kris with a smile. “No—to me the imagination is a place all by itself. A very wonderful country. You’ve heard of the British Nation and the French Nation? . . . Well, this is the Imagination. And once you get there you can do almost anything you want.”43 Imagination is also, of course, precisely the term used by the Walt Disney Company to promote its animated films and products. Through what is now termed “Imagineering,” a new portal to the world of wonderlore opened up in the twentieth century. In Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery revealed how strongly she felt about the joys of an expansive imagination, yet the story of Anne Shirley reveals deep anxieties about the antisocial side to imagination, how it can isolate a child and turn her into something of a misfit, out of tune and out of step with the pressures and exigencies of the real world. Anne’s brief infatuation with stories and writing turns out to be something she must outgrow as quickly as the plain brown dresses sewn for her by Marilla.

  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, along with Empathy and Imagination

  “You must not forget the Kris Kringle.” These are the words of Mary Rommely, an Irish immigrant grandmother in Betty Smith’s 1943 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She is giving her daughter advice about how best to raise her children, one of whom is the novel’s heroine, Francie Nolan. And she urges her daughter to also tell legends, “fairy tales of the old country,” and stories about “the great ghosts that haunted your father’s people.” But Francie’s mother has reservations about telling her children “foolish lies.” Still, Mary Rommely insists and offers a powerful counterargument that resonates with what Kris Kringle (living in almost the same neighborhood) declared in Miracle on 34th Street just a few years after the publication of Smith’s novel. Uneducated and illiterate, she makes a plea for wonders and marvels: “The child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination. . . . Only by having these things in my mind can I live beyond what I have to live for.”44

  Living in the imagination is exactly what Francie does, “sitting on the gutter curb for hours,” as her piano teacher, Miss Tynmore, observes. “What do you think of then?” she asks the quiet child. “Nothing. I just tell myself stories.” Francie, impoverished and isolated, learns to make something from nothing. “Little girl, you’ll be a story writer when you grow up,” Miss Tynmore predicts.

  A story writer is exactly what Betty Smith herself became, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is as close to autofiction as Little Women and Anne of Green Gables. At the age of fourteen, Smith’s mother insisted that she quit school to help support her family. After that, Betty Wehner (her maiden name), like Francie, struggled to piece together a formal education over a period of many years, working nights and finishing high school only after she was married with two daughters. “I like to think of her as feminist back in the 1920s and ’30s before the movement even developed,” her daughter Mary later wrote about her. There was her mother, Betty Smith, in the midst of the Great Depression, a divorced woman with two daughters to raise. And how did she propose to support them? To make a living, she took bit parts in theater productions and turned to writing for a living, producing sketches, essays, plays (70 one-act plays alone), and anything that paid, knocking out copy in the early hours of the morning before the two girls left for school.

  It is hardly surprising to find that Francie, like her author, discovers in writing a social mission. Giving up the pleasures of expressive sensationalism, she draws on real-life experience: “poverty, starvation and drunkenness,” subjects that displease her English teacher, Miss Garnder. Those topics, this new teacher intones, are “ugly,” and Francie is ordered to stop writing “those sordid little stories” and encouraged to write in a mode that is “pretty” and “cute.” With a wonderful sense for drama and a reprise of Jo March’s burning of her Weekly Volcano stories, Francie sets fire to her prose and chants “I am burning ugliness” as the flames rise high. Betty Smith’s novel reminds readers of how women were discouraged from taking up social causes in their writing and guided toward the domestic and sentimental. At the same time, their writing was judged to be inferior in literary terms, precisely because of its subject matter. This curious double bind can be traced from Jo March to Anne Shirley and on to Francie Nolan, girls who are all criticized for daring to write in new, “unfeminine” ways.

  What inspires Francie to turn her attention to subjects like poverty? Her own hardscrabble background, of course, explains much. But throughout the novel, as the perspective changes from Francie to her mother and back again, we discover
that coming-of-age for Francie also means learning to be tolerant and to cultivate empathy. In the middle of the novel, we read an electrifying account about a young woman named Joanna who bears a child “out of wedlock” and is stoned by her women neighbors. “‘Bitch! You bitch!’ screamed the stringy one hysterically. Then acting on an instinct which was strong even in Christ’s day, she picked a stone out of the gutter and threw it at Joanna.” How does Francie react as witness to this atrocity? She is overwhelmed by pain: “A wave of hurt broke over Francie. . . . The hurt waves swept over her. . . . She was now getting her lesson from Joanna but it was not the kind of lesson her mother meant.” “Let Joanna be a lesson to you,” Francie’s mother had said. The lesson turns into a tutorial about being “less cruel” and feeling empathy for others as well as compassion for their circumstances.

  As in many other works that follow the pattern of the bildungsroman, in this case a girl’s coming-of-age story, there is a powerful inflection point, a moment in which the heroine walks in someone else’s shoes, feels their pain, or gets inside their skin. That form of social awareness has its origins less in parental instruction than in the reading experience. When Francie learns to read, the power of imagination is accelerated and intensified. One day, Francie turns a page and “magic” happens. “She looked at the word, and the picture of a gray mouse scampered through her mind. She looked further and when she saw ‘horse,’ she heard him pawing the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat. The word ‘running’ hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself. The barrier between the individual sound of each letter and the whole meaning of the word was removed.” Imagination builds a solid bridge between the mental conceptions of things and their real-world embodiment. With the power to move from the signifier (the word for a thing) to the mental concept of the thing and its real-world embodiment, Francie will never “be lonely.” At the same time, she is anointed as a writer precisely because she can visualize and animate the lives of others.