Looking for Anne of Green Gables by Irene Gammel

Author:Irene Gammel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Red Hair, Puffed Sleeves, and the Rituals of Growing Up

“ … I cannot imagine that red hair away. I do my best. I think to myself, ‘Now my hair is a glorious black, black as the raven’s wing.’ But all the time I know it is Just plain red, and it breaks my heart. It will be my lifelong sorrow … .”

—Anne Shirley to Matthew Cuthbert1

Even though the words “adolescent” and “teen-age” were not yet in common use during Maud’s era, precocious Anne has the classical adolescent temperament. Like a modern-day teenager, she is constantly reinventing and testing herself—inhabiting countless roles that add to the reader’s delight, suggesting both a fantasy of unfettered freedom and a coming to terms with a distinctive personal identity that is also carefully negotiated with respect to its social context. Like her author, Anne is able to play a myriad of roles, even contradictory ones. Thus she experiments with hairstyles (Anne’s hair changes color and goes from long to short) and clothing (witness the dramatic changes from gray aprons to modern dresses). She also showcases her performance talents as an actress (Elaine), an amateur model (Dawn of Hope), and stage performer. Like Maud, who tried out a number of different pseudonyms (Maud Cavendish, Joyce Cavendish, Maud Eglinton, Belinda Bluegrass, Cynthia, J. C. Neville),2 so Anne plays at renaming herself (Geraldine, Cordelia, Elaine). As Anne of Green Gables, she also gives herself a noble connection to a place like the famous medieval redhead and free spirit, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

The self-defining female child is an adolescent myth, in addition to being a powerful myth in Canadian literature and culture: “For this story of the sensitive young woman who doesn’t somehow ‘belong’ in the environment into which she has found herself situated, who must somehow refuse to be limited by her birth-identity who creates for herself a new identity more appropriate to her ‘finer’ qualities, occurs again and again in Canadian writing after Anne of Green Gables.”3 We find an exuberant pattern of female reinvention in the work of Maud’s literary daughters including Canadian icons such as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Margaret Laurence. In fact, there may be a trajectory from Anne Shirley to the Honorable Kim Campbell, who also renamed herself, rejecting her birthname Avril Phaedra (though her fame as the first woman prime minister of Canada was short lived, unlike the enduring popularity of the Island redhead). As for Anne Shirley’s compelling journey into selfhood, she is equipped with tools she shared with her author including a highly developed sense of fashion, a talent in performance, and a dynamic personality. Her multiple roles suggest that the story of Anne is at heart a fable of identity.

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