By: Grace Kielstra
Author Bio:
Grace is a fourth-year anthropology student trying to get back into reading fiction, something she loved and somewhat lost in the midst of academic pressures. She is particularly interested in stories about stories and the way narrative can seep into and shape everyday life. In this review, she revisits her Grandmother's favourite heroine, Anne of Green Gables.
THE REVIEW:
The story goes that the first books my grandmother ever read in English were LM Montgomery’s Anne series. She was Frisian, immigrating to Canada with her family as a young woman, trying to escape a life of rural poverty after surviving the Nazi occupation. Her first job was tobacco, her second, domestic service for a local family who happened to possess a very large library. While the wife was British and seeking a traditional upper-class household structure, the husband was Canadian, less used to staff, and very willing to let their new maid read whatever she wanted. Since picking up that first book, she loved Anne for her entire life.
My grandmother died this summer and this autumn I find myself returning to Anne. My copy of these books are hers, I took them steadily from her house whenever I visited, keeping the row of fading paperbacks on my childhood bookshelf. Yet, as a child I didn’t love Anne. I would read most things put in front of me, but Anne was too whimsical, too romantic, she said silly things about Octobers and bosom friends and named places ridiculous things. In hindsight I was jealous too, of her lack of self-consciousness and of how easily she charmed all of Avonlea. I thought her flighty and dramatic and quite without substance.
The truth is, however, that the whimsy of the Anne books which is so often lauded hides a much deeper understanding of grief. There are flashes of this in the first two books of the series, but I believe it becomes a much more steady undercurrent in Anne of the Island, the third novel in which Anne is headed off to university and life will never be the same again.“Harvest is ended and summer is gone,” she quotes as the opening line, and she and Diana Barry, her best friend, begin with talk of loss and leaving, those headed to university, those who have left Prince Edward Island permanently (such as the beloved pastor Mr. Allan and his wife). The idea that they have all come to “a parting of ways” lingers throughout the narrative. The unchanging childhood beauty of Green Gables and Avonlea is shifting as they watch, and notably even the youthful friendship between Anne and Gilbert Blythe is disintegrating since Gil makes it very clear he has fallen in love with Anne, something Anne does not believe she reciprocates. While Anne may still return at the holidays to Green Gables, she senses that it will never be home again. Even at the happy moment of Diana’s marriage, Anne is touched with sadness, crying that “Diana Barry will never kiss me again.”. There is, it seems, no way to return to the past.
(My grandmother, at least by the time she was my grandmother and had built a life for herself in Canada with growing sons and a growing business, did not romanticise her childhood in the Netherlands. While she did engage with the tight-knit local Dutch immigrant community, she and my grandfather always separated themselves more than was common. Canada had been better to them, providing a chance to rise from the very bottom of the social hierarchy, becoming accountants with far more social respect and financial stability than their shared agricultural roots indicated. Nevertheless, when she was young it cannot have been easy to find herself in a new place with a new language full of people she did not know. It is never easy to face a time of such change even when the change may lead to even better things).
To be clear, there are many good things to be had at Richmond, the college Anne attends. She has her two housemates Priscilla, a friend from earlier in life, and Philippa, whom she meets on the first day of college, perhaps indicating the straddling nature of university between the old life and the new. Anne witnesses romances, she visits “chums”, she enjoys her studies and she continues to find beauty and joy in nature as she always has. Yet, throughout the novel the undercurrent of anxiety regarding change and the future remains strong: even happy times are marred, often by Anne’s uncertain feelings for Gilbert, or simply her own loneliness. When she at last comes home after graduation she finds that the old Snow Queen, her beloved cherry tree, has blown down and was “rotten at the core,” merely a flimsy upholding of dreams with no real substance. Simultaneously, Diana cannot welcome her home because Diana has a new baby - the many romances Anne witnesses often only serve to highlight the feeling that she is being left behind by the world she loves. Anne of the Island is the closest Anne book to a romance novel and while Anne has many interests other than marriage, with a significant plotline being her struggle to be published, she does wish for a romance for herself. To an extent, this is because she romanticises romance so much, leading to her dating Roy, a tall, dark, handsome man almost out of a book, convincing herself she is in love with him right up until he proposes. However, there is a much more real underpinning to this search for romantic love – Anne grew up without a family, without ever being wanted for the first eleven years of her life. She built a life in Avonlea which now seems in danger as everyone else has someone more important than her. The possibility of that old bone-deep loneliness comes creeping back in.
This book dwells more seriously on Anne’s status as an orphan than the previous two novels. While her orphanhood was never shied away from, in the earlier books the fact that she claims she was never loved by anyone is almost glossed over, taken as it is exactly as seriously as the immense tragedy of dying your hair green or ruining a cake. In Anne of the Island, however, Anne gets to return to the house her parents lived in and is given the old letters between her father and mother. It’s a joyous moment, Anne feeling as though she’s “not an orphan any longer,” but the humanisation of the distant parental figures also brings a greater sadness to their deaths and the loss that echoed through the first years of her life. Just as they come back to life in the knowing of them, so too do they die again, much more painfully.
The harshest pang of death, however, is found in the middle of the book in Ruby Gillis, boy-crazy, beautiful, full of silliness and frivolity and laughter. Ruby Gillis’ death from galloping consumption is not the first in the Anne books – one of the great griefs of the entire series is the loss of Anne’s beloved father-figure Matthew Cuthbert. Yet, the loss of Matthew does not lead Anne to face her own mortality as the loss of Ruby does, for he was the generation before her, whereas Ruby was “the brilliant, the merry, the coquettish! It was impossible to associate the thought of her with anything like death.”. “If it is true that she is dying any other sad thing might be true, too,” says Anne, “Ruby is the first of our schoolmates to go. One by one, sooner or later, all the rest of us must follow.”
LM Montgomery’s life itself was often darkened by death and struggle. Her earliest memories, she claimed, were of her mother dying when she was less than two years old. Her father abandoned her and her stepmother hated her, she was a lonely child, often suffered from depression as an adult, and her eventual husband and she had very little in common leading to a stifling, unhappy marriage. Anne’s early stories, one could argue, certainly have an old-fashioned feeling of wish-fulfilment, in which a strange, imaginative, lonely child finds love and community. However, Anne of the Island feels less like wish fulfilment and almost more like a manifesto. The tragedies of life are laid out plain, and yet they are not succumbed to. Ruby Gillis might die yet life has to still be lived. Even when Anne is at her lowest, feeling as though life is stripped of all romance, she is still “much comforted by the romance in the idea of the world being denuded of romance.”. Her love of nature, of her home, of the possibilities of the world are never lost to her. Montgomery is skilled at balancing her writing so even the darkest moments never become trudging misery, and equally she seems to be always insisting the same must be done in life. There is, as Anne says, always the bend in the road.
The novel’s ending, especially, clings to this idea of survival and joy. Anne of the Island concludes with, to me, the most moving and memorable moment in all of the Anne books. Gilbert Blythe is dying and Anne realises that night that she loves him. The next morning at dawn as she goes outside she meets Pacifique, the hired man for the family who lives next door to the Blythes.
'“Did you hear how Gilbert Blythe was this morning?” Anne’s desperation drove her to the question. Even the worst would be more endurable than this hideous suspense.
“He’s better,” said Pacifique. “He got de turn las’ night. De doctor say he’ll be all right now dis soon while. Had close shave, dough! Dat boy, he jus’ keel himself at college. Well, I mus’ hurry. De old man, he’ll be in hurry to see me.”
Pacifique resumed his walk and his whistle. Anne gazed after him with eyes where joy was driving out the strained anguish of the night. He was a very lank, very ragged, very homely youth. But in her sight he was as beautiful as those who bring good tidings on the mountains. Never, as long as she lived, would Anne see Pacifique’s brown, round, black-eyed face without a warm remembrance of the moment when he had given to her the oil of joy for mourning.
Long after Pacifique’s gay whistle had faded into the phantom of music and then into silence far up under the maples of Lover’s Lane Anne stood under the willows, tasting the poignant sweetness of life when some great dread has been removed from it. The morning was a cup filled with mist and glamor. In the corner near her was a rich surprise of new-blown, crystal-dewed roses. The trills and trickles of song from the birds in the big tree above her seemed in perfect accord with her mood. A sentence from a very old, very true, very wonderful Book came to her lips,
“Weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning.”'
The final chapter of Anne of the Island, Gilbert surviving, Anne realizing she loves him, the two kissing in the dusk, does not remove the darkness of the rest of the book. The night is real, the weeping is just as true and long. Things lost are still lost, and almost everything must be lost at one point or another. Anne of the Island says you can never go back. “Old shrines” are desecrated, old friends are taken. There is a mourning throughout the entire book of childhood and simplicity and of beloved old fairies and ghosts. But just because you can’t go back doesn’t mean there won’t be joys, potentially even greater than before. Such joys are won at a great cost, but they stand steadfast against the griefs of the world. Small wonder, perhaps, that a war-raised young immigrant woman sitting in her employers’ library would love them so deeply.
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