"The Other Was Whole": Anne of Green Gables, Trauma and Mirroring

More than a century after its first publication in 1908, L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables remains exceptionally popular, read worldwide: a dynamic text passed from generation to generation. "Anne fans," as Brenda Weber terms men and women who love Montgomery's novel, demonstrate an intense connection to its heroine that passes beyond the confines of their own childhood, perhaps only comparable to the widespread affection retained for Louisa May Alcott's Jo March (Weber 50–51). The considerable amount of consumable Anne product is tangible evidence of the text's draw. In a salutation to Green Gables's centennial, Margaret Atwood details the "Annery" available to the text's devotees: "Anne boxed sets, Anne notepaper and Anne pencils, Anne coffee mugs and Anne aprons, Anne candies and Anne straw hats. . . ." Green Gables, clearly, has transcended the limits of time and of the narrow geographic space of Prince Edward Island, inflating into a beloved international literary commodity.

However, despite a great deal of scholarly attention, the enigma of this popularity has not been entirely resolved, nor all of the dimensions of the text's appeal understood. Fascination with Green Gables is often credited to the unorthodoxy of its eponymous character. Anne Shirley is mercurial to the point of ridiculousness: she is a narcissist; she is a rebel. Nevertheless, by Green Gables's end, she has transitioned into something entirely other, an undeniable movement. This transition is a significant and neglected locus of fascination with Green Gables. Working within the framework of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic orders, I propose that that fascination is fundamentally connected to the pleasures of witnessing Anne's active healing from early childhood trauma, her movement from isolated fantasy and profound mirror distortions to productive social relationships within an embracing community.

Scholarship that addresses Anne's appeal has, of course, already proposed manifold answers to this question of textual attraction and longevity. Elizabeth Waterston argues that Anne is memorable "not only because her adventures are like those [of] questing heroes," but because those adventures derive from the folk-tale norm. Anne is both trickster and rescuer, hero and foe (28-29). Perry Nodelman's influential article on formulary structure in Green Gables, "Progressive Utopia," notes the significance and appeal of predictability, and supports Peter Neumeyer's argument regarding the importance of narrative units: "[C]ertain special formulas speak deeply to us, make us satisfied, and elicit a fuller response." The use of "these formulary triggers . . . bring[s] us to a receptive state of mind" (Neumeyer 28, 30). However, this satisfaction at the embrace or rupture of formula and norms is not alone sufficient to ensure the devotion to Anne of Green Gables that has persisted for the century since its publication. "Thousands of readers," writes Elizabeth Rollins Epperly, "identify with and are inspired by Montgomery's [Anne] . . . Why?" (3). Epperly charges that it is Anne's "distinctive . . . determined romanticism" (18) that prompts such high levels of devotion to the text. While the appeal of Anne's romanticism is indeed great, it, like formula, is not sufficient explanation. In this article, I propose that this continued fascination with Anne is, in part, a response to the parental loss that Anne experiences before coming to Green Gables, and her successful movement from the specularity of the mirror to the social community of Avonlea in order to transcend the pain of neglect and abandonment. Green Gables's readers certainly delight in Anne's engaging unconventionality, but the premature deprivation that prompts the extremes of that deviation constitutes another major crux of this work. Anne's survival, her successful recovery from the trauma of profound loss, is fundamentally appealing.

It is Anne's relationship with her own image—or, more precisely, her disconnect from it—that constitutes the most telling consequences of her early childhood mistreatment. Her reluctance to incorporate the reflection of her image into a construct of self suggests her resistance to the universal process of alienation first identified by Jacques Lacan—a state with which she is already too familiar. In deconstructing the "I" that is Anne, in attempting...