In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

4 | “Astronomers located her in the latitude of Prince Edward Island” L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, and Early Hollywood Lucy Maud Montgomery is the only author considered in this study who can be compared to Mae West in terms of her impact on popular culture. Her first novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908), became an international best seller and spawned seven sequels, numerous screen adaptations, a series of spin-off products, and an entire tourist industry in Prince Edward Island. In their book on Canadian popular culture, Mondo Canuck, journalists Geoff Pevere and Greig Dymond identify Anne of Green Gables as “the most widely read Canadian book ever written” (13). By the 1910s and through the interwar years, Montgomery was known around the world, but her fame has always been contingent on the much greater renown of her character Anne Shirley . Anne might be considered a celebrity sign in her own right; today, even the official Prince Edward Island car license plates proclaim the province “Home of Anne of Green Gables” rather than “Birthplace of L. M. Montgomery.” Anne’s identity, like that of “real” celebrities, has frequently been appropriated by, or imposed upon, others. In the earliest instance, L. M. Montgomery found herself being reinvented in Anne’s image: journalists and publicists projected onto the author the qualities they discerned in the heroine, notably wholesomeness, youthful modesty, and identification with a rural environment. In 1919, Paramount released the first Hollywood adaptation of the novel, a silent film directed by William Desmond Taylor. Its success further increased the popularity of the original novel, yet in the reviews, Montgomery’s name, and even Anne’s, were given much less prominence than that of the starring actress, Mary Miles Minter. T4194.indb 100 T4194.indb 100 5/2/07 6:45:53 AM 5/2/07 6:45:53 AM L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables | 101 Through her role in the film, Minter’s celebrity image was invested with some of the same innocent, pastoral associations which the media had already attached to Anne and Montgomery. Yet Minter and Taylor effectively turned Anne into an American girl and relocated her to New England. By contrast, the media image of Montgomery-as-Anne was intimately connected with a conception of Canada, and specifically Prince Edward Island, as a refuge from the materialistic modernity of urban America. Three years after this film was made, William Desmond Taylor was murdered. Minter, thought to be his lover, was suspected of some association with the case, which was never solved, and this ended her screen career. She later began writing for magazines, and instead of signing her work with her own, rather tainted name, she used the pen name “Anne Shirley,” perhaps seeking to evoke the sweet, girlish image on which she had earlier based her screen appeal. The actress playing the lead in the next film version of Anne of Green Gables (1934) went one better than Minter, actually changing her screen name from Dawn O’Day to Anne Shirley for this film and all her future roles. The relationship among Montgomery’s celebrity image, that of Anne herself, and those of the actresses playing Anne on screen is fascinating and can be traced through numerous sources. Montgomery’s extensive personal writings, including a journal running to two million words, provide one set of narratives of her rise to fame, while others can be traced in her novels, especially her autobiographical Emily of New Moon trilogy (1923, 1925, 1927). It is fascinating to compare the forms of self-mythologization discernible in Montgomery’s own writing with the way she is constructed by the media. Her clipping scrapbooks attest to her interest in the way she was reviewed and profiled in newspapers and magazines,1 and reveal that different periodicals appropriated her into different ideologies, such as cultural nationalism, regionalism, Protestant ethics, and literary idealism (including a resistance to naturalism and its perceived association with the corruption of the American city). The scrapbooks also document the reception and impact of the 1919 film, although it is impossible to offer a critique of the film itself, since no copy has survived. Nothing has yet been written on this first screen version of Montgomery ’s work. Critics have, though, recently turned their attention to the later adaptations,2 especially Kevin Sullivan’s immensely popular films and miniseries for Canadian television, broadcast in the 1980s and 1990s.3 This new attention to Montgomery’s significance...

Share