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crarr voices concern over the Montgomery adaptations for their perpetuation of a white past for Canada, one that excludes the nation-building contributions of non-white, non-Anglo Canadians. Where some cultural critics see the costume drama as constructing an indistinct, contextless past, others describe the production of a specific, racially exclusive past. Rather than imagining ourselves into Montgomery’s words and her world, the screen versions provide us with a community already imagined for us, one which implicitly requires particular traits for belonging—whiteness being the most obvious and the most exclusive. Such imaginings of a national past have immense power, promoting feelings of community and belonging, or conversely, fragmentation and exclusion. The stories we tell ourselves about our past have implications for Canada today and tomorrow , and must be squared with the civic democratic goals of our public broadcaster. With the screen Montgomery, we are contending with not only an adaptation of a novel, but perhaps more pressingly, with an adaptation of Canada’s past, making for a troubling public policy situation. For to whom does the nation’s past, and by implication, its present and its future, belong? Notes 1 In English-Canadian television history, Sullivan’s two-part Anne of Green Gables holds the record for the most-watched Canadian miniseries, drawing 5.6 million viewers. Sid Adilman, “Ratings King,” Toronto Star 16 January 1995: e7. 2 Additional Avonlea-related films include Happy Christmas, Miss King (1998) and Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story (2000). Of these Montgomery adaptations, Cinar and Salter Street produced Emily of New Moon. The others all belong to Sullivan Entertainment. Because my paper concerns criticism as much as adaptation, I do not discuss Happy Christmas, Miss King. Moreover, at the time of writing, Eleanor Hersey’s observant analysis of the third Anne film did not exist. See Hersey, “‘It’s all mine’: The Modern Woman as Writer in Sullivan’s Anne of Green Gables Films” in Making Avonlea : L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture, ed. Irene Gammel (Toronto: University Toronto Press 2002), 131–44. 3 The now-settled litigation between the pei government and the Montgomery heirs over trademark rights, and the ongoing litigation between Sullivan Entertainment and Montgomery ’s descendants over profits from the adaptations, attest loudly to this phenomenon . See Doug Saunders and Gayle Macdonald, “Anne’s Scary Stepparents,” Globe and Mail 16 October 1999: c1; and Tracey Tyler, “Custody Battle over Anne of Green Gables: Trademark Tussle Worth Big Money,” Toronto Star 6 March 1994: a1. 4 For examples, see Gabriella Ahmansson, A Life and Its Mirrors: A Feminist Reading of L.M. Montgomery’s Fiction, vol. 1 (Stockholm: Uppsala, 1991); Mavis Reimer, ed., Such a Simple Little Tale: Critical Responses to L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (Metuchen, NJ, and London: Children’s Literature Association and Scarecrow Press, 1992); and Mary Rubio, ed., Harvesting Thistles: The Textual Garden of L.M. Montgomery (Guelph, ON: Canadian Children’s Press, 1994). 5 Christopher Gittings, “Re-Visioning Emily of New Moon: Family Melodrama for the Nation,” Canadian Children’s Literature 91/92 (1998): 22–35. The article has been reprinted in Making Avonlea, 180–200. 284 (Dis)Locating Language 6 Ann F. Howey, “‘She look’d down to Camelot’: Anne and the Lady of Shalott,” paper presented at the L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture Conference, University of Prince Edward Island, 2000. A version of this paper has since been published in Making Avonlea , 160–73. 7 Susan Drain, “‘Too Much Love-Making’: Anne of Green Gables on Television,” The Lion and the Unicorn 11.2 (1987): 63–72; Trinna Frever, “Vaguely Familiar: Cinematic Intertextuality in Kevin Sullivan’s Anne of Avonlea,” Canadian Children’s Literature 91/92 (1998): 36-52. 8 Marcia Landy, Film, Politics and Gramsci (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 135. 9 Stella Bruzzi, “Jane Campion: Costume Drama and Reclaiming Women’s Past,” Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Pam Cook and Philip Dodd (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 233–35; Landy, 126. 10 Along these lines, see Barbara Tepa Lupack, ed., Nineteenth-Century Women at the Movies: Adapting Classic Women’s Fiction to Film (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999). 11 Bruzzi, 233–34. 12 Andrew Higson, “Re-Presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” Fires Were Started: British Genres and Thatcherism, ed. Lester Friedman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 109–29. 13 Frever, “Vaguely Familiar,” 50. 14...

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