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  • Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture
  • Cecilia Morgan
Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture. Edited by Irene Gammel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Inc., 2002. Pp. xiv, 348, illus. $70.00

Making Avonlea is the result of both editor Irene Gammel's longstanding interest in L.M. Montgomery's relationship to Canadian culture and of a widespread scholarly fascination, in Canada and abroad, with Montgomery and her work. Originating from a conference held in 2000 at the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island, this collection of essays explores both the meanings and manifestations of Montgomery and her most famous characters, Anne and Emily of New Moon, in a wide variety of genres and locations. Twenty-three authors have contributed to this book; most of them write from either the discipline of English, with a specialization in Canadian literature, or from interdisciplinary perspectives, such as gender studies and cultural studies (which includes film, television, drama). One essay comes from music history. There also are pieces that are as much reflections on the more personal, material, and sometimes embodied meanings of 'Anne' and Montgomery to these authors' lives (for example, Tara Nogler's essay on working in a Japanese theme park, performing Anne) as they are academic work. L.M. Montgomery and Canadian popular culture, the authors of Making Avonlea argue, are compelling and significant topics for both scholarly and popular communities.

Making Avonlea is divided into three parts: Avonlea's cultural weight and Avonlea as iconography; Avonlea on film and television and as music and drama; and Avonlea as tourist landscape. The first section deals primarily with Montgomery, Avonlea, Anne, and Emily in literature and spans the late-Victorian and Edwardian decades and selected periods in the twentieth century; its authors consider topics as diverse as Montgomery's visual imagination, the meanings of hair in Green Gables, international images of Emily, and the controversy over English professor Laura Robinson's paper on lesbian desire in Green Gables (given at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Edmonton, 2000). Part two explores the treatment of Montgomery's novels in Kevin Sullivan's television adaptation (at both 'macro' and 'micro' levels); the role of the Disney Corporation in Sullivan's Road to Avonlea series; CBC's Emily of New Moon series; Paul LeDoux's play, Anne of Green Gables; and the music of Elaine and Norman Campbell, Don Harron, and Mavor Moore's long-running musical. Part three looks at the construction of 'Avonlea' as a tourist site, both in its geographic manifestation in Prince Edward Island and as an imagined terrain and community that is [End Page 634] recreated elsewhere, whether in Japanese theme parks and clubs or in electronic discussion groups around the world.

As Gammel points out in her introduction, there is no one 'unified thesis' or particular approach that underpins the book. While all of this work is written from feminist perspectives, it also represents a mixture of other theoretical approaches to understand the formation of Avonlea as an imagined community in its cultural manifestations (including Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, John Fiske, Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, Dawn H. Currie, and Angela McRobbie). Many of the essays point to, though, the shifting boundaries between 'high,' 'middle,' and 'low' cultures that Montgomery's work and its subsequent iconography illuminates, although with a few exceptions they do so in ways more contemporary than historical. Furthermore, Making Avonlea illustrates another boundary, one that has been constructed to neatly divide the personal, subjective, and local from the 'academic,' objective, and national. A number of these scholars identify with Montgomery's work on both these levels, often simultaneously, and see that identification as a source of strength, not weakness. While I find this approach intriguing (for while historians do so as well, they usually are not so honest about it), it has its pitfalls, for it can lead us to focus more on the poetics and less so on the politics of cultural production. While some authors consider issues of race, ethnicity, and representation (for example, Christopher Gittings in his essay on both the original and the television version of Emily), the...

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