"Kindred Spirits" All: Green Gables Revisited

Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series represents a common problem in children's literature, the problem of the enduring classic that retains its popularity through the years without much evidence of what is usually defined as literary merit. Almost as much as Little Women, Montgomery's Avonlea books are a common bond shared by women of our century; but there is no gainsaying that Montgomery is sometimes sentimental, frequently cliché-ridden in plot and style, and often given to excessively flowery descriptive passages. What explains her enduring appeal and gives her a place in the history of literature, a history that continues to ignore her in spite of her impact on millions of readers in the past seventy-five years?

One explanation is that those readers were mostly women and girls, and thus invisible. Gerda Lerner called attention to their invisibility in her The Female Experience: An American Documentary in 1977, and in 1979 gave us a new way to look at history in her seminal The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History. "Women have been left out of history," Lerner tells us in the latter,

not because of the evil conspiracies of men in general or male historians in particular, but because we have considered history only in male-centered terms. We have missed women and their activities, because we have asked questions of history which are inappropriate to women. To rectify this, and to light up areas of historical darkness we must, for a time, focus on a woman-centered inquiry, considering the possibility of the existence of a female culture within the general culture shared by men and women. History must include an account of the female experience over time and should include the development of feminist consciousness as an essential aspect of women's past. This is the primary task of women's history. What would history be like if it were seen through the eyes of women and ordered by values they define?

What Lerner suggests for historians is a legitimate task of the literary critic as well. Pursuing it will not only help elucidate the "development of feminist consciousness," but should place in a new perspective the role and impact of a large number of books for children and young adults written by women, Anne of Green Gables among them.

There are six books in the Avonlea series by one count, eight by another, and the count could go up to ten if all Montgomery's books with the Avonlea setting and some connection with Anne were included. Mollie Gillen, Montgomery's most reliable biographer and bibliographer, cites eight and lists them chronologically in sequence of Anne's life. Anne of Green Gables appeared first in 1908, and introduced to Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert and the world the red-headed orphan "without a pick on her bones." They were expecting a boy. On that slight donnée depend all the books that follow: Anne of Avonlea in 1909, about Anne's experiences as a teacher; Anne of the Island, 1915, about her college days; Anne of Windy Pophrs, 1936, about her engagement to Gilbert Blythe and her term as school principal; Anne's House of Dreams, 1918, about her marriage and the death of her first-born child; Anne of Ingleside, 1939, about the raising of her six children; Rainbow Valley, 1910, more about the children; and finally, Rilla of Ingleside, 1921, about Anne's daughter and her reaction to the war.

These capsule summaries and Montgomery's chapter titles mirror Lerner's feminist categorization of history, in which she discards such familiar headings as "The Age of Revolution" and "The Age of Jackson" for such categories as "Childhood," "Marriage, Motherhood, and the Single State," and "Just a Housewife." In Montgomery's books we have "Anne Is Invited to Tea," "Gilbert and Anne Disagree," "Just a Happy Day." Not much happens, but only if one defines the action against Moby Dick . And why should we? Especially since, as Lerner points out in The Majority Finds Its Past,

women's culture is not and should not be seen as...