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Journeys of the Mother in the World of Green Gables by Nancy Huse Nineteenth century English-speaking women claimed the rights of citizens because of their role as mothers (Reuther). Although feminist psychoanalytic critics today seek to identify the nature of female autonomy, Nancy Chodorow and others have established the importance of recognizing that women are socialized to be mothers. In fact, part of the feminist project is to discover a sane representation of motherhood, one which emphasizes its power without entirely idealizing or, as in the case of many Oedipal quest narratives, depicting the mother's power as something to be escaped from (Ruddick 345). Like nineteenth century women writers, L. M. Montgomery used motherhood as a central theme; unlike many other writers—perhaps because of her island settings—Montgomery filled her Anne books with physical journeys. The orphan's journey, for example, opens the series; and Anne makes many trips, short and long, in the course of her education and adulthood. Two decisive journeys in the books, however, are taken by other female characters: Marilla, Anne's adoptive mother, and Rilla, Anne's biological daughter who, at the end of the series, likewise becomes a foster or adoptive mother. These two women seem to frame the story of Anne; they likewise—because they are/are not mothers and are/are not Anne herself— offer a way of viewing the female journey of simultaneous relatedness and autonomy (Gallop 6). Because Marilla' s action in mothering Anne is decisive in allowing the Anne stories to exist, and Rilla' s action in mothering represents the possibility for a happy ending to that set of stories, these two journeys are of structural interest. As examples of the way motherhood is presented to child readers in her time period, Montgomery's stories of "maidens" who choose to be "mothers" are of historical interest. Perhaps the most important thing about these journeys is that they can refine our understanding of archetypical patterns as they are found in female experience. The mature female, according to Annis Pratt, is at once maiden/mother/crone, and can employ any one of these roles at any time (172). The Green Gables books offer an interconnected and simultaneous presence of maiden/mother/crone in Rilla/Anne/Marilla, and moreover the three "stages" are present in the three women as each makes her metaphoric quest. (Anne, for example, sometimes seems "older" than Marilla or "younger" than her own children). The journeys of Marilla and Rilla, especially, vary the traditional heroic separation/test/reintegration pattern; each journeys away and makes a major decision, yet each is traveling with a child and interacting with that child as she makes her decision. Montgomery thus shows the beginning and the end of the female life cycle not as a place of enviable or unfortunate freedom as in many myths of maidens and crones, but as a state in common with that of mothers themselves, a condition in which decisions and change, power and the acquisition of power, are intrinsic. While I do not want to overemphasize the powerful aspects of the maternal journeys in Montgomery's books—Anne herself has too many headaches in the later ones to suit my ideas of adventure—it is clear that the journeys of Marilla and Rilla are both positive and powerful. The powerful aspects of mothering, and the reasons mothers engage in these powerful activities, are described by Sara Ruddick as "maternal thinking," a mode of social practice and theoretical orientation which draws especially on the training in empathy most females acquire in our role as daughters (358). Its most notable characteristic is seeing the child's reality with the eye of attention. Maternal thinking focuses on the other in order to preserve life, foster growth, and produce a young adult acceptable to the group. Though the exercise of maternal thinking is prone to the temptation of too-rigid control, the recognition of the child's separate life also calls on the cheerfulness and openness to change necessary to this mode of thought. Reading the journeys of Anne's adoptive/adapting mother and daughter with Ruddick' s comments as framework offers some extrinsic justification for viewing the...

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