Windows and Words: A Look at Canadian Children's Literature in English

From Pagan to Christian: The Symbolic Journey of Anne of Green Gables

From Pagan to Christian: The Symbolic Journey of Anne of Green Gables JOHN R. SORFLEET O'N JULY 5, 1911, Lucy Maud Montgomery married a Presbyterian minister named Ewan MacDonald to whom she had been secretly engaged for five years, since October 12, 1906. In subsequent years Maud's ideas about Christian doctrine went through some significant changes, but at the time Anne of Green Gables was written they were comparatively orthodox. Indeed, she afterwards noted that the very evening she started to write the novel was the first day that Ewan came up to get his mail (Montgomery 1987, 147), and they made a regular practice of talking "for an hour or so" on various matters: "I began to enjoy our chats on theology and philosophy—the only subjects he had a real grasp of—and moreover, I began to be attracted by the man himself (Montgomery 1985, 321). Further, in a May 1907 letter to Ephraim Weber, her long-time pen-pal, when she first mentions writing most of Anne of Green Gables "last fall and winter" (Eggleston 1981, 51), she also says she had spent the last year reading the Bible—"really, reading if (53)—a logical activity for a woman who had become interested in (and later engaged to) a minister while writing the novel. It is only natural to consider how her relationship with Ewan and her careful Bible study might be reflected in Anne of Green Gables. What we have in the novel is Anne's life-journey from childhood (age eleven) to young adulthood (age sixteen and a half). Anne's growing-up has 176 various dimensions: physical, educational, social, moral, and spiritual. I'm going to focus most on the moral and spiritual journey, as conveyed through the fairy tale elements, imagery, symbolism, and religious allusions. Montgomery adds force to the details of her depiction by drawing on the power of archetype, especially fairy tale archetype. Anne is the orphaned heroine, the outsider coming to an unknown land, where she is involved in a case of mistaken identity, is strongly associated with nature and natural forces, gains protectors who are themselves atypical—indeed, she can even be said to wake them from a kind of sleep—demonstrates her competence and worthiness, defeats her enemies, helps transform Avonlea society, and is finally reconciled with her Prince Charming, Gilbert Blythe. She is, then, a powerful personality in terms of fairy tale archetype. Anne's unusual qualities are apparent in the novel's first description of her: "no commonplace soul inhabited the body of this stray woman-child" (Montgomery 1908, 12-13). She soon shows remarkable powers, including the ability to pick the Cuthbert homestead out of many in a panoramic landscape before she first arrives there. On her initial trip to Green Gables in Chapter Two, she is also described in fairy tale terms, as "this freckled witch" (16). Similar uses of imagery and symbolism occur later in the novel. In Chapter Three, Marilla says: "Matthew Cuthbert, I believe that child has bewitched you!" (31). In Chapter Four, we are told that Marilla "had an uncomfortable feeling that while this odd child's body might be there at the table her spirit was far away in some remote airy cloudland, borne aloft on the wings of imagination" (36). Later she says to herself, "She'll be casting a spell over me, too. She's cast it over Matthew" (38). In Chapter Seven, Anne is again described as "this freckled witch of a girl who knew and cared nothing about God's love, since she had never had it translated to her through the medium of human love" (55). In Chapter Fourteen, Marilla says, "I declare I believe Green Gables is bewitched" (108), while in Chapter Thirty Rachel Lynde declares, "an odder, unexpecteder witch of a child there never was in this world" (265). Anne also imagines she is "a frost fairy" (133), tells "beautiful fairy storfies]" (128), believes in fairies (263) and dryads (183), is compared to "[s]ome wild divinity of the shadowy plain" (121) and a "sprite" (189), plays "a red-haired fairy" at the school concert (205), imagines she is "an enchanted princess" (173), and proves to be a female ugly duckling who becomes a beautiful swan. Fairies and witches and dryads, of course, are intrinsically linked 177 with nature and with nature-based or pagan religious perspectives— hence...