Anne of Green Gables: Criticism after a Century

The centenary of the publication of L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908–2008) itself saw many publications: newspaper articles reflecting on Anne's place in Canadian life, fiction (most notably Budge Wilson's Before Green Gables, the authorized prequel to Montgomery's novel), and scholarly works. Special issues of journals, single-authored monographs, and collections of essays revisited the novel that launched a series, a tourist destination, and an academic industry. Both Storm and Dissonance and 100 Years of Anne with an 'e' are evidence of the vitality of that industry. Although the essays in Storm and Dissonance began as conference papers in 2006 and are thus less explicitly connected to the centenary, both collections offer the opportunity to reflect not just on Anne's and Montgomery's places within Canadian culture and literature, but also on the changing nature of scholarship on the novel and on Montgomery's works generally.

The Seventh Biennial International L. M. Montgomery Conference, held in Charlottetown, PE, in 2006, was the genesis of the essays collected in Storm and Dissonance, since the conference was organized around topics related to conflict in Montgomery's life and writings in general. Previous conferences have also produced collections of essays: for example, L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture ; Making Avonlea: L. M. Montgomery and Popular Culture; and The Intimate Life of L. M. Montgomery. Just as the conferences themselves facilitate scholarly conversations about Montgomery's writings, these essay collections—and Storm and Dissonance is no exception—recreate that sense of scholarly conversation, particularly since contributors refer to one another's essays. This strategy also seeks to create, as the editor says in the acknowledgements, "a coherent collection of essays" (xiii).

The volume is organized into five sections: "Narrating Self and Other" (three essays); "A World of Conflict and Private Sorrows" (four essays); "Performing Difference(s)" (six essays); "Avoiding, Mediating, and Resolving Conflicts" (four essays); and "Troubling Translations and Dissonant Readings" (five essays). In addition, Mitchell provides an introduction, while a short, personal reflection on Montgomery and Island readers by Jane Ledwell closes the collection. Some of the sections are quite unified: all four essays of "A World of Conflict," for example, explore the relationship between major sociopolitical occurrences (World Wars I and II, the Great Depression) and Montgomery's writing. Other sections are more diverse: the last ranges from recent Canadian media representations of Anne, to German and Japanese translations of the novel, to Montgomery family history, to an eco-feminist reading of Montgomery, using Anne of Green Gables, Emily of New Moon, and The Blue Castle as examples. The diversity of such sections is appealing, however, in part because it testifies to the multiple perspectives that have been and continue to be brought to bear on Montgomery's works. Moreover, the unity of the collection as a whole is not compromised, for as Mitchell acknowledges in her introduction, there are themes that cross the section divisions: she identifies recurring concerns with "Shadows and Light" in Montgomery's work (2–3); with Montgomery's depiction of the "everyday" and her own cultivated "cosmopolitanism" (3–4); with "place" as "central to . . . the identities of her heroines" (5); with anxieties about change (6–7); and with the generational gaps and gender roles that cause conflict (8–9). The sections thus group roughly similar topics, presumably for readers to find related articles more easily, but these underlying themes emerge in essays throughout the collection.

I would argue, however, that the real strength of the book is in its diversity, not its unity. Whether the conflict explored is confrontational (storm) or more gentle (dissonance), scholars have found many different aspects of Montgomery's writing that reveal conflict. Given the author's oft-cited advice about "realism" in writing—"Flower-gardens are just as real [as pig-sties] and...