Anne of Green Gables: A Girl's Reading

Abstract

Anne of Green Gables:A Girl's Reading Temma F. Berg (bio) While it is impossible to verify the following statement, I do believe it is true: Anne of Green Gables was the book that most profoundly influenced me as a child and young adolescent. What I remember most about my childhood reading experience of Anne is my sense of total immersion in the story. I was Anne Shirley. I, like Anne, was an orphan. Not literally of course. I had a complete set of parents, but I felt alienated in some undefined way from the world I lived in. I was a lonely, book-ridden child. I had a few friends, but I felt different from even them, and when I was among them, I usually preferred to be by myself, reading in a corner, wishing I could be curled up on a window seat like Jane Eyre. Of course, the houses my friends and I lived in did not have window seats, so I read on sofas or chairs, but I might just as well have been hidden in a window seat. I read Anne's books both because I was a reader and because they confirmed my sense of my difference and apartness. They told me it was okay to be different. Not only did I recognize my self in Anne, but I also used the events of Anne's life as models for my own. I wanted to be as like Anne Shirley as possible. I wanted a bosom friend like Diana Barry. I picked one friend to be my "kindred spirit," but she never seemed to be as good a friend to me as Diana was to Anne. Luckily, though, her mother and my mother did not get along very well, so they almost fit the pattern of Marilla and [End Page 124] Mrs. Barry. However, my friend's mother never forbade me her daughter's company, so we never had to make undying vows of friendship in the face of parental opposition, probably the best stimulant for animating ordinary youthful feelings. While I had difficulty finding a friend like Diana or turning the ones I had into an image of her, I could more easily duplicate Anne's imaginative yearnings and love of reading. I, like Anne, liked to think of myself as a heroine and having a heroine like Anne to model myself on and project myself into made it easier. Just as Anne's reading gave her models, patterns, ways to interpret her experience, Anne and her books gave me models, patterns, ways to interpret and validate my experience. Reading stoked Anne's imagination just as it stoked mine. Though I lived in the city, I used Anne's rural landscape to green my own. I tried to look at the trees along my street and the playground at the end of it through her eyes. I composed long, eloquent descriptive passages as I walked along the streets of my world as a means to enter Anne's. Both by reading the actual books and by reading my own life in their terms, I was able to enter, even if only sporadically, Anne's world. Recently, PBS presented a four-part TV movie based on The Anne of Green Gables series, and because the TV movie seemed so faithful to and yet different from my memories of the novel, I found myself reconsidering what the novel meant to me as a child. The TV series seemed more feminist than the novel I remembered. I didn't remember the women in the novel as quite so powerful as the women in the TV show, or Marilla as quite so warm-hearted under her gruff exterior. And I didn't remember the strong-willed woman school teacher at all. Were these and other manifestations of feminist thought I noticed in the TV series—for example, the obvious comparison between Anne who sought education and her bosom buddy Diana who missed it because her mother thought book-learning was wasted on a girl—present in the novel or simply the addition of a modern screenwriter's sensibility? And, if they were in the novel, why...