green gables and fitting in

How Anne Shirley compassionately models quiet social resistance in L.M. Montgomery's first Anne book

I highly recommend the following soundtrack for today’s close reading, which is all about L.M. Montgomery’s Green Gables and Anne Shirley.

When I was a little girl, no one understood me more than Anne Shirley. She inspired my middle name; she loved to read poetry aloud, dramatically, as she wandered home from school; she sought kindred spirits in the world and was devastated when they had to part. She was the kindest, safest mirror I had as a child. And now, in my thirties, she is still the one—across all the literature I’ve read and all the stories I’ve found myself in—who feels truest, closest to my heart. She is both the person I’ve longed to become and the friend I’ve always longed to find in the world. Reading L.M. Montgomery’s stories about her, I gain a crushingly meaningful proximity to that self and to that friend.

Today, I am limiting myself to close reading the opening lines of the first Anne novel, Anne of Green Gables, first published in 1908. I have so much to say about this book, so I expect there’s a lot more to come here.

My well-loved copy.

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today’s scene:

Anne of Green Gables opens by drawing us a map:

“Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops, and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place, she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.”

I can’t imagine a more lovely start to a story about an odd little girl who comes to a well-organized, tended place and shocks it into wondrous life.

This overlong, packed opening to the novel looks and acts like a whole paragraph—but look at the punctuation. It is one, complete sentence, brimming overfull with imagery and information. And like a good first sentence should, it establishes the rules of the story’s universe:

• There’s a main road, from which families are known and mapped.

  • Lynde Hollow is a space of “decency and decorum”

  • the “old Cuthbert place” is “away back” from the main road, among the “dark secrets of pool and cascade”

• Nature’s beauty cleanly lines social spaces: there is a crisp, well-defined harmony between society and nature here.

  • The road dips into a hollow; a brook traverses the road; trees and flowers fringe the way

This opening paragraph establishes a harmonious ecosystem of binaries: of society and nature, order and disorder, rules and the unruly, known and unknown. Mrs. Lynde is clearly aligned with the former; the Cuthberts with the latter.

expanding the microcosm

As we keep reading, we start learning from whence this orderliness comes: Mrs. Lynde, with her “all-seeing eye,” is “keeping a sharp eye” out for anomalies. Far from the stereotypical busy-body whose life is consumed by gossip and spying, Mrs. Lynde is a kind of personified panopticon—a watch tower for the town whose “sharp eye” identifies outliers and threats and constantly, continually relieves social anxieties about difference by rooting out their causes: “ferret[ing] out the whys and wherefores thereof.”

In other words: Mrs. Rachel Lynde, like society itself, works hard to identify differences, make them known, and in that knowing, give itself the illusion of safety. We know, however, that social knowledge is incomplete—that those “dark secrets of pool and cascade” tend to persist, even in the most organized towns. Indeed, the dark woods are necessary to a town’s identity. They provide its boundary.

Anne—the unexpected and unwanted orphan girl who is en route to Avonlea at the novel’s outset, unknown to Mrs. Lynde—will come to configure the most befuddling social boundary. She will become the unwitting catalyst for a town of easily threatened, overly cautious people, like Mrs. Lynde, to re-evaluate their definitions of danger and she will also model wonder, rather than “ferreting out,” as a perfectly viable, even compassionate, mode of social interaction.

Anne models the magic of closely reading. By paying attention to the way she pays attention, we might become better readers of stories and of society.

The opening sentence is an invitation, isn’t it? This runaway, run-on sentence, ravenous for detail, thrilled by the art of noticing…it invites us, from sentence one, to become more like Anne, who we haven’t even met yet. Try reading the paragraph aloud. You are out of breath by the end, aren’t you? That’s Anne’s main mode: breathless from an unbridled desire to narrate her world. What she sees, how magically she feels, how much she wants you to know it.

This opening sentence, then, is quietly introducing Anne herself. At the very least, it starts to set the stage for us to meet an eager, observant, noticer of the world. A close reader. Unlike Mrs. Lynde, Anne resists ferreting and analyzing; she prefers the wide world of mystery, rendered as poetically as possible. Where Mrs. Lynde seeks anomalies so she can dissect them, Anne seeks them out (she is herself one) to delight in their company, whether she understands them or not.

This is yet another dichotomous set-up the novel gifts us from the first sentence—the orderly, “well-conducted” world into which Anne comes unwanted, and the way this world has to fundamentally shift so that it can deeply love and respect her. It matters that we meet the stern gaze that will judge and attempt to define her before we ever meet Anne, because it matters that, when we meet her, we know the intricacies of what she is up against. We long, as we read, for that stern social gaze to see her as we see her. To allow her to be exactly who she is, free of any fears she’ll be unwanted any longer.

That Anne deserves love—she has inherent worth as a person, she knows she is wanted, and she has a right to a home that makes room for all of her—is the underlying assumption of the book. The novel works keenly and quietly to ensure that we believe Anne deserves a kinder gaze, fewer judgments, and more chances to be who we—as readers—get to see her as. We are meant to love her; many of us do long before those in her story learn to.

In other words: Anne’s story is about observing, almost like a step-by-step guide, what it takes for the social gaze to become more loving, more patient, and more kind. It’s about meeting someone primed for the easy labels Mrs. Lynde readily applies and being willing to see the folly of that cheap appraisal. It’s about closely reading the world because, by doing so, you realize that the fearful social stance toward difference is very rarely right in its determinations. You learn that looking only for difference robs you of the ability to look for magic.

Anne’s journey into the Cuthbert home, into greater Avonlea, is a coming-of-age tale that suggests the necessity of assimilation but resists it at every turn. Like the brook that runs wildly, then orderly, across the landscape in the opening sentence, Anne’s story is about the socialization of wild impulses, about being visible to the all-seeing eyes that deem you “other,” about figuring out where you sit in relation to the “main road.” Perhaps more than anything else, Anne’s story is about being curious about your visibility in the social. Being willing to look back at the social gaze that perceives you in one, easy way—and daring to be something else.

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a thought on close reading, as a practice:

I’ve long heard the argument that close reading “ruins” books for people. Thinking too hard about how a story makes them feel dampens the emotions or undoes the magic—like an illusionist showing that the rabbit was there all along. But there’s nothing illusory about literary magic. I’ve found that the deeper and more carefully I study a story, the more there is to love. That paying attention is a way that I fall in love. That re-reading is how I show my love is still there, still intact, still so willing to engage.

I love that closely reading Anne only ever brings her closer.

I can think of so many other beloved novels—especially about children—that open with social maps like this. Peter and Wendy. Harry Potter. Matilda. What are coming-of-age stories if not journeys to find the place on the map where you feel most wanted and most seen?

Closely reading these maps gifts us with our own mental maps—story patterns and ways of linking experience to action. I can’t find a way to think that such an act could ever ruin a story.

‘Til next time.