This novel should be about something completely different
Federal commemoration of Anne Of Green Gables will be reworked with “new narratives” from Indigenous, Black and French perspectives, Parks Canada said yesterday.
Look, if you dislike Anne of Green Gables because it’s too white then don’t commemorate it, but if you are going to commemorate it then leave it the fuck alone. It’s a brilliant work, and really very progressive in a lot of ways.
Novels depicting the red-haired orphan raised by a white, English-speaking Presbyterian couple on Prince Edward Island have been bestsellers since 1908…
WRONG. They’re not a couple, you dumbfucks, they’re sister and brother.
‘Cultures not currently presented, e.g. Acadians, Black, Indigenous and people of colour, will be shared with visitors.’
What for? Just for the sake of pissing on a classic novel about a girl because it isn’t about something else? Everyone and everything can’t be “presented” in every novel so just get over yourselves.
You know what other book doesn’t mention Indigenous people?
The Bible.
Talk about Not Getting it. Here’s yet another example of Canada becoming a global joke because it’s full of goody-two-shoes bureaucratic busybodies. I can’t imagine any other country treating its own literary legacy the way we do. If Lucy Montgomery wrote characters as annoying as Canadians appear to be today, no one would have bothered with the books.
It’s infuriating. Anne of Green Gables is surely Canada’s most famous book, and that’s because because Anne’s story has resonated with girls (and maybe a few boys, ahem) around the world, across cultures. It was never about ethnic or religious cultures, it was about a girl and her life, told colourfully and humanistically.
An Anne anecdote: when I was young, I briefly had a housemate, a seventeen or eighteen year old Japanese girl named Reiko, who had run away from her troubled home in Japan to Prince Edward Island, so obsessed with Anne of Green Gables she had been. A sympathetic retired couple on the island took her into their home for a while — how very Anne of Green Gables-like! But she eventually moved to Toronto, I guess because there’s not much work in PEI besides… I don’t know, lobster fishing, potato farming, and more Japanese Green Gables tourists?
It still amazes me that she travelled all the way across the globe as a sixteen or seventeen year old, all by herself, to PEI, because her love of Anne was so strong.
Reiko’s is a sad story, though: teenage runaways, especially undocumented girls from Asia with no family in the country, don’t tend to thrive. She ended up working in a “parlour” for a while, but me and a couple other housemates got her out of there and away from the sleazy pimp who had convinced her he was her boyfriend, and she eventually went back to Japan to try and work her life out. So… not a very Anne of Green Gables-like story in the end.
But there’s something in this anecdote about the fact that characters like Anne have a lot of meaning and significance to girls going through difficult situations all around the world. Anne of Green Gables ain’t broke. So don’t fix it.
“If Lucy Montgomery wrote characters as annoying as Canadians appear to be today, no one would have bothered with the books.”
Bahahaha I love that. Sums it right up.
I’ll just share some of my favorite bits.
When Marilla, despite seeming so brisk and chilly, can’t bring herself to leave Anne to the mercies of the terrible woman with 97 children. When Anne blows her stack at Mrs Lynde and isn’t thrown out on her ear. When Marilla apologizes for not believing Anne about the brooch. When Anne knows all about how to treat croup and saves the baby.
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If you want a new take on Anne, write one of those “Pride and Prejudice and Vampires” things.
Don’t fuck with the Original.
Parks Canada: L.M. Montgomery’s Cavendish National Historic Site of Canada Management Plan, 2023
I could be wrong here, but I’m not seeing what is hinted at in that article excerpt from Blacklock’s Reporter. Parks Canada is in charge of the historic site, which is dedicated to but is broader than L.M. Montgomery and her works. I get the impression that they doing some reworking of the historic site in keeping with the broader scope, at a time that coincides with the 100th anniversary Anne of Green Gables, perhaps because they expect an influx of visitors. It’s possibly misguided and overly deferential to certain interests, but it doesn’t seem to me to be trying to broaden the book itself, nor trying to take anything away from commemoration of the book.
I was unable to read anything more than that one paragraph, without links, at Blacklock’s Reporter. Perhaps their full article makes the situation clearer, or makes a better case for what is being claimed.
It is one of those, Oh Eff Off moments isn’t it? AoGG is so much rooted in a particular time and place – a Presbyterian community of farms, with the one room schoolhouse; the families with 8 children or so; the busyness of the farmers and their wives (or sisters in Marilla’s case). The importance of the church. The narrowness and rigid honesty.
One of the social history aspects of the books is that it is common for the girls to go away to college – even if their only career prospects seem to be school teaching. I don’t think that would have been the case for girls at the same time in Britain.
Can’t people enjoy the great distinctness of this culture without trying to introduce disparate elements for “modern relevance”?
@Sackbut – OK it’s reasonable not to froth until hearing the full story. I shall just froth on principle.
@OB – Marilla is a brilliant creation – her briskness, sarcasm, kindness and gradual thawing.
I’m sort of reminded of a true story that is in the news in France at the moment, of a little boy of 9 who was left alone by his mother in his apartment for two years. She left to live with her girlfriend about 5 km away from the apartment. This is part of a report (Googletranslated, but it seems to represent the original accurately):
The whole account is at https://www.aufeminin.com/news-societe/cet-enfant-age-de-9-ans-a-vecu-seul-chez-lui-pendant-2-ans-ce-que-l-on-sait-de-cette-histoire-troublante-s4078504.html
If you find the story hard to believe in detail, you are not alone. In particular, it isn’t clear to me where his food and clean clothes came from.
@Barbykost,
The Bible does mention quite a few peoples indigenous to the Levant, though mostly in the context of Yahweh telling the Israelites to genocide them.
The post title immediately put me in mind of this classic QI moment. And then the dumb, empty concern about the book even more so.
Heh.
Is this what our neighbors to the north are doing as apology for the Resident Schools where native children were tortured after being taken from their families, and often buried in unmarked graves and no notice to their parents?
Hardly sufficient, if you ask me.
Or is this what Canada is doing instead of honoring the treaties that were to share the wealth of the mineral extraction in Ontario in the area north of Lake Superior?
Still hardly sufficient.