Yes, I Am Still Talking About Anne Shirley

As I mentioned before, when I'm feeling down I seek comfort in the greatest Canadian heroine of the 20th century: Anne Shirley.

Watching Anne of Green Gables every time it was on PBS (or, even better, on the two tape collection) was a major past-time in my family. My mother loved it. My sister loved it. My godmother was usually the person we borrowed the tapes from. And I had no chance but to love Anne of Green Gables, too.

I was young enough that when I did the majority of my watching of Anne of Green Gables (and the sequel, which at the time was called Anne of Avonlea but has since been retitled to Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel) the follow-up TV series, Road to Avonlea, was still airing on Disney. But Avonlea without Anne Shirley is like a day without sunshine.

So, as I was feeling pretty crappy this past 4th of July as well as feeling rather miffed at my fellow Americans, I decided that I'd watch Anne of Green Gables while drinking a tumbler of Mexican tequila mixed with German cherries and cherry juice. And then I kept watching as the weekend went by. There is very little on television at this time of year, so why not just keep re-watching Anne of Green Gables?

And then I pulled out the old battered copies that my mother had received as a child in the 1950s. With artwork depicting a slender and sleek redheaded woman that looks nothing like Megan Follows and also nothing like any early 20th century Canadian girl I've ever imagined.

The books were a bit of a letdown, the first time I started thumbing through them. I've seen the tv specials so many times in my life- I remember when I used to also get scared when Diana was helping the limping Anne through the woods and Anne would start talking about the ghosts they imagined living there. That's how young I was the first, oh, dozen or so times I watched the specials. So, to go back as an adult and realize that Montgomery's writing isn't exactly the greatest was a little startling. The books are decent enough- it's not like they're terrible, but they're easy reads with a lot of flowery writing. Similar to Little Women, in some respects. There's very little action, however, with a lot of talking and I've come to realize that they're much better when being read outloud. As otherwise I'll just start to glaze over from the plethora of new names and silly little conversations that don't read in my head nearly as entertainingly as Dear Lucy Maud intended them to be.

So, that's how I spent a whole sick day from work this week- listening to the audiobook of Anne of the Island, only to realize that there's no audio version for Anne of Windy Poplars (at least not one available on Audible, iTunes, or even Librivox). It's a little intriguing to realize what was grabbed from Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, and Anne of Windy Poplars to make the second television movie and what was kept. There's a rather heart-breaking death in Island that was completely ignored, but I wonder if it would've been worth including. Possibly not The twins, Davy and Dora, were pretty much completely removed and I can't really blame them (although, they did end up on the tv show towards the end). Minnie May Barry ends up basically taking Davy's place.

Thankfully, they also removed most of the proposals Anne received while at university. The girl has FIVE proposals by the summer she graduates. FIVE. And only one repeat customer!

For what it's worth, the second special is still good but not nearly as good as the original. I would've liked it more if they kept the story in Avonlea or at least on the island. I don't care for all that prep school meangirls nonsense. I would've preferred to see Anne going to her birth place and maybe a bit of Stella and Aunt Jimsie or Miss Lavender and more Marilla and Rachel than we were given. And having Gilbert as a friend for a bit before the whole weird distance-y mooning deal. However, I do love watching Colleen Dewhirst's scenes and trying to guess if she was wearing jeans under her dress or not (apparently, she was at times, I can't blame her!).

"Hello, John Blythe. I'm totally wearing jeans under this dress- want a peek?"

And, of course, the second TV special gets extra points for including not one but TWO members of the Kids in the Hall.

I think the thing that really gets me about the Anne of Green Gables tv specials is that they has no right being as good as they are. If you've ever had the misfortune to see the animated version, you know how terrible it can get. In the animated version, you don't end up loving Anne. You end up wanting to smack her and then kill her, she's so disgustingly ignorantly upbeat.

But Megan Follows has such an amazingly perfect performance in the 1985 special that never makes Anne's flights of fancy sound saccharine and one-dimensional. Anne Shirley may be an optimist and a romantic- but Megan Follows knew as a teenager to play Anne as someone that is trying to convince herself that everything is okay. She knew that the only way an orphan could keep her head up and stay as determined as Anne did was to use her fantasies for escape and for courage.

I think my favorite moment is when Miss Stacy comes over for dinner. Because normally I hate the type of moments like that one. Anne discovers a dead mouse in the sauce for the pudding but, before she can both remove the mouse and fully confess to having forgotten to cover the sauce to prevent that, a comedy of errors results in the sauce being served to everyone for dessert. Then, just as her treasured teacher is about to take a spoonful of cream with a hint of dead mouse- Anne shouts "PLEASE DON'T EAT IT MISS STACY!" and startles everyone into a near heart-attack. She then confesses about the mouse, apologizes for her faults and then, to her surprise, Marilla and Miss Stacy start to laugh heartily at Anne's drama. It's as they laugh that Megan Follows has one of her best moments- Anne struggling to understand her emotions- embarrassment, relief, confusion, and a little bit of weariness at not finding the moment funny despite how much everyone (well, you can't tell if Matthew is in on it) is laughing. It's perfect.

Anne was such a good character to get to know as a young girl. I was never one to "pretend out loud" but I felt like I got to by proxy via watching Anne. As a kid (and, well, as an adult) I was prone to speak flowery a little too often and wrote more than my fair share of bad poetry (at one point, I wrote a freeverse poem for each of the girls in my little middle school clique. All of them pouring my heart and soul into how much I appreciated each girl for her uniqueness. Thankfully, I never showed them to those girls.). Anne got that. Anne was that. Anne was the safe knowledge that it's okay to be the girl that's reading and walking at the same time. Anne was the comfort that it was okay to not yet be interested in boys, despite your friends being completely obsessed with boys. Anne was the distance needed to see that when a parent yells at you, it's often out of fear or worry rather than hatred. Anne was the dream that you don't have to go only as far as people think you will go.

And, most importantly, Anne was the realization that friendships, not romances, are the strongest and most emotional relationships you will have outside of family.

Sadly, the roommate does not share my love of The Anne-Girl yet. Mostly because she has never seen any of it. I will fix that, eventually.

Oh, and you might've realized I didn't bring up the third special. Because there was no third special. Don't be ridiculous. I also tend to feel that Annes House of Dreams and all later books are too boring, though.

Close Your Eyes and Think Of Anne Shirley

"I think amethysts are just sweet. They are what I used to think diamonds were like. Long ago, before I had ever seen a diamond, I read about them and I tried to imagine what they would be like. I thought they would be lovely glimmering purple stones. When I saw a real diamond in a lady's ring one day I was so disappointed I cried. Of course, it was very lovely but it wasn't my idea of a diamond." - Anne Shirley, Chapter 13 of Anne of Green Gables

I possibly think of Anne of Green Gables too often. If there is such a thing. The above quote is not especially important in the grand scheme of things or even the grand scheme of the fictional life of Anne Shirley, but it's one that bounces in and out of my head with some amount of frequency. And has nothing to do with the picture I've chosen from the classic TV special, other than how I always was amused with the thought that Marilla decided to give Anne some fringe when she had to cut the green out of her hair.

Of course, I think of Anne's quote about diamons when I see almost any precious stones matched with their proper names for the first time. I've never been one to really pay attention to them, as I like glass pearls for my jewelry and my birthstone is the color of B12-infused urine (also known as "topaz"). So, the one year I went to the Gem Show in Tucson and found myself surrounded with little (and gigantic) stones I was unfamiliar with, Megan Follows's voice saying that line was ringing through my head all day.

But it's not just that. Anne Shirley, although she is fictional, is speaking for readers in that moment. Those of us that grew up with our noses in books and knew the meaning of words we had never heard outloud. Knew of hundreds and thousands of items outside our daily lives only by the beautiful twists of words an author had used to describe those items. And where the author failed to describe an item enough- either for assume the audience would know or to be vague enough to let the reader fill in their own gaps- images still appeared in our heads. Forming an alternate reality for each reader, where the spaces were filled with details that had to come from their specific history and life.

Colin Shepherd has a piece in The New Yorker today about a similar issue. Except instead of diamonds not living up to expectations, he writes of the Met and how it's missing something he desperately wanted, an item of mythology in his childhood: the bed that Claudia picked out for sleeping in when she and her brother ran away to live in the Met in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The Met no longer has that specific bed on display and it's resulted in the museum becoming a sore spot for Shepherd, for crushing his hopes of one day being able to see that same bed that Claudia described.

And, in this era of visual adaptations of everything, the quote also comes to mind almost every time a beloved book is adapted into film, television, comic book, ect and what-have-you. It came to mind, most awkwardly, when a portion of Hunger Games fans reacted not-so-well to finding out that they had managed to just not realize that Rue was black when they read the books and then made racist fools of themselves for complaining about the casting of Amandla Stenberg.

But, even so, their complaints would not have suddenly become justified if it had turned out that Rue had at some point been described as having light skin. Because it's a little ridiculous that something like the Hunger Games in those books, which specifically pick two random kids from each of the districts in what used to be North America, would have that many caucasian-y looking kids selected. But... whatever. That's an argument for another day.

The point being: that twelve-year-old Anne Shirley just assumed that diamonds, the beautiful rare stone that was mentioned so much in stories, would be purple. Because that was what was beautiful to her. And that realizing that diamonds were not purple made her feel like her world fell appart for a day. Maybe she didn't realize exactly why, and maybe I'm reading too much into Lucy Maud Montgomery's writing, but in more recent years that moment has struck me as Anne realizing that what she values isn't eye-to-eye with what the world at large seems to value. And she was scared and sad to realize that.

It's like the moment where you realize that racists still do really exist. Or, say, the moment you realize that some small minded person was so offended that a teacher grieving the death of her mother happened to give another woman's name as her partner in the obituary that the small-minded person wrote to the teacher's Catholic school and got her fired after 19 years of employment. And that small-minded person and the school feel that they can rationalize their spiteful hateful decisions by claiming that loving the people you love falls under "immorality or serious unethical conduct" yet sending a hateful letter to get someone innocent fired from their job- that's not also immoral or seriously unethical? I know the parent is not an employee of the school, but they should be ashamed of themselves.

That people like that still exist... it's like discovering diamonds aren't purple.

To end on a less "gah, people are awful" note: The Canadians are planning on making a 13-part new adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. Your mileage may vary to the point of still thinking that counts as "gah, people are awful". But... hey, there are worse things.

This post went in a million directions I didn't intend to originally send it in.