As a medical diagnosis, it’s not exactly airtight. Hoy admits there’s zero indication that Anne’s birth mother, a schoolteacher, was a tippler. Here Hoy grasps at straws to support her thesis, suggesting that Anne’s mother might have inadvertently consumed a “women’s tonic” containing alcohol. Even then, there’s no suggestion that Montgomery, who refers to alcoholism often in her work, made any such link with Anne, the notable exception being the famous scene in which Anne unwittingly served Diana currant wine instead of raspberry cordial.
There’s also the fact FASD affects a part of the brain that can’t be changed. But Anne changes markedly throughout the novel and achieves her goals. And though FASD sufferers often require lifelong support, Anne herself becomes a caregiver when she sacrifices going to university to stay with Marilla (a decision criticized by some feminist scholars).
Undeterred, Hoy contends that Anne benefited mightily living where and when she did—long before FASD was diagnosed. “It’s a world that can accommodate Anne’s kind of brain and turn her into a positive figure who is appreciated for her differences rather than seen as deficient,” she says. Montgomery unwittingly “articulates strategies” for creating an environment supportive of neurologically challenged individuals, Hoy writes, by placing Anne in a stable, nurturing home with a lack of sensory overstimulation and proximity to nature.
That she might be romanticizing FASD by associating it with such a successful, popular character wasn’t a concern, Hoy says, though she expects caregivers of FASD children to respond that Anne was much less difficult to handle.
Irene Gammel, a professor of English at Ryerson University and co-editor of Anne’s World, calls Hoy’s essay courageous: “It’s a tour de force argument and it’s a rigorous argument,” she says.
That it is. Still, it makes the nine-year-old in me for whom Anne of Green Gables was a defining book want to shout out: “Leave Anne alone!” It’s discombobulating to see a cherished novel reread as a mental-health primer. What’s next? News Emma Bovary suffered from “female sexual arousal disorder”? The very idea that imaginative Anne is “brain damaged” unhinges a central childhood tenet, like finding out Santa Claus doesn’t exist, but a thousand times worse.
Even today, the thrall of reading the novel for the first time remains vivid: being swept into Anne’s fanciful world, commiserating with her many woes, cheering her triumphs, and coming to care as deeply for her as any real person, the first fictional character to elicit that response. I loved “Anne with an e”—and not in a Sapphic way. When she shed tears when Matthew died, so did I.
Only later would I fully appreciate the novel’s archetypal themes and the multi-layered richness of Montgomery’s prose, which makes it ripe for the academic cogitation found in Anne’s World.
Gammel, author of Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic, believes recontextualizing the novel is critical to keep it relevant to a modern audience. That’s an audience who looks to books as self-therapy tools, as is evident in Gammel’s essay in Anne’s World “Reading to Heal: Anne of Green Gables as Bibliotherapy,” which examines how rereading the novel has become a coping mechanism, even an antidote to depression.
Just how Anne has been exploited to advance a range of social and cultural agendas is a theme that underlies many of the 15 essays in Anne’s World—most explicitly in “An Enchanted Girl: International Portraits of Anne’s Cultural Transfer,” a fascinating study of how the novel is reinterpreted globally: in the West, Anne is celebrated for her individualism and mischievousness; in Iran, she’s valued for forging familial and community bonds; in China, she’s revered for respecting her elders and ultimately making traditional choices. Within such a tradition, Hoy’s provocative reading fits right in. No doubt we’ll see more like it arising from the upcoming conference devoted to “L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature.” Anne as eco-villain? Don’t laugh too soon.
Pages: 1 2
