By Kate Wakely-Mulroney
This
is the first time that I’ve contributed to the Children’s Literature blog and
I’ve spent the past few days wondering what the subject of my post might be. While
I’m a member of the Faculty of English, my work on eighteenth and
nineteenth-century didactic texts has led me to become an unofficial member of
the Children’s Literature Seminar group. One of the wonderful things about this
group is how often students are encouraged to engage with one another’s
research.
So,
what might I contribute?
I
thought about sharing my current work on the significance of child mortality in
Isaac Watts’ Divine Songs, or my
fascination with Lewis Carroll’s mnemonic systems… but then, something
tremendously important happened:
Anne
Shirley, Lucy Maude Montgomery’s freckled heroine with “very thick, decidedly
red hair” (Anne of Green Gables 20),
has been reimagined by an anonymous publisher as a blonde, curvaceous, and
provocatively-posed young woman.
While
this edition of
Anne of Green Gables
was self-published last November on Amazon’s CreateSpace, its cover swept the
internet last week after appearing in an online NPR column. This is the kind of
“news-lite” on which our twenty-four-hour media depends, and international
publications were quick to spread the story. Near-identical articles popped up
on
ABC News,
The Guardian,
The Daily Mail,
and
The Toronto Star, each of
which
identifies discrepancies
between the updated cover and Montgomery’s descriptions of Anne’s appearance,
before giving way to a series of online comments written by disappointed fans,
such as:
"Anne has
red hair. RED HAIR. It's a key part of her character and is a strong influence
on her words and actions.”
What the above
comment and others like it reveal is the extent to which this new cover thwarts
both our aesthetic and our psychological expectations. While Anne is an
undoubtedly romantic child (she reenacts scenes from Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur and christens local
landmarks “The Lake of Shining Waters” and “Lovers’ Lane”), these fantasies
allow her to transcend an otherwise unromantic physical exterior.
The plot of Anne of Green Gables is largely
dependent on its heroine’s self-consciousness: Anne erupts in fury after a
neighbour describes her as “skinny and homely,” with “hair as red as carrots” (88);
she accidentally dyes her hair green in a failed attempt to render it a
“beautiful raven black” (279); she refuses to speak to Gilbert Blythe for
several years after he humiliates her in the schoolroom with taunts of
“Carrots! Carrots!” (145).
While,
like Anne, we “cannot imagine that
red hair away” (27), what’s really bothering us about this cover has more to do
with the new model’s suggestive expression than the colour of her hair. Various
sources draw attention to Anne’s “come-hither eyes,” “sexy pout,” and “buxom”
figure, while one commenter on The
Guardian web site rebrands Montgomery’s text “Lolita of Green Gables.”
If Anne
develops confidence later in the series (she breaks hearts, albeit with great
earnestness, in Anne of the Island), she
spends most of Green Gables convinced
of her utter lack of sex appeal. When Diana Barry whispers that the names of a
boy and girl in their class have been written together on the porch wall, Anne
simply sighs: “She didn’t want her name written up. But it was a little
humiliating to know that there was no danger of it” (142).
Is
there room for a Lolita in Montgomery’s texts?
When
Anne attempts to imagine her red hair into oblivion, she conjures up an
attractive alter ego with “lovely starry violet eyes” and hair that “is
glorious black, black as a raven’s wing” (27).
This
sounds a bit like someone else we know:
Emily
Starr, the heroine of Montgomery’s shorter and less well-known Emily series, has long lashes, scandalously
shapely ankles, elfin ears, “hair like black silk” and “purplish-grey eyes”
that are decidedly “alluring” (Emily’s
Quest 10). Emily’s dangerous sex appeal gets her into all kinds of trouble,
not the least of which involves the attentions of her substantially older
cousin, Dean Priest, to whom she is briefly engaged in the final book of the
series. During their first meeting, when Emily is eleven and Dean is
thirty-six, he asks her if she finds him handsome. Emily blushes, but has, in
fact, been appraising his “thin and sensitive lips” all the while: “She liked
his mouth,” we are told, “Had she been older she would have known why—because
it connoted strength and tenderness and humour.” She likes his eyes too, which
are described as “remarkably dreamy and attractive” (Emily of New Moon 236).
This
sexually charged language extends to other child characters in the book, who
are described as both objectively attractive and acutely aware of the power
that comes with physical beauty. Ilse Burnley, Emily’s best friend, is a
vixenish creature with amber eyes and hair like “brilliant spun gold” (Emily of New Moon 72). If, over the course of the series, she
develops from a sunburnt tomboy to an “exotic, provocative, [and] beautiful”
young woman (Emily’s Quest 50), she
is described throughout the trilogy in terms of her confidence, attractiveness,
and very yellow hair.
Sound
familiar? The animators of Japanese adaptation Kaze no Shoujo Emily (2007) depict Ilse Burnley with the same
tousled blonde hair and dreamy eyes with which we are confronted on the new Green Gables cover.
Perhaps
this anonymous publisher would have had more success with the Emily trilogy and its vivacious,
self-confident heroines. Perhaps we
might consider that the image we associate most closely with Anne (complete
with red hair, plaits, and a straw hat) is guarded by Montgomery’s estate and
therefore beyond the budget of most self-publishers.
Though
this new cover is, without a doubt, outrageously unfaithful to Montgomery’s
characterisation, it may be the very thing that Anne herself would have chosen
for the story of her life. While her most common fantasies involve violet eyes and black hair, she is hardly adverse to the
complexion shared by Ilse Burnley and the cover model in question. Indeed, she romanticizes blonde hair in the opening pages of Green Gables:
“I read of a girl once in a novel […] Her hair was pure gold
rippling back from her alabaster brow. What is an alabaster brow? I never could
find out. Can you tell me?”
“Well now, I’m afraid I can’t,” said Matthew, who was getting
a little dizzy. He felt as he had once felt in his rash youth when another boy
had enticed him on the merry-go-round at a picnic.
“Well, whatever it was it must have been something nice
because she was divinely beautiful. Have you ever imagined what it must feel
like to be divinely beautiful?”
“Well now, no, I haven’t,” confessed Matthew ingenuously.
“I have, often.” (28)
While,
Anne comes to recognize that, if not divinely
beautiful, she is a charismatic
and attractive young woman (Diana assures her that her hair grows more auburn by the day), at this point in the
narrative she’d far rather resemble the new cover model than the freckled creature that greets Matthew at the station in a “very short, very tight, very
ugly dress” (20).
Surely
we might also imagine these qualities
away, for Anne’s sake—allowing her, if only for one cover, “a soul above red
hair” (190)?
Works Cited:
Anne of Green Gables. London: Everyman’s
Library, 1995.
Emily of New Moon. London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1923.
Emily’s Quest. London, Puffin Books,
1990.
Labels: anne of green gables, anne shirley, book covers, children's literature, emily of new moon, emily starr, emily's quest, ilse burnley, lucy maude montgomery