Sometimes the Gables are Greener: Little Orphan Anne's Odyssey

Last week, I finished reading Before Green Gables by Budge Wilson.  It'd been on my bookshelf since Christmas, and I'd been avoiding it.  It's not that I thought I wouldn't like it.  It's that I knew this prequel to Anne of Green Gables would challenge me and everything I knew about Anne.  I felt a little like this when I read Marilla of Green Gables, too.  But finding out about Anne's past was an entirely different kettle of fish.  As you know, L. M. Montgomery's eight-volume series about the little redhead who could is very special to me.  It got me through my tween years, which might sound weird because, unlike Anne, I grew up with two loving parents.  Still, I didn't fit in at school, and somehow Anne spoke to me.  I felt a kinship with this girl who loved big words and pretty clothes and felt like she didn't belong.

Nevertheless, my curiosity got the best of me, and I finally opened Before Green Gables.  And it was worth it.  The whole novel is based on a conversation between Marilla and Anne when Anne arrives in Avonlea:

' "Were those women -- Mrs. Thomas and Mrs. Hammond -- good to you?"  asked Marilla, looking at Anne out of the corner of her eye.

"O-o-o-h," faltered Anne.  Her sensitive little face suddenly flushed scarlet and embarrassment sat on her brow.  "Oh, they meant to be -- I know they meant to be just as good and kind as possible.  And when people mean to be good to you, you don't mind very much when they're not quite -- always.  They had a good deal to worry them, you know.  It's very trying to have a drunken husband, you see; and it must be very trying to have twins three times in succession, don't you think?  But I feel sure they meant to be good to me."

Marilla asked no more questions.  Anne gave herself up to a silent rapture over the shore road and Marilla guided the sorrel abstractedly while she pondered deeply.  Pity was suddenly stirring in her heart for the child.  What a starved, unloved life she had had -- a life of drudgery and poverty and neglect; for Marilla was shrewd enough to read between the lines of Anne's history and divine the truth.  No wonder she had been so delighted at the prospect of a real home." (41)

The way that Budge Wilson (such a curious name!) weaves this information into a new narrative draws you right in.  She starts with the death of Anne's adoring schoolteacher parents in an epidemic (creepy in these current times, no?) when Anne is only three months old.  Then she follows Anne to two foster homes where, starting at five years old, she's forced to clean diapers, carry pails of water, and cook.  Wilson tells the story of women with too many children and not enough money, showing us a world far removed from the charmed and charming sphere of Avonlea.  Wilson's ability to reveal this dark underbelly of Anne Shirley's life while maintaining Anne's sunny spirit lends depth to Anne's character.  Yet even Anne struggles with demons, and she reaches a turning point when she meets the Egg Man, or as she eventually comes to call him, the Words Man.  He sets her on the path to self preservation through imagination.

' "Anne," Mr. Johnson said, quietly and firmly, "listen to me.  Imagining things is not wicked.  It's good.  It's what makes people write books and paint pictures and make music.  It means pretending things.  Go on doing it.  Don't, for heaven's sake, stop, even if Mrs. Thomas gets cross.  It can often rescue you from the depths of sadness."' (137)

There were times when I felt that this hardship and heartbreak were at war with the Anne of my childhood.  But by the end of the book, I realized that the opposite was true, that all of the trials had made Anne tougher without making her rougher, creating a foundation for the strength she would need to chase the life that she wanted.

Anne, of course, finds her way through the woods (literally and figuratively, as both of her foster homes are deep in the forest), even if she first ends up in an orphanage.  There she falls prey to a mean girl who almost destroys her trust in people forever.  But then she finds out that a fine lady is coming to adopt a hard worker -- ironically, by way of one of the mean girl's schemes -- and scrubs like she's never scrubbed before.  The rest, as they say, is history.  Anne gets adopted, and the mean girl is left behind.   

Revenge fantasies rarely come sweeter.

Ultimately, Before Green Gables is about hope.  It shows that if you hang in there, you'll be rewarded.  It's a beautiful book, and I'm better for having read it.  But now that it's done, I'm ready for something lighter.

Like a nice, cheerful murder mystery.

Green Queen: Mistress Marilla

I've always been suspicious of prequels, sequels, and alternate versions of classic books written by people other than the original authors.  It's why I passed on the not-Margaret Mitchell's Scarlett and the not-Daphne du Maurier's Mrs. de Winter.  Although I do recall watching the Scarlett miniseries on TV as a kid with my mom and sister.  Remember network miniseries?  And Sunday night movies?  If not, then picture a Lifetime movie airing on CBS every Sunday after "Murder, She Wrote."  Oh, '80s and '90s, you made cheesy melodrama worth staying up for.  Even if that cheese, much like its lactose-laden inspiration, gave us nightmares.  (If my mother is reading this, then I feel honor-bound to say that not one of those soaps stirred up bad dreams.  That was just a bit of hyperbole.  It takes more than a wedge of Gouda and Judith Light whaling on her husband to mess with my sleep.)

Yet despite -- or because of, I'm not quite sure which -- my eternal love for Anne of Green Gables, I gave Marilla of Green Gables a chance (which you probably saw coming a mile away, given the wide berth I gave Meg & Jo).  Written by Sarah McCoy instead of L. M. Montgomery, this prequel is Marilla Cuthbert's origin story.  Known to grown-up little girls and book lovers the world over, Marilla is the iconic, no-nonsense closet softie who gives Anne Shirley a home.  She's middle-aged when we meet her, a gray-haired spinster living with her bachelor brother on the family farm in Avonlea.  She's proper, she's stern, she's set in her ways, and she's downright disgruntled when the orphanage sends her a wisp of a girl instead of a strapping boy to work her farm.  At first.  But her kind heart lets the endearingly eccentric Anne stay, forging a bond that will change them forever.

Still, one can't help but wonder: Just how did Marilla end up alone in the first place?  Sarah McCoy explores this question, using it for the foundation for her irresistible novel.  She shows us Avonlea as it was forty years before Anne ever set foot there.  It's a more austere, pioneery sort of place than the fairy tale land we see through Anne's eyes.  But it honors the spirit of Montgomery's magic, its seemingly simple descriptions of small town life seeping into the soul.

Marilla of Green Gables starts in 1837 and ends in 1860.  At the start, thirteen-year-old Marilla is the daughter of modest, hardworking people.  Her older brother Matthew is painfully shy, and none of the Cuthberts are demonstrative.  But they love each other deeply even if they seldom say so.  Still, Marilla feels her reserve melt away when she starts spending time with handsome John Blythe.

"They sat together under a canopy of meadow grasses and a sky of spun sugar.  Marilla's heart still beat fast from the dance.  John's did too.  She felt the pulse in his fingertips.  From the magazines she'd read, she thought she'd feel embarrassed or ashamed to be holding a boy's hand.  The same way she felt holding the pages of the romance quarterlies.  But she didn't.  She only felt John: simple, solid, and true." (110)

Wait.  Hold up.  Blythe, do you say?  As in Gilbert Blythe, Anne Shirley's one true love and husband?  Yes!  Apparently, in Anne of Green Gables, Marilla tells Anne that people used to call John her beau.  But I'd forgotten that.  Not so for McCoy.  This brief but telling revelation sparked her need to write this book and get to the bottom of what happened between John and Marilla to cause Marilla to end up -- to use the term of the time --an old maid.  McCoy draws upon the themes of pride, duty, and the passage of time that influence the plots in so many of Montgomery's novels.  At times, McCoy's writing is so like Lucy Maude's it's as if the late author herself is writing through her.  One marked difference, though, is the prominence of historical events and -- but, of course -- feminism.  McCoy takes us on a sometimes somber journey that encompasses Canada's fight to split from Mother Britain as well as the American Civil War.  At one point, Marilla witnesses the public hanging of some "radicals" and is horrified by the way the onlookers laugh:

"They were too young to understand that life is ephemeral while death is permanent.  These weren't her children or children of Avonlea, and yet they pained her.  Like a tendon tethered to splintered bone." (198)

Marilla's own Aunt Izzy, a dressmaker in Charlottetown, offers her home as a safe house for runaway slaves.  Marilla is proud, reflecting that her aunt couldn't have made such a difference if she'd stayed in Avonlea and married a local boy as planned.  Instead, she uses her talent with needle and thread to offer refuge:

"Their costumes were their salvation, transformative as Cinderella on the night of the ball, and Izzy was their fairy godmother."  (238)

McCoy also examines what it means to be a wife and mother, and it isn't always as idyllic as the Avonlea of old would have us believe.  Poverty, farm chores, and mouths to feed conspire to create a life that is oftentimes drudgery.  Women are discouraged from speaking their minds, and many succumb to sickness and even death as a result of childbirth.  Still, Marilla of Green Gables needs to be told because it speaks its own truth and sets the stage for everything that comes after it.  If Marilla and John had married, then there would never have been an Anne or a Gilbert.  It's because they didn't that Anne and Gilbert come into the world, cross paths in Avonlea, and fall in love.  Which is the way it's supposed to be.  Like Marilla and John 2.0.  But not.  And that's the bittersweet part, I guess.

So, you see, I had no choice but to read Marilla of Green Gables.  Even if I eschewed Scarlett and Mrs. de Winter.  Because I'm a fool for an origin story.

And because I never loved Gone with the Wind or Rebecca the way that I've always I loved Anne.