In Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery explores how the style of the writing and the ideology of the characters form the atmosphere of a literary work. This focus on the interplay between form and content forces us to examine our own process of constructing the world of the text as we read.
In Green Gables, for example, Rachel Lynde embodies the controlling mentality of the town of Avonlea. Mrs. Lynde’s brand of cerebral tyranny extends even to the “dark secrets of pool and cascade” of the brook, which, by the time it reaches her house, becomes a
Quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.
This passage illustrates the conformist nature of Mrs. Lynde and of the town she lives in, but it also reflects the powerful effect the mentality of the characters has upon the objects of the text. In essence, Mrs. Lynde’s controlling nature is so pervasive that even the brook is “conscious” of, and compliant with, her laws of “decency and decorum.”
Anne, too, exerts control over the literarily constructed world that surrounds her. “When I don’t like the name of a place or a person,” she says, “I always imagine a new one and always think of them so.” Yet this manipulation of environment stems not from Rachel Lynde’s brand of small-town-despotism but from Anne’s desire to transform “a world that had not wanted her” into one that did.
Through her powers of imaginative transformation, Anne creates the emotionally and aesthetically complete world in which she has always longed to live. She achieves this by convincing a household to love her and then transforming that household with her love. Of her room, we are told, “It was as if all the dreams, sleeping and waking, of its vivid occupant had taken a visible although immaterial form and had tapestried the bare room with splendid filmy tissues of rainbow and moonshine.” Anne’s imaginative longing is so powerful it acts as the ultimate interior decorator not only of her room, but also of the world of the text.
The other characters’ worldviews, too, are changed as a result of Anne’s vision. The most beautiful passage in the book reveals Anne’s influence on her adoptive mother:
Marilla was not given to subjective analysis of her thoughts and feelings. She probably imagined that she was thinking about the Aids and their missionary box and the new carpet for the vestry-room, but under these reflections was a harmonious consciousness of red fields smoking into pale-purply mists in the declining sun, of long, sharp-pointed fir shadows falling over the meadow beyond the brook, of still, crimson-budded maples around a mirror-like wood-pool, or a wakening in the world as a stir of hidden pulses under the gray sod. The spring was abroad in the land and Marilla’s over middle-aged step was lighter and swifter because of its deep, primal gladness.
Marilla has come a long way from the stern disciplinarian who adopted Anne. Through Anne’s example, whether she realizes it or not, she has developed a sense for the romantic and the sublime that results in this awareness of smoking red fields and “deep, primal gladness.”
Yet the book’s characters are not the only ones whose outlook Anne changes. Through a close reading of the text, we, too, are made aware of the powerful effect that a text has upon its reader. Anne’s attitude is so infectious that it effects the style in which she is written, the characters that surround her, and even the readers who read her. I remember reading this book when I was young and letting Anne help me see “a wakening in the world as a stir of hidden pulses.”