100% found this document useful (1 vote)
279 views13 pagesSteven Bruhm, "Is Anne of Green Gables A Lesbian?" (1998)
paper presented at Second Biennial Conference on Modern Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Nashville, TN, 1998.
Uploaded by
JonathanCopyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF or read online on Scribd
100% found this document useful (1 vote)
279 views13 pagesSteven Bruhm, "Is Anne of Green Gables A Lesbian?" (1998)
paper presented at Second Biennial Conference on Modern Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Nashville, TN, 1998.
Uploaded by
JonathanCopyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF or read online on Scribd
/ 13
Is Anne of Green Gables a Lesbian?
“You're a queer girl, Anne. I heard before that you were queer. But I
believe I’m going to like you real well.” (88)
Anne Shirley and Diana Barry pledge eternal love for each other (88); they
participate in all the courtship rituals that Anne knows so well from romance novels,
exchanging chocolate (89), locks of hair (132), love poetry (146); they distinguish
their friendship as “loving” rather than the pallid “liking” common among their
peers (132). At one point, Diana reproaches Anne's “infatuation” with Stella
Maynard (278, 290) while Anne assures her that it is only a “second best affection”
(the kind Shakespeare is reputed to have bestowed on Anne Hathaway in preference
for his fair-haired youth) and claims that she loves Diana more than ever~yet none
of these moments, we suppose, means that Anne and Diana share a lesbian desire.
Indeed, as my students will tell you, Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables
simply presents a friendship whose rituals and expressions are not atypical of
pastoral girlhood. It wraps the two young girls in a romantic gauze that makes
their desire easy to read as platonic precisely because it is so common, so familiar, so
“normal.”: But why are we so sure? How do we know? Were these rites to be
performed between a young boy and girl, we would have no doubt as to what they
mean, and were they performed between two boys we would certainly know what to
think, but between girls they are repeatedly voided of erotic content, What, besides
the universalizing and normalizing diagnosis of “friendship,” forbids us from
claiming for Anne and Diana a lesbian love?
While the language of love between Anne and Diana cannot definitively
connote lesbian desire--and indeed, what could Montgomery write that would?--she
does ask that this “platonic romanticism” be taken seriously. Anne's desire for a “kindred spirit,” “an intimate friend . .. in whom I can confide my inmost soul” (57),
gestures to the kind of romantic soul mate that poets like Shelley had in mind when
he wrote that “there is something within us which from the instant that we live and
move thirsts after its likeness ..., the ideal prototype of every thing excellent or
lovely that we are capable of conceiving .. ., a mirror whose surface reflects only the
forms of purity and brightness” (“On Love.”) And that Anne should specify that
spirit as female~-"I've dreamed of meeting her all my life” (57)-gestures to
romanticism’s source for the idea of the spiritual complement: Aristophanes’
speech in Plato’s The Symposium. In that speech, Aristophanes lays out his parodic
myth that our originary state was one of doubleness, that we were all joined to our
loved one physically and thus always satisfied, whole, unified. But Zeus, seeing the
power that such beings could harness, split us in two, thereby initiating in us a
desire to find our other half, our perfect spiritual complement, our “kindred spirit”
and “bosom friend.” As Aristophanes argues,
Whenever the lover of boys~-or any other person for that matter-has the
good fortune to encounter his own actual other half, affection and kinship
and love combined inspire in him an emotion which is quite overwhelming,
and such a pair practically refuse ever to be separated even for a moment. It
is people like these who form lifelong partnerships... (63)
For Aristophanes, this spiritual desire manifests itself physically, sexually, in a way
that renders a “platonic” love like Shelley’s sexual and spiritual at the same time.
But unlike Shelley, Aristophanes argues that in the majority of cases our kindred
spirit is of the same sex as we. To the degree, then, that Aristophanes’s language is
also Anne's, I want to suggest that it constitutes a kind of homoerotic double-speak,
a queer ventriloquism that the text refuses to suppress, and that demands to have its
lesbianism heard. InShelley’s neo-platonism, the lover's mind “selects among those who
resemble it, that which most resembles it; and instinctively fills up the interstices of
the imperfect image” with the imagination (“Discourse”). This desire for a lover
who “most resembles” the self--what psychoanalysis would later pathologize as,
“narcissism” —underwrites Anne and Diana’s special bond. They sympathize with
each other; they have similar imaginations and reading tastes; their spirits
“commune”, as Anne hyperbolically writes in a billet-doux. And this
intersubjectivity has a distinctly physical component in Anne's fantasy, a fantasy she
draws from the sentimental novel's definition of erotic desire:
Iwas thinking the loveliest story about you and me, Diana. I thought
you were desperately ill with smallpox and everybody deserted you,
but I went boldly to your bedside and nursed you back to life; and
then 1 took the smallpox and died and was buried under those poplar
trees in the graveyard and you planted a rosebush by my grave and
watered it with your tears; and you never, never forgot the friend of
your youth who sacrificed her life for you. (124)
This dissolution of boundaries, this erotic interchangeability, marks Montgomery’
own relation to a number of women. There is Tillie McKenzie Houston, “one of the
few Cavendish people who really mattered to me, one of the few people in the
world whom I deeply and intimately love” (Journal 62). Between Tillie and
Montgomery “There seems to be a perfect harmony . . . and a perfect understanding.
‘And in the future we may see but little of each other and have to find our associates
among people whose companionship cannot give us one tenth the pleasure we can
give each other” (63). And there is Frede Campbell MacFarlane, a cousin for whom
Montgomery had a “great love” (Journals 293), a “too-great love and too perfect
friendship” (295); “we were ‘part of one another,” and despite the fact that
Montgomery was nine years older than Frede, “our souls were of the same age” (Journals 303). Any differences, any “interstices” between Montgomery and Frede
can be collapsed under the utterance that the souls are equal. And any differences
between Anne and Diana provide an actual purchase on spiritual communion:
Diana possesses the “jet-black tresses” and “soulful eyes” that Anne always wishes
she'd had; and Anne occupies the thin and lithe frame that Diana finds so graceful.
‘What few physical differences exist provide the poles for magnetic bodily attraction.
Regardless of where one places them on the lesbian continuum, theirs is a bond of
fluid intersubjectivity that capitalizes on Aristophanes’s dialectic: the self seeks itself
in the other; it embraces the other as self.
I want to suggest that this intersubjective fluidity, this seemingly free play
between female subjects, offers us a number ways to queer Anne of Green Gables.
First, it renders heterosexuality a pallid afterthought to homoeros. Any reading of
Anne's friendship with Diana is bounded by her “unspeakable” desire for Gilbert,
the boy whose name she refuses to say, the boy whose presence propels her into
scholarly achievement and emotional maturity. To our post-Freudian ears, what
Anne refuses to say about Gilbert says all. While it is true that Gilbert will assume
the primary position in Anne's life (a position that Montgomery deems only
marginally successful in the later novels), it is worth noting that Anne first directs
energy Gilbert’s way only as academic competition, and only because Mrs. Barry has
angrily withdrawn Diana from Anne’s orbit (following the raspberry cordial
debauch). Anne returns to school only because, Aristophanes-like, “my friend has
been ruthlessly torn from me” (133), and her compensation is to compete with
Gilbert for top scholastic honors. In this novel, same-sex desire is not the
pathologized retreat from unsuccessful heterosexuality; rather, hetero-normativity is
the non-normal product of withheld homoeros. And nowhere is Anne clearer about
this interruption than in imagining heterosexual union: Ilove Diana so, Marilla. I cannot ever live without her. But I know
very well when we grow up that Diana will get married and go away
and leave me. And oh, what shall I do? I hate her husband~I just hate
him furiously. I've been imagining it all out-the wedding and
everything--Diana dressed in snowy garments, with a veil, and looking
as beautiful and regal as a queen; and me the bridesmaid, with a lovely
dress too, and putfed sleeves, but with a breaking heart hid beneath
my smiling face, and then bidding Diana good-bye. ... (119)
A quaint childhood tantrum? Perhaps, but seen through a platonic lens it is also a
serious indictment of Zeus’s dividing what is sexually and spiritually whole. Men
in Montgomery replace erotic bonds; they do not constitute them. They are lack,
outside the economy of desire, a pallid replacement or annoying intrusion.
It is precisely that division of self from the self’s other than marks the second
of the novel’s major queer resonanc:
Anne's first contribution to the story club. She tells of “two beautiful maidens called
ts literary allusions. Consider for a moment
Cordelia Montmorency and Geraldine Seymour who lived in the same village and
were devoted to each other. ... They grew in beauty side by side until they were
sixteen” (208), at which point Bertram DeVere intrudes-like Diana's prospective
husband~and sets up an erotic competition between the two women. Cordelia
eventually wins, in that Bertram and Geraldine drown in each other’s arms, but the
murderess ends up in an asylum. While in one way the story borrows romance
convention to sing the praises of true het love, in another way it invites us to read its
lesbian content. Cordelia’s “comet of ... hair and duskly flashing eyes” (208)
conjure Coleridge, whose Christabel is the story of two women--Christabel and
Geraldine-who are separated by a man, Christabel’s father. But not before
Geraldine has actually seduced Christabel sexually; the tale is strikingly about
lesbian sexuality. And that Anne “used to imagine” her name was Geraldine, but now prefers “Cordelia” (25) is interesting: perhaps the lesbian seductress of the
ing, Christ-like
Shakespearean virgin . . . a virgin who, in this fantasy, ends up in a madhouse,
romantic pastoral must be killed off in favor of the self-sa‘
Such heterosexual intrusion, however, can be redeployed for lesbian fantasy.
Recall Anne hovering around the back pasture:
The cows swung placidly down the lane, and Anne followed
them dreamily, repeating aloud the battle canto from “Marmion”. .
exalting in its rushing lines and the clash of spears in its imagery.
When she came to the lines:
“The stubborn spearsmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable toood,”
she stopped in ecstasy to shut her eyes that she might the better fancy
herself one of that heroic ring. When she opened them again it was to
behold Diana coming through the gate. ... (229)
In one way, the quotation continues the kind of intersubjective fluidity Ihave been
noting in the novel: the lines directly following those Anne quotes describe each
spearsmen “stepping where his comrade stood, / The instant that he fell.” In
another way, the quotation inscribes Anne in a kind of butch fantasy in which she
protects that “dark, impenetrable wood,” a dark impenetrability that metonymically
give way to Diana. But most interesting is that Anne is the spear-carrier, the
‘goddess of the hunt; the passage transforms her into the mythological Diana as a
way of figuring desire for the Avonlea Diana. And this mythological Diana,
according to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is herself no one, stable subject. She is the figure
of Jove, who has disguised himself as Diana in order to ravish Callisto, the Arcadian
nymph. She is the Diana whose affiliations with The Lake of Shining Waters are
reminiscent of the mythic Diana’s hidden pools and ponds, her “babbling rivulet”
(Ovid's Metamorphoses 38) suggesting Avonlea’s babbling brook. And itis at these hidden pools that Ovid's Diana bathes with her nymphs (chastely, away from the
male gaze). Asa kindred spirit, Anne both desires Diana and is Diana in the
exchange of subjects that marks the possibility of coded lesbian eros, of sexual and
textual desire. Little wonder, then, that she shudders in ecstasy.
If the novel renders same-sex cathexis prior to and privileged over
compulsory heterosexual bonding; if it can even deploy heterosexuality to figure the
homosexual, then it raises a third queer question: what is the origin, the
psychogenesis of desire, and how might it relate to the text's lesbianism? To
consider this, I want to look at the novel's earliest erotic scene, one which I take to be
the most formative. During their discussion of the kindred spirit and Diana, Anne
tells Marilla about her relation to the glass door of the china cabinet back at Mrs.
Thomas's:
Lused to pretend that my reflection in it was another little girl who
lived in it. I called her Katie Maurice, and we were very intimate. I
used to talk to her by the hour, especially on Sunday, and tell her
everything. Katie was the comfort and consolation of my life. We
used to pretend that the bookcase was enchanted. ... And then Katie
Maurice would [take] me by the hand and [lead] me out into a
wonderful place, all flowers and sunshine and fairies, and we would
[live] there happily ever after. When I went to live with Mrs.
Hammond it just broke my heart to leave Katie Maurice. She felt it
dreadfully, too, I know she did, for she was crying when she kissed me
good-bye through the bookcase door. There was no bookcase at Mrs.
Hammond’s. But just up the river a little way from the house there
was a long green little valley, and the loveliest echo lived there. It
echoed back every word you said, even if you didn’t talk a bit loud. So Limagined that it was a little girl called Violeta and we were great
friends and I loved her almost as much as I loved Katie Maurice. (58-9)
The literary source here is clearly the story of Narcissus, itself a companion piece to
Aristophanes's theory of lovers. But whereas cultural exegesis has condemned
Narcissus for self-love (which is also, significantly, homo-love), Montgomery
capitalizes on the original story’s repetitions and reduplications. Like Narcissus,
Anne is most in love with the image in the glass, but unlike Narcissus, she also loves
the Echo, the verbal other whose figure in the original Ovid is female. Thus, rather
than condemning Narcissus, Montgomery normalizes him by making him female:
she uses the myth to set up a web of feminine desires which are prioritized but
never mutually exclusive.
In this sense, then, libidinal narcissism is strikingly Lacanian: Katie Maurice
and Violetta are reflections that open up the very possibility of desire by positing an
otherness that is the self. They initiate a (decidedly female) imago that Anne desires,
and will continue to desire in the person of Diana. But unlike the normalizing
Lacan, Montgomery posits a seamless trajectory of same-sex desires from the mirror
stage to later libidinal object choice. Anne will want Diana “to be my bosom friend”
but “Imust never quite forget Katie Maurice and Violeta. They would feel so hurt
if I did and I'd hate to hurt anybody's feelings, even a little bookcase girl’s or an
echo girl’s. I must be careful to remember and send them a kiss every day” (60-1).
Pace Lacan, Anne's desire for Diana does not displace or compensate for the loss felt
at the mirror stage; rather mirror desire becomes the corporeal, embodied desire for
the same-sex other. Indeed, embodied, same-sex love constitutes a wholeness and
fulfillment that no return to the Imaginary of the mirror can ever again effect: “I
shall never have another friend. I'm really worse off than ever before, for [haven't
Katie Maurice and Violeta now. And even if [had it wouldn't be the same” (132).
Anne’s refusal to fall back into the fetish object of the mirror, her inability to reclaim her imago as the self-fulfilling other, tacitly normalizes her desire for Diana as both
the desire for self and the desire for the other. Since Aristophanes, since Lacan,
perhaps all desire is fundamentally narcissistic, fundamentally same-sexed.
Montgomery exploits this narcissism by multiplying and bifurcating selves, and by
emphasizing the desire for and between selves.
Which brings us back to Montgomery's relation to Frede Campbell, Frede
who “[sleeks] her beautiful black hair before my mirror” and “haunts my dining
room table, sitting opposite the mirror and looking into in according to [her] habit”
(Journals 308-9). Montgomery and Frede “’found’ each other” while sharing a bed
one August night of 1902; “Our friendship seemed to open into full bloom”
(Journals 302). And it is that full bloom reflected in a mirror that seems to have much
to do with the characters of Green Gables. Three years later, as Montgomery was
writing the first Anne book, Frede moved to Stanley, near Cavendish. In many
ways, she seems to be a source for Anne herself. “Her enemies called her ugly”~
shades of Rachel Lynde and Josie Pye?--
but she was never that, There was almost too much spirit and
character in her face for that. She had beautiful thick glossy black hair,
greenish-gray eyes that, like mine, had the Montgomery trick of
seeming black at night. ... But her features were irregular and her
complexion--her worst point-sallow and freckled. Yet I have seen
Frede look positively handsome. (Journals 304; underlining mine)
Like Anne, Frede felt orphaned~she assumed her mother didn’t love her. Like
Anne, only more candidly, Frede was depressed at the thought of “endless,
monotonous years of teaching country schools for a mere pittance” (Journals 303)--
even though, like Anne, Frede was a great teacher who “had in a marvelous degree
the power of drawing out and inspiring her scholars. They invariably worshipped
her” (Journals 304) as they do Anne of Avonlea. But this inscription of Frede as 10
Anne raises interesting questions about identification and desire in Montgomery: for
haven't we always read Anne as Montgomery herself, the poor but imaginative and
intelligent young woman forced to sacrifice her career for an aging maternal figure?
In this sense, doesn’t “Anne” as a signifier collapse Montgomery and Frede into
one? And if we consider, moreover, that Frede has “beautifully glossy black hair”
and that, despite her intelligence, her parents had no “ambition for their family
beyond giving them enough education to enable them ‘to earn their own living’ ina
very humble way” (Journals 304), we get hints of Diana, Diana of the raven hair,
Diana whose “parents did not intend to send her to Queen's” (243). Perhaps, then,
the kindred spiritual wholeness of two “innocent girls” is a ventriloquistic strategy
to write Frede, and to deploy the bifurcations on which desire is predicated, to
engage and celebrate Montgomery's desire for her. Perhaps among the other things
that Frede meant to Montgomery was the complex, gorgeously alluring, and
terrifying relation between mirror replication and lesbian eros.
Shortly after Frede’s death, Montgomery wrote, “I shall make no new friends
~-even if there are other Fredes in the world. I have lived one life in those seemingly
far-off years before the war. Now there is another to be lived, in a totally new world
where I think I shall never feel quite at home. I shall always feel as though I
belonged ‘back there’—-back there with Frede and laughter and years of peace”
(Journals 306). And just four and a half weeks after Frede’s death, Montgomery
began her tenth novel, which she fervently hoped would be the last of the Anne
stories; “for she belongs to the green, untroubled pastures and still waters of the
world before the war” (Journals 309), the world before the loss of Frede. This desire
to remain “back there” constitutes, I believe, the fundamental nostalgia of Anne of
Green Gables: and that Anne's life is framed by the birth of a friendship and the death
of that friend makes the nostalgia inexorably queer." The desire to return to Katie
Maurice and Violetta; the desire to return to Diana as a replacement for Katie 1
Maurice and Violetta--or is it the desire to return to Diana to fulfill the desire
initiated in Katie Maurice and Violetta?; the desire to return like Aristophanes’s
lover to originary wholeness and unity, a return effected by homoerotic union; and
finally, a desire to write this desire, since “there has been a strange sad comfort in
[writing]--as if it brought me nearer to Frede to write thus of her--as if death and the
grave were cheated for a little while” (Journals 306): these are the complexities of
homoeros and homonarcissism that circulate throughout Montgomery’s text and her
life. They mark the pleasures of a separation that initiates desire itself, the desire for
otherness, the desire to return, to re-turn the other back into the self in an erotic
completion. Anne of Green Gables is a lesbian not (not only?) because she desires
Diana genitally, but because she announces a desire in Montgomery that only
lesbian return can address.
Steven Bruhm
‘Mount Saint Vincent University 12
Notes
‘At might be worth noting Anne’s ambivalent relation to the commonplace. On the one hand, itis the
rusticity and predictability of Avonlea that makes her love itso, On the other hand, her explosion at
‘Marilla about the Haunted Wood makes clear the otherwise suppressed conviction (one she shares with
Montgomery) that “All the places around here are so—so~commonplace” (164). In other words, Anne
‘cannot be counted on to accept the commonplace so uneritically.
“The psycholanalytic paradigm of female sexuality posits woman as lack, needing the phallus she can never
hhave to complete her, and needing to be the phallus her husband can never have in order to complete him, But
‘how might this phallic complementarity be viewed through a lens of lesbian narcissism and in a writer whose
«erotic cathexes are so firmly women-oriented? Let us look at Montgomery's description of her reaction to her
‘wedding night:
Ewan came Tuesday night, The marriage was to take place the next day, Wednesday, July
‘5th, at toon, ‘That night I did two things T had never exactly pictured myself doing the night before my
‘wedding day. cried alittle while after I went to bed-and then I slept soundly the rest of the night!
Thardly know why Tetied. Iwas not happy. I was quite contented, I think I wept a lost
