The Virtuous Imagination of Anne of Green Gables

Much ado has been made recently of the decision by Netflix to remake L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, making her more “realistic” and giving the setting more “grit.” Some have defended the supposed realism as truer to what life would have been like for a nineteenth-century orphan; others have opposed the remake, arguing that Anne was never meant to be “realistic” and that the “grittiness” of the new version is unfaithful to the emotional heart of the original tale.

But where I believe the new remake gets Anne wrong is in stripping her imagination of its virtue - or, more precisely, in neglecting the fact that, for Montgomery, Anne’s imagination is integrally linked to her unshakeable, unwavering faith in the reality of goodness and beauty. It is this faith that gives her imagination its power and makes it a virtue. Anne's imagination is not an end in itself; it serves a higher, more transcendent truth: the truth that goodness and beauty are out there, waiting to be grasped by anyone, even - or especially - by a poor, ugly, unloved orphan.

It’s understandable why the creators of the new series would eliminate this virtuous quality of Anne's imagination. It's not a virtue we believe in anymore, especially when we try to imagine someone enduring what Anne has endured. For some reason, we can no longer conceive that it might be possible for someone who has faced evil and cruelty to honestly believe in the reality - the fundamental truth - of goodness and beauty. Sure, we can pay kindness and loveliness poetic lip service - but if such a person does still truly believe in goodness and beauty – well, then, it must be a psychological coping strategy that comes at the cost of facing reality. And this is how “Anne with an E” tries to transform Anne of Green Gables.

But this is not the Anne that Montgomery created. Yes, it is true that Montgomery portrays Anne’s vivid imagination as a strategy that a very clever girl uses to deal with her traumatic past. But in Montgomery’s telling, Anne’s ability to see goodness and beauty in the ordinary and even the ugly is, like all virtues, a matter of determined will. “I’ve made up my mind to enjoy this drive,” she tells Matthew on the drive that she’s convinced will return her to the orphan asylum. “It’s been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will. Of course,” she adds, “you must make it up FIRMLY.” For Montgomery, Anne’s imagination is a sign of her transcendence. Like the scrub firs, Anne’s spirit is “quite unbroken by long years of tussle.” For “Anne with an E,” however, her imagination is a mark of her brokenness.

Yet to envision Anne’s imagination as merely a “coping mechanism” wildly misses the point. Underlying Anne’s imagination is not a desire to escape reality; underlying it is, rather, her firm, convicted faith that somewhere, somehow, goodness and beauty actually do exist. And this is the source of her virtue. This belief gives her the ability to see goodness and beauty in the ordinary, such as when she sees the Avenue and is “struck dumb” by its beauty. Even more: her belief in the reality of goodness and beauty enable her to hope for the goodness and beauty of those around her, even when she can’t see it. Speaking of the cloth merchant who donated cheap wincey to the orphan’s asylum, Anne says: “Some people said it was because he couldn’t sell it, but I’d rather believe that it was out of the kindness of his heart, wouldn’t you?”

To postmodern ears this sounds hopelessly naïve. But at a different time, Anne’s faith in goodness was a sign not of naivete but of innocence. Naivete refuses to acknowledge that ugliness exists; Anne never does that. She has known poverty; she has known what it is to be unloved and unwanted; she has known cruelty. Anne is not naïve; she is innocent. For innocence is aware of the existence of ugliness and evil, but it insists that goodness and beauty are the greater powers, the deeper realities, and will always ultimately triumph.

In our culture, we’ve confused innocence with naivete. It’s our loss. By turns we want to shield our children’s naivete – don’t let them go to funerals, don’t let them hear about terrorist attacks – or else we want to expose them to the “hard truth” of hatred and war and violence and bitterness. We do this because deep down we ourselves don’t believe in the reality of goodness or beauty anymore. If we did, we could let our children go to funerals without fearing they’d lose their innocence, because we could tell them, with firm conviction, that death is not the end of the story. We could let them face dragons because, as Chesterton put it, we could give them our belief that dragons can be defeated. But we do not believe this anymore. And in a world where there is no place for real goodness or beauty, there is also no room for true innocence.

Anne’s innocent virtue is not “realistic.” But it is true, truer than any depiction that portrays the darkness as greater than the light, the brokenness as bigger than the transcendence. As Anna Mussmann points out, Montgomery’s Anne wasn’t meant to be realistic – any more than Cinderella, with her kindness and long-suffering patience in the face of abuse is realistic. But the beautiful, wonderful, delightful irony in Montgomery’s tale is that, in the process of imagining herself a fairy tale heroine, Anne truly becomes a fairy tale heroine. She becomes a beautiful, virtuous woman with a family who loves her. She has surrounded herself with beauty and light and love. She gets her fairy tale ending.

And this is why it is so dangerous to dismiss, psychologize, and pathologize the virtue that undergirds Anne's imagination. The thing is, we need fairy tale heroines today, perhaps even more than we need gritty, realistic portrayals of the lives of adolescent girls. Of course, the latter have their place and their purpose, in protecting us from naivete. The world is ugly, filled with bullying, anger, hatred, sadness, brokenness. But if our young people are taught that believing in the very reality of goodness and beauty is only an escapist fantasy, we are stripping them of the very tools they need to create goodness and beauty. In order to make good and beautiful things, we have to believe that good and beautiful things exist – and, indeed, the very act of believing can, itself, be an act of creating. “It’s delightful when your imaginations come true, isn’t it?” Anne asks Matthew. In the course of her own story, Anne’s did. And just as Anne, in believing herself to be a heroine, managed to create a space for herself flourish and become a heroine, so too can we. 

The Perfectly Imperfect Approach to God

Monday of the Third Week of Easter

Gospel: John 6:22-29

Today's Gospel fills me with both sadness and hope. My initial reaction was one of sadness: I can almost hear how forlorn Jesus must have sounded when He says: Amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs, but because ate the loaves and were filled. Imagine if we treated any other person in this way, seeking their company not because we loved them or cared for them or simply treasured their presence, but because of what they could do for us - give us a free meal, do us a favor, give us a gift. Yet that, so often, is how we treat God: seeking Him out only when we need something from Him.

The flip side, though, is that Jesus welcomes even these seekers, who come searching for the food that perishes. He does not turn them away, but rather invites them to more, beckons them closer, into deeper intimacy. Their motivations weren't entirely pure, but despite His gentle rebuke He doesn't reject them but asks them to deepen their relationship with Him: believe in the One He sent. 

There is hope in this. I remember once I went to Confession and lamented the fact that even my good works - my volunteer efforts, my work as a mother and wife - so often were tainted by selfishness - a desire to look "good" or to feel "important." The priest gently reminded me, though, that while we're on earth, our motivations are never going to be entirely pure - and that we need to keep trying anyway. Yes, all our motivations for turning to God will be mixed with selfishness and pride, or at any rate will fall short of complete holiness - but that's not a reason not to keep on turning to God. Because it is only by this constant turning to God that we will, ultimately, be purified. 

The Confirmation Director at my parish interviews each Confirmation candidate at the end of the two-year program, and one of the questions she asks is: "Why do you want to be confirmed?" Many times the students will answer: To make my mom happy. To make my grandmother happy. And the Director will tell them: That's okay. You may not be doing it for exactly the "right" reasons - a desire to grow closer to God, or a desire to grow in holiness or virtue - but you're doing it out of love for family, even out of obedience (which is, in Christian eyes, still a virtue!). And who knows what graces will come?

So long as we keep asking, What can we do to accomplish the will of God? God welcomes us. Yes, we will make mistakes. We will seek God, at times, in a less-than-perfect way, for less-than-perfect reasons. That's okay. As long as we keep seeking. As long as we keep asking. As long as we keep trying. As long as we don't remain satisfied with food that perishes and keep striving for the food that endures for eternal life - God will welcome us, however imperfect our approach to Him may be.