Childhood, Revisited

"But they shouldn't call that lovely place the Avenue. There is no meaning in a name like that. They should call it--let me see--the White Way of Delight. Isn't that a nice imaginative name? When I don't like the name of a place or a person I always imagine them a new one and I always think of them so. There was a girl at the asylum whose name was Hepzibah Jenkins, but I always imagined her as Rosalia DeVere. Other people may call that place the Avenue but I shall always call it the White Way of Delight. Have we really only another mile to go before we get home? I'm glad and I'm sorry. I'm sorry because this drive has been so pleasant and I'm always sad when pleasant things end. Something still pleasanter may come after, but you can never be sure. And it's so often the case that it isn't pleasanter. That has been my experience anyhow. But I'm glad to think of getting home. You see, I've never had a real home since I can remember. It gives me that pleasant ache again to think of coming to a really truly home. Oh, isn't that pretty!"

Anne of Green Gables talks too much.

Desperate for something to read, the other day I pulled out my old copy of L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. I'm sorry to report that the book is just not as captivating as it was when I was a girl.

Eying an upcoming paragraph of Anne monologue that lasted through most of two pages, I found myself thinking, "Here we go again. I wonder what she's going to blather on about now..." And I skimmed right through most of the lengthy descriptions of P.E. Island scenery--they were so wordy. Even Anne's "scrapes"--flavoring a cake with liniment oil, dyeing her hair green, and falling off a roof--seemed contrived and lame this time through.

But in spite of these shortcomings in the book, I still found myself admiring Anne's goodness and caught myself wanting to be like Anne--even after all these years (and even if she does run on at the mouth a little too much).

You see, there was a time when Anne, and L. M. Montgomery's other girls, Emily of New Moon and especially Pat of Silver Bush, were a major part of my life. I devoured every book of Ms. Montgomery's that I could get my hands on and very much wanted to be like these amazing, individualistic, imaginative, good girls.

In fact, that was the fascinating part of reading Anne of Green Gables this week. I discovered the roots of myself in L. M. Montgomery's didactic, flowery prose. As a girl I must have soaked up the morals in her books because many of Anne's peculiarities became mine. I was a consummate daydreamer (when I wasn't reading), living in a world of fairy tales and fantasy. I looked for evidence of elves and fairies in the woods around our Washington home, even as a teenager. I certainly picked up my ideas of academic competition from Anne. I used big, long words that I usually didn't quite know the meaning and rarely the pronunciation of. (I thought "fatigue" was "fat-ih-gew" well into high school.) I even remember trying to cut out slang words from my vocabulary in 5th or 6th grade--I have to admit I wasn't very successful because modern speech is slang, but I did manage to end up speaking differently than most other kids my age.

I come from a wonderful family who were a little unique (we didn't have TV after I was in 6th grade) but still pretty middle class normal. I always wondered where I picked up my affinity for things more...snooty. For example, I really love opera and well-written classic literature. And now I'm wondering if it all came from reading Anne books (and similar ones like An Old Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott) at an early, impressionable age...

Anne's author writes: "Perhaps she [Anne] had not succeeded in "inspiring" any wonderful ambitions in her pupils, but she had taught them, more by her own sweet personality than by all her careful precepts, that it was good and necessary in the years that were before them to live their lives finely and graciously, holding fast to truth and courtesy and kindness, keeping aloof from all that savored of falsehood and meanness and vulgarity." I have a sneaking suspicion that was L. M. Montgomery's own secret ambition, anyway, in creating Anne and the other girls.

I'll tell you I ate it up as a girl. The barely hidden morals, the subtly manipulative passages about influencing others, the goodness: I drank it all in. Even reading these books now, I realize that I still hold Anne as the ideal of girlhood and womanhood. (She does outgrow her loquaciousness, by the way, but never her imagination.) A year away from turning thirty, I catch myself wishing I could posess her "certain evasive charm" and thinking maybe if I were more charitable toward others, cared less about public opinion, and tried to be more sincere all around maybe I could achieve "Anne-ness". And I think I need to bake more cakes from scratch and start studying poetry and Latin, too.

And now you all know what a nerd I really am.