If you know only one thing about Anne Shirley, it is most likely that she has red hair. Maybe you can even picture it, braided into pigtails, sticking out from underneath an unfortunate straw hat, as when Matthew first sets eyes on her. In the 1890s, red hair was a symbol of witchiness, ugliness, passion. Anne’s hair immediately establishes her as an outsider, even as it intimates a kinship between her and Avonlea, with its startling red roads. Anne wants nothing so much as to be rid of it. “I can’t be perfectly happy,” she tells Matthew with characteristic drama on their first ride to Green Gables. “Nobody could who has red hair. ... It will be my lifelong sorrow.”
Anne longs to be beautiful. Not only does she wish for her hair to turn a more dignified auburn, she also tells her best friend, Diana Barry, “I’d rather be pretty than clever.” Praying at Marilla’s behest, she asks God to let her stay at Green Gables and to “please let me be good-looking when I grow up.” She loves pretty things, because she has had none, and swoons over cherry blossoms, an amethyst brooch and the possibility of one day having a stylish dress with puffed sleeves, which sensible Marilla refuses to make for her.
If “Anne of Green Gables” were written today, it is easy to imagine that over the course of the book, Anne would come to learn that none of these externalities matter: not the color of her hair, not the sleeves of her dress. Instead, in the novel, her hair mellows to the coveted auburn, and Matthew, in a moment of tremendous fatherly kindness, gives her a dress with puffed sleeves. Rather than dispense the message that it’s only what’s on the inside that counts, “Anne of Green Gables” conveys something more nuanced, that beauty can be a pleasure, that costumes can provide succor, that the right dress can improve your life — all things that adults know to be true, sometimes, but that we try to simplify for our children.
“Green Gables” is rife with complications like these; it’s an artifact from a different time that, instead of being outdated, speaks to ours in an uncanned, unpredictable voice. Anne has survived for so long because she is more sophisticated than she initially seems.
The book, in a manner that is rare for young-adult novels even now, is a celebration of Anne’s intelligence, which is ultimately cherished by her adoptive parents, her community and her future partner, Gilbert — who is also her closest academic rival and who instead of being threatened by Anne’s brain admires her for it. And yet at the end of “Anne of Green Gables,” Anne quits college and returns to the farm to care for an ailing Marilla, never becoming the writer she wanted to be as a child. This is, perhaps, a disappointing ending (and one that presages a string of follow-up novels in which Anne eventually becomes muted by family life), but it is an honest one: We still live in a world where a woman’s intellect does not preclude her from accruing vast domestic responsibilities.
“Anne of Green Gables” is also a romance, but a slow-burning one. Anne can’t stand Gilbert until the final pages of the first novel, her attentions turned less to love than her friendship with Diana. In the middle of the third novel in the series, “Anne of the Island,” Anne is still putting Gilbert off, rejecting his proposal of marriage. It is not until the beginning of the fifth book, “Anne’s House of Dreams,” by which point Anne has had other suitors and other proposals, that the two are finally married, going on to have seven children.
For all her curiosity, imagination and education, Anne eventually arrives at the traditional ending: a husband, a family and all the attendant duties, the nonconforming woman who conforms. But the novels do not present this as either a great tragedy or a great victory. Instead, these choices look a lot like the fraught and difficult compromises of adulthood, in which you might put aside personal desires to care for your mother or modify your career goals to accommodate children. We would flatter ourselves to think that there is anything particularly old-fashioned about Anne’s trajectory. She is a thoroughly modern girl.
