Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea

[ailbhe]

Wait - all those maids and hired hands described as French are actually black, aren't they?

I think I preferred the books before I realised that.

Comments

[estoile.livejournal.com]

Umm ... are they? French has always made sense to me, it being Canada and all ...

[ailbhe]

I think that's why I never noticed before. Someone mentioned it to me months ago and I just reread them and I do think so. Charlotta the Fourth (Miss Lavendar's maid) is twice described as having "brown paws."

Also, the representations of dialect don't look much like French-speaking English, now.

And there isn't a single servant, indoor or out, described as an adult. Young this or that boy.

[estoile.livejournal.com]

Oh, I've always found it unsettling, at best. (Not least as my grandfather was Quebecois.) Just hadn't twigged to the 'socially non-White' aspect, as such.

Very good analysis below. Thank you.

[barakta]

I reread this series last month... Gutenberg++

Interestingly thought while some people are definitely socially non-white in the books. I'm not sure Charlotta the Fourth is entirely "deemed socially non white" so much as "Poor, but good salt of the earth poor who has to work hard".

In later books Charlotta the Fourth (I can't work out how enraged that Lavender can't remember her maids names, cos that's how 'non-white' people have been treated for generations by the "ruling classes") gets married and Anne goes to the wedding and remains in contact with her and her new family.

I got the impression Charlotta the Fourth was of a lower socio-economic class and therefore a maid and by being a maid to someone of a "higher class" is exposed to people of a higher class than herself and "given opportunities" which might not have often arisen... One mode of social mobility in a time when things were very class/family/history defined.

What I found interesting on rereading was how Anne became "family" and left me wondering if the boy she had meant to be would have remained a servant or become family in anything like the same way.

A lot of the books in the series do discuss people who were "well classed" but poor or crappy for various reasons and also people of "lower classes" who have managed to prove themselves worthy or married up or other social mobility. One wonders whether for their times the books were radical in that people didn't just stay with the ordained order of things and there was challenge to it.

[biascut.livejournal.com]

cos that's how 'non-white' people have been treated for generations by the "ruling classes"

There's a plaque in one of the Protestant cathedrals in Dublin saying, "FAITHFUL TO THE MEMORY OF MY LOYAL SERVANT EOIN McDUFFY, KNOWN AS "JOHNNY"". Seriously, like.

[biascut.livejournal.com]

Also, I totally agree with you about Anne, and have wondering the same thing. I don't know whether it's just the non-realist, fairy-tale trope of "poor, neglected child makes good" - in the same way that Harry Potter seems to suffer no psychological ill-effects after 11 years stuck in a cupboard - or whether the fact that Anne had poor but middle-class parents and lived with them for the first four (five?) years of her life means that she is able to retain her membership of the middle-classes, despite by being brought up by very poor families after that.

[ai731.livejournal.com]

Also, the representations of dialect don't look much like French-speaking English, now.

I *think* that's because the dialect being represented is Acadian, not French. I'll have to pull my set out and re-read it.

The Acadians would have been considered "French" (and very low-class French, at that) by the English/Scottish.

[ailbhe]

Aha! And that's why the dialect triggered mind-link "Cajun" in my head. Thank you.