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

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

My mom tells a story of how her grandfather always insisted on them having a cleaning lady, because floor scrubbing was "no work for a white woman".

Now, considering that we were all born and lived IN THE CAUCUSUS, one can safely assume that both the white and the non-white women in this little vignette were, well, caucasian.

I think there's an anachronism at work here, with class prejudice and racial prejudice not being as sharply defined back then as they are for us (no -isms, if that makes sense). You looked down on people who weren't white, and on people who were working class; and it didn't violate any boundaries for you to mix up cause and effect by believing that if all brown people are working class, then all working class people are brown.

Which they probably were, to boot, what with being outdoors a lot and not obsessing about veils and parasols all the goddamn time. Anne's constant battle against the sun and her freckles is totally a class thing - she wants to elevate herself to the level of the more refined Diana and the more established Gilbert. There's all kinds of class stuff going on in that series, and Anne is essentially a climber: from peniless orphan to respected teacher via a lot of pretentious intellectual posturing in her teenage years.

[sfred]

The freckles thing is something I always had trouble with, even when I was 8 or 9 and reading Anne for the first time. But at least that (and the hair-dying thing) is written so that it seems like a silly thing she's doing before she becomes happy with and in herself.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

A lot of the things she does are played for laughs, and the fact that she grows to have a sense of humour about herself is one of her strongest points as a character; I'm not on some sort of mission to completely discredit and deconstruct the books, they were probably my #1 favourites at one point.

But there is definitley a class trajectory in Anne's personal growth journey, and a lot of the little vignettes (peeling potatoes comes to mind), while showing up her snobbery, are nevertheless emblematic of her aspirations. And, inevitably, class is present in the books in other forms, as well - e.g. the ubiquity of servants. I don't think Avonlea was ever billed as any kind of egalitarian utopia; the moral centre of the community and the books is very much grounded in a Protestand Christian ethic, with emphasys being put on hard work, generosity and learning, which are all good things - but the exclusive, judgemental flip side of that mindset is bound to also be evident.

[sfred]

Yes, to all of this.

It was interesting to read the prequel from this POV, actually, because it's a reminder that until her parents died, Anne was in the class/position that she spends the first couple of books aspiring to: so her social climbing is partly to do with a sense of entitlement to that position. I think this would bother me more if there wasn't so much social mobility for other characters too.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

The Emily of New Moon books are all about the clash of class privilege with New World social mobility, aren't they? The Murray aristocracy versus Perry's social climb from slums to lawyer's bench. The Murrays selff-mythologise, of course, but I would wonder how aristocratic they really were. Would Presbyterian settlers from Scotland not have been dirt-poor on arrival?

[sshi.livejournal.com]

Wow, I had forgotten about the freckle thing. I know I found really odd, considering that I was living in Ireland, which probably has the highest density of freckles in the *entire world* and at least half of my class in school had visible freckles (myself included). I think I just dismissed it as 'odd stuff from books', into the same category as magic wardrobes, Fruhstuck und Mittagessen, magic waves and foiling smugglers with only your wits.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Hehe, if those books read as a bit exotic in Ireland, imagine what they were like in Jerusalem... =)

I didn't really get a lot of the stuff while I was a fan of the books. I identified with a strong willed, intelligent, articulate and passionate heroine, of which there were precious few for me to identify with; all the weird cultural shit went by the wayside, freckles included.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

you do know that in Russian, chërnyi, black, means Caucasian? I love that the same word can turned inside out to have a completely different racial connotation in different cultures. It shows up the radical instability of racial categories like nothing else.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

It does? Never heard that one before.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

Well, this dates back to a conversation I had fifteen years ago, so may only be anecdotal and outdated evidence! A Russian teacher told me not to use 'chernyi' to refer to African Americans, as it was a racist word - one applied to Caucasians at the time, particularly Chechens. Maybe it was just her, but I found the reversal fascinating, which is why it stuck in my memory!