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

[sashajwolf]

I think they're white French Canadian. The issue comes up in this article.

[estoile.livejournal.com]

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

[biascut.livejournal.com]

They're not black as in descended from Africans, but they're not White by the standards of the British descended Protestants, as I understand it. jeejeen told us that when the Blythe's "boy" tells her that "Gilbert got de turn", that means he's an adult man being referred to as "boy" to keep him in his place, same as happened to African-American men. I always just assumed it meant he was twelve!

But yes, it kind of makes a lot more sense of Quebec pissed-off-ness when you realise that.

[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.

[ailbhe]

The dialect is actually not like most representations of French-speaking English, either, and Charlotta the Fourth is described as having brown paws, twice.

[ailbhe]

Oh, and Davy is threatened with having to wait for his food until everyone is finished, "Like the French."

[biascut.livejournal.com]

I think that's more the class/ethnic thing of only WASPs being actually White, though, rather than Charlotta being African-black. She probably is darker skinned than the Scottish-descended Protestants, both because of genetics and because she has to work harder than them!

I mean, I'm willing to be corrected by someone with a better knowledge of Canadian history, but as I say, I'm pretty sure that the French Canadians are people who'd we recognise as white, but they weren't seen as white by the English-speaking ruling classes in Canada at the time.

(sorry, just read your comment again, and you're probably not actually disagreeing with me, are you?! I agree that they're definitely represented as non-white!)

[sfred]

Ugh, I hadn't twigged that either.
I've just read 'Before Green Gables', which is an LMM-estate-approved prequel and is quite good. Must re-read the actual books now.

[ailbhe]

I've changed the original post to read "socially non-White" instead of "black." Gosh, it's ugly.

I'm reminded of English books describing Irish people as dark-skinned and apelike - Punch cartoons and things.

Part of the nastiness is that the comparison is to African-black people and is supposed to be insulting. Ew.

Racism in insidious, complicated and unpleasant shocker, film at 11, I know.

[tiggsybabes.livejournal.com]

I've been enjoying re-reading the Enid Blyton St Claire's books, but ...

... why do none of the stay at home mothers drive? Why are some of them too busy to have their children home from boarding school in the holidays?

I could go on about how the girls look down on those less fortunate than themselves, but I shan't.

I still enjoyed the books over all again though.

[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.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

Why are some of them too busy to have their children home from boarding school in the holidays?

Odd 1930s childrearing ideology? In The Diary of a Provincial Lady, which was written by a middle-class woman in the 1930s and 1940s, the mother's constant anguish is that she is un-PC for wanting to be affectionate towards her children and see more of them. The dominant ideology she's operating within seems to be that it is pure maternal selfishness to want to be with your children; the child-centred thing to do is to give them as much autonomy as possible once they have left home for boarding school.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

Ew, indeed. There's also an Enid Blyton 'brown paws' = 'hard work outdoors' = 'vulgar, common, dirty' thing going on there too, I'll be bound.

[tiggsybabes.livejournal.com]

I know it was different then, but I didn't pick up on any of that when I read them as a child in the '70s. My husband went to boarding school & hated it & my ex FIL went at aged 7 :/ That's a bit boggling as my eldest is now 7 & I can't even imagine sending her away from me.

[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.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Where I grew up, only orphans went to boarding school. I've always found English kids' literature really, really weird for that reason. Like the Pevensie kids - why are they constantly on exile from their house? No wonder they get abducted by witches and lions, with such neglectful parents! =)

[jenett]

The driving, there's a good explanation for, so my mother (born in the mid-30s) once pointed out to me. Cars of that era often didn't have automatic steering, so it took a rather major amount of physical upper body strength to get the steering wheel to turn.

And since most women weren't encouraged to develop that kind of physical strength, most of them didn't drive.

[tiggsybabes.livejournal.com]

Ah, that makes sense, I was putting it down to a "keep the little woman reliant on a man" kind of thing. Though, these mothers travel by taxi a lot.

[sfred]

To be fair to Mr and Mrs Pevensie, when the kids are away in the holidays, it's because they're being evacuated because there's a war on. When they're away at school, they're at school, but I imagine there would have been a lot of social pressure on middle-class parents to send their kids away to school, in the same way that there's social pressure against home-educating now.

[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.

[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.

[shreena.livejournal.com]

Not totally sure what you mean by "automatic steering" - do you mean "power steering"? If so, I've driven a car without that regularly and it really doesn't require much strength. I have very little upper body strength and never really struggled with it.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, but then they gallivant off to America for six weeks, take only the pretty Susan with them, and pack of the youngsters to stay with the hottible Uncle and Aunt Scrubb! Bad parents! No cookie! =)

[sfred]

Oh, I'd forgotten that bit. :/
I'd rather go to the end of the world on the Dawn Treader than go to America, though!

[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.