The other day, I found a copy of Anne of Avonlea (1909) in a charity shop on the Walworth Road, just behind the Elephant and Castle. Anne of Avonlea, oh wow. The front of the book showed Kim Braden as Anne, wearing a spriggy, ruffly cotton frock in the 1975 BBC TV adaptation. The back showed Anne with Marilla, her magnificently stern adopted aunt. Anne and Marilla were one of the great fictional duos of my childhood. They were like Dignity and Impudence, the Landseer painting of the big sad bloodhound and the little yappy cairn.
I read the book eagerly that very afternoon. And it was awful: plotless, sententious, contrived, full of vile stuff about a "guerdon" and "the page of womanhood" and "the river in purple durance". But then I got hold of Anne of Green Gables (1908), the first of L M Montgomery's popular novels of Canadian girlhood, in the copy I inherited from my mother, who had been given it, in turn, by her mother. Good news for all you Anne fans out there: Anne of Green Gables still pretty much stands up.
Anne of Green Gables tells the story of Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, an elderly unmarried brother and sister who have set up house together in a small town on Prince Edward Island, just north of Nova Scotia on the Canadian east coast. One day, they send to the orphan asylum for a boy to help them with the farm work; only, a little girl is sent instead. A little girl with carroty hair, freckles and an enor-mous imagination. Shy, odd Matthew wants to keep her; dour, sensible Marilla wants to send her back. For once, Matthew and the powers of the imagination win.
Anne is a captivating heroine, a whirlwind of energy and good intentions. The basic joke is that her imagination is forever running away with her, getting her into "scrapes": she flavours a cake with liniment instead of vanilla; she dyes her red hair green; she gets her best friend drunk on currant wine. Then Marilla gets angry and punishes her; then Marilla says she is sorry (ha!), realising she has been over-harsh. Gradually, Anne becomes more sensible, and also beautiful and brainy and popular. Marilla gets kinder and happier, and even Matthew starts to perk up. Virtue is its own reward, you see, and something more than that: the truly virtuous have the power to infect the world around them for the better. And so, in the long run, the truly virtuous will win.
I grew up in Aberdeen, Scotland, in the 1970s, in the shadow of oil rigs, punk rock and the ascendancy of Mrs Thatcher. And yet, by a strange kink in human geography, our corner of the world had much more in common with turn-of-the-century Canada than it did with horrid old England down the road. There was the climate, for one thing, cold and wet and very lovely - when Montgomery writes about "the sweet, fresh, chilly days" of springtime, we Aberdonians knew exactly what she meant. And there was the religion, with ministers not vicars, and a vestigially puritan preoccupation with "duty" and "sincere work" and "besetting sins". Duty, sincere work, besetting sins and baking. Like the good people of Avonlea in the 1900s, the Aberdonians I knew in the 1970s were always extremely fond of cake.
Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on Prince Edward Island in 1874 and raised by her grandparents after her mother died. She trained as a teacher, then went away to college, but dropped out to look after her grandmother after the death of her grandfather in 1896. This, presumably, is the autobiographical source for the awful, magnificent moment in Anne of Green Gables when our adorable heroine, having slaved away to win a scholarship to college on the mainland, gives it up to look after Marilla, after the death of Matthew. "She had looked her duty courageously in the face and found it a friend - as duty ever is when we meet it frankly." To support herself and Marilla, Anne will teach at the local school.
Half a century later, my mother, too, trained and worked as a teacher, and so, I always thought, would I. I was, in fact, in the middle of a teacher-training course in Edinburgh when I came across "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", a famous essay by the once fashionable French Marxist Louis Althusser:
"In fact, the Church has been replaced today in its role as the dominant Ideological State Apparatus by the School. It is coupled with the Family, just as the Church was once coupled with the Family - the School (and the School-Family couple) constitutes the dominant Ideological State Apparatus, the Apparatus playing a determinant part in the reproduction of the relations of production of a mode of production threatened in its existence by the world class struggle."
Well, jings! I had no desire to be part of a dominant Ideological State Apparatus - in the 1980s, people referred to these things familiarly, as ISAs - and I was disappointed to discover that Anne had been brainwashing me into it all along. So I packed my rucksack and moved to London, and started practising the entirely unideological profession of journalism instead.
In London journalism, no one ever talked much about virtue and duty and "sincere work" until recently, when everyone suddenly got very keen on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (My friend Vincent Deary has written a great essay on this topic.) Not that I disagree with them. I think Buffy's great. I just also think that, give or take a bit of demonology and 21st-century sexual frankness, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is not so different from Anne of Green Gables. Except that there is one problem with Anne and those other heroines of 19th- and early 20th-century girls' fiction: in the originals, they are terrific; but in the sequels, they are increasingly soppy and defeatist - an index, presumably, of the 19th- and early 20th-century limits on thinking about womanhood. Buffy, on the other hand, is now in her sixth season, and showing no sign of giving in. Is the 21st-century heroine, then, truly limitless? Does this mean that in the long run, the truly virtuous will win?
Jenny Turner is a writer and critic
