Marilla of Green Gables
frowning most resolutely
When men I date do impressions of me to me,1 they invariably call something “elegant” or “romantic.” Earlier this year, I started a reread of Anne of Green Gables, front to back, something I hadn’t done in at least 15 years, and noticed at least one place I picked up the habit. Anne Shirley is always calling things elegant and romantic. Lucy Maud Montgomery imbibes the orphan with big ideas about glamor that contrast her incredibly humble beginnings and repeatedly described homely looks.
Of the classic girlhood heroines, Anne’s probably the one who I most saw myself in. Anne is so deeply weird and off-putting. She speaks like a grown-up, but a grown-up from a melodramatic romance novel, not from Presbyterian, pragmatic Avonlea on Prince Edward Island. She’s got notions and big ideas. And of course, she’s a romance novel heroine, both by her own design and Lucy Maud Montgomery’s. Anne’s love story with Gilbert Blythe is as romantic as they come. My most reread Anne Shirley books as a kid were Anne of the Island and Anne of Windy Poplars, the two that most directly deal with Anne and Gilbert getting together.
In Anne of the Island, Anne initially rejects Gilbert’s proposal because she imagines romance must be big and sweeping, like her beloved Tennyson poems. By the end of the novel, when Gilbert is sick with typhoid, Anne realizes that she and Gilbert together are what makes something big and sweeping, not their circumstances. Anne of Windy Poplars is an epistolary novel, with many letters between the couple prior to their marriage.
But I promise this is not an essay about girlhood and Anne and Gilbert as romance heroes.
What I noticed on this go-around was something so obvious about Anne of Green Gables, but something that the following titles in the series obfuscate, with the help of our cultural memory. Anne Shirley is the titular heroine and by my measure, might be one of the greatest characters of all time.2 And if we’re looking at the first book in the series as a bildungsroman, like many books with children protagonists, Anne is the one who episodically has adventures. But Marilla Cuthbert, her long-suffering guardian, is the one who is changed by them.
Anne’s moments in the first few chapters are iconic. Rereading them in my 30s was not unlike reading Hamlet or watching Seinfeld for the first time. That experience of “oh *that’s* where that phrase comes from,” but instead of culture at large, it was my own personal vocabulary. “The depths of despair,” “unromantic,” “elegant,” “divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good,” “worldly goods.” However, in all of Anne’s singular dialogue, we spend most of the time in Marilla’s head, and if not there, the narrator reveals quite a bit about Marilla’s character in a tight POV.
Matthew Cuthbert (sweetest man in a book ever?) is on board with Anne immediately and Marilla is usually seen as “having to come around to the idea” of keeping Anne at Green Gables. But even before Marilla has the “what is your name?” conversation (“Will you please call me Cordelia?” “Call you Cordelia, is that your name?” “No-o-o, it’s not exactly my name, but I would love to be called Cordelia. It’s such a perfectly elegant name.”) she has a moment of softening in response to Anne’s hyperlexia, hysterics and tribulations.
“Yes, there is need!” The child raised her head quickly, revealing a tear-stained face and trembling lips. “You would cry, too, if you were an orphan and had come to a place you thought was going to be home and found that they didn’t want you because you weren’t a boy. Oh, this is the most tragical thing that ever happened to me!”
Something like a reluctant smile, rather rusty from long disuse, mellowed Marilla’s grim expression.
Later when Marilla is taking Anne back to Mrs. Spencer, the woman who made the mistake and brought a girl, instead of the Cuthberts’ requested boy, Anne gives her history of living with two beleaguered women, taking care of their children, including the infamous three sets of twins, before she ended up at the orphanage. We get lots of Marilla’s internal thoughts during this passage, mostly given over to sadness that a child could experience so much neglect in only eleven years. Matthew lets Anne yammer and name all the things she sees on the trip between the train station and Green Gables, but he’s not the person she discloses her history to—Marilla is the one who asks and listens. Matthew had earlier suggested that they might be some good for Anne and on the carriage ride, Marilla starts to think of her potential role in it: “She’s got too much to say…but she might be trained out of that. And there’s nothing rude or slangy in what she does say. She’s ladylike. It’s likely her people were nice folks.”
When they arrive at the Spencers, Mrs. Spencer apologizes to Marilla for the mix-up; she’ll give Anne to a Mrs. Blewett who happens to also be at her house at that moment. Mrs. Blewett interviews Anne and says she’ll have to earn her keep, taking care of her “fractious” baby. During this interview, “Marilla looked at Anne and softened at sight of the child’s pale face with its look of mute misery—the misery of a helpless little creature who finds itself once more caught in the trap from which it had escaped. Marilla felt an uncomfortable conviction that, if she denied the appeal of that look, it would haunt her to her dying day. Moreover, she did not fancy Mrs. Blewett. To hand a sensitive, ‘highstrung’ child over to such a woman! No, she could not take the responsibility of doing that!”
In these first six chapters, the theme of each is a softening of Marilla, not even by some external force, or really convincing by Matthew. Anne seems to awaken something already present in the spinster who thinks of herself as made of brittle iron. The chapter “Marilla Makes up Her Mind” ends with Marilla talking to herself: “Marilla Cuthbert, you’re fairly in for it. Did you ever suppose you’d see the day when you’d be adopting an orphan girl? It’s surprising enough; but not so surprising as that Matthew should be at the bottom of it, him that always seemed to have such a mortal dread of little girls. Anyhow, we’ve decided on the experiment and goodness only knows what will come of it.” The anxiety is twofold for her: what good can she do this little orphan girl, who is so singular in her personality and personal tragedy, and what will this little orphan girl do Marilla’s self-narrative, one that seems to have been in stasis for decades?
After these opening chapters, the Anne Adventures start (Anne learning how to pray, Anne insulting Rachel Lynde, Anne lying about losing the amethyst brooch, Anne breaking her slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head, Anne getting Diana Barry drunk). Supposedly these missteps by the eleven-year-old are her learning lessons in virtues (humility, honesty, patience, decorum), but anyone who has read the book, or any of the books after the first one, these are not virtues that we associate with Anne really at any point in her life. The major positive changes happen to her when she is trusted by her family and just by virtue of no longer being eleven and having some sense of cause and effect of her actions. Her mind never gets narrower, her dreams never get smaller.
So that change is really happening with Marilla, learning to communicate with Anne and learning to read her efforts in good faith. A major turning point in their relationship is when Anne gets Diana drunk on the currant wine and Marilla defends Anne to Mrs. Barry, a contrast to the scene a few chapters earlier when she makes Anne apologize to Mrs. Rachel Lynde for an outburst (triggered by Mrs. Rachel Lynde being very rude to the girl). Marilla does have an interior moment of empathy for Anne after Rachel calls the girl skinny and ugly, thinking back to a time when she heard someone say about her “What a pity she is such a dark, homely little thing.” She softens to Anne in that moment, but still makes her apologize to Rachel. In the case of the wine/cordial mix-up, Marilla is firmly on Anne’s side from the beginning and lets her know this too.
The last chapters of the book confirm that Marilla is the one who has gone on a journey of change in the novel. In the penultimate chapter, Matthew dies (everyone, start crying now). Anne and Marilla are heartbroken. The Barrys come to stay the night at Green Gables and Diana, her “bosom friend” and “kindred spirit,” offers to stay in Anne’s room with her, but Anne says she would rather be alone. Anne has not yet cried about Matthew and this confuses Diana, and makes Anne herself sad, that she hasn’t yet cried over a man who meant so much to her. But while she is sleeping, Anne wakes up to the thought of Matthew saying “My girl—my girl that I’m proud of,” and starts uncontrollably sobbing. Marilla, ironclad, crispy, Presbyterian, Marilla, creeps into Anne’s bed to hold her and says:
“We’ve got each other, Anne. I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t here—if you’d never come. Oh, Anne, I know I’ve been kind of strict and harsh with you maybe—but you mustn’t think I didn’t love you as well as Matthew did, for all that. I want to tell you now when I can. It’s never been easy for me to say things out of my heart, but at times like this it’s easier. I love you as dear as if you were my own flesh and blood and you’ve been my joy and comfort ever since you came to Green Gables.”
After Matthew’s funeral, Anne and Marilla talk about her future and the topic of Gilbert Blythe comes up. Marilla makes a disclosure that I can only imagine felt like a crumb of the most decadent dessert in the world to starry-eyed, romantic, elegant Anne, coming from her seemingly-repressed guardian, about how she and Gilbert’s father were once very close, to the point of people in town calling him her “beau.” Anne wants the story and Marilla says “We had a quarrel. I wouldn’t forgive him when he asked me to. I meant to, after awhile—but I was sulky and angry and I wanted to punish him first. He never came back—the Blythes were all mighty independent. But I always felt—rather sorry. I’ve always kind of wished I’d forgiven him when I had the chance.” This rupture mirrors Gilbert and Anne’s stormy relationship. Anne responds “So you’ve had a bit of romance in your life, too.”
Gilbert turns out to be less hard-headed than his father, since when Anne decides to give up her scholarship to college so that she can stay closer to Green Gables, Gilbert withdraws his application to teach at the Avonlea school and recommends Anne (she was going to have to go to Carmody and only return to Green Gables on weekends). Gilbert himself will instead have to pay for board for his teaching position. The gesture opens the door to their friendship being repaired, which will bloom into a romance in later books.
The last conclusion we get about Marilla’s transformation comes from the keeper of Avonlea information, gossip Mrs. Rachel Lynde. Rachel quips about Anne still seeming like a child in many ways when she runs from Green Gables to go see Diana and Marilla comes to her defense: “There’s a good deal more of the woman about her in others,’ retorted Marilla, with a momentary return of her old crispness.” The narrator tells us “but crispness was no longer Marilla’s distinguishing characteristic.” That night, Rachel tells her husband that “Marilla Cuthbert has got mellow. That’s what.”
Marilla’s acerbic bite and contrariness are still wielded to counter Rachel Lynde, but she does it in defense of Anne, without a second thought. Anne Shirley is the romance novel heroine, with the eventual wedding to the dark-haired, sarcastic dreamboat, and she has the romantic outlook that lends itself to melodramatics and Gothic interpretations of the everyday. But at least in this first book, if the question is who is transformed by love? Who is restored by learning to communicate with another person and see them for who they are, and be seen, perhaps for the first time in their whole life? The heroine and protagonist of that story is unequivocally Marilla Cuthbert. The “romance” may be adjacent to her, but Anne’s grand notions are the catalyst for Marilla’s undoing and remaking.
recommendations
Someone to Hold by Mary Balogh and The Secret Mistress by Mary Balogh: the closest I can think of to Marilla and Anne heroines, respectively. I am reading a bunch of Mary Balogh for a big project coming in the New Year, so apologies for those being the front of my mind. But I do really love both of these books!
Theodora Goes Wild (1936, dir. Richard Boleslawski): This film starring Irene Dunne is about a romance novelist who writes under a pen name. The prudes of her small town have no idea that their beloved favorite daughter is actually a bestselling author over sexy book “The Sinner.” Fun insight into 1930s perception of sensual books and Irene Dunne is an incredible comedic actress. The small town of Lynnfield is not unlike Avonlea!
Happy-Go-Lucky (2008, dir. Mike Leigh):
Is this a peril of dating men? Am I uniquely easy to do an impression of, so they feel the need to? Do I specifically date men compelled to do impressions? Sound off on what seems most likely.
Other contenders: Fred Vincy from Middlemarch, Pierre from War and Peace, Emma Woodhouse from Emma, every Dickens character, Columbo.
this essay is divinely beautiful AND dazzlingly clever AND angelically good