Christianity and Literature

Vol. 62, No.3 (Spring 2013)

Secular or Spiritual:
Rereading Anne ofGreen Gables

Ann F. Howey

Abstract: Comparison of L. M. Montgomery's 1908 Anne of Green

Gables with Kevin Sullivan's 1985 telefilm adaptation clarifies the role
ofreligious and spiritual practices in both texts; the comparison, while
it demonstrates the process ofsecularization in late twentieth-century
popular culture, also highlights the institutional context for Anne's
religious maturation in the novel. Montgomery's representation of
a changing church and of a personal spirituality that is an essential
component of maturation raises questions about the implications of
secularization to the depiction of spiritual identity in young people's
literature.

It sometimes seems to have become a fact almost universally

acknowledged that to speak to a wide audience in late twentieth- or early
twenty-first century Canadian and American society, one must tone down
or avoid explicit Christian content in novels or films. As Canada and the
United States become more aware of their increasing religious diversity,
and as fewer people explicitly identify as Christian,' the assumption is that
explicit Christian content is alienating. However, the continuing popularity
of certain texts, such as L. M. Montgomery's 1908 Anne of Green Gables,
problematizes any easy acceptance of such an assumption. Although some
readings of the novel, including Kevin Sullivan'sadaptation of it in his 1985
television miniseries, have glossed over its religious content, Montgomery
demonstrates that Anne's spiritual life is intimately linked to her intellectual
and emotional development. It is possible that the novel remains popular in
spite of this religious dimension, but it is also possible that Montgomery's
representation of a changing church and of a personal spirituality that is

395
396 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

an essential component of maturation provides other ways for twenty-

first-century readers to produce relevance (to use John Fiske's term)" from
Montgomery's text. Comparison of the novel to Sullivan's telefilm clarifies
the role of religious and spiritual practices in both; the comparison, while
demonstrating the process of secularization in late twentieth-century
popular culture, leads to questions about the institutional context for Anne's
religious maturation and the implications of secularization to the depiction
of spiritual identity in young people's literature.

Context
Anxiety about Christianity in cultural texts, particularly those directed
toward young people, has two forms: a fear of Christian content perceived
as propaganda and a fear that Christian content will not appeal and thus not
sell. The way these two forms can be linked was made most explicit this past
decade in regards to C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. As HarperCollins
sought ways to capitalize on the post-Harry Potter popularity of fantasy,
it considered publishing "new Narnia novels by unidentified authors"
(Carvajal 1), but with a marketing strategy determined "that no attempt will
be made to correlate the stories to Christian imagery/theology" (1). Douglas
Gresham noted that "in to day's world the surest way to prevent secularists
and their children from reading [the series] is to ... link Narnia with modern
evangelical Christianity" (qtd. In Carvajal 18). Gresham's phrasing, with
its emphasis on "evangelical:' points to the anxiety about Christianity as
propaganda, since evangelism, as it has come to be understood, privileges
conversion to a particular authoritative view.' Admittedly, Montgomery's
novel has not faced the same degree of hostility regarding religious content
as Lewis' novels,' perhaps because of Lewis' profile as a Christian apologist.
Nevertheless, the debate over the Narnia series-whether Lewis' novels
constitute a sort of propaganda, whether the publisher should expand a
secularized version of the series-is instructive, as just one articulation
of ongoing social tensions, particularly in Canada and the United States,
concerning the role of religious institutions in public life and the way that
those tensions enter and affect the field of young people's literature. The
Lewis debate works on the understanding that while Christians may read
secular literature, secularists will not read "Christian" texts. The implication
is that secularism becomes a cultural common denominator and that the
way to speak to readers of different belief systems is to avoid religion.
There are two dangers to this position. The first is that secularism seems
 REREADING ANNE OF GREEN GABLES 397

to be held as ideologically neutral, and feminist and postmodernist theories

have critiqued in various ways the possibility of any ideologically-free
position. To hold secularism as neutral, then, invisibly privileges certain
values over others. The second danger is the assumption that "Christianity"
has one definition. Diana Butler Bass situates her study of American
mainline Protestant churches in the context of a cultural definition of
Christianity that is becoming more narrow: "According to most reports,
politically conservative evangelicalism is the only vital form of the Christian
faith. Other Christians do not even seem to exist" (3). She discovered that
they do exist, as the title of her 2006 book, Christianity for the Rest of Us,
suggests, and that they "have found new vitality through an intentional and
transformative engagement with Christian tradition as embodied in faith
practices" (7). Bass' study thus emphasizes "church" not as fixed institution,
but as community, and as communities of faith, vital congregations
continually negotiate the attractions, even demands, of traditional and new
practices, and of institutional, communal, and individual understandings
of spiritual engagement and ministry. However, individuals as well as faith
communities negotiate their personal sense of spirituality in relation to
these sometimes competing attractions and demands, whether or not that
negotiation is a conscious one, and whether or not they are members of
formal religious institutions.
Raymond Williams' distinction between institutions and formations
is useful in this context. Formations, he argues, "are most recognizable as
conscious movements and tendencies" and they "can by no means be wholly
identified with formal institutions, or their formal meanings and values"
(119); furthermore, formations can be "alternative and oppositional" (119)
as wellas hegemonic. Culture, in this model, is a site of continual negotiation
among different institutions and formations, whose positions may change
over time. Williams describes these positions as "dominant:' "emergent:'
and "residual:' and places "organized religion" within the residual (122).
However,he also suggests that some aspects of organized religion remain in
the dominant through a "body of incorporated meaning and values" (122),
while others act as alternative or oppositional formations, as in ideas of
"absolute brotherhood, [or] service to others without reward" (122). Thus,
even ifsecularism reallyis a cultural common denominator, now "dominant:'
in Williams' terms, there are multiple religious (as in institutional) and
spiritual (as in personal faith) formations at work within culture, and the
process of socialization necessarily involves complex interactions with (and
among) these different formations.
398 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

What then is role of fiction for young people in this process of

socialization? As anxiety about propaganda suggests, one of its roles has
historically been to offer didactic accounts of dominant cultural formations.
Scholars of Montgomery's novel defend it against such charges; they tend
to emphasize that it is not "one-dimensionally didactic or moralistic"
(Gammel 133), or refer to its "nostalgia" (Whittaker 50) or its "iconoclastic
affirmation of faith" (Hilder, "That Unholy Tendency" 35). The novel's
emphasis on a personal spirituality characterized by authenticity,
questioning, and femininity means that its representation of religion does
not only describe a once-dominant institution, but also creates a pleasurable
narrative movement reaching forward to readers beyond Montgomery's
own time. More importantly, however, the novel models for its readers a
process of negotiation of institutional structures and personal feeling, and it
is this process as much as the explicit content that, I argue, makes Anne still
relevant, and that suggests a potential ongoing role for religious (although
not just Christian) discourses in literature for young people.
A number of scholars have noted that religious references contribute
to important themes in Anne of Green Gables, for Montgomery makes
religious observance and spirituality central to Anne's maturation and thus
to the novel as female bildungsroman? Mary Henley Rubio has compared
Montgomery's satire of religious practices with that of Mark Twain ("Satire,
Realism, and Imagination in Anne of Green Gables") and contextualized
Montgomery's depiction of religion and education in the setting of the
Scottish Presbyterianism of her Prince Edward Island upbringing ("1.
M. Montgomery"). Rosemary Ross Johnston has analyzed the religious
discourses in four of the Anne novels to show the way the texts "encode"
Anne's world as "God-created and God-oriented" (17), and John Sorfleet
has articulated Anne's development in the novel as from pagan to Christian,
as "Annes original values, based in nature and the imagination, have
subsequently been enriched by Christian love and ethics" (182). Monika
Hilder has explored Montgomery's use of humor to critique "a socially
restrictive and repressive Christianity" ("That Unholy Tendency" 36)
and has examined Montgomery's work as a whole to demonstrate "how
Montgomery creates a feminist theological vision" ("Imagining" 308).
Most recently, Christiana Salah situates Anne's religious upbringing in the
context of Victorian ideals of femininity, domesticity, and Christianity.
These and other discussions of religion in the Anne books suggest a critical
consensus that Anne's spirituality is significant to the novel (indeed, to the
whole series) and to what Anne brings to her community.
 REREADING ANNE OF GREEN GABLES 399

What this essayseeks to add to this conversation, then, is an examination

of the negotiation of secular/religious/spiritual formations undertaken by
the first novel of Montgomery's series and by the telefilm adaptation of
it. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, published in the early twentieth
century when Christianity was still dominant, is permeated by a Christian
vision: maturation necessarily involves some degree of integration of public
faith practices and personal spiritual development. Sullivan's Anne ofGreen
Gables, produced in the increasingly secular late twentieth century, treats
religious content as comic or as quaint background. The two different
attitudes to religious and secular public spaces performed by novel and
telefilm depend to a great extent on the way each approaches Anne's
personal negotiation of religious institutions and individual spirituality.

Montgomery's and Sullivan's Religious Discourses

As adaptation theorists have pointed out, judging an adaptation on its
fidelityto its adapted text is problematic (see Linda Hutcheon, for example);
however, comparison of adapted text (Montgomery's novel) and adaptation
(Sullivan's telefilm) illuminates a trend of the period of production to which
each is speaking. Religious discourses-that is, a set of textual references
to religion as both an institution and personal belief system that occur
within the text and that connect the textual world to a particular socio-
historical reality-are present in both novel and film. Although there are
some similarities in these discourses, the differences indicate not just the
different conventions of two media, but also the greater secularization of the
period of production. Sullivan's film represents religion as form, something
always exterior to the individual, rather than representing religion, as
Montgomery's novel does, as also personal, transformative experience.
The novel's religious discourses are comprised of five different types
of references, communicated to readers in three different ways. Important
types of religious references include comments on religious institutions
and their activities as part of the social backdrop, allusions to texts that are
either religious in themselves or that reference religious subjects, imagery,
explicit discussions of religious practices and beliefs, and descriptions
of moments of personal spiritual experience. The novel provides these
references through the narrator speaking as the narrator (in exposition or
in commentary), through the narrator but with one of the characters as
focalizing agent (particularly in thoughts communicated only to readers),
or through dialogue between characters. The importance of the narrator for
400 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

the novel's religious discourses is significant, as it is a convention that the

film does not duplicate.
The film's religious discourses include some of the same references
and communication. Churches, church activities, and church personnel
(the minister and his wife) are part of the social backdrop, communicated
through dialogue, visual images, and diegetic sound. Allusions, imagery
(that is, descriptions that imply a sacred dimension to otherwise secular
objects), explicit discussions of religious beliefs, and moments of personal
spiritual experience occur in the film, but much less frequently than in the
novel, since their only vehicle is characters' dialogue and because the choice
of scenes excludes several possibilities with religious content, such as Anne's
first Sunday at church or her discussions with her guardian Matthew of
potential new ministers. The scenes that have been chosen for the film and
the way they are presented therefore limit the religious discourses to those
that communicate a particular nostalgic sense of setting, provide humor,
or emphasize the romantic possibilities of the relationship between Anne
(Megan Follows) and Gilbert (Jonathan Crombie).
In Montgomery's novel, religious discourses do help to create setting.
Avonlea-the community which the eleven-year-old orphan, Anne,
enters-is defined in part through the presence of the Presbyterian church,
its affiliated organizations, and its conventional practices. The narrator's
initial portrait of Mrs. Lynde, the first representative of Avonlea readers
meet," includes her work with the Sunday school, the Church Aid Society,
and the Foreign Mission Auxiliary (7) in a way that suggests the importance
of these organizations to the life of the community; it also implies a concept
of"church" as more than just Sunday services, although references to church
announcements (80), or ministers' sermons (138) reflect Anne as regular
church-goer. Furthermore, religion is not separated from other aspects of
society. One part of the school day's activities is "testament reading" (112),
for example, and each scholar seems to have her/his own testament since
the narrator, when describing Anne packing up her books to leave school
in chapter 15, includes one among her possessions (98). Social activities,
such as the picnic in chapter 13 or the concert Anne wants to attend in
chapter 19, are an extension of church activities or include church groups;
for the concert, Anne tells her guardian, Marilla, "the choir are going to
sing four lovely pathetic songs that are pretty near as good as hymns" (123).
The presence of the church is so ubiquitous in the novel as to suggest that
Avonlea's citizens take for granted that presence as part of the social fabric.
 REREADING ANNE OF GREEN GABLES 401

The social setting that religious institutions help define, however, is firmly
located in the past. Even when the novel was first published, its setting was
temporally distant from readers, the period before the turn-of-the-century,
the realm already of memory; for today's readers, of course, this effect is even
more pronounced. The novel's references to religious institutions and their
practices help to evoke a sense of this past moment, albeit a selective one:
for example, Montgomery "often attended [the Baptists'] church activities
in Cavendish for social reasons" (Rubio, "1. M. Montgomery" 97), but there
is little discussion of other faith groups in Avonlea in Anne ofGreen Gables?
Exact historical accuracy, however, is not as important as a nostalgic sense
of returning to a past era. David Lowenthal, talking of Western attitudes to
the past, compares the past to "a foreign country with a booming tourist
trade" (xvii), with fiction as one means of travel. One of the pleasures of the
text is the sense of visiting a previous historical time, but like most tourism,
it involves the simplification of complex social and religious relationships
within a historical community.
Sullivan'stelefilm also uses religious discourses to contribute to setting.
Although dialogue includes some religious references, visual imagery and
sound cues generally communicate the institutional Christian context of
the Avonlea community through the presence of church steeples as part
of lingering landscape shots, sometimes accompanied by diegetic sounds.
After the Sunday school picnic-which is strictly a social event-there is
a shot of a typical steepled church as part of the village; before the Elaine
of Astolat sequence begins, the ringing of church bells introduces another
shot, where the camera pans over the village to settle again on the church
steeple. Furthermore, when Gilbert (Anne's school rival) gives Anne a ride
in a buggy-an activity that causes much concern for Mrs. Lynde (Patricia
Hamilton) and Marilla (Colleen Dewhurst)-a church can be seen in the
background as they begin driving together. Likewise, the funeral service
for Matthew (Richard Farnsworth), when Gilbert also speaks to Anne and
Marilla, takes place outside the church. The telefilm thus depicts religious
institutions literally from the outside.
If the depictions of religion as social backdrop in both novel and film
have similarities, the representation of private religious practices, such as
prayer, show the spiritual/secular divide more clearly. The scene of Anne's
first prayer while at Green Gables illustrates the shift from spiritual in the
novel to secular in the film, in part because it is one of the scenes of religious
practice that the film keeps. Anne and Marilla's dialogue in the film contains
402 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

lines from the novel, though the conversation as a whole and Anne's prayer
itself are shortened. Both novel and film use the scene to emphasize Anne's
ignorance of the practices of conventional, religious Avonlea society (as
represented in this instance by Marilla) and thus to create humor. Marilla
instructs Anne to say her prayers and is horrified to learn that Anne does
not regularly pray because she has been told "that God made [her] hair red
on purpose" (46, emphasis in original). Anne follows Marilla's instructions
to "thank God for your blessings and ask Him humbly for the things you
want" (47), but her interpretation becomes, as the film's Marilla says, "a
business letter to the catalogue store" rather than what Marilla expected. In
both novel and film, Marilla concludes that the orphan is scandalously close
to being a "heathen:'
Although the scenes are similar, the novel contains more details,
and the order of events differs in novel and film. In the novel, besides
making her unconventional judgements of God's decisions on hair color,
Anne demonstrates that she has attended Sunday school and memorized
something from the catechism; she is able to answer Marilla's question
about God with the appropriate dogma that "God is a spirit, infinite, eternal
and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness,
and truth" (46). Although this response is given "glibly" (46), it satisfies
Marilla, at least for the moment; as Hilder notes, "The practice of faith at
this time was often regarded as a dutiful exercise in rote-memory skills
and conformity to legalistic forms" ("Imagining" 319), and Anne performs
well in this regard. However, later in the same scene, Marilla abandons
memorized forms and thus the idea "that familiar religious language will
be adequate for [Anne's] needs" (Hilder, "That Unholy Tendency" 49); she
lets Anne say her own prayer rather than teaching her "the childish classic,
'Now I lay me down to sleep''' (Montgomery, Anne 47). In this scene, both
the narrator and Marilla demonstrate awareness that Anne already knows
ritual answers, but she does not understand them. One of the developments
of the novel's Anne is her growing understanding of the spiritual reality
that the dogma codifies. The novel, through Marilla's unspoken thoughts,
communicates Marilla'sunderstanding that Anne "knew and cared nothing
about God's love, since she had never had it translated to her through the
medium of human love" (47), which Sorfleet identifies as an "important
point" (177) of the chapter.
In the film, such narrator-communicated information disappears, and
with it, theological reflection and the importance of personal spirituality
 REREADING ANNE OF GREEN GABLES 403

that the novel highlights. The reorganization of material in the adaptation

has a similar effect: the prayer scene in the film no longer immediately
precedes Anne's being told she is to stay at Green Gables for good, de-
emphasizing the role of Christian duty in Marilla's decision in the novels
in favor of a bond based on quarrels with Blythe men in the film." Anne's
learning of the Lord's Prayer the next day in the novel includes a discussion
between Anne and Marilla of a picture of Jesus talking to children; in the
film, her memorization is interrupted by Rachel's arrival, so the ongoing
religious discussion is dismissed-apparently out of social considerations,
since Marilla does not want Rachel to know Anne is a "heathen:' Anne's
first prayer is an opportunity for humor in both novel and film, but the
novel makes it an opportunity for pity of the orphan's spiritual state and
reflection on living out religious beliefs; in the film, it is one comic moment,
soon followed by another-Anne's fit of temper and her eventual apology-
that demonstrates the social gulf between Avonlea matrons and the orphan
"from away","
Because of the interiority of many of their instances, the religious
discourses of the novel are perhaps difficult to translate to a visual
medium. Montgomery tends to combine types of references and means of
communicating them in anyone scene, and to translate all ofthem to dialogue
would slow the action of the telefilm, which may pause for landscape shots
to depict changing seasons and moods, but which otherwise tends to move
from one of Anne's scrapes to another. For example, an instance of imagery
that Johnston analyses-''Anne's first trip along the Avenue" (lO)-contains
in the novel the comparison of the sky to cathedral windows (Montgomery
21). The film depicts Matthew and Anne travelling down the Avenue as the
sun begins to set, but no verbal cues make the cathedral comparison, so the
beauty of the Avenue creates an imaginative space (as the book does), but
does not connect nature and the imagination with the sacred. The cathedral
comparison migrates, in the film, to Anne's speech during the prayer scene,
when she describes the way she would pray under the open sky. The film
does, in this one instance, gesture toward nature as sacred space, but what
Johnston identifies as a network of symbolic associations in the first four
Anne books (8-11) fades from view, and with it what she calls the "deep
structure" of religious themes that exist in the novels (7).
Chapter 8 of Anne of Green Gables, when Marilla finds Anne standing
enraptured in front of the picture of Jesus and the children, provides a
useful example of Montgomery's technique, particularly since the film
404 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

does not include it. The scene includes allusions to the Bible: the narrator's
description of the picture alludes to the story of the children from Matthew
19; the Lord's Prayer, a copy of which Anne is supposed to bring from the
sitting room, alludes to Matthew 6. Then, when Marilla confronts Anne, the
two of them converse about Anne's response to the picture, with the narrator
providing insight into Marilla's reactions as the dialogue takes place; the
narrator's description of Marilla as "wondering why she had not broken into
this speech long before" reinforces Marilla's exclamation that Anne is being
"irreverent" (51). The conversation reveals the "deeply spiritual experience"
(Hilder, "That Unholy Tendency" 46) Anne has had in imagining herself in
the picture; the fact that Marilla does not disrupt Anne's narrative earlier
may suggest Marilla's unacknowledged attraction to the type of experience
Anne describes, and thus hints at her own spirituality, even if her speech, as
Hilder notes (47), rejects Anne's mode of spiritual engagement. This brief
analysis of just one example suggests the degree to which Montgomery
weaves into her novel religious discourses that are based in the Protestant
tradition of the individual's experience of God: they are embedded in
description and dialogue, and are articulated by multiple characters as well
as the narrator.
If the adaptation minimizes exploration of personal spirituality, it does,
however, make use of its church-as-landscape shots for symbolic purposes.
In particular, shots of Gilbert and Anne with a church in the background
rely on late twentieth-century associations of churches and weddings to
make the building's presence another way to suggest a romantic relationship
between the two characters; for Montgomery's Presbyterian characters,
marrying in a church would be a novelty, as the conversation between Anne
and Diana about Charlotte Gillis' wedding in chapter 29 suggests." In the
funeral scene, the minister speaks of love and mortality, contextualizing
Gilbert's presence and his speech to Anne within a carpe diem tradition;
the reminder that "death comes to all of us" suggests that the young couple
should not defer their relationship too long. Neither the buggy scene nor
the funeral is depicted in Montgomery's novel, and both serve to increase
the romantic tension in the film. Visually, the church as backdrop teases
spectators with the question, "How close to the altar will Gilbert and Anne
get ". " 12
Thus the film's use of Montgomery's religious material, like its use of
shots of church steeples, remains exterior, secular in its focus on the material
world or on emotion defined by romantic love. The religious references it
 REREADING ANNE OF GREEN GABLES 405

does use can be read, for viewers so inclined, as residual practices of the
depicted era, even of the adapted text. Instead of addressing the realities of
spiritual life in a religious context or, as Hilder argues Montgomery does,
creating a "model [of] imagination as the very means to stronger Christian
faith" ("Imagining" 313), the film secularizes "spirit" as literary imagination,
which works to focus on Anne as writer even as it simplifies Anne as religious
being. As a result, religion is a matter of social convention-a product of the
times-rather than what the novel ultimately suggests it is: an experience
negotiated in the tension among institutional traditions, social conventions,
and community understanding of and individual desire for the sacred.

Montgomery's Anne: The Individual inland the Institution

Many ofthe scholars who have discussed religion in Montgomery's Anne
of Green Gables have celebrated Anne's personal articulation of spirituality,
generally contrasting it to the religious institutions and practices of
Avonlea. Thus Shirley Foster and Judy Simons characterize Anne as having
a "natural religious impulse" (158) and "a freer spiritual existence" (158)
than that of her author; Salah similarly describes Anne's "natural inner
spirituality" (200). This spirituality, however, tends to be seen in opposition
to Presbyterian Avonlea. Johnston argues that in the novel, "orthodoxy is
set against spirituality, truth against pretence, and law against love" (9), and
Hilder similarly comments that the novel "distinguish[es] between social
conformity to the appearance of reverence ... and the genuine, personal
quest for faith" ("That Unholy Tendency" 49), with Anne representing the
personal quest. Anne's choice of real flowers to decorate her hat on her
first attendance at church (Montgomery 69) is often used as an example
of Montgomery's emphasis on the genuine: as Patricia Santelman argues,
"Annes choice of the real" represents larger "distinctions between faith
and facade" (66). Hilder concludes that "Montgomery notably subverts the
wrongfully repressive patriarchal world of economics and rationality with a
celebration of childlike spirituality that has strong links with Romanticism
and feminist discourse" ("That Unholy Tendency" 52), though it has its
roots, as Hilder earlier explains, in Puritan traditions (40).
That Montgomery "criticize]s] the way religion is practised;' as Rubio
says ("Satire" 30) is not at debate; that Montgomery validates Anne's
spirituality is also clear. It is the binary that is often emphasized between
the two in critical discussion, however, that I wish to question. For example,
Foster and Simons state that "Anne's selfhood ... develops from outside
406 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

the narrow parameters of religious orthodoxy" (158), which implies

a separation between her spiritual development and institutional and
communal practices. Nor is it simply that Anne "revises her community's
ideal of Protestant womanhood" (Salah 200), although she does do that.
One of the pleasures of the text is, admittedly, Anne's ability to resist
conforming, as Angela Hubler has noted in talking to girl readers. However,
to over-emphasize this resistance implies that the institutions within which
Anne lives are static without her presence, instead of necessarily dynamic
systems. In other words, the community's religious "orthodoxy" changes
without Anne's influence, too.
That change in the church institution depicted in the novel is represented
by individuals: Sunday school teachers, and ministers and their wives. There
is a shift from one type of educator in Sunday school-a single "middle-aged
lady" (69) named Miss Rogerson -and one type of minister-the widowed,
older Mr. Bentley-to a married, young male minister (Mr. Allan) whose
wife teaches Anne's class in Sunday school. 13 Although that shift might
be seen as local and thus restricted to individual choice rather than any
institutional context, the process of selecting a minister in particular involves
conversation and debate within the community. Like Mrs. Lynde and other
congregants, Anne has "her opinions about [potential ministers] and
discussed the same in full with Matthew" (138). She approves of Mr. Allan
because "he prayed as ifhe meant it and not just as ifhe did it because he was
in the habit of it" (139), recognizing a sort of genuine spiritual experience as
opposed to conformity to tradition in his practice of ministry. Nevertheless,
as a child, she does not have the power to select him as the new minister,
so the institution's and the local community's movement toward a more
open, personal, questioning spirituality happens independently of her. The
call to Mr. Allan does not of course indicate unanimous support within the
community for the authentic spirituality that he represents. Nevertheless, it
does suggest a receptiveness to emerging practices-a "transformation" as
Salah calls it (203)-which can be read as progressive: Kate Wood, talking
of both educational and religious institutions, argues that the "introduction
mid-story [of Miss Stacy the schoolteacher and the Allans] represents a
kind of progress from repressive to hopeful" in terms of power structures in
the novel's society (37).
Because the religious practices of the Sunday school teachers and
ministers are most usually reported by others, notably Anne, they are thus
made available to the reader with accompanying commentary on their
 REREADING ANNE OF GREEN GABLES 407

effectiveness through evaluation of content and style, which highlights the

contrast between old and new. Frank Davey comments that "Miss Rogerson's
rigid style of teaching Sunday school ... contrasts with the approach of her
successor, Mrs. Allan ... [and] Mr. Allan's interesting sermons contrast with
the long and doctrinaire ones of the previous minister, Mr. Bentley" (165).
Both of these representatives of once-dominant practices follow assumptions
about authority and religious learning. Catechisms, included in such
famous texts as the New England Primer (ca. 1690), assumed that figures
of authority would ask questions of students, whose memorized responses
would prove mastery of doctrine. Miss Rogerson follows this model; she
asks the questions and expects memorized responses and paraphrases (69,
71). As Hilder remarks, Anne "acquires easily enough" such rote knowledge
("That Unholy Tendency" 47), but she objects to the system because the
programmed answers do not explain the mysteries of her personal religious
experience satisfactorily.
Approaching religious teaching (whether in Sunday school or
ministry) from this assumption of authority creates distance between
expert and learner, most dramatically demonstrated in Mr. Bentley's lack
of individuality. He is a position more than a person, consistently referred
to as "the minister:' whether by Marilla, Anne, or the narrator. Only after he
has departed does the narrator reveal his name, the length of his service to
Avonlea, and his status as widower (138). This withholding of his name until
after his departure distances him from readers: it is as if Montgomery never
introduces us. His presence in the narrative is incidental: he is referred to
in matters of housekeeping-whether the tea set should be used (102) or
currant wine made (107)-and public duties-making announcements (80)
or public speaking (123). The narrator expresses the community's feeling
that he is "their good old minister" (138), but Montgomery's use of internal
retroversion'" makes that attachment seem relatively unimportant, and the
narrator spends little time on the community's regrets at his departure. The
narrator also reinforces his shortcoming: besides Anne's initial comment
that he "hasn't enough imagination" and Marilla's silent agreement (72), the
narrator, in summing up his career in Avonlea, repeats the comment twice
(138). Anne's relative silence about him (except for an initial appraisal of a
sermon) and his lack of name suggest that Anne does not find him relevant
to her own spiritual life; the narrator's silence affirms Anne's judgment.
The transition in Sunday school teachers and ministers, then, ushers in
religious practices that Anne does find relevant. In Sunday school, there is
408 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

a new attitude to questions, as Davey notes (165). Mrs. Allan tells the class
that they "could ask her any question [they] liked:' to Anne's delight, and
she immediately calls Mrs. Allan "a splendid teacher" (139). Mrs. Allan's
presence and Anne's enthusiasm (humorous as it is) validates the desire
to ask questions as natural to the development of human spirituality. The
sequence of Sunday school teachers in the novel suggests that in its depicted
society dominant notions of educating children in religion-memorization
of doctrine-are giving way to concepts of a spiritual education grounded in
individual investigation and growth in understanding. Jennifer Henderson
notes that at the turn of the twentieth century, Canadians were criticizing
educational systems based "on rote learning and instead promoted a
pedagogy centred on 'living practice" (462); in the context of religious
education, the Allans model such "living practice:'
In contrast to the invisibility of Mr. Bentley, the first pages introducing
Mr. and Mrs. Allan are replete with physical and character descriptions,
particularly of Mrs. Allan, whose dress causes comment (137), but of Mr.
Allan as well, so Montgomery makes available to readers a clear physical
presence for both characters. Both are described in terms of the "cheerful"
nature of their religion (139-40), part of Montgomery's characteristic
opposition of "judgmental, unloving, fearful Christians with ... merciful,
charitable, joy-filled believers" (Hilder, "Imagining" 312). Mr. Allan also
clearly influences Anne with his suggestion that "everybody should have a
[worthy] purpose in life and pursue it faithfully" (195). In contrast to Mr.
Bentley,whose speeches aside from picnic announcements are not repeated,
Anne's tendency to quote Mr. Allan (195, 201) and her reference to his
"magnificent sermons" (201) suggest that he represents a spirituality that
Anne finds relevant. As Fiske suggests people do, Anne produces meaning
from a cultural "text": not just Mr. Allan's words, but the way he lives his
ideals.
The narrator's refusal to separate Mr. and Mrs. Allan in initial
descriptions and in their later work in Avonlea reinforces that, as a young
couple who will be starting a family (as Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the
Island mention), the Allans symbolize religious practices that are not sterile,
that will be (re)productive in terms of encouraging genuine commitment in
their congregants. They have related ministries in the community: they are
"a young, pleasant-faced couple ... full of all good and beautiful enthusiasms
for their chosen life-work" (139, emphasis mine). Mrs. Allan's part of that
work goes beyond fundraising, caretaking, and being a Sunday school
 REREADING ANNE OF GREEN GABLES 409

teacher in the church," for she acts as Anne's confidante and spiritual
mentor. Anne quotes Mrs. Allan as well as her husband, and if Mrs. Allan,
as reported by Anne, seeks to "influence other people for good" (139), her
role as a model of Christian femininity for Anne demonstrates that she lives
out her beliefs.
The importance of Mrs. Allan as a type of "righteous woman mentor"
(Salah 200) for Anne indicates, as Hilder notes, Montgomery's "emphasis
on the relational nature of the individual's faith journey" ("Imagining"
319). That important relationship, however, is not just between random
individuals; Mrs. Allan can never be simply another woman, but is alwaysalso
a representative of an institution in her position as minister's wife. Although
Montgomery's own conflicted religious beliefs demonstrate that a minister's
wife does not necessarily have to uphold religious orthodoxy in private
correspondence and journals," the tendency at the time was certainly to
uphold it in public. Mrs. Allan's mentorship thus situates Anne's individual
faith journey as a negotiation of formal, institutional practices and personal
feelings. Mrs. Allan's public role as Sunday school teacher and semi-public
role as mentor make her a model for Anne of a way to negotiate the realm
of public religious ritual, social interactions, and personal spirituality. The
conversation between Anne and Diana on Anne's thirteenth birthday, for
example, shows Anne thinking seriously (if not always successfully) about
how to live out her faith as she understands it under the influence of Mrs.
Allan's teachings (167), in everyday matters of gossip about other girls or
duties at home. Salah suggests that "It is Mrs. Allen [sic] who finally 'teaches'
Anne the doctrine to which she subscribed all along" (203); even if Anne
does know the content ("doctrine"), she still must be taught ways to live that
doctrine successfully within the institution and community, as the episode
of her first prayer (previously discussed) makes clear. The Allans bridge
the binary of institutional and personal by working within the institution
with a genuine, personal spirituality; they model for Anne, who in turn
models in more detail for the reader, the negotiation of a space for personal
beliefs within an institutional and communal context. Montgomery's novel
thus emphasizes the importance of a religious feeling that is personal and
imaginative, but that is not neglectful of organized religion, even if not
completely bound to its conventions.

Conclusions: The Individual inland Young People's Literature

Re-examining the importance of the institutional context within which
Anne shapes her personal religious identity allows greater consideration
410 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

of the way the emerging practices of Montgomery's time have become

dominant in ours, and the way that the emphasis on individuality shapes not
only mainline Protestant denominations but influences the secularization
which shapes young people's literature. Protestant Christianity is closely
linked to the historical development of philosophical ideas of individualism
because such denominations located spiritual authority in the Bible as
God's Word and in the individual's reading of that Word, although such
reading was not, initially, equated with individual interpretation, since the
meaning of the Word was seen as "self-evident" (Andrew 17).17 The idea of
the individual conscience as guiding behavior comes out of this belief; as
Jennifer Blair notes, "Protestantism's signal departure from Catholicism was
its remodeling of confession as a private, inwardly located experience, an
occasion in which the individual communicated directly with God" (187).
The ramifications of these beliefs have affected theological, educational,
political, and economic philosophies from the Reformation to the present
day," as different practices have emerged and receded. In any given period,
assessments of the rights of the individual (and which individuals are
included) vary: notions of "Individual liberty ... [as] controlled by a distinct
understanding of virtue that was Christian, rational, and positive" have
shifted to present notions of "freedom from public, and even from familial,
moral interference" (Shain 119).19 The increasing percentage of Canadians
and Americans who claim "no religion;' or Christianity with no specific
denomination, may reflect secularism as one possible expression of this
understanding of individual freedom."
Youngpeople's literature also expresses these ideas of the importance of
the individual. In a study of award-winning children's books from the period
1978-1982, Patrick Shannon suggests three classifications of the "social
perspective offered in the children's books": his terms are individualist,
collectivist,and balanced (103). His findings-that 29 of the sample 30 books
"presented some version of an individualist perspective" (104)-suggests
the currency of the rhetoric of the individual in Western culture in the late
twentieth century (his concern was specifically American readers) and the
way that rhetoric has shaped the children's book industry. As Shannon notes,
the "consensus of opinion" (105) that values the individualist perspective
may affect which books are published, promoted as worthy for children to
read, and selected as favorites by readers themselves.
Montgomery's novel is published well before the others in Shannon's
study, and Anne seems closer to the "balanced" category on Shannon's list,
 REREADING ANNE OF GREEN GABLES 411

where "self-development [is] appropriate, but not more important than

social responsibility" (104). This difference between Anne and Shannon's
individualist category draws attention to the way that "new" practices
Montgomery depicts speak to concepts of spirituality that continue to be
familiar in the twenty-first century, yet that always in the novel remain in
the context of a wider community of faith. Anne of Green Gables therefore
offers different ways to read its religious discourses. As in Sullivan'stelefilm,
religious content may be treated as nostalgic backdrop, thus privileging
tourism of a past time and focusing on the text as essentially secular in
nature. Religious discourses may be recognized for their validation of
personal beliefs, seen as the triumph of the innate spirituality of the
individual. Or, the novel may lead to a recognition that Anne's negotiation
of religious institutions in her community and of her personal spirituality
speaks to a requirement that many of us continue to face: the need to develop
as individuals within and through the experience of such institutions in our
own lives, which often demands we negotiate conflicts between conformity
to tradition or community practices and the expression of individual beliefs,
in the context of institutions that are also living, changing systems. It is this
last reading that, I believe, has implications for young people's literature. It
asks us to consider religion not just as content (propaganda) but as process
of maturation: the development of spiritual identity which, like sexual or
racial or cultural identity, texts can sensitively explore and model for young
people.

Brock University

NOTES

'Census data for both Canada and the United States show greater numbers
of people identifying as having no religion. Statistics Canada data shows 16.2%
answering "no religion" for 2001 (the latest data on this subject available), an
increase of 43.9% from the previous census asking for religious affiliation (Statistics
Canada). In the United States, the percentage of people selecting "no religion" rose
from around 8% in 1990 to nearly 15% in 2001 and 2008 (U.S. Census Bureau). For
more details, see the websites for Statistics Canada or for the U.S. Census Bureau.
2Fiske privileges the agency of consumers to select cultural texts and to produce
meaning from them; he argues that "Relevance can be produced only by the people,
for only they can know which texts enable them to make the meanings that will
function in their every day lives" (6).
412 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

3Loren Mead defines "evangelist" as "in the biblical sense of the word-those
who bear good news" (10). The age of Christendom, where "by law the church was
identified with the Empire" (14), fused the spreading of that "good news" with the
imperial project of conquest/conversion. That era of Christendom, a period Mead
defines as beginning around 313AD and coming to an end during the twentieth
century, is also characterized by "no distinction between sacred and secular" (15),
since society was assumed to be, and sometimes legally defined as being, Christian.
41 am thinking of Philip Pullman's 1998 description of Lewis' novels as "one of
the most ugly and poisonous things [he's] ever read:' He accuses Lewis of creating
propaganda filled with misogyny and racism.
sA female bildungsroman is defined by Eve Kornfield and Susan Jackson "as
a synthesis of the coming-of-age novel, or bildungsroman (which is usually male-
oriented), and domestic fiction" (69).
'Susan Drain notes the importance of the community to Anne of Green Gables
and the significance of Mrs. Lynde as the representative of the community with
which the novel begins ("Community" 16).
7My thanks to Benjamin Lefebvrefor his question about this at the 2008 Ryerson
symposium. Later books in the Anne series show tensions between Presbyterians
and other denominations, notably the Methodists, but the first book focuses on the
Presbyterian community.
8As both Hilder and Holly Blackford note, the usual reason for adoption at

this time was to acquire labor. Hilder sees Marilla's emphasis on duty as significant
theologically ("Imagining" 310), while Blackford sees it as representative of
changing notions of the child (xx).
"The film extends the length of time that Anne stays at Green Gables on a trial
basis, so it is only after Anne breaks her slate over Gilbert Blythe'shead that Marilla,
who once quarreled with Gilbert's father, formalizes Anne's acceptance.
IOTo this day, Islanders tend to refer to those not born on Prince Edward Island
as "from away:'
"Dtana reports that "Charlotte's beau won't agree to [marrying in the church],
because nobody ever has been married in the church yet, and he thinks it would
seem too much like a funeral" (185). Both Diana and Anne, in later books, are
married at home. In the twenty-first century, couples with no religious affiliation
may still choose a church for a wedding, sometimes on the basis of the aesthetic
backdrop a particular sanctuary may provide for the event.
12There are many scholarly discussions of the Gilbert-Anne romance in this
adaptation, among them Susan Drain's "Too Much Love-Making;' K. 1. Poe's"Who's
Got the Powerr," Eleanor Hersey's "It's All Mine;' Benjamin LeFebvre's "Stand by
Your Man;' and Eleanor Hersey Nickel's "The World Hasn't Changed Very Much:'
l3Sullivan's adaptation has only the one minister, Mr. Allan, and his wife.
14Mieke Bal terms "an internal retroversion" a "compensation for a gap in the
story" (91).
 REREADING ANNE OF GREEN GABLES 413

IS All of the organizations to which Mrs. Lynde belongs in the novel (7) indicate

various ways in which women worked in and for the church. Montgomery's 1903
story "The Strike at Putney" humorously emphasizes the value of this work, but also
raises the issue of women's ministry in the debate over whether a female missionary
could give a speech from the pulpit on a Sunday evening. The ordination of women
is an issue of theological and institutional debate in Anne of Green Gables, as
evidenced by Anne's interest and Mrs. Lynde's dismay (202), a debate that in 1936
led to the ordination of women in the United Church of Canada (the unification of
some Presbyterian congregations, Methodists, Congregationalists, and local Union
churches), although ordination was not offered to married women until 1964
(Shepherd 41).
"Htlder notes that Montgomery's writing is not "the product of some sort
of easy, sentimental and uncritical faith" ("Imagining" 309). See both of Hilder's
articles for more discussion of Montgomery's complex religious beliefs.
17Edward G. Andrew points out that Martin Luther "emphasized his obedience
to the Word of God and the dangers of individual conscience throwing off this
anchor" (16); the individual conscience as spiritual authority depends on that
conscience following Scripture. The emphasis on conscience is thus not necessarily
the same as subjectivism (17).
18Andrew, for example, suggests a linkbetween the theological and the economic,

using The Communist Manifesto's observation that "freedom of conscience is the

appropriate ideology for the capitalist marketplace, in that it applies the principle
of free competition to religious goods and services" (Andrew 55).
19See Barry Alan Shain'sdiscussion of the distinction between "freedom to" and
"freedom from" (118-19); the former he associates with the eighteenth century and
the latter with the late twentieth century.
2°Environics research for the United Church of Canada indicates that many
Canadians 30- to 45-years-old who do not regularly attend church "showed strong
leanings toward personal faith and questing" (Wilson 12) but are reluctant to
explore that faith within religious institutions. One of the reasons for their dislike
of religion as institution is a perceived lack of freedom of belief: "Seventy-three
percent in the target population told interviewers they think 'organized religion
tells you what you have to believe" (Wilson 12).

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