Claire (with the help of Mom and Grandma) just finished reading Anne of Green Gables for her first major homeschool novel assignment. I was so impressed with how drawn into the story she became: when we were contemplating names for the new baby (soon to arrive), Matthew was on our shortlist. To which Claire, very excitedly, told us that Matthew was so very nice to Anne of Green Gables, and yes, Matthew is a very nice name.
We have been talking quite a bit about the power of our imagination to make the world a beautiful place. Anne's imagination is her greatest strength, and, as the novel progresses, she harnesses her youthful imagination into positive ambition for her adult life. The imagination, as it seems to me and as it is embodied by Anne throughout the novel, is the invigorating source behind the virtues of empathy and kindness and joy and hope and broad horizons. For Anne, the greatest disappointment that she experiences in other people is a serious lack of imagination ("The trouble with him seems to be that he hasn't enough imagination" [ch. xi]), but with the imagination, Anne brings light, goodness, beauty, and humor to her friends and family and everyone whom she meets. The sourpusses scorn or criticize Anne's outsized imagination, but those with open hearts (as Marilla proves to have despite her steely exterior), allow Anne's generous imagination to mellow their hard dispositions into something softer and kinder and gentler altogether.
It is Anne's imagination that instills in her the curiosity and inquisitiveness that leads to her excellence in scholarship and in her quest for knowledge. And yet, more importantly, it is her imagination that allows her to see past the vainglorious pursuits of awards and prestige and worldly recognition and instead imagine the beauty of fulfilling the duty that relationships require in true self-giving and love. When she is confronted with the impossible choice between pursuing her scholarship afield at Queens College, away from Green Gables and away from a "widowed" (i.e., brother-less) and ailing Marilla, Anne instead "looked her duty courageously in the face and found it a friend---as duty ever is when we meet it frankly" (ch. xxxviii). When Marilla protests and encourages Anne to pursue all of her ambitions instead of staying behind in quiet, hidden, Avonlea, Anne replies with one of the best passages of the entire book:
“I’m just as ambitious as ever. Only, I’ve changed the object of my ambitions. I’m going to be a good teacher—and I’m going to save your eyesight. Besides, I mean to study at home here and take a little college course all by myself. Oh, I’ve dozens of plans, Marilla. I’ve been thinking them out for a week. I shall give life here my best, and I believe it will give its best to me in return. When I left Queen’s my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don’t know what lies around the bend, but I’m going to believe that the best does. It has a fascination of its own, that bend, Marilla. I wonder how the road beyond it goes—what there is of green glory and soft, checkered light and shadows—what new landscapes—what new beauties—what curves and hills and valleys further on.”
I love this image of the bend in the road and Anne's imaginative response to it. She neither scorns Marilla, nor does she bemoan the detour Marilla's degenerative illness poses to her lofty academic ambitions. She doesn't dwell on the "burden" that her loved ones impose on her, but rather she embraces her duty toward those she loves the most and to whom she is the most indebted. Our current culture would have us believe that the sick, the dying, the elderly, the disabled, the orphaned, the widowed, the unwanted, children...are terrible burdens to society that must be eradicated or limited or euthanized or aborted or conscripted to the severe margins of our most terrible imaginations. Anne, however, alters her course, through the power of her imagination, to envision a new landscape that allows for both her academic passions and her duty toward Green Gables and Marilla. There are people who shake their heads at Anne and believe that she has thrown away her opportunities, but those with the best imaginations commend her for her generous heart and her "world of dreams."
"And there was always the bend in the road!" (ibid.).
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