‘Anne of Green Gables’ and ‘Twilight’

Sorry to have been gone for so long but I have been vacationing on Prince Edward Island and Avonlea with Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. I’m working on a new book now that Spotlight: A Close-Up Look at the Artistry and Meaning of the Twilight Novels is available for purchase on Amazon.com. The new book is tentatively titled Bella Swan’s Bookshelf (creative, I know) about the literary influences playing on the Twilight series and putting this together requires a lot of reading time with Lucy Maud Montgomery’s beloved Anne Shirley-Blythe.

Today I want to start the discussion of the Anne of Green Gables (hereafter Anne) Montgomery (”LMM’) link to Mrs. Meyer’s Forks Saga here with some notes about Mrs. Meyer’s comments about Anne, the obvious parallels in the stories, and the several reasons well outside of plot points that I think Anne Shirley and Bella Swan are a match.

In order of least to most important, then, let’s start with the author’s Anne comments. It’s way up there on her “Great Books” and “Big Influences” charts.

Anne, for example, makes Mrs. Meyer’s Amazon.com “List of Books You Should Read” with the note that “This is another frequent reader for me. Once I begin, I can’t stop until I’ve read the entire series through.” As ‘the book’ she lists is not just Anne of Green Gables, the first novel, but the Bantam Classic Seven-Pack “The Complete Box Set,” we’re talking well over 1500 pages of re-reading, a good-sized work to which the author has been returning frequently since childhood. Outside of her statement that she has read all of Orson Scott Card twice, this devotion to LMM is the most impressive on her list of influences.

From EW’s ‘Stephenie Meyer: 12 of My Twilight Inspirations,’ #2 behind only Jane Eyre is Anne of Green Gables:

”The series influenced how my series turned out. Because I was never a fan of the stories where everything ends and they kiss at the wedding. Anne of Green Gables started out with her as a child, she had a very fully described adolescence, she had a book-long engagement, we got to see her wedding, we got to see her have her first child and lose her first child, we got to see her children grow up. We got the whole life, and I loved that.”

Also from 2005, an interview in School Library Journal, ‘Love at First Bite’:

I love Austen and the Brontës. L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables books were also a big influence on me, and Orson Scott Card is one of my favorite authors. Shakespeare is a big influence. I’m always coming back to things he has done.

I think that’s enough from Mrs. Meyer to show she likes Anne. Do her Twilight books show the influence she claims, though, beyond showing “the whole story”? Neither Anne nor Twilight tells us the full life of their heroines, birth to death, of course, except in comparison with Nancy Drew or the Boxcar Children, whose characters age like Edward, but there is significant plot overlap in the PEI Classics and the Forks Saga.

We have a young female lead, of course, and the first three books in the series are prologue to the wedding of this heroine and her husband-of-destiny. We get a strong play from an alternate suitor in the Anne books during her college days at Redmond (see Royal Gardner in Anne of the Island). This is no Jacob Black but Gardner did seem a lock for Anne’s hand, with much more going for him relative to Gilbert than Jacob ever had on Edward.

Edward Cullen, though, may just be Mrs. Meyer’s ideal man borrowed from Anne, that is, Gilbert Blythe, preserved through the century between the events of Anne and Twilight via Cullen vampire-cryogenics. The better Anne stories take place in the late 19th Century but were written in the early 20th, which are Edward Masen Cullen’s formative years. If you think this is a stretch, pull down your copy of Eclipse. The third book in the Saga is heavy on Wuthering Heights with Edward and Jacob taking their roles largely from that tale of the moors. But Bella mentions Anne twice in the third book, both mentions in terms of her understanding of Edward and herself as “vintage” flashback figures from another time, Anne’s time:

I saw myself in a long skirt and a high-necked lace blouse with my hair piled up on my head. I saw Edward looking dashing in a light suit with a bouquet of wildflowers in his hand, sitting beside me on a porch swing. I shook my head and swallowed. I was just having Anne of Green Gables flashbacks.

(page 277)

And then with Alice looking at her wedding dress:

“What do you think?” she demanded.

It was my Anne of Green Gables vision all over again.

“It’s perfect, of course. Exactly right. You’re a genius.”

She grinned. “I know.”

“Nineteen-eighteen?” I guessed.

“More or less,” she said, nodding. “Some of it is my design, the train, the veil. . . .” She touched the white satin as she spoke. “The lace is vintage. Do you like it?”

“It’s beautiful. It’s just right for him.”

(page 614)

The scene of Edward and Bella locking eyes after she comes down the stairs for their marriage ceremony in Breaking Dawn (page 68) is the Reader’s Digest version of the Anne’s House of Dreams wedding:

But it was a happy and beautiful bride who came down the old, homespun-carpeted stairs that September noon – the first bride of Green Gables, slender and shining-eyed, in the mist of her maiden veil, with her arms full of roses. Gilbert, waiting for her in the hall below, looked up at her with adoring eyes. She was his at last, this evasive, long-sought Anne, won after years of patient waiting. It was to him she was coming in the sweet surrender of the bride. Was he worthy of her? Could he make her as happy as he hoped? If he failed her – if he could not measure up to her standard of manhood – then, as she held out her hand, their eyes met and all doubt was swept away in a glad certainty. They belonged to each other; and, no matter what life might hold for them, it could never alter that. Their happiness was in each other’s keeping and both were unafraid.

Hey, don’t laugh. We waited for three books for that moment, the epiphany and the transcendent union in marriage…

(See the Anne Lexicon for more on the dress and the Anne parallel, a movie moment.)

Not enough?

As Mrs. Meyer noted, we get a childbirth parallel between the two series. In both the baby comes soon after the wedding and is anything but what the heroine expected (Anne’s child dies and she is forever changed; Bella’s baby lives and, of course, childbirth causes mom’s near death and her fictional apotheosis).

That’s about as far as I want to go with plot points, though. Forgive me — and please feel free to share in the comment boxes other shared-story-points that you have in mind and I have neglected. Lining up Marilla or Matthew with Charlie Swan as a tit-for-tat correspondence works on one level (we’ll come back to it) but this sort of thing, again, forgive me, strikes me as mechanical and forced interpretation by eye-balling the surface for any look-alike moments. Even the “hits” leave me with a “so what?” question. I’m sure there are a lot of stories with long awaited weddings at character signature homes, stories featuring women whose child-birthing experiences are transformational. (I can’t think of any of those stories right now, but I’m confident they’re out there…)

Feel free to correct me on that last. I want to move on to the meatier discussion of Anne and Twilight parallels and possible influence, beyond details like each series being conceived as a stand-alone piece that grew due to publishing contract and reader demand. For ease of reference in your comments and corrections, let’s go with three for starters: (1) ‘Mary Sue’ novels or author wish-fulfillment in story, (2) Criticism of misogynist world, and (3) the Heroine as Heart-Incarnate.

Twilight and Anne as ‘Mary Sue’ Novels

Robert Pattinson, the UK heart throb who plays the part of Edward Cullen in the Twilight movies, supposedly told E! magazine in a video interview that he has thought of the books as Mrs. Meyer’s barely repressed fantasies.

“When I read it I was convinced Stephenie was convinced she was Bella and it was like it was a book that wasn’t supposed to be published. It was like reading her sexual fantasy, especially when she said it was based on a dream and it was like, ‘Oh I’ve had this dream about this really sexy guy,’ and she just writes this book about it. Like some things about Edward are so specific, I was just convinced, like, ‘This woman is mad. She’s completely mad and she’s in love with her own fictional creation.’ And sometimes you would feel uncomfortable reading this thing.”

Even if Mr. Pattinson didn’t say that, the idea that an author’s first work is almost necessarily psychological projection is sound. I detail in the later chapters of Spotlight: A Close-Up Look at the Artistry and Meaning of the Twilight Novels the several personal issues and circumstances Mrs. Meyer was dealing with in 2003 that she has revealed in interviews and how the novels she wrote from her first wish-fulfillment dream are fantasy resolutions of these problems.

The temptation here after recognizing that the author is writing a wish-fulfillment fantasy is to dismiss the consequent work as necessarily worthless because it had therapeutic value and inspiration. That would be an unfortunate and very silly mistake.

Most obviously, it is a mistaken impulse because, if we threw out as soiled bandages every “Mary Sue” novel in which the author acts out satisfying, compensatory dreams through a story surrogate, we’d lose a lot of great books. Start out with Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bronte’s Jane Eyre and work your way through English fiction up to and including Joanne Rowling’s Harry Potter.

All of these books have their reflection in Twilight but none as much commented on as Harry’s influence on Bella. In addition to magical or paranormal settings and characters, the two series are both ‘Mary Sues.’

We can see Harry as a stand-in for Ms. Rowling, for example, in noting that they share green eyes, a birthday, and a beloved dead mother. Ms. Rowling’s painful estranged relationship with her own father is revealed and acted out in the books via the violent deaths suffered by almost every father figure in the narrative line; she admits that she only had Mr. Weasley survive the snake bites he received in Order of the Phoenix because she had killed all the other daddies in Harry’s adventures.

A character, especially the main character, serving as an author surrogate is no measure of a work’s value. It means only that the writer is human. All books, perhaps even all artistic endeavors, have a significant psychological component of the inside being expressed on the outside in therapeutic narrative. Especially, it seems, in first novels.

Every novel as a creative work represents in varying degrees a psychological exercise of its author to work through unresolved interior conflicts. The subconscious content of Mrs. Meyer’s Twilight Saga, though, asks for our reflection more than most books both because it is her first book and because its core inspiration is dream material.

Robert Anderson, a psychiatrist whose Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith (Signature Books, 1999) explores Smith’s Book of Mormon as an exercise in psychobiography, explains the importance of an author’s first composition:

It is a general truism that the first artistic creation of an artist or writer is usually most revealing of his personality, for it is hoped that the artist’s work will also be psychotherapeutic work and contribute to resolving original conflicts and problems…. If the creative work of the artist or author is psychotherapeutic (as one hopes it will be and does sometimes seem to occur), then subsequent work will become more and more removed from the original struggles and conflicts….

The creative artist may reveal aspects of his life throughout his works, but it is hoped that the artistic work will be therapeutic and maturational for the artist. When this is so, the first work of the artist is usually most revealing of his personality, and the problems or conflicts most transparent.

(pages xxx, 30)

In June 2003 Mrs. Meyer has told us that she had three sons and felt heavy, old, fragile or broken, and weighed down with responsibilities that kept her from her self-expression. She was inspired by her dream of the girl and vampire in the meadow and feverishly wrote a story in which her main character Bella has one daughter (there will be no more…), her love for the baby is acknowledged and praised by everyone as sacrificial and heroic, and the fruit of her labors are peace on earth or, at least, a stop in the fighting around Forks.

Anderson calls this sort of reversal in a psychobiography a “fantasy conquest” in which the author is “compensating for a horrible real-life experience by displacing it with a conquering fantasy.” Mrs. Meyer works out her personal issues through her story proxy Bella and writes, as Anderson believes the Mormon Prophet did in The Book of Mormon, a “fantasy compensation for [her] real life incompleteness and loss.”

Mrs. Meyer writes Twilight after being inspired by a dream, she writes it without thought of publication, and, perhaps most important in seeing the work as auto-therapy, she writes it and Forever Dawn, the first sequel or “epilogue,” for herself and her sister, the closest likeness to a mirror’s reflection she could find in another person. Her work reflects the several psychological tensions and conflicts she was working though at the time of her inspiration for the series.

This ‘Mary Sue’ author-surrogate argument is an addendum to Spotlight’s discussion of the Mormon character of the Twilight novels rather than the focus of my work because the less personal, more archetypal artistry of her books — their literary alchemy, mind-reality, and allegorical meaning — are much more important to understanding their popularity. But it is a connection with Anne of Green Gables. As much as Twilight is one woman’s wish fulfillment therapy, in which the author’s surrogate is adored by supermen and misogynists gets their due in the end, Anne in important ways takes this to deliberate heights.

My daughter Anastasia’s favorite Anne book, and mine, too, I think, is Anne’s House of Dreams. It is the fourth Anne novel and was published in 1917. She wrote it very quickly — six months — in the context of three borderline life-changing circumstances: the birth of another boy after the death of her second son on the day of his birth, the discovery that her husband, the Rev. Ewan MacDonald, was mentally unstable and subject to debilitating breakdowns, and her ongoing fight in court with publisher L. C. Page, who always seemed to get the best of her (and most of her money) even when he lost in court. House of Dreams reflects all these problems and their resolution via “fantasy conquest” and author surrogates.

Mrs. Meyer, I suspect, is still coming to terms with her books as wish-fulfillment dreams. Her comment in a TwilightMoms.com interview that she’s like to ask Jane Austen about how much of herself is in her books is telling. House of Dreams, though, written ten years after the first Anne and under the pressure from fans to continue to produce Anne stories and novels, reflects a writer who is consciously addressing her situation in fiction and who knows that her work is a “house of dreams.”

Three characters in the book seem obvious and deliberate images of LMM. First, there is Anne Shirley Blythe herself. Her marriage to Gilbert, now a doctor, is everything that LMM’s marriage was not — Gilbert, as noted, is a Victorian Romantic’s picture of the Ideal Gentleman, from his sacrificial manners to poetic heart — but Montgomery brings personal and lasting tragedy to Anne’s life in House in a way she never had before: Anne’s first pregnancy ends tragically. Her baby daughter dies at birth. As in LMM’s real life, though, Anne recovers and has a baby boy. Anne does so, of course, gracefully and heroically, faith unscathed.

As interesting is an older woman in the books who is an unbridled misandrist or man-hater, by name Miss Cornelia Bryant. The name is important, because as Anne notes, ‘Cornelia’ is assonant with ‘Cordelia,’ Anne’s true name that she begs the Cuthberts to use and to which name she makes mention throughout the series. Cornelia Bryant is a wonderfully funny woman, an “old maid” with a blistering tongue who can see little to no good in any man except ancient ‘Captain Jim’ and no good at all in any person not a Presbyterian (certainly not a Methodist). LMM, as the victim of misogynous businessmen, the wife of a Presbyterian minister, and a depressed, aging woman, I believe draws in Cornelia her comic caricature of the woman she fears she is becoming. “Just like a man” ends every one of her many tales illustrating an encyclopedia of male failings

But the write-home-about character in House of Dreams is Leslie Moore. She is the most beautiful woman in the Anne canon but her life is positively Dickensian. Her only brother dies in a freak accident she witnesses, her father in despair commits suicide (Leslie finds the body…), and then her mother forces her to marry a sadist because he holds the mortgage to their home. That man, Dick Moore, goes to sea and disappears, but Captain Jim recognizes him in Cuba and brings him home. But Dick Moore isn’t the man he was; he has suffered some kind of brain trauma so has the mental capacities of a very young child. Mrs. Moore is not abused by her husband but she is trapped in poverty and in a marriage without any hope of love or happiness.

How is this an LMM author surrogate or Mary Sue? Well, the initials LM, for one thing, and the mentally disabled husband the strikingly beautiful woman is married to are all LMM pointers except for the drop-dead good looks (but, hey, we’re talking wish-fulfillment, right?). In LMM’s House of Dreams this character achieves three fantasy reversals that indicate Montgomery is deliberately working on her issues.

First, Leslie Moore hates Anne Shirley Blythe, though she is fascinated with her. She befriends her reluctantly and with reserve. Anne, after all, has and is everything that Leslie Moore’s life events have prevented her from having and becoming, from a college education to the perfect marriage. Only after Anne loses a baby and she has faced tragedy do the walls around Leslie Moore tumble. Then the two become the best of friends: Anne tells Leslie, incredibly, at the end of chapter 21, that:

“I am your friend and you are mine, for always,” she said. “Such a friend as I never had before. I have had many dear and beloved friends — but there is something in you, Leslie, that I never found in anyone else. You have more to offer me in that rich nature of yours, and I have more to give you than I had in my careless girlhood. We are both women — and friends forever.”

That’s a remarkable statement to a new friend, certainly, from a woman who is telling the truth about having “many dear and beloved friends.” None of them, to include Diane Barry, though, is equal to Leslie Moore? This makes sense, though, if the author here is making peace in her relationship with her fictional, “house of dreams” projection and vice versa. The wish-fulfillment ex machina ending of Dreams confirms this; L(M)M’s husband, the idiot “Dick Moore” from Cuba, turns out to be his doppelganger cousin and she is free to marry the dream suitor, Owen Ford, who loves her at first sight and whose writing genius, industry, good looks, and virtues make him worthy of her many gifts.

Anti-Misogny within Conventional Limits

Remember relatively early on in Twilight when Bella is writing an English paper for Mr. Mason (!) on “whether Shakespeare’s treatment of the female characters [in Macbeth] is misogynistic” (p. 143)? I suspect this is something Mrs. Meyer or a friend she admired wrote in Stephen Wilder’s Shakespeare class at BYU, the one in which I have to think she learned about literary alchemy and story-hero-apotheosis. [See the School Library Journal article mentioned above and Shakespeare's "big influence" and her "always coming back to things he has done."] The culture warriors on the politically correct left and right have lambasted Twilight for its fostering by Edward and Bella’s example of abusive misogynist relationships, call it “Edward Stalker Syndrome.”

This criticism, of course, is not literary criticism, per se, that is, work trying to explain why and how books and stories do what they do (or why they fail to satisfy the needs readers bring to books). It is moralism driven by political ideology, religious belief, social mores, or combinations of all three. In neglecting the reason better stories connect with readers, namely, their allegorical and anagogical meaning, this kind of reading, which, alas, is most of what passes for real-thinking-about-books today, is critical nominalism or surface evaluation of narrative. Sad but true.

Curiously, this kind of nominalism makes it all but impossible for critics using these mechanical, litmus strip measures of a story being good or bad — be it aestheticism or “tween-lit pornography” concerns — to see the clear anti-misogynist message of the Twilight books, especially when written by a woman living in the most patriarchal and chauvinistic of religious cultures. If only as wish-fulfillment dream, Mrs. Meyer’s male characters, when they act like patronizing women despisers, get their come-uppance. Think of Jacob after the forced kiss, Emmett and his boring and demeaning sexual innuendo, and the Volturi at the ‘Last Battle’ in the Mountain Meadow: all of them have to admit defeat and their relative nothing-ness before the super-woman Bella after her sacrificial birthing and resurrection as the all-powerful savior of Veggie Vampires and Quileute Shape-Changers.

This is more evident in the principal allegory of the story — Bella as Human Seeker, Edward as Christ/Joseph Smith, Jr. — and in its anagogical, alchemical content that is the “wow” of Twilight (and the focus of Spotlight ) but it is even in the surface and moral layers of the story. Mrs. Meyer isn’t trying to launch a “revive the ERA” campaign, of course, but qua postmodern she is all about feminism, just within the boundaries of conventional LDS mores.

Bella isn’t going to move out on Charlie for encouraging Jacob in physical assault and she won’t forsake Edward because he takes paternalizing condescension to new depths. She loves these men and will transcend their failings in her love for and through her sacrificial “free agent” obedience to them.

This could be lifted from the Presbyterian populated pages of LMM’s Anne books. The men of these books are, for the most part, Edward Cullen wanna-bes with just enough cads and hen-pecked husbands to keep the story realistic. Anne Shirley, however, and LMM’s other story surrogates have their great victories that they earn on their merits even in direct competition with men (especially in school) and the story doesn’t end happily unless the lead women characters have found their Gibert-Edward-Owen. Even Cornelia Bryant the misandrist spinster finds a husband at the end of House of Dreams.

The Anne books for their times and even today fostered a relatively liberated idea of women’s potential despite chauvinism to achieve an edifying and full education for a happy life. They are not Suffragette manifestos by any means, of course, and I’m sure there are few women today that could agree without qualification in LMM’s definition of female happiness, as man-centered as it is:

No. 17 “Your idea of happiness?”

A good novel and a plate of russet applesl Well, that is a flippant definition. But to give a faithful account would require pages. And yet-and yet-no! Holding my little son in my arms or feeling his chubby arms around my neck is happiness. Once I might have answered “To be in Herman Leard’s arms”. I would not so answer now. But to be in the arms of a man whom I loved with all my heart and to whom I could willingly look up as my master is, after all, every woman’s real idea of happiness, if she would be honest enough to admit it. There are dear and sweet minor happlnesses. But that is the only perfect one.

The Allegorical Heart: Bella and Anne as Primary Imagination Incarnate

“No I will continue with the fantasy world. I need to dream, to imagine. I am not sure the real world is that fascinating.” Stephenie Meyer, interview with Paris Match

If you read the Anne novels, I think you have to be struck by the number of Tennyson, Browning, and Wordsworth allusions and quotations. As striking are the near constant descriptions, “florid” literally and figuratively, of the natural beauty of PEI and Avonlea. My Canadian Anne expert and correspondent confirms that LMM, like Anne Shirley, was a close reader of the Victorian Romantics and John Ruskin.

So what?

I think it is more than plausible that these books are as popular as they are today — and there is an international Anne fandom, especially in Japan — because of their allegorical and anagogical meanings. The anagogical meaning is in the scaffolding of beauty, the succession of natural landscape paintings LMM draws for the reader, the character of which mind-pictures work subliminally (as do our real world surroundings, eh?) to transform our interior landscape in edifying fashion.

That’s quite the jump from this sort of Modern Painters anagogical artistry to Meyer’s literary alchemy and mind-reality — just as there is a considerable chasm separating the prose heights and comic touches of both writers — but I don’t think that it is here that we see the influence of Anne on Twilight. That is in the allegorical meaning they share.

Bella, as I have explained in Spotlight, is the allegorical ‘heart’ or ’spirit.’ She averages in New Moon an astonishing two angina events per chapter in Edward’s absence and frequent cardiac events in his presence in each books because, as the Human Seeker in pursuit of union with God-Edward, she is principally her “heart,” the Biblical and patristic spiritual faculty. Twi-mania is largely a consequence of reader engagement with Bella and their experiencing her cardio-spiritual chrysalis imaginatively.

Any reader of LMM’s Anne novels knows that Anne begs her adopted family to call her “Cordelia” at their first meeting, and, unlike the several names she calls herself in the first book (to include a Coleridge Christabel reference in ‘Geraldine’), this name is recalled several times in the follow-on books. Diane Barry, for example, names her first daughter “Little Anne Cordelia” to honor her best friend, a choice which mystifies her family.

Why is “Cordelia” an important marker? I think there is a reason more obvious and more meaningful than the tragic King Lear echoes, which are something of a stretch for the later Anne Shirley to make (or for the child Anne to know!) even given Cordelia’s virtues or the original Welsh meaning (“jewel of the sea”), both of which possibilities are cited in The Annotated Anne of Green Gables as the most likely connections. “Cordelia” is from the Latin for “warm-hearted” and this is the core, if you will, of the Anne books’ allegorical meaning: Anne Shirley is the “heart,” very much as Bella Swan is.

Three quick points in this regard:

(1) In Coleridgean anthropology, the Primary Imagination is the uncreated Logos in the human person and the Secondary Imagination is the same faculty engaged in art. (See Chapter five of The Deathly Hallows Lectures for more on this.) This noetic quality is the “heart” of Christian scripture and Patristic writing, whence Coleridge’s natural theology, and of imaginative literature, especially poetry and fantasy post-Coleridge. Anne Shirley is a creature of “imagination” whose vision recreates PEI and its rather mundane existence into an endless series of visions bordering on the supernatural, which seems to infuse her world. Her life-long hope is only for a “greater scope of imagination.”

(2) There is a brotherhood of people in the Anne books, her “kindred spirits” and the “house of Joseph” from Anne’s House of Dreams, who recognize each other, usually by the light shining in their eyes and their distinctively sacramental or un-empirical way of seeing things. They are as distinct from the non-kindred and as “magical” a group as Witches and Wizards in Rowling’s sub-creation are from her Muggles or Vampires are from the human cattle in Meyer’s Twilight. This quality of light in the eyes is another pointer to Coleridgean and Romantic cardiac intelligence and logos (cf., John 1:9). Anne Shirley’s enlightened crew are another Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

(3) There is a borderline disdain for religious conformity in the Anne books, which, while never crossing over into impiety or heresy, is nonetheless always a note contrary to hollow devotion or hypocritical faith-without-living-works. The real faith of the books isn’t the Methodism or Presbyterianism LMM gently mocks as being little better than Grips or Tory political parties in their partisan differences but the vibrant faith evident in Anne’s love and her imagination. This is the logos-Christ within her heart that shines through her and transforms her world. The references to books like Drummond’s Natural Law in the Supernatural World and LMM’s constant stream of Romantic poet and scripture citations as well as the story transformations centering on hearts opening highlight this meaning repeatedly.

There is no explicit, devotional religious content in the Twilight books beyond a fairly pedestrian attempt at portraying Native American spirituality around a campfire. There is a truck-convoy load of esoteric and borderline occult meaning in the books through both Mrs. Meyer’s understanding of Shakespeare and the Radical Reformation heresies implicit in Mormonism’s magical foundations (again, see Spotlight). From each of these streams, Mrs. Meyer, like the Presbyterian LMM, infuses her story with the non-conformist, anti-empirical, and anti-nominalist Romantic view that is the literary magic delivering the archetypal or mythic experience Eliade says secular readers look for in fiction.

Anne of Green Gables and the follow-on books, then, like Twilight, are carrying a boatload of meaning, allegorical and anagogical, via the Romantic tradition’s understanding of imagination as the spiritual heart of the human person. I offer for your consideration the thesis which I think obvious, namely, that it is just these levels of meaning and artistry which account for the longevity of fascination with and the power and universal appeal of LMM’s Anne Shirley’ s adventures as well as for their 21st century echoes in the mania for Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books.

To the point I mentioned about there being a Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert parallel with Charlie Swan, they are all imaginatively deprived and heart starved before their respective girls arrive, unexpectedly and to change them forever. Matthew has literal heart disease and dies from it but spiritually he and his sister are re-born in the Life that enters their lives through Anne. Much the same can be said of the Phoenix girl that comes to Forks and her effect on her father.

Your comments and corrections are coveted as always. I have posted on Anne Shirley and Harry Potter over at Hogwarts Professor if you’d like to explore that connection, too.