How I Learned to Love the Anne of Green Gables Industrial Complex aka A Paean to Canada
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We spent our vacation in the Maritime Provinces. Actually, we thought we were spending our vacation in PEI1 and Nova Scotia, but it turned out the hotel we booked for our last night was just across the Nova Scotia/New Brunswick line. Our last vacation activity before we headed home was also in New Brunswick, so we feel that we can say we spent our vacation in the (three) Maritime Provinces.
My husband plans our vacations because he does not get overwhelmed by vacation possibilities and decisions as I do. When he suggested PEI, Cape Breton, and the Bay of Fundy, I said great, I’ll do whatever you want, I just need one full day of Anne of Green Gables.2 That day turned out to be two half days, which was probably for the best, as I can handle a lot of Anne and her creator, Lucy Maud Montgomery, known to family, friends, and fans as Maud, but even I can only handle so much at one go.
In those two half days, we went to every Maud and Anne site in and around Cavendish, PEI, Maud’s hometown and the model for Anne’s hometown of Avonlea.3 This means we went to Maud’s birthplace; the Homestead, her grandparents’ home where she grew up; her aunt and uncle’s house down the lane, which was the model for Green Gables and is now part of Green Gables Heritage Place, which also comprises a visitor center, Lovers Lane, and the Haunted Woods, all of which we visited; the Anne of Green Gables Museum, which was the home of her cousins, the site of her wedding, and the setting for the Pat of Silver Bush4 books; Montgomery Park, where you can share a bench with Maud; and not just one purported original Lake of Shining Waters but two!5
It was all illuminating and fascinating. We learned so much, we saw so many copies of Anne of Green Gables in different languages, and we walked through so many gift shops with so much Anne swag.
Actually, the Anne barrage started our first night on PEI, in Charlottetown,6 where we first encountered Anne of Green Gables Chocolates and Anne of Green Gables Raspberry Cordial (which children and I were drinking all over PEI), as well as Anne-centric gift and book shops galore. But that was only the beginning. When we got to Cavendish…my god, the Anne dolls, costumes, tea sets, t-shirts, Christmas ornaments, keychains, board books, coloring books, graphic novels, cards, posters, videos..so much Anne, so many gifts, so many ways to spend money.
And yet, once I got over my shock - which really was uncalled for, because it is the 21st century, life is commerce, travel is shopping, characters are opportunities for branding and commodification, so of course there were gift shops everywhere with every kind of Anne imaginable - I was actually ok with it. Most of the Anne stuff was sweet, or cute, or funny, or not my thing but nice for someone else.7
But more than that, it was the context. One fascinating thing about the Anne scene in Cavendish is that a lot of these sites are owned, and often staffed, by Maud’s family members. And spread among them is the best stuff: old photos, letters, Maud’s many scrapbooks into which she pasted everything she published (hundreds of stories, hundreds of poems, dozens of essays), the original blue willow platter, the wedding dress her cousin packed away in a trunk on her wedding day when her fiancé didn’t show up (subsequently fictionalized by Maud in The Story Girl), and so much more, like walls and and tables and bookshelves and display cabinets full of stuff. We couldn’t get enough of it.
Basically, a family saved things, someone in the family got famous in a nice way (writing books people love), so they saved all that too, and now they get to share it with the adoring world…and make some money with a gift shop and ridiculously low entrance fees. How could anyone begrudge them? Well, I’m sure somebody could, but I can’t.
And everything else was public! National Heritage Sites! Public parks! Open to everyone! Free! Excellently curated exhibits! Fun activities for children! Great bathrooms! And of course gift shops, but what the hell, sure, let them sell shit too, it’s helping to pay for the public good!
So, yeah, when the Anne of Green Gables industrial complex is cottage industry + nationalized industry, it sure is easier to love.
The Way We Live Now
Comparison and analogy are my instinctive starting points for understanding the world. When we arrived on PEI, I thought it was the Martha’s Vineyard of Canada because vacation + island. But as we traveled about, I realized that analogy was neither accurate nor useful. PEI has a big agricultural economy (with the smallest provincial landmass and population, they produce 25% of Canada’s potato crop), a respectable amount of industry, apartment buildings, stores, schools, baseball fields, garages, excavators…all the normal stuff of real life.
But Cavendish is not only home to the Anne Industrial Complex. It also has beaches and bike trails and dinky little amusement parks and dairy bars and lobsters and campgrounds and so many cottages, those little matching ones all in a row that are so much more enticing than motels, and so many out-of-province license plates. In other words, it is PEI’s very own vacationland central, despite not being Martha’s Vineyard. So I finally decided that PEI was the Cape Cod of Canada, with Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario license plates standing in for Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey license plates, but also a bunch of real life.
That analogy basically held up, but it still wasn’t quite right, and after another day or so, I put my finger on it.
Cavendish was not tense. Have you been to the Cape or Martha’s Vineyard lately? Or any other major vacationland in the US? Sure, it’s great when you get to the beach or you get your table at the restaurant or your horse on the carousel, but it’s so tense. The traffic, the lines, the scrambling to make sure you get your share of whatever it is, from the summer rentals to the parking space to the view of the sunset. The cranky Americans, cranky about life in America and even crankier when their vacation turns out not to be the perfect escape they needed. We stopped in Bar Harbor on our way up to PEI, and oh my god, so beautiful once you got to the beauty, so stressful to get there.
But it wasn’t like that in Cavendish. Everybody was chill, people waited in line patiently, you could find a parking space at the beach, there were one stretch of road where there were a few minutes of traffic at dinnertime and that was it. Truly the only unhappy people we saw in Cavendish were toddlers between the hours of 5 and 7 PM, and even that was just a small fraction of the toddlers.
So what was up? Yeah, sure, Canadians. But that couldn’t have been the whole of it. And besides, what makes Canadians Canadians?
Size? Cavendish is smaller than the Cape, there were fewer people on vacation, it was easier for things to be easy. Sure, fine, maybe, probably. And yet.
Finally, I had my aha moment. Income inequality! Or rather, the relative absence of income inequality. Which is surely chicken and egg with Canadian, but still.
Of course there’s income inequality everywhere. As we drove through PEI, northern Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, we saw down-and-out towns and spiffy well-off suburbs, tiny shabby houses and big fancy houses, Tim Hortons and elegant oyster bars. But there’s income inequality and there’s income inequality. We did not see a single Range Rover. We did not see a single McMansion.8
In Cavendish, we saw one newly subdivided farm with a bunch of big houses and less than a handful of small but aggressively architectural new builds. Other than that, pretty much everyone was vacationing in cottages or old farmhouses, in regular family cars, at the same seafood places and coffee shops and ice cream parlors and beaches (which were FREE - while DOGE decimated our national parks, Canada made all its national parks free this summer!!). Goodness knows we were all shopping at the Cavendish Tourist Mart, because that was the only place to buy anything you actually needed.
To recap: We were all sharing the same minor inconveniences (so minor). We didn’t have to see lots of super-rich people with their fancy cars and houses and boats having a better time than we were and buying lots of things we couldn’t afford. We could just live life and not be tense. Because there was no outrageous income inequality. Also no guns, and we only saw three cop cars in eight days, but I will stop now before we all get more depressed than we already are. Because that is how they live in Canada. And it is not how we live now.
Because we still deserve nice things…
If you know me well or have been reading me for a while, you are likely aware that I am something of a quasi-Lacanian, which is to say that I know one thing about Lacan and I believe it is deeply true and structures pretty much everything. That one thing is his account of how desire can never be satisfied, because all our desires are just attempts to fill the lack at the center of our existence, which cannot be done.
But anticipation9 is different from desire. Anticipation is about waiting for something you want, not wanting something (though the two can coexist). Anticipation simply ends when you get to the thing, which probably doesn’t satisfy and we’re back to Lacan, but that’s not the point. The point is that anticipation is one of the most delicious feelings in itself, separate from the thing you are waiting for.
That moment when you know you are about to kiss someone for the first time? So good. Waiting for the newly-baked bread to be cool enough to cut and eat? So frustrating but so good. Waiting to see your children when they’ve been away at camp or college or their real grownup lives? Excruciating but so good.
Right now, I am reveling in my anticipation of Taylor Swift’s upcoming album.
The Life of a Showgirl? I am old Hollywood/old Broadway/old musicals to my bones.
“The Fate of Ophelia”? Hello, ex-English professor!
“Elizabeth Taylor”? Have been obsessed since I was a child.
“Father Figure”? Are you looking at me, the person who still misses George Michael more than any musician who has died in my lifetime?
“Elder Daughter”? Of course I am.
“Bangers!” says Jason Kelce? I am here for it!
But here’s the thing: this album could be terrible. Or, more likely, meh. I hope it’s not, and come October 3, we will know, and if it’s great, that will be great. But it will still be different from the delicious anticipation of right now, when we are waiting for the anticipated thing but don’t have to deal with however it turns out in reality. So that’s the nice thing: anticipation. Maybe we’ll also get some nice new Taylor down the road, but that’s a different PEI potato.
We thought we were going to Prince Edward Island until we got to Canada where everyone just says PEI, so that’s what we say now because we are Canadian now, at least we were in Canada. We also said washroom, but we don’t anymore because we are no longer in Canada and people would look at us funny.
We listened to the Apple audiobooks version of Anne of Green Gables (read by the superb Kae Denino) as we were driving to the Maritime Provinces, all over the Maritime Provinces, and home from the Maritime Provinces, finishing up the last 2 1/2 minutes in our car in front of our house the night we got back. It was especially nice to be listening to the book while we were in Cavendish, where we could track the places and people that inspired it. Having not read it since childhood, I was struck by what a complex character Marilla is. I remembered her as stern and Matthew as loving and indulgent, probably because I was racing past the adults to get to Anne, but she is actually sly and rebellious in her own way, and she develops over the course of the book. I also didn’t remember how lush (you could say purple) the prose is. In the last couple of years, I read Rilla of Ingleside and The Blue Castle, two of Montgomery’s later novels, both excellent. I noted the lush prose, but I had no memory of it in her earlier books, probably, again, because I was so focused on Anne herself. But it sure is there, via Maud and Anne (who of course is via Maud but her own voice). And if you were wondering, my husband is absolutely Matthew, and I am Anne and Mrs. Lynde.
This is a lie. We did not go to Maud’s grave, because by the time we would have gone, on our first Anne afternoon, we were tired. We said we would go back, but we never did. I forgive us, and I forgive myself for putting this caveat in a footnote, because even my textual scrupulousness has its limits.
I have read almost all the Anne books (I didn’t know about Rainbow Valley until I got to PEI, but I bought it!), all the Emily books, and The Blue Castle, as per above, but I never even heard of the Pat of Silver Bush books, let alone Jane of Lantern Hill, which was highly recommended by the motorcycling grandfather and huge Anne fan who was staying at our bed and breakfast in Cape Breton. He’d never met anyone else who had read The Blue Castle, and we went deep on Maud, to what appeared to be the entertainment of his son and my husband, though it could have been cheerful boredom. Fortunately the proprietor of the bed and breakfast had a huge guitar collection, which entertained the two of them after breakfast.
This was obviously sketchy, and in fact inspired us to call out “Lake of Shining Waters!” whenever we passed a pond or lake for the rest of our stay on PEI. But one was in the national park and had a plaque! And the other was at the Anne of Green Gables Museum and had an attestation to its authenticity written by Maud herself!
Charlottetown was great, would move there in a heartbeat. Highlights were learning all about the Charlottetown Conference of 1864 which led to the Confederation and ultimately the country, dinner at Sea Rocket where we had the first eight of many delicious oysters, the excellent museum at the Confederation Centre for the Arts, the samosas at the farmer’s market, and most of all the Bog tour, where we learned all about Charlottetown’s original, now gone, Black neighborhood.
Except for the Raggedy Anne-style Anne dolls, which I found utterly repulsive, but then again, I’m sure a whole lot of three-year-olds adore them.
I realize we were in the Maritime Provinces, and I know things are different in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, but still.
If you immediately started thinking about the song, or even hearing it in your head, here it is.
I adored your insights into our very own cottage-core red-headed Disneyland. I have yet to get over to that side of the country.
Also enjoying the TS12 anticipation. And the anticipation of reading Anne of Green Gables with the kids!