Playing “Anne”: Red braids,Green Gables,and literary tourists on Prince Edward Island

Anne’s journey from Bright River: anticipation of arrival

The reader is introduced to the themes of the novel that inflect tourist practices on the Island today through Anne’s first conversation with Matthew Cuthbert. As the title of the novel’s second chapter indicates, “Matthew Cuthbert Is Surprised” to find a girl waiting for him on the train platform at Bright River instead of a boy. Shy and withdrawn, Matthew opts to take the girl home (“she couldn’t be left” (Montgomery, [1908] 2004: 64)) and let his sister Marilla sort out the misunderstanding. The buggy ride from Bright River to Green Gables is significant for its high expository yield, and, as Canadian studies scholar, Alexander MacLeod (2010), has noted, “many of the novel’s most lasting and influential lines are uttered during this interval” (p. 141). As Anne explains on the buggy ride, she has had a difficult life leading up to this point. The journey from Bright River is the last leg of her transitional journey to what she believes will be a better life; this is the moment she vocalizes the real potential for flourishing that being adopted promises. She enters the buggy a hapless and homeless orphan and exits it certain she has arrived “home” in a place and a family to which she will belong. The novel that unfolds from this scene is an account of Anne’s challenges and triumphs as she advances toward this end. For tourists, however, playing Anne almost always represents the moments just before her arrival at Green Gables.

The journey from Bright River introduces three themes central to Anne tourism as it has developed: the desirability of the Island’s natural beauty, which cues tourism; the literary focalization of Anne’s appropriating gaze, which construes the Island as the arriving outsider needs/desires/imagines it to be, and Anne’s preoccupation with her red hair, the defining symbol of her character emulated by tourists. The buggy ride covers a distance of eight miles (incidentally, the same length as the Confederation Bridge by which more than three-quarters of the province’s pleasure visitors arrive on the Island). ⁹ The literary pilgrim following in Anne’s footsteps rehearses the themes (rather than the route) of Anne’s passage from Bright River train station to the north shore region of PEI identified on visitor maps as “Anne’s Land.”

Hair “as red as carrots”

Anne’s red braids are established so firmly by Montgomery as her protagonist’s defining physical feature that their appearance on souvenirs is immediately comprehended by anyone familiar with the story. Montgomery introduces Anne, waiting for Matthew at the Bright River train station, with a physical description: “She wore a faded brown sailor hat and beneath the hat, extending down her back, were two braids of very thick, decidedly red hair” (p. 63). The fact of Anne’s red hair seems incidental until Anne confides to Matthew during the drive that, despite the beauty of the Island and her delight at being there, her hair color prevents her from feeling “perfectly happy” (Montgomery, [1908] 2004: 68). Anne’s red hair is the one of her greatest childhood woes and the catalyst for her most embarrassing impulsive acts, including breaking a slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head after he calls her “carrots” (Montgomery, [1908] 2004: 154), and unsuccessfully attempting to dye her hair black (it turns green instead). Juliet McMaster’s (2002) close reading of Anne’s hair reveals multiple layers of symbolic import:

If we remember nothing else about Anne of Green Gables, we remember that this garrulous orphan girl has red hair, that the red hair troubles her sorely, and that it also gets her into trouble. Anne’s flaming red hair is her visible and identifying sign […]. (p. 58)

Some souvenir producers eschew assigning a unique face to their representations of the character by showing only the braid-trailed back of Anne’s head. Disembodied red braids attached to hats are sold in Island gift shops in miniature form as magnets, brooches, and other souvenirs (see Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

Anne hat & braids souvenir magnets.

For a tourist hoping to annotate her own body with some symbol of Anne, the character’s red braids are a visually striking and portable accoutrement. So iconic is the symbol of Anne’s red hair that it is not uncommon for visitors to arrive at Green Gables Heritage Place with hair colored red, or braided in the style of popular illustrations of Anne Shirley as a child (see Figure 5). For tourists not naturally endowed with hair to dye red or to braid, souvenir hats effect a speedy transformation.

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Figure 5.

Tourist with “natural” braided Anne hair, Green Gables Heritage Place.

Mass-produced Anne hats commoditize and perpetuate a practice to which tourists were already inclined. McMaster interprets Anne’s red hair as representing her trials and foreshadowing her subsequent belonging to her adoptive home: “We are meant to recognize a propitious kinship between Anne’s red braids and Prince Edward Island’s red roads […]” (p. 63). Wearing Anne’s braids symbolizes the tourist’s “propitious kinship” with Anne and with her island. George Campbell, owner of the Anne of Green Gables Museum at Park Corner and the Anne of Green Gables Store retail shops, estimates that his company has been manufacturing Anne hats a little less than 20 years, though he places the origins of Anne hats as a tourist commodity around 1985. Dollar-wise, the Anne hat ranks among Cambells’ top five bestselling items, with hats sold numbering “in the low 1000s” annually (G. Campbell, 11 September 2013, phone interview). Though there are markets outside the province, the hats are sold mainly on PEI. The Green Gables Heritage Place gift shop, overseen by an incorporated division of the not-for-profit Parks & People Association, sold over 1000 hats in 2012 and the years prior, a number former shop manager Trudi Walker calls “significant” compared with sales figures for other items (T. Walker, 13 September 2013, phone interview). Reading these manufacturing and retail estimates together, it appears that most Anne hats sold on the Island are sold at Green Gables Heritage Place.

Playing “Anne,” however, does not require the purchase of a $15.99 souvenir hat. Some visitors color and braid their natural hair, or devise their own costumes. Anne enthusiasts desirous of snapshots can borrow a costume at Avonlea Village, or rent one at Cavendish Figurines. At Green Gables Heritage Place, a “loaner” hat is always available by request in the cafe, or hanging on the buggy parked in the barnyard. Some tour guides carry their own hats for clients in their parties to wear for photos. One guide for a motor coach tour company removed the shiny synthetic hair from the souvenir hat she had purchased, replacing it with plump braids of bright orange yarn I asked about her customized hat, which I observed her carrying on several visits. “The book says Anne’s hair is red as carrots. Well this,” she asserted, brandishing the tasseled end of a yarn braid for emphasis, “is the color of carrots” (site observation 2011). The availability of hats for loan—either for a small fee, or for free, means that a greater number of people are wearing a hat for a quick photo than sales figures for the hats can represent.

Anne’s red hair was her bane, among the first of her afflictions to be enumerated on the drive to Green Gables from the Bright River train station. Despite her broad imaginative capacities, she “cannot imagine that red hair away” (p. 68). The single flaw that Anne cannot imagine away is the feature her fans embrace in their own acts of imagination. Hat manufacturers may be capitalizing on tourists’ sentimental regard for Anne’s red hair and their proclivity to buy novelty goods, but souvenir straw hats with attached braids complement an activity tourists are already doing—imagining themselves arriving at Green Gables as Anne did.

Anne’s land: arrival at “Green Gables”

Anne is associated with the PEI (and Canada) as a whole; however, the Anne tourist industry thrives near sites historically linked to Montgomery.Tourists can visit the north shore sites of Montgomery’s birth, childhood, employment, marriage, and burial; the home sites of her maternal (Macneill) and paternal (Montgomery) grandparents, and of her Campbell cousins. They can shop at Anne-themed private retail businesses such as the Anne of Green Gables Store, Anne of Green Gables Chocolates, and Avonlea Village, an open-air entertainment and retail attraction that intersperses newly constructed buildings with a church Montgomery attended, a manse she lived in, and a schoolhouse she taught in. ¹⁰ Each site makes claims to authenticity, displaying artifacts Montgomery owned or touched accompanied by her impressions of the place as quoted from her publications, journals, and correspondence. ¹¹ Green Gables Heritage Place, operated by Parks Canada,interprets the house upon which Montgomery claimed to have based her most famous setting. Furnished to depict the 1890s-era Green Gables (“the house is decorated the way she imagined the house in the novel,” a guide explains), with bedrooms staged to represent each fictional inhabitant, Green Gables is the centerpiece of a complicated map of real and imaginary places inhabited variously by Montgomery, “Anne,” and the tourists who follow in their stead.

The ubiquity of Anne’s braids in tourist shops is matched only by the iconicity of the Green Gables house. ¹² White houses with dark green-painted trim and shutters appear on numerous signs, promotions, and souvenirs, with and without Anne represented. Representations of a white house with green trim unequivocally reference the Green Gables house as it appears today. The irony of this iconic vision of the house often noted by scholars is that it was an invention of Parks Canada personnel and not L.M. Montgomery. Alan MacEachern cites a letter written by parks surveyor R.W. Cautley in 1936, in which he states, “[…] the present colour scheme is not altogether suitable, and it would accordingly be desirable to repaint the building at an early date in order to emphasize the gables of the house, which should, of course, be green” (p. 73). Though a green paint trimmed house did not “serve as inspiration for the setting of Anne of Green Gables” and was “based […] partly on someone’s imagining of details nowhere mentioned in the novel,” this painting scheme, instituted in 1939, has been maintained as a Level 2 historic value of the site because “it created the iconic image that remains in the public mind to this day of what the ‘Green Gables’ of the novel looked like” and “it reflects […] efforts to create an attraction that would bring tourists to Cavendish” (Parks Canada, 2011: 19–20). The remaking of the Green Gables site along the perception-imagination continuum serves to emphasize its function as a “setting” where tourists can “perform” their arrival at a fictional place.

Anticipation of arrival at Green Gables is built into the site plan. If tourists follow the recommended route and do not, say, bypass the orientation film, they will pass through no fewer than eight doorways to get to the intimate core of the house interior. The Green Gables house is strategically hidden behind a large replica barn, building visitor anticipation and preventing “free” roadside viewing. ¹³ Having learned about Montgomery’s life in the Visitor Reception Centre, the tourist follows a gravel path leading to the barn, the gateway to the staged fictional setting. Spatial cues reinforce the boundaries between fact and fiction: as visitors approach the barn, the large barn door, folded open like a book cover, reveals the iconic Green Gables, framed as if it were an illustration on a page (see Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

The iconic Green Gables house, framed as if it were an illustration on a page.

The house that came to be known as Green Gables exists both inside and outside Montgomery’s texts. A heritage presenter greeting visitors at the house’s front door explains, “Before everything else—before the books—this house stood here.” One or two guides are available to answer questions about artifacts and the historical period, to explain the relationship between the Green Gables house and Montgomery’s own home site nearby, ¹⁴ and to offer a brief history of the Macneill and Webb families who built and inhabited the house. Memorable scenes in the novel are referenced by recognizable objects positioned throughout: Marilla’s amethyst brooch, Anne’s broken slate, and the dress “with puffed sleeves” elicit cries of recognition from visitors. During the height of the summer season, student staff dressed as Anne and her friends reenact scenes from the novel and interact with visitors. The lifelike staging of Montgomery’s fictional Green Gables, from the storybook reveal through the barn doors to the significant props displayed in the house, creates a compelling materialized imaginary that permits tourists to “feel” as if they are arriving at “Green Gables.”

The feelings of anticipation with which visitors arrive at Green Gables can be glimpsed through comment cards written by tourists from around the world and posted publicly to a bulletin board in the Visitor Reception Centre. ¹⁵ Mary and Erin of Detroit, Michigan, write: “Hearing, reading, and watching the stories since we were little girls, this trip is truly our pilgrimage!” These fans have encountered Montgomery’s story repeatedly, and in multiple formats. A visitor who identifies as “R.” titles the card “My Bucket List” and concludes, “Dream for me to come.” Another visitor writes, “When I was very small, my mum and I read the ‘Anne’ books. I always wanted to visit but never thought it would be possible. It’s taken over 50 years to make it[.]” An Australian visitor called Alex, who was seven when introduced to the books in the 1950s says, “I have wanted to come for 57 years.” Netta, who borrowed the book from her primary school library in Scotland, did not yearn to visit because she “never imagined” she “would ever see Green Gables.”

Reading is a form of “armchair tourism” that conveys insight into other subjectivities and places. Holly Blackford (2004), who studies how girls use literature, finds that books permit young readers to “take a break from and move beyond themselves” (p. 19). Though the imperative to visit a fictional setting may be “a deeply counter-intuitive response to the pleasures and possibilities of imaginative reading” (Watson, 2006: 1), visitors who express a longtime desire to visit Green Gables see this external milieu as complementary to, and even a culmination of, the internal experience of reading. Melinda from Toronto posts a note saying, “[…] It’s always been my dream to visit PEI & be in the world of Anne.” An anonymous visitor writes: “I had my wish at last, to visit and see where my favourite story was made […].”Another writes, “[…] my dream has come true. I am finally at this beautiful island […].” These examples show a range of framing tendencies that visitors use to make sense of their trips. Melinda’s comment implies a desire to be immersed in a storybook setting. The second commenter is more focused on the production context of a beloved story. The final commenter does not specify Green Gables (the setting) or Cavendish (where the book was “made”), but refers to the entire Island as an attractive, long-desired destination to which Montgomery’s books were an invitation. The memories of growing up while yearning to visit this mythical PEI landscape figure significantly in visitors’ perceptions of their arrival on the Island.

Photos are almost always taken to capture the excitement of arrival and spontaneous moments of wearing the Anne hat at Green Gables. Exemplifying the not-everdayness of the tourism experience, these photos “emphasize leisure and playfulness” (Gordon, 1986: 140). Opportunities to play Anne are often staged as the moments before Anne’s arrival at Green Gables, when she is full of anticipation and enthusiasm on the buggy ride from Bright River. A buggy is positioned in the Green Gables barnyard for tourist photos (weather permitting). There is no sign inviting them to touch or climb on the buggy, yet tourists of all ages are attracted to do so (site observation 2011). An Anne hat lent from the Butter Churn Cafe nearby is frequently left hanging on the buggy, and for certain if the Anne hat is there, tourists will make use of it for their photos.

Photo ops permit the tourist to insert herself into a well-known narrative as it is popularly visualized. Such “stages” for photo-taking reinforce “pre-existing discursive, practical, embodied norms which help to guide [tourists’] performative orientations and achieve a working consensus about what to do” (Edensor, 2001: 71). Pierre Bourdieu (1990) explains the purpose of the tourist photograph as

trying to consecrate the unique encounter (although it can be experienced by thousands of others in identical circumstances) between a person and a consecrated place, between an exceptional moment in one’s life and a place that is exceptional by virtue of its high symbolic yield. (p. 36).

Over time, as identical compositions of visitors to consecrated places proliferate (and, in the twenty-first century, are shared widely online), positioning oneself in these pre-conceived “photo op” spots situates one within that destination’s collective tourism history. Complex places come to be defined by a few iconic compositions, perpetuating the desire of tourists to replicate familiar performances for themselves—in this case, “arriving” at Green Gables in a buggy, as Anne Shirley and so many tourists before them have.

Conclusion: feeling like a child, feeling like a local

It is the 11-year-old Anne, as she first arrives at Green Gables, appreciative, curious, and imaginative, braids as red as carrots, to whom today’s literary tourists relate. Despite sequel novels in which Anne grows up, marries, and bears children of her own, it is the child-Anne of the first book who remains at the iconic center of this extra-literary universe. Benjamin Lefebvre (2010), analyzing the “Anne” brand, asserts that the first book “possessed a brand power that Montgomery’s later books lacked” (p. 199). When Anne bemoans her red hair as a barrier to normative physical attractiveness, neighbor Rachel Lynde equates it with childhood, consoling her that it will turn “a handsome auburn” once she matures. Yet, the longer Anne stays at Green Gables, the less her red hair seems to matter. After her disastrous attempt to dye it, Anne announces that she has been cured of her vanity and rarely mentions her red hair again. Toward the end of the first book, when Marilla is looking at Anne just short of her 14th birthday, she perceives her as a “slim, gray-eyed girl” (Montgomery, [1908] 2004: 271) and later, as “a tall, serious-eyed girl” (p. 284). As Anne matures in later books, she becomes “an almost regular citizen” (MacLeod, 2010: 147), and, not incidentally, her hair color becomes less vivid.In her analysis of Anne commodities, Jeanette Lynes (2002) notes “the most privileged consumable images of Anne depict her at her most childlike […]. The preponderance of dolls in the Green Gables market-place enshrines the female child as perhaps the key commodity of the Avonlea mythology” (p. 278). Costumes available for playing Anne follow suit, comprising the pinafores, long braids, and straw hats of a vivacious young girl, aged 11. The floor-length skirts and auburn chignons of adult Anne are absent from tourist Anne-play.

A visitor from Binghampton, New York, writes on a card at Green Gables Heritage Place, “at the age of 27, I feel like a child as I take this opportunity to explore the site that inspired my favorite books.” Playing “Anne” is not about being a child, but about feeling like a child, or, more accurately, recalling one’s own girlish feelings and aspirations. George Campbell, owner of the Anne of Green Gables stores and manufacturer of numerous Anne commodities, describes his pleasure at the sight of little girls playing with the Anne hats he sells: “I get a great charge out of it. They’re in business whenever they put that hat on. They are Anne of Green Gables” (speaker’s emphasis 2013). It is not uncommon for young children to engage in imaginative play involving costumes, and the classic stories of children’s literature can be the basis for such play. Shelby Anne Wolf and Shirley Brice Heath, editors of The Braid of Literature, describe how Heath’s daughters

[…] often spoofed their [favorite books’] language, characters, and situations. They felt compelled not only to reread favorite stories but to enact them with their bodies. Such play represents a testing of alternative identities. (Jenkins, 1998: 28)

Though many first encountered Anne as children, the adult women wearing Anne hats are not play-acting the role as children might, nor are they testing “alternative identities.” Folklorist Beverly Gordon (1986) writes that “when tourists purchase or wear Mickey Mouse T-shirts they are pretending to be other than serious, working adults—they show they are (or have been) on vacation by stressing the playful and the humorous” (p. 138). Tourist souvenirs follow suit, reflecting the “childish or child-like” moods of tourists. The Anne hat furnishes a moment of “pretend” through whimsical age regression (and, for male tourists, gender transgression). ¹⁶

Anne is a compelling muse for tourists because she is a guileless child on the cusp of becoming/arriving, yet the tourist’s (and tourism industry’s) focus on the earliest moments of Montgomery’s eight-volume series of books suggests the appeal not only of Anne as a child but also of Anne as an outsider. Arrival, wonder, wish fulfillment—these are the themes of the tourist’s own experience of Prince Edward Island. Anne’s arrival as an outsider who admires the scenery and expresses gratitude is reenacted by the tourist. Much later, once she becomes a permanent resident and begins school, Anne learns about the Island’s ecology, but this level of belonging and becoming “local” is not rehearsed by the typical short-term pleasure visitor. Tourists are less likely to rehearse the scenes of Anne’s later exploits not only because Anne grows up, but because Anne becomes a local. Feeling like a local may be a professed aim of leisure tourism, but becoming local is not. Anne’s anticipation of her arrival at Green Gables easily translates to a touristic sensibility of anticipation—and a joy upon “arrival” which is replicable by the tourist (joining a local family as a new citizen is not, though some tourists do decide to move to the Island permanently). Once Anne stays, and belongs, her story becomes less resonant with the subject position of the tourist.

Green Gables Heritage Place and other tourism venues on Prince Edward Island cater to the desire of thousands annually to arrive. Wearing red braids, tourists temporarily inhabit the “idealized body” (Stewart, 1993) of Anne Shirley at her youthful moment of arrival as a child and as an outsider. Worn for several hours or several seconds, mass-produced, hacked, or home-grown, red braids advertise the wearer’s affinity for Anne, and arrival in a beautiful, longed-for place–as it is perceived, and as it is imagined.