‘Anne of Green Gables’ and Harry Potter

Where have I been by the holidays? Mostly on Prince Edward Island with Anne of Green Gables. I’m working on a new book, tentatively titled Bella Swan’s Bookshelf (creative, I know) about the literary influences playing on the Twilight series and that requires a lot of reading instance with Lucy Maud Montgomery’s green and grey-eyed red-head.

We’ve discussed the possible influence of Anne on the Hogwarts Saga before (see Anne Shirley vs. Harry Potter from the archives of the Anne Lexicon site and my response here whether you missed that). I want to re-visit the topic for three reasons:

In order of least to most critical:

(1) I have been corresponding that past week with an Anne expert who will go unnamed until she chooses to join that conversation. S/he assures me that Ms. Rowling herself has confirmed that she is an Anne fan and that Lucy Maud Montgomery (hereafter ‘LMM’) was an influence. A quick search at Accio-quotes does not bring up anything more than an aside about Anne but the sources my expert-friend noted seem more than credible. The critical Anne community in Canada accepts the Anne-Harry link as a given.

(2) Reading LMM biographical pieces, it’s hard to miss the Rowling-Montgomery parallels: successful author of Bildungsroman-orphan novels, with something of a Cinderella story, whose work was neglected (despised?) by critics, an unhappy marriage, wish-fulfillment qualities in the writing, and a life struggling with depression. Ms. Rowling got the help and medication she needed to deal with that last; LMM, tragically, did not, through the ‘failing’ of being born too soon, alas.

(3) whether 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 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 universal Anne fandom, particularly in Japan — considering 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 convert our interior landscape in edifying fashion.

That’s quite the jump from that sort of Modern Painters anagogical artistry to Rowling’s literary alchemy — 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 Harry. That is in the allegorical meaning they share.

Harry, as I have explained in The Deathly Hallows Lectures, is the allegorical ‘heart’ or ’spirit,’ as a stand-alone character and subject of the alchemical purification and theosis of the series as well as a member of the series’ soul triptych, body-mind-spirit, Ron-Hermione-Harry. Potter-mania is largely a consequence of reader engagement with Harry and experiencing his spiritual chrysalis imaginatively.

Any reader of LMM’s Anne novels knows that Anne begs her adopted family to shout 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’), that 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 to the mystification of her family.

Why is “Cordelia” an vital 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 produce (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 that is the core, whether you will, of the Anne books’ allegorical meaning: Anne Shirley is the “heart,” very much as Harry Potter is.

Three quick points in that 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 that.) that noetic quality is the “heart” of Christian scripture and Patristic writing, whence Coleridge’s natural theology, and of imaginative literature, particularly 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 humans 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. that 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 by 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. that 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 that meaning repeatedly.

Anne of Green Gables and the follow-on books, soon after, like Harry Potter, 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 explanation for the longevity of fascination with and the potential and universal appeal of LMM’s Anne Shirley adventures.

Your comments and corrections are coveted as always.