miriam ho
fictional terrain
landscape | memory by miriam ho
reading mythologies landscape identification narrative
When Anne Shirley arrives in the fictional village of Avonlea, her imagination takes possession of the landscape. ‘It would be lovely to sleep in a wild cherry tree all white with bloom in the moonshine, don’t you think?’ Anne greets her adoptive parent, Matthew, taking the elderly farmer on a romantic rereading of his hometown. ‘You could imagine you were dwelling in marble halls, couldn’t you?’ 1 Where local residents recognise farmlands and woodlots, the little orphan girl beseechingly finds a verdant island of shining lakes and fragrant, canopied laneways at the place she hopes to call home. Anne, who has never belonged anywhere, draws upon cherished dreams to claim Green Gables as her new home; since Anne’s publication in 1908, tourists have likewise sought the Green Gables house in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island with an ecstatic sense of homecoming. Just as Anne imaginatively appropriates the world within the novel, her story also rewrites the real village of Cavendish into Avonlea. In Myth and Education , English poet Ted Hughes describes a story as a flexible construct that reconciles two disparate worlds by gathering concepts from each system. Hughes invokes Plato’s description of Greek culture, which mediates between heaven and
earth through mythology. He also discusses Freud’s analogy of the city of Rome as a palimpsest of fragmented monuments from various eras that can only be apprehended through a narrative, suspending and transcending material reality by imagination. The embedded theme of imagination in Anne of Green Gables informs the perception of Cavendish, both an actual landscape translated into fiction, and, in turn, recreated into reality. The inversion of fiction into reality at Green Gables simultaneously inverts private yearnings onto a cultural space of collective memory. L M Montgomery wrote Anne of Green Gables dreading her impending departure from Cavendish upon her grandmother’s death. Montgomery explicity states that she modelled Green Gables, not after the childhood home she was about to lose (which now lies in ruins in Cavendish), but on a neighbour’s farm. Often retreating into fiction to escape a dissatisfying reality, Montgomery avers that, although she wrote about real places in Cavendish, ‘doubtless many of my childhood experiences and dreams were worked up into [Anne]’s chapters’, 2 suggesting that Avonlea is composed of spaces filtered through her own memory and longing.
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