miriam ho
Avonlea is a place at the border of the real and fictional, the regional and the universal.
—Irene Gammel, Making Avonlea
and material world outside of the story that has been forcefully restructured in an ongoing effort to… make it better conform with the pre-existing representation it is trying to copy. 4 Fans come to Green Gables to share the same space where they imagine Anne once ‘lived’. Comments in the Green Gables guestbook indicate a foray into nostalgia and future hopes: one entry says – Today, I visited my childhood. Anne, my literary kindred spirit, is alive and well in Cavendish , conveying a fond suspension of disbelief in the fictional world; another declares – I also want to be a writer! 5 suggesting the confluence of the visitor’s own fiction, dreams and memories at Anne’s house. Through the ritual of literary tourism, Green Gables and its surroundings become a landscape constructed for dreaming. Critics attribute the popularity of Avonlea, not to the portrayal of a specific locale, but to its use of universal imagery. Writing in an era when Longfellow’s poem Evangeline brought tourism to Nova Scotia, scholar Janice Fiamenco likens Montgomery’s text to Victorian travel writing, which mythologises geographical features into familiar scenery.
Green Gables National Park, overlaid on the agrarian community of Cavendish in 1936, preserves the original farmstead of Green Gables and its environs. Initially repainted green to match the story, the modest farmhouse was later renovated extensively to simulate Anne’s world. In accord with Parks Canada’s redevelopment guidelines that ‘the surrouding landscape will be created... according to the interpretation of features described in the literary works’, 3 the house and grounds are furnished with period artefacts recalling incidents from the story to evoke Anne’s presence. For scholar Alexander Macleod, the heritage monument creates new social spaces in Cavendish. Visitors to the Green Gables house negotiate the actual, historical and fictional, projecting their story onto the site, altering how it will be shaped. Like Baudrillard’s simulacrum, fictional Avonlea is no longer a copy of Cavendish, but precedes and determines the real world of Cavendish, both in the minds of visitors and in the physical environment: Montgomery’s text ... has left a secure and lasting impression on the landscape of Prince Edward Island, and it is the real, physical,
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