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Montgomery unfixes the landscape from its actual place to fabricate Avonlea, a suspended state at the ‘border of the real and fictional, the regional and universal’. The landscape of Avonlea, visually symbolic of Anne’s passionate personality, encourages the generations of readers that have come to Cavendish to connect with Anne through a transcendent encounter with the site’s natural beauty, echoing Anne’s own elation. –
Montgomery paints Prince Edward Island as a garden sanctuary, a controlled, picturesque nature. Her characters are rarely subject to the hardships of the hostile wilderness, a salient theme found elsewhere in Canadian literature. Instead, Montgomery creates a protected world for Anne to grow up in. Seen through Montgomery and Anne’s beauty-loving eyes, Prince Edward Island is a scene of mesmerizing delight – a landscape of shifting light, colour and fragrance, reflective of Anne’s own vibrant spirit. These sentient landscapes, personifying the human spirit and its communion with nature, belong to a Romantic tradition where details are blurred to evoke a greater resonance with the cosmic world. In beholding a ‘rich landscape’, the poet Emerson writes that he ceases to distinguish particular elements, but feels ‘lost in a sense of tranquil unity’, 6 perceiving the parts but discerning a unified whole. Emerson describes poetic creation as a synthetic process, reliant upon the plastic power of the human eye: ‘[the poet] unfixes land and sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought’, invoking fiction as that which establishes order. Using the Cavendish of her memories as a loose model,
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1 Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Anne of Green Gables , chap. 2, Project Gutenberg edition, accessed November 25th, 2011, http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/45/45-h/45-h.htm 2 Montgomery, Lucy Maud. The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery vol. 1, ed. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2004. p331 3 Gammel, Irene. “Introduction” in Making Avonlea. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. p11 Green Gables, a popular tourist attraction in its thematic representation of a classic story, also shelters the memories and dreams of generations of readers who have loved Anne.
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