Recently we had a discussion in one of my classes about the Prince Edward Island National Park and the infamous Green Gables.
There were two things I was obsessed with as a child. The first was the Phantom of the Opera. At a very young, age I knew every word to every song off the CD and could even hit the high note at the end of the song: The Phantom of the Opera (seriously!). And this was all before I even went to see the musical. The second was Anne of Green Gables, although through the films not the books I am sorry to say. As a child, I remember being very excited to visit Green Gables, which if you look on the Parks Canada website is a National Historic Site within the Prince Edward Island National Park.
It is funny, because I remember approaching Green Gables, noticing that there were aspects of it that were different from the way I ‘remembered’ it (again simply from my memory of the films). Once I entered the house, I could not understand why things were not as they had been represented in the films. I honestly remember making comments such as, “this isn’t what Anne’s room looked like” and “the living room was not set up this way” etc.
Despite these technicalities, which merely an only child with a huge imagination and a freakish attention to detail would notice, I still enjoyed visiting Green Gables. I was a child nonetheless, and I liked the idea of pretending for the day that I was immersed in another time, with other characters, who I felt I knew like I knew my closet friends. My childish innocence and imagination allowed me to enjoy it.
However, some have argued that this historic site is not representative of history in the typical sense, because the building that is now referred to as Green Gables was altered in order to embrace the characteristics of the house found within L.M. Montgomery’s fictional novels. This house did inspire the Green Gables known to us in those stories; however the actual house never had green gables (they needed to paint them in order for it to match to the ideal). Thus, the natural landscape that was there was altered to conform to a history that was not even based on a factual story, but a fictional one (at least that is what is argued).
L.M. Montgomery created characters and a story that gave a sense of who the author was, as well as what life was like for people in the maritime provinces of Canada during the period represented in the stories. In essence then, the park is meant to be an imaginative place as well as function as a place to memorialize a woman, her books and her characters, while also representing the time period in which these stories were set. In other words, we are forgetting that the park is a celebration of a wonderful author, who captured a particular era through her novels and became famous throughout Canada and the world because of it.
Let us consider something for a second. If you go to an art gallery there are many paintings that have captured various periods in history. Art historians consider this a wonderful window into the past. How is this any different from what has been done in the Prince Edward Island National Park? Green Gables (and the books for that matter) are like the painting; it is giving us a window into L.M. Montgomery’s creative mind (an important historical figure), and it is doing so in order to tell her story as well as portray a particular period. Therefore, it is simply presenting history in a different form. The house in the Prince Edward Island National Park is the house that inspired one of the most important pieces of literature in Canadian history, and in order to tell that story, it needed to be altered.
In one of my history classes on the First World War from a Canadian perspective, one of our first readings was to look at L.M. Montgomery’s, Rilla of Ingleside (the eighth instalment of the Anne series). We had a few other readings for that week that focused on how Canadians reacted to the possibility of war and its declaration in August 1914. If I remember correctly, the other readings focused on how people in urban centres reacted to the news. There was a sense in those readings that people were aware that war was coming, and that huge amounts of people gathered in the streets in anticipation. In Rilla of Ingleside, we get more of a sense of how rural Canadians reacted to the prospect of war. They seemed indifferent to the idea that the assassination of some Duke could have anything to do with them across the ocean. And many were shocked when they finally found out that war had been declared, and that they were going to be a part of it. At the end of the class discussion, the professor asked us which one of these readings we felt best represented the Canadian reaction to the war in August 1914. The general consensus was that Rilla of Ingleside best represented it as most of the population lived in rural communities. The professor went on further to tell us that it is noted that when Rilla of Ingleside was first published in 1921, the publishers deemed it a very accurate account of what it had been like for Canadians in the First World War. And this is a fictional novel we are speaking about. This just proves how important these novels are in the history of Canada.
As Public Historians we are constantly going to struggle with representing history as accurately as possible, while preserving as much as we can. However, in this case I think that the history has been captured. The story or theme is based on L.M. Montgomery and her novels, like Rilla of Ingleside, which is considered to be a fairly accurate portrayal of what it was like for Canadians in the First World War. Therefore, the fact that the house that inspired Montgomery has been altered has, in a sense, given us a glimpse into her imagination (a concept she promoted in her protagonist, Anne). This is no different than the artist who chooses to portray a particular episode in history through an artistic medium (think of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica). The canvas and house are one in the same; they are the settings that have been transformed in order to preserve a moment in time.
Photograph: Take a guess who that is...;)
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