The courage to imagine: Anne's pursuit of her ambitions in Lucy Maud Montgomery's "Anne of Green Gables", "Anne of Avonlea", and" Anne of the Island"

Abstract

The literary genre of bildungsroman embodies narratives involving the development and process of maturing and becoming an adult of their protagonists. These novels narrate their protagonists’ journey from infancy towards adulthood. This genre has been evolving before it was coined bildungsroman in the eighteenth century. At those times, these novels were only focused on male characters, but some female authors have introduced female protagonists to these novels in the last centuries. An author who has devoted her writing career to address children with her female bildungsromans is Lucy Maud Montgomery. The present study analyses the first three novels of Montgomery’s Anne book series that account for the protagonist’s coming-of-age: Anne of Green Gables (1908), Anne of Avonlea (1909), and Anne of the Island (1915). This study examines the evolution of the protagonist’s (Anne’s) imagination throughout these three novels in order to demonstrate that the author presents Anne’s imagination as a driving force that allows the protagonist to question the limits imposed on her by reality, and to thrive and create her own life, even if that involves defying the established gender roles. The data presented in this paper may have significant value for the field of study as it extends the existing knowledge of the role of imagination in this series. The existing research fails to describe the development of Anne’s imagination during her whole coming-of-age and it only focuses on her imagination in the first of the novels. Regarding future research, it would be interesting to assess whether imagination still has a meaningful role in the rest of the novels that compose the series. The paper concludes by arguing that in a society where children grow under the influence of technological devices that leave them with little time for daydreaming, it is significant to read works such as these where imagination is fostered.