Anne Shirley ‒ Episode 6

If you’re keeping track at home, this episode covers chapters twenty-six and twenty-seven of L. M. Montgomery’s novel, or episodes twenty-nine and thirty of the 1979 anime. Yes, as has been observed before, this version of Anne’s story is moving at a good clip. However, it’s worth mentioning that there are implied or stated time skips in the novel, such as the one we’re coming up on next week between the hair dying incident and the “Lady of Shalott” debacle. And yes, some of the choices this adaptation is making are questionable; Josie was introduced far too late, and the omission of Diana’s Aunt Josephine, who gets a mention this week, is inexcusable in my mind. But it’s also worth noting that the job of an adaptation isn’t to reproduce the original text perfectly. It’s to put its own spin and interpretation on that text. That’s hard to stomach sometimes (see: me in high school ranting that “there’s no kissing in Jane Austen’s novels”), but every adaptor is allowed to play with the original text as they see fit to present their interpretation of what is hopefully a story beloved by them as well. In that sense, I think Anne Shirley is still succeeding.

Just look at Anne’s green hair framing this week: it’s filmed like a horror movie. From the worsening weather to Anne’s desperate crawl across the bedroom floor, the lighting and the angles, it’s a beautiful encapsulation of how Anne feels. She’s not just upset, she’s horrified and not a little afraid of Marilla’s reaction. That allows us to see how much Marilla has changed, too – two years ago, when Anne was eleven, Marilla would have been furious. But now Marilla is upset, resigned, and ready to help Anne past this mistake. As she says before the green hair is revealed, coming home to Green Gables is much nicer and warmer now that Anne is there, and her actions carry that point out. Yes, she still has to be prodded to show her affection sometimes; the scene where Matthew shoves the magazine Anne and her friends compiled in Marilla’s face with a meaningful look (I love their sibling communication; it’s so real) shows that she’s still herself. But she’s also become a softer, more understanding person, and she can appreciate that about herself and that Anne is the one who helped her to get there.

The first half of the episode, the formation of Anne’s story club, may not be as striking as the green hair plotline, but it’s still both delightful and a tribute to the sort of fiction that was popular in both Anne’s and Montgomery’s day. Anne describes her work as “pathetic,” in this context meaning “full of pathos” rather than how we’d use the word today. She’s specifically aping the writing styles of authors like Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Lady Audley’s Secret), Mrs. Georgie Sheldon (A Hoiden’s Conquest), and Susan Warner (The Wide, Wide World); Braddon is likely the only one of those authors whose name you recognize, and even that’s not a given, since so-called women’s fiction has traditionally been overlooked by academia. By way of an example, this is the opening of A Hoiden’s Conquest: “Robert! Oh, Robert! Tell me that you will help me! – Tell me that you will save me! There is no one else to whom I can go – I haven’t a friend in the world save you!” (The chapter is titled “A Startling Proposal,” for the record.) Anne’s story of tragedy between Cordelia, Geraldine, and Bertram is absolutely in this vein, and written by a thirteen-year-old to boot; no wonder Marilla and Aunt Josephine burst out laughing! In Anne’s mind, it’s all terribly serious and pathetic; to the adults (and us), it sounds ridiculous and overblown. Montgomery’s readers would have gotten the reference, even as they observed, as Diana does, some marked similarities between Cordelia, Geraldine, and Bertram and Diana, Anne, and Gilbert. (Gilbert…Bertram…real subtle, Anne.) Anne may still be stubbornly insisting that she despises Gilbert Blythe while he quietly pines for her, but perhaps the truth is to be found in her fiction.

Next week looks like it’s going to bring us to another of the most famous scenes in the novel, and I’m looking forward to how it’s going to play out in this version. While I’m still annoyed about leaving out Aunt Josephine, I still feel like the omissions have been largely well thought out – I breathed a sigh of relief that Anne’s mildly antisemitic comment about the peddler was omitted. But like any piece of art, we’re all going to form our own interpretations, which feels fitting to say as we come up on Anne’s interpretation of a famous literary work.

Rating:

Anne Shirley is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.