Iâm modeling painting her room on the puffed sleeves, actually: Something frivolous she desperately wants, that Matthew and Rachel make happen for her, causing extreme bliss.
Iâve thought about this a lot and you do have to change some of the really basic dynamics a little. Orphans like Anne in late 19th century Canada were basically indentured labourers; you have to change it up.
Also, Iâm reaching deep into my childrenâs lit study of AOGG. You see, the underlying dynamic of AOGG is that Matthew, Marilla, and Avonlea think they know what virtue, morality, and Christianity are all about. They have very specific ways of doing things and very established notions of what a good, respectable person looks like.
Anne is, on the surface, not at all a good or respectable person. Sheâs a hoyden. But she does value virtue. At the beginning she tells Matthew sheâs considering whether she should want to be âdivinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good â
But by the end of the book, she proves that she is already inherently all threeâher beauty is compared to a woodland deity; sheâs the top of her class; and she has a spirit of love and kindness that so radically breaks Avonlea conceptions that she also turns the people around her into better, kinder people as well.
Matthew and Marilla would sign up to be foster parents because their church is encouraging people to foster children in care and sponsor refugee families and things like that. Theyâre kind of staid white liberals in middle age who want to do the right thing, like making sandwiches for the homeless on Thursdays in the church basement. But they care more about appearing correct than breaking out of their shells.
And they were expecting a child. Their concept of fostering and adoption is still kind of old; they were both adopted as infants by their parents, so they think a foster child coming to your home is going to be, if not in a crib, still at the blocks and Sesame Street age. They bought a little bed. Maybe theyâd already fostered a little kid or two.
But then their caseworker calls them up and tells them about Anne, and whomp, theyâve got a trans preadolescent.
And Anne has a ton of psychiatric diagnoses and a regiment of meds, and you could see her as a walking behavioural disaster even after sheâs taken her Ritalin, but sheâs also so friendly and so kind, and sheâs the one making fast friends with the eldest girl of the Syrian family the church has sponsored into the neighbourhood, sheâs talking to and getting to know the homeless, sheâs trying to save the whales and navigate the complicated ethics of the seal hunt and sometimes she lies awake at night crying about wild bee populations and gay men in Chechnya.
So Matthew and Marilla have to slowly come around to thinking: We can try to squash all the abnormal out of this girl and make her as âfunctionalâ as possible, or we can accept that sheâs going to be a wild anarchic SJW goblin, and help her be the best one she can. Which also spills over into academics: They have to push the local school to accommodate the way she learns, because when sheâs accommodated sheâs so smart, but stuck without supports in an ordinary classroom, sheâs a living nightmare and getting suspended all the time.
They theoretically know that itâs good to be good to people and you should work to make the world better, but Anne really challenges them to decide between comfort and normalcy, or supporting their queer trans neurodivergent activist girlchild as much as they can.
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