Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Anne of Green Gables, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Home and Family
Beauty and Imagination
Friendship
Mishaps, Milestones, and Growing Up
Boys and Romance
God, Prayer, and Church
Summary
Analysis
As they travel to White Sands, Anne tells Marilla that she’s determined to enjoy the trip by admiring her surroundings. A wild rose prompts a digression about the color pink and how people with red hair can never wear it. When Marilla says she doubts that Anne’s hair will ever be less red, Anne quotes a line from a book, that her “life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.” She says that romantic lines like that cheer her up.
Many passages in the book are long digressions like this one, giving Anne’s ideas and perspectives on events without describing them directly. Especially early in the book, this is meant to endear Anne to readers (and to other characters) by instilling a sense of her imagination and quirks. Here, Anne’s quote suggests that she often uses melodramatic language to help her cope with sadness, so her extreme declarations shouldn’t always be taken at face value.
Themes
Literary Devices
Marilla says that if Anne is going to talk for the entire five-mile journey, then she might as well tell Marilla about herself. Reluctantly, Anne begins to talk about her birth in Nova Scotia. She was the daughter of two high school teachers, Walter and Bertha Shirley. When they were young and poor, the Shirleys lived in a tiny yellow house, which Anne has always pictured being surrounded by flowers. Anne was born in the house, but her parents both died of fever within a few months.
The journey to White Sands gives Anne an opportunity to acquaint Marilla and readers with her backstory. It’s a very sad one; Anne lost the only home and family she has ever known when she was still too young to remember them. Thus she fills in the unknown details with her imagination, and her life since has been spent longing for a permanent home.
Themes
Literary Devices
After that, nobody knew what to do with Anne; neither of her parents had any living relatives. Finally, Mrs. Thomas, the woman whom the Shirleys had hired to clean, took Anne to live with her. Mrs. Thomas was even poorer than the Shirleys, and her husband was often drunk. Anne lived with the Thomases until she was eight years old and spent her time looking after the four younger Thomas children. After Mr. Thomas died, his relatives didn’t want Anne, so a local woman named Mrs. Hammond took Anne in to help raise her eight children, including three sets of twins.
Anne doesn’t remember a time in her life when she was genuinely wanted for her own sake; she’s always been expected to earn her keep by working hard and helping raise other people’s children. As a consequence, she’s never had much of a childhood of her own. Anne’s history explains some of her oddness; her articulate use of words and ideas is mature for her age, yet her exuberance and imagination remain childlike.
Themes
Literary Devices
After Mr. Hammond died, the children were divided among relatives, and there wasn’t anywhere for Anne to go, so she wound up at the overcrowded Hopeton orphan asylum, spending four months there until Mrs. Spencer showed up. At this, Anne sighs with relief. She evidently doesn’t enjoy talking about her past. To Marilla’s further questioning, she says that though her schooling has been spotty, she can read well and recite lots of poems from memory.
While Anne could talk all day about her imaginings, she apparently doesn’t enjoy talking about her own history, suggesting that her imagination provides a way of avoiding the sorrowful parts of her life. Reading and poetry serve a similar function.
Themes
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Marilla asks if Mrs. Thomas and Mrs. Hammond were good to Anne. Anne isn’t sure what to say. She’s sure that the women intended to be kind, but they both had a lot to deal with. Anne slips back into daydreams, and Marilla pities her. She realizes Anne’s life has been filled with neglect and that she’s been starved of love. What if Matthew were right? After all, Anne isn’t rude or disrespectful, and she could be trained to talk less. Anne breaks her silence to admire the beach at the base of the cliffs they’re driving along. She dreads arriving at Mrs. Spencer’s—it feels like it will be “the end of everything.”
Anne tries to speak well of the women who gave her shelter in the past, but it’s clear to Marilla that those women never really loved or cared for Anne. After hearing the story of Anne’s childhood, she is beginning to soften toward Anne and to reconsider her attitude about adoption altogether. She begins to picture what providing a home and family environment for Anne might actually look like.
Themes
