Cultivating Imagination
For much of her life in school, Anne has a teacher who is passionate about educating. Montgomery writes: “Miss Stacy was a bright, sympathetic young woman with the happy gift of winning and holding the affections of her pupils and bringing out the best that was in them mentally and morally.”Following the classical method of education, Miss Stacy has her students memorize and recite great works (such as “Mary, Queen of Scots” and “The Faerie Queene”), and then imitate them in their own writing. She teaches her students to observe the world (bringing them on nature walks that baffle the practical Marilla), and to draw from this observation in their writing, inspiring them to behold and to relay their vision to others.
Miss Stacy recognizes that there is a right and a wrong way to cultivate the imagination. As Anne says, “‘You ought to cultivate your imagination, you know. Miss Stacy says so. Only we must take the right way.’”
The right way is not to let your imagination run away with you, to the point that it obscures reason. Previously, Anne gave complete license to her imagination, even creating things to be afraid of when she found her surroundings too commonplace. She decides one day that the woods are haunted, and Montgomery writes, “Her imagination had run away with her and she held the spruce grove in mortal dread after nightfall.”
Under Miss Stacy’s influence, Anne puts her imagination to better use and inspires her friends to do the same. She starts a story club for a small group of those “who felt that their imaginations needed cultivating,” and each member agrees to write one story a week. Anne offers to help her friends along and gives them ideas until they can continue on their own; she insists that a moral guide each story. Now, Anne employs a disciplined imagination to create art that adds beauty to the world; imagination reaches for the good, rather than idly seeking entertainment.
Aristotle and Imitation
In the “Poetics,” Aristotle observes that imitation (or mimesis) is “an instinct of our nature,” and the process by which we learn. He writes, “The instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated.”From our earliest days we imitate our elders in sounds and behaviors; art itself is an imitation of things as they were, as they are, or as they ought or could be.
Anne’s stories in “Anne of the Island” imitate the loftier and elegant speech of yore. Her manner of speech imitates those well-beloved works she studied at school in the wrong way. Though her friend Mr. Harrison counsels her to let her own characters speak everyday English, her early imitations help her grow as a writer.
Literature helps Anne find her own identity. As the series develops, there’s a noticeable change that takes place in Anne, who initially longs to be a far more beautiful girl, to be named Cordelia, and to be enjoying other lives and other adventures. By the end of the third book, after giving a poetry recitation at a concert, Anne remarks, “‘Well I don’t want to be any one but myself, even if I go uncomforted by diamonds all my life. I am quite content to be Anne of Green Gables, with my string of pearl beads. I know Matthew gave me as much love with them as ever went with Madame the Pink Lady’s jewels.’”
The Land Where Dreams Come True
Modern education, in large part, measures students’ success by quantifiable results in the form of standardized test scores and grades. By contrast, education that fosters the imagination and strives to form well-rounded, virtuous individuals proves to be far more humanizing, though its success can’t be easily measured or communicated on college applications. The focus is on preparing the human person to live well rather than on the work they can achieve.Whatever field they go into, students who benefit from such an education share the same foundation and have outlooks formed by the same works. For example, Anne’s classmate and eventual love-interest, Gilbert, ends up going to medical school, but he doesn’t discard what he learned in literature classes. Instead, he internalizes it and cites poetry just as Anne does throughout the novels. The common frame of reference enables either to make allusion to Lord Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” or Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Lord of Burleigh” and be immediately understood, communicating a world of meaning within a passing allusion.
By the end of the third novel in the series, Anne learns that the purpose of imagination is not to escape from reality but to better it. She doesn’t cling to ideals of “diamond sunbursts and marble halls” and she doesn’t think that she can only be content in reality if she obtains the best that she can imagine.
Instead, her imagination colors her present circumstances. In the start of the third book, Montgomery writes: “In imagination she sailed over storied seas that wash the distant shining shores of ‘faery lands forlorn.’ ... [S]he was richer in those dreams than in realities; for things seen pass away, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
By the end of the book, as Anne beholds the landscape before her, Montgomery writes, “‘I think,’ said Anne softly, ‘that “the land where dreams come true” is in the blue haze yonder, over that little valley.’”
No longer does Anne look to distant, imagined worlds for fulfillment and happiness; her dreams take place within her own world, and she betters it by sharing her observation of its beauty with others.
Just as Gilbert hopes to “add a little to the sum of human knowledge,” Anne strives to “add some beauty to life, ... to have some little joy or happy thought that would never have existed if I hadn’t been born,” and in both missions, imagination serves to open new pathways to knowledge, and to craft new lenses through which beauty might be discovered.
