"Bloom In the Moonshine": Imagination As Liberation In Anne of Green Gables
In L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), heroine Anne Shirley seemingly dreams her way through life, envisioning scenes of romance or adventure in order to endure and overcome obstacles. This use of imagination serves as a means of ideological transcendence for an early twentieth-century girl in rural Canada, thus enabling Anne to triumph in her community. Anne's employment of imagination functions in similar ways to that of certian discursive strands of Canadian suffrage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By examining Anne of Green Gables alongside the ways in which these suffrage factions used imagination to free themselves from conventional thought, as well as influence others to join their cause, we see how imagination can operate as an agent of change.
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