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Sitting alone in her "ugly" dress outside the Bright River train station on rural Prince Edward Island, Anne Shirley, red-haired heroine of L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), waits hopefully for Mr. Matthew Cuthbert of Green Gables (11). Given her experience as an orphan and her familiarity with disappointment, she anticipates his delay, but Anne is determined to transform the situation into an ideal and lovely experience, rather than one of despair. When Matthew does arrive, she tells him:
I'd made up my mind that if you didn't come for me tonight I'd go down the track to that big wild cherry tree at the bend, and climb up into it to stay all night. I wouldn't be a bit afraid, and it would be lovely to sleep in a wild cherry tree all white with bloom in the moonshine, don't you think? You could imagine you were dwelling in marble halls, couldn't you? (12; emphasis added)
You could imagine. Imagination in Anne of Green Gables serves not only as a source of pleasure for Anne, but also as a source of survival, motiva- tion, and power. As a poor, clever girl with no family and few options in early twentieth-century Canada, Anne's fantasies prior to her adop- tion by Marilla and Matthew serve as a means to mentally create safe havens and luminous spaces.
This singular, independent girl situated in a moment of societal transition relies on imagination to transform the reality of her surround- ings. Anne's imaginative ability and its function correspond with Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's "mythic woman artist," who "through all these stages in her history . . . dreamed, like her sibylline ancestress, of a visionary future, a utopian land in which she could be whole and energetic" (102). In this essay, I argue that the evocation of imagina- tive tropes-romantic tropes in particular-works toward the visionary purpose expressed by Gilbert and Gubar in both the fictional case of Anne and the historical case of certain discursive strands of suffrage across Canada, Britain, and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With closer examination, we find Anne of Green Gables and the rhetoric and imagery of suffrage campaigns bound together in a...