In which the storybook romance has a happy ending, and Anne prepares for the next phase of her life; and in which your narrator can finally update his "currently reading" status on Goodreads.
Our final cover for this book is from a 2014 edition published by Sourcebooks Fire, the YA imprint of Sourcebooks. It's designed by Canadian illustrator Jacqui Oakley, who posted the in-progress rough designs of this cover on her site (scroll down a bit.) Oakley illustrated covers for the whole series, of course, and says that "as you can imagine, I got pretty good at painting red hair throughout this project. Each cover depicts Anne as she grows up, a specific building related to each story, as well as flowers and animals native to PEI." It's a lovely set of covers all together, and I appreciate the thoughtfulness that obviously went into each, and the fact that while none depict a specific scene from the book, they don't fall into the completely generic trap that so many of the others I've looked at do. A beautiful cover to bring our reading to a close.But we're not going to get out of this without a whole bunch of notes! Even though this isn't as long as the last two installments we somehow managed to need even more annotation, so look for them behind the jump.
They were especially popular around the late 1870s to early 1880s, around the time this story takes place, and has stayed a consistent part of dress design up through the present day.
5:20 - "the vision and the faculty divine." This comes from William Wordsworth, whom we've met before, from his long poem The Excursion: Being a portion of The Recluse, a poem. He never finished The Recluse, so don't look. Anyway, this was from Book 1 of The Excursion: "The Wanderer":
O, many are the poets that are sownBy nature; men endowed with highest gifts,The vision and the faculty divine;Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse
In short, he goes on to talk about how many talented people there are who never discover their talent through lack of learning, an excess of temper, etc. Marilla has decided not to take further steps to try and discourage Anne's own poetic gifts, though I somehow think it was the narration and not Marilla herself that dragged Wordsworth into it.
7:54 - "melancholy Byronic hero." We briefly met Lord Byron in Mary Shelley's introduction to the 1832 edition of Frankenstein, and I glancingly mentioned the "Byronic hero." Byron didn't actually invent the Byronic hero, as characters of the archetype existed before him, but he certainly codified and popularized it. The Byronic hero is the dark, brooding character, charismatic, passionate, and idealistic, but cynical. Inflexible in his philosophy and self-centered, yet mercurial in temperament and full of self-loathing, he (for this is usually a man, though not always) generally considers himself above the strictures of society. He the one that you, like Anne and Diana here, fall in love with, or think you want to fall in love with, as a teenager, before realizing that he's really just a self-important ass who needs to get over himself. See also: Hamlet, Mr. Rochester, Victor Frankenstein, Heathcliff, Batman, most vampires, and Lord Byron himself.
7:59 - "things seen are mightier than things heard." Ah, our old friend, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. This comes from his narrative poem Enoch Arden, published in 1864. It's the story of the titular Enoch, who loses his job and thus has to take work going to sea, but gets shipwrecked for ten years. When he finally returns, he finds that he's been declared dead and his wife had remarried a childhood friend of his, and has a child by him (added to the children she had with Enoch, now raised by this guy.) He wants them to be happy, so he doesn't reveal himself to them and dies of a broken heart. This quote comes from the part where Enoch, who had previously been informed of his family's new situation, actually sees them for the first time, and it really sinks in.
8:55 - "if everybody saw alike. . . as the old Indian said, 'Everybody would want my squaw.'" Nope, no idea. I found a couple of other sources that use this or a similar expression (one attributing it to a "Cree chief," but they all came from after Anne of Avonlea, and all the words are just generic enough to make it hard to find sources that aren't just talking about something else entirely. So whether this is a reference to a specific story I can't find, or whether Montgomery made it up out of whole cloth, I can't tell you. Kinda racist either way, though.
13:43 - "lares and penates." Lares were spirits of the dead who became guardian deities in ancient Rome. They protected places, which included individual households, roads, crossroads, cities, and even entire states. Penates were deities that were more specifically domestic, associated largely with the hearth and pantry of a specific household. The two often got conflated together under the umbrella of "household spirits," and sometime in the 1700s or so the phrase came to mean "all of one's household goods."
17:08 - "helmet of Navarre . . . waved ever in the thickest of the fray." This most likely is a reference to the poem "The Battle of Ivry," or "Ivry, a Song of the Huguenots," by Thomas Babington Macauley. He wrote it as a young man in 1824, but eventually published it in 1842 as part of his Lays of Ancient Rome, a collection of narrative poems that were apparently standard reading in British schools for more than a century. Contrary to the title and most of the other poems, "The Battle of Ivry" is about the titular battle that won Henry IV of France and his Protestant forces the French throne over the forces of the Catholic League in 1590, as part of the French Wars of Religion. Before becoming King of France, Henry was King of Navarre, a small kingdom that lay on what is now the border of France and Spain, so it's his helmet we're talking about. Specifically, I'm pretty sure this is a reference to the lines
And in they burst, and on they rushed, while, like a guiding star,Amidst the thickest carnage blazed the helmet of Navarre.
17:23 - "horsehair trunk." Horsehair, or, uh, hair from a horse's tail or mane, can be woven into a very durable fabric that was often used for hard-wearing surfaces like upholstery and, as in this case, luggage.
18:15 - "if not exactly a thing of beauty, certainly a joy forever." Surprisingly, this is apparently the first time any of our books to reference Keats. Huh. Anyway, this is a reference to the famous first line of John Keats's 1818 poem Endymion: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." The poem retells the myth of Endymion, a shepherd (or hunter, or king maybe?) who Selene, the Titan goddess of the moon, fell in love with. She had him put into an enchanted sleep so he would never leave her and would stay young forever, and had fifty(!) children by him. That's rough, buddy. Anyway, contemporary critics hated the poem, and even Keats was pretty critical of it and regretted publishing it, but that first line entered the popular lexicon and has stayed ever since.
19:01 - "slept the sleep of the just and weary." I can find several other works that use this exact phrase, or the present-tense version of it, all from the 1890s through the 1920s and almost all from news articles for some reason, but no obvious source for it. Maybe just one of those things that just arose naturally in the public lexicon.
19:56 - "a figure of fun." Basically, a person that other people make fun of.
20:06 - "pour cats and dogs." Again, you all know this phrase surely, but no one's really sure where it comes from. Versions of it (like "rain dogs and polecats") date back at least to the 1650s and could be from Norse mythology, or the Greek phrase cata doxa ("contrary to belief"), the Old English word catadupe meaning "waterfall," and others.
20:36 - "and upstairs was awaiting a bride, 'adorned for her husband.'" Another Bible quote, this one from Revelation 21:2: "And I John saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" (King James Version.) So, Miss Lavendar is a bride who looks like a post-apocalyptic heavenly city that looks like a bride.
21:11 - "Raphael's cherubs." Painted by the legendary turtle-inspiring Renaissance painter Raffaello Sanzio di Urbino, aka Raphael. You know the ones:
_-_1512-1513.jpg)
What I somehow never really realized is that these cherubs are just a fairly small detail of a much larger work called the Sistine Madonna, commissioned by Pope Julius II in 1512 for the church of San Sisto, Piacenza. Here's the whole thing:
.jpg)
23:17 - "The bags of rice are in the pantry, ma'am, and the old shoes are behind the door." Throwing rice, of course, is a tradition that modern people have likely at least heard of, even if it has fallen out of favor in recent years. (No, it won't make birds explode. They don't exactly cook the grain they eat in the wild, after all.) Anyway, grain has long been a symbol of prosperity and fertility in many cultures, so it makes some sort of sense. But what's this with the old shoes? That's a new one on me, but apparently it was indeed a thing in Victorian times, especially in England and associated areas. You can read a whole 24-page treatise from 1895 on the possible origins of the custom, including theories that it was a call back to when the woman's family would back against the man capturing and running off with her, that it's a symbol of the "authority" over the woman transferring from her father to the groom, and that it came from a general ritual of luck symbolizing the transference of "life" from one person to another.
Anyway, this custom eventually turned into tying shoes to the back of their carriages, presumably to cut down on bruises, then onto their automobiles once they became a thing, and then it seems that Americans decided they'd rather keep their shoes and started tying cans to the cars instead, a custom which I HAVE heard of, or at least seen in old cartoons.
25:19 - "apple-pie order." This naturally just means that things are in neat and precise order, but the origins of the phrase are murky. The first recorded use of it was in the 1780 journal of a sailor named Thomas Pasley, where he wrote that the sailors had to be "clean and in apple-pie order on Sundays." It could be as simple as referring to the steps of making a pie, or pies stacked on shelves in a shop, or it could be a corruption of a French phrase like nappe-pliée, referring to neatly folded napkins, or cap-à-pie, meaning "head to foot."
25:39 - "long, long thoughts." This is part of another Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, this one called "My Lost Youth." The poem reflects on Longfellow's youth growing up in Portland, Maine, and each of the ten stanzas ends with the refrain "A boy's will is the wind's will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
27:47 - "guerdon." A reward.
28:12 - "durance." An archaic form of "endurance" which also meant "imprisonment" or "confinement."
And that's it! It only took us just shy of five years, but we've finally finished Anne of Avonlea. Next up with be a Short Story Interlude, and then a brand new book. Thanks for listening!
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!
No comments:
Post a Comment