On Monday, I put out a call for help to the Aunties, and your response has been amazing. A whole bunch of Auntie Bulletin readers upgraded to paid subscriptions (thank you, thank you, thank you), and many more sent along words of support, encouragement, and genuinely helpful guidance. A few Substack writers with bigger platforms have amplified my request for support to their readers, for which I’m very grateful.
I find that although I’m in danger of losing the disability insurance benefit that pays my bills, I feel genuinely steady and hopeful. I’ve gotten good advice about hiring an attorney to help me appeal the insurance company’s decision, and I feel truly held by the beloved community.
As many readers will know, I’ve been increasingly placing my faith in the idea that what I give will come back to me — but I hadn’t imagined I’d need to ask for support so soon. This experience is going to stick with me, and I’ll likely have more to say about it as time goes by. For now, I’ll just say that I am so grateful for the community we’re building here. The love and generosity of Aunties is a mighty thing indeed.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
Welcome to the Kindred Spirits Book Club
I first met Kelly Gerner and Ragon Duffy of the Kindred Spirits Book Club podcast in the Culture Study comments section (you know it’s my fave!). I’d been admiring them from afar for months, because I love, love, love Anne of Green Gables and these two are the go-to experts. But it turns out they’ve also got an Auntie situation going on! They’re longtime friends, and Ragon has a kid, and Kelly is said kid’s loving and devoted Auntie. They are lovely people, and — after four seasons of the podcast — they can quote whole swaths of Anne of Green Gables from memory. It was such a delight to take a deep dive with them into this book that is an absolute core text for me, especially when it comes to models of found family.
Our conversation focused in particular on the many Auntie figures in the Anne books, and how these books surface the ways that the idea of the family is always socially constructed. We had a lot to say about Matthew, and an even-lotter to say about Marilla.
If you love Anne of Green Gables (or even if you haven’t read or watched it yet1) I hope you’ll check out this conversation about friendship and found family — on the page and in real life — that turned out to be even more insightful and profound than I’d expected. Video above, lightly edited transcript below.
Now Let’s Get To It
Lisa: Welcome, everybody. This Substack Live is a collaboration between me, Lisa Sibbett from the Auntie Bulletin, and Kelly Gerner and Ragon Duffy of the Kindred Spirits Book Club podcast. Today we're using one of our very favorite novels, Anne of Green Gables, to explore the relationship between motherhood and Auntiehood and the many ways those categories actually can be much blurrier than we often assume.
I'm the official host of the Substack Live, but really we're running this conversation together as a collaboration, all three of us, because we're really mutually interested in each other's main topics. These two are really interested in Auntiehood, and I'm super interested in the Anne books. There are really rich veins to mine here, where our areas of interest overlap.
Ragon: Kelly and I like to say we're just two grown-ass ladies who like to geek out about Anne of Green Gables. We started it as a friendship project about three years ago. We had batted around ideas for starting a podcast, and honestly, books were the cornerstone of our friendship from the jump. It made sense that we would want to talk about books, and this was a book that really brought us together from the very beginning.
We thought this would be a fun way to put intentional time into our friendship, to do a project together about friendship, and now this podcast keeps us connected as life gets busy. Making time for each other and for something that we love together was really important to us.
Now this podcast has grown. We've done four seasons, three years, 74 podcast episodes so far. We're talking not just about Anne of Green Gables, but the other books in this series about friendship, about our lives together, about historical context for the books and trying to look at the books and the adaptations from a modern perspective. And we give lots of book recommendations, of course!
Ragon: The reason why we felt so connected to Lisa's Substack, The Auntie Bulletin, is that Kelly, as my best friend, is totally the uber Auntie. Now that I have a daughter, Kelly's Auntiehood is a huge part of our friendship.
There's a lot of discourse out in the internet these days about how friendships wither and die when one friend has kids and the other doesn't. But weirdly, when I had my daughter, I feel like that took our friendship up to a whole other level.
Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. And unexpectedly, right? But it was just about meeting each other in the season of life we were both at.
Ragon: Kelly and her husband Chuck were the people who, when she was a newborn, were showing up being like, "Hey, we're coming over. We're bringing dinner. We'll hold the baby so you guys can eat. After she goes to sleep, we'll play games. If she doesn't sleep, that's fine, too." She never made us feel like my daughter, Alice, was a bother. They really put a lot of intention into becoming a part of her life as well.
It's really bloomed into this beautiful friendship, not just between us as the adults, but that's included my daughter, Alice. Kelly just took Alice on the most amazing summer day, just the two of them. She's like, "Yeah, mom, you don't get to go. This time it's just me and Kelly."
Kelly: I took her to a museum in Los Angeles called the Getty Villa. Alice is really in a Greek mythology phase right now. She just read all the Percy Jackson books. I had to take her to the Getty Villa, which is all Greek and Roman art. I'm thinking we're just going to walk around and look at statues. Girl gave me, I swear, a college-level course in Greek mythology. She knew who everyone was. She knew all of the myths. She was my tour guide.
Now I want to connect back to something Ragon was talking about—intentionality. When I think about being an Auntie, when I think about creating relationships with the children of my friends or my brother's son, my actual nephew, intentionality is really where it starts.
This summer, I decided to start something that I called Kelly Camp. I'm very lucky in my job—I have a lot of job flexibility. I have alternating Fridays off work. At the beginning of summer, I texted all my girlfriends with kids and said, "Look, these are my free days. If you just want to drop your kids off at my doorstep one of these days, I will take them out. We will do a thing. We will go out to a museum. We will go out to dinner. We'll have a nice day together. And that's a day you don't have to pay for camp."
I think taking kids to museums is super fun because the way they look at art is so different than adults. The questions they ask are never what you think they're going to ask. One of the nice things about going not as a teacher or an educator or a parent, but just as a cool adult is, "Look, we can spend as much or as little time here as you want."
One of my friend's kids, we're standing in the middle of this gallery and she looks at me and she's like, "I'm only here because I know you're going to buy me something from the gift shop later on." And I got down on her level and said, "Guess what? The reason I like to go to museums is for the gift shop too." She was like, "Awesome. Great. We're in the exact same place."
That was definitely a door opener to having a good time. Just giving them a chance to be themselves outside the context of school and their families. That's a really big part of Auntiehood in my mind.
Lisa: I love hearing about family-Auntie relationships. It just makes me so happy. I feel like this kind of relationship is actually so much more common than gets talked about in popular culture. One of the things that I'm trying to do with The Auntie Bulletin is make visible that this happens all the time. It's really important. It clearly makes everybody's life better.
The very first Auntie Bulletin post that I was ever going to write (it didn't end up getting published, but I did write it) was about Matthew Cuthbert from Anne of Green Gables, because he's such a fascinating character—is this person kind of an Auntie/uncle person or a parent figure or what? And then when you start talking about Marilla, it's even more complicated.
I have just been an Anne of Green Gables super fan since I was a little kid. I remember being told by one of my dad's fishing friends, "You have to read Anne of Green Gables because you have red hair." So I was dutifully like, "Okay, I'm going to read the redhead books." My mom and I read it together, and it was just our favorite thing. We would read it together every couple of years.
And then don't get me started on the Canadian broadcasting miniseries from 1985—I watched that thing with my family a billion times, recorded on a VHS tape off of public broadcasting so that it has the pledge drives in there and you have to fast forward through the drives when you rewatch it.
I really do think of Anne of Green Gables specifically, and really many of the Anne novels and many other novels by L.M. Montgomery, as really cornerstone texts for me on what found family is. Because L.M. Montgomery throughout her era, not just in the Anne books, but in lots of books, was always writing about found family.
So I’m excited to talk to basically the biggest Montgomery experts in the world.
For those who are not familiar or need a refresher, Ragon, can you give us an overview of what this story is about?
Ragon: Anne of Green Gables was first published in 1908. It's about a little girl named Anne Shirley—a spirited, red-headed orphan on Prince Edward Island in Canada. She has a temper and she has an imagination, and she is sent from the orphanage to a pair of adult siblings — bachelor Matthew and spinster Marilla — who live on a farm in Prince Edward Island.
But it is immediately discovered that there is a mistake. Matthew and Marilla had sent word that they wanted a boy to come live on the farm. In return for a home and education, they wanted a boy who was going to help with farm chores because Matthew was getting up there in age. But both of them end up being charmed by the spirited Anne, and they decide to keep her.
The rest of the book follows Anne's growing up in this idyllic village of Avonlea. Anne is just an iconic figure in children's literature.
Kelly: And very specifically, she's this iconic character in found families. We have this recurring theme throughout Anne of Green Gables that children can have meaningful relationships with adults who are not their parents, who are not their blood relatives, and this ongoing theme conversely about how people who are not parents can still have an impact on children and young people in their communities.
So much of what we talk about on Kindred Spirits Book Club podcast is about how we make community and what the importance of having community is—how that makes us stronger, how it makes us better people, how it gives us more resources, how it literally just helps us survive, get through the day. Finding your people, finding your family is the first step of that.
Lisa: There's actually not a lot of conventional parent characters in L.M. Montgomery's work and in the Anne books specifically. Those who are conventional parents are often not great people a lot of the time. There are also a lot of Auntie characters who start out with major issues, but they usually get redeemed, whereas the parents often don't get redeemed. It makes me really curious about L.M. Montgomery’s life.
Ragon: L.M. Montgomery's mother died when she was a baby, and her father promptly gave her into the care of her elderly grandparents on Prince Edward Island. He took off out west to Alberta, Canada. So she was raised primarily by her grandmother, who was kind of a Marilla figure but without the redeeming aspect. Very strict, very stern. However, she was also surrounded by several farms on either side of her grandparents' farm that were full of aunts and uncles and cousins. So she grew up going between all of those farmhouses, but her grandparents were primarily her parental figures.
We have noted on the podcast that Montgomery struggles with writing moms. Biological parents, biological mothers are not her strong suit. There's very few of them. Even when Anne becomes a mom, she doesn't really know how to write that well. But aunts, pseudo-parents, grandparents, aunt-like figures, mentors—all over the place.
Lisa: We're talking about late 19th century, early 20th century Canada. The sort of social construction of family, of adoption (which is really important in Anne of Green Gables specifically as an adoption story), and who is family and what are family roles—in some ways feels really familiar and in other ways feels quite unfamiliar.
Now I want to take a quick pause and talk about what we mean by “Auntie.” The word "aunt" is a technical term that refers to your parent's sibling or your parent's sibling's spouse. It's a very thin term. It doesn't have a lot of dimension. You can have an aunt who you've never even met.
The word "Auntie," which I'm trying help grow in the public lexicon, can have a much more capacious meaning. At The Auntie Bulletin, I write about Aunties as what researchers call alloparents. Alloparents are any individuals who are really involved in helping to raise children, and it doesn't matter what their kinship or friendship relationship is as long as they are load-bearing in that child-rearing role.
In our conversation about Anne of Green Gables, we're going to be talking about that second meaning of Auntie, as very broadly defined. Sometimes it's cousins, sometimes it's somebody else's aunt, sometimes it's a schoolteacher. Matthew and Marilla have no official kinship relationship to Anne, although technically they're her parents by our modern standards because they adopt her. But what the adoption even means in that context is really quite different.
Kelly: Anne is brought into this household and then she becomes introduced to all of these different people who end up having a quasi-parenting role.
Ragon: We start the book from an Auntie's point of view—Mrs. Rachel Lynde, who is their busybody next-door neighbor. Not only does she come to be a supporter of Anne, she does something very important in that she supports Marilla in her raising of this child. She is the person Marilla goes to for parenting advice. She becomes not only someone who has a relationship with Anne, but Mrs. Lynde has a really powerful relationship with Marilla and providing her that social support of raising a child.
We also have Marilla, who from the very beginning—Anne asks if she can call Marilla "Aunt Marilla." And Marilla's like, "Absolutely not. I don't believe in calling things what they aren't. I'm not your aunt. You can call me Marilla." Anne's like, "Oh, but we could pretend. We could imagine I'm your aunt." She's like, "No, thank you." But that doesn't stop them from becoming family. Marilla is not fussed about titles.
We also have Aunt Josephine, who is Anne's bestie Diana Barry's great aunt. Like many of Anne's relationships, they get off on the wrong foot when Anne and Diana leap on Aunt Josephine in the middle of the night because nobody thought to leave the girls a note that the great aunt was sleeping in the spare room. But Aunt Josephine becomes a huge supporter of Anne and offers her opportunities to experience things she wouldn't get at home. She gives Anne a trip to Charlottetown to see all the riches and glittering lights, and she provides her with beautiful but impractical items of clothing. Kelly strives to be an Aunt Jo.
Kelly: I do.
Ragon: We've got Mrs. Allen, who is the minister's wife and becomes very much an emotional mentor for Anne. Her teacher, Miss Stacy, becomes a huge supporter of Anne's ambitions and helps channel and give support and direction to Anne's ambitions.
Kelly: What's interesting about them is they all give Anne options. They give her options to think about what her life might be like. Marilla gives her the option of staying home and taking care of the farm. Mrs. Lynde shows her what it would be like to be the mother of ten children and the pillar of the community. Aunt Josephine shows her what an urban life would be. Miss Stacy shows her what it would be to be a teacher and earn your own living. Mrs. Allen shows her what it would be like to be a leader of the community from a religious and moral perspective. They're giving her paths that she can choose from, whereas where she was coming from originally she was so limited. And now she has options.
Ragon: That's one of the things we really loved, especially when you go back and read this as an adult, because when you're reading it as a kid, there are these adults and you kind of take them a little bit for granted. It's only when you go back and read it from an adult perspective that you realize what the adults are specifically giving to Anne, and what they are also getting from their relationship with Anne as well.
Anne is adopted by the Cuthberts when she's 11 years old. Before that, we're given to understand that her upbringing was very tragic. There was neglect. There was possibly abuse. She was put in a lot of situations that are not appropriate for a child.
One of the things I was thinking about is that I think she needed this. I think she needed not just one adult who was going to be in her corner, but she needed half a dozen adults who were going to stand up next to her and say, "No, you are deserving. You are a worthy child. You can have everything you want." That was the amount of love that Anne needed at that point in her life.
Lisa: Anne comes into their life through adoption, although I don't know if they use the word “adoption” per se; they say "we’re getting an orphan." Anne was very exploited in her childhood. She's essentially just kind of farmed out as child labor for her entire childhood. We get the impression that that's just basically what happens to orphans—when one child labor orphan placement doesn't work out, they send her back to the orphanage and then she goes and gets placed at some other family to basically be their drudge laborer.
Ragon: Not only that, she never gets sent back to the orphanage. They just pass her. There is no official oversight. They're like, "We're done with her," and they literally just gave her to somebody else.
Lisa: So Mrs. Spencer went to Carmody to get an orphan, and Matthew and Marilla were like, "Well, pick us up an extra orphan. We need a boy to work on the farm." So this woman went and picked up two orphans. She accidentally got two girls when she was supposed to get a boy. Since she's a girl, Marilla doesn't want her. So then she's going to go get passed off to Mrs. Blewett, who is horrible.
Ragon: Mrs. Blewett already has a pair of twins and is pregnant with another set of twins. It is very clear that there will be no kindness in Mrs. Blewett's home, and she likes the look of Anne because "the wiry ones can work the hardest." So it is extremely clear that Anne's job there is going to be to help wrangle all of her children. She will not be going to school. She will be working from sunup to sundown and probably past that, helping raise Mrs. Blewett's many children.
Lisa: And then Marilla's like, "You know what? Actually, never mind. I'll take her back."
Ragon: For all of her tough exterior, she sees exactly what this would look like. She had just heard Anne's story of her childhood—how she had already been helping to raise multiple pairs of twins throughout her young childhood. Anne is only 11 and she has helped raise six or seven children already. For all that Marilla can imagine what use Anne is going to be at their home, she can't let this keep happening to her.
This was around the same time in the American West that we had the “orphan trains.” This was on a much larger scale of taking children who were homeless or orphaned in New York City or other big cities on the East Coast, putting them on trains to head West to rural communities. They would have stops and display all of the children to the farming families. The farming families were expected to provide a home and education and religious moral guidance, and in return they picked out kids who could help them on their new farms. We did that here in the United States from the late 1850s through the beginning of the 1900s.
There was very little oversight. There was no screening really for potential foster parents. Sometimes it worked out okay, and sometimes they were basically just used as indentured servants and slave labor. Sometimes they did find families where they were loved and became part of the family.
Kelly: Remember, child labor in general was very common. This is before child labor laws. The idea that the second a kid is old enough to work, they would be working was just an idea that people were a lot more comfortable with then than we are now.
Lisa: Anne's experience with Matthew and Marilla is very different from what I have experienced in my own family. I grew up in a family with a lot of adopted people—three adopted siblings, adopted aunts, adopted cousins. Unlike my family members, Anne never changes her name. She's not a Cuthbert. She's always a Shirley. She never calls Matthew and Marilla her parents or anything like that. She's not invited to.
In my family, I have two siblings who were adopted as teenagers, around almost the same age as Anne. Both of them, as soon as they came to live with my family, were invited to call our parents mom and dad. That is just so different from what happened with Anne. That surfaces the real gray area in the way that the relationship emerges in this family. It's not like just one day they're not family and the next day they are family, which is truly what happened in my family. It's this kind of slow process.
Although Matthew jumps on board a lot faster than Marilla does.
Ragon: Matthew is the one who picks up Anne at the train station, befuddled by the fact that it's a girl waiting for him and not a boy. Matthew is this extremely gentle, quiet, withdrawn man, really only comfortable with a few people in his life, primarily his sister and maybe his close neighbors. He is immediately charmed by Anne on the drive home—by her imagination, by her chatter, by her willingness to be comfortable with him. Anne tells Matthew right away, "I know we're going to be kindred spirits." And Matthew doesn't know exactly what that means, but he feels it.
Marilla is the holdout. Marilla is the practical one. When they get back and she's like, "Um, what? No, this was not our plan," Matthew immediately is the one who's advocating for Anne. He says one of our favorite lines when Marilla says, "She's not going to be any good to us"—he says, "But we might be some good to her." That's where Matthew becomes family to Anne. Whatever label you want to put on it, he sees that humanity and that connection with Anne right away. Marilla's a much slower burn.
Lisa: Would we say that Matthew is like a father figure, or not?
Kelly: I think we hesitate to say that Marilla or Matthew are father and mother just because those are labels they would have rejected, even if the relationships were essentially parental.
I will say that Matthew provides two really important things to Anne that she hadn't had prior to this. First is unconditional love. He pretty much is enchanted by her from that first drive home. He gives her so much acceptance and space for her to bloom into and become exactly who she needs to be.
I also think that what Matthew is doing—this is subtext, not text—is giving Anne a lesson or an example of gentler masculinity, showing that you can be the patriarch, you can lead the household, you can be the farmer without being loud, without being angry, without being drunk, without being violent. Some of these other examples of masculinity she had seen.
But he's not raising Anne. This is really important to understand. Marilla tells him sternly that she's going to be doing the child raising, that neither of them know what they're doing, but he definitely doesn't know what he's doing because he's a man. She tells him he's not to "put his oar in," and she'll be making all the child-rearing decisions, which in a way gives Matthew space to just love her.
In that way that a grandfather or an uncle would get to have that relationship—he gets to be the one who just occasionally brings her chocolate caramels home from town in his pockets and just listen to her prattle on about everything that she's experienced. Anytime Anne experiences something emotionally important to her, her first thing is, "I have to go tell Matthew." She's always running off to share with Matthew whatever it is that she's learned.
Marilla is going to be the one who is doing the practical aspect of raising kids. I think part of Marilla's reluctance to take on Anne was because a girl is going to require more from Marilla in parenting than a boy would. The boy would be more in Matthew's domain, right? Learning the farm, learning how the farm works, learning all of the things that need to happen in the farm. Marilla is the one who's going to be teaching Anne what she needs to know in terms of cooking, cleaning, and homemaking. Anne is a terrible cook to start with because she's extremely distractible. It drives Marilla crazy where she's always forgetting things or getting distracted halfway.
Lisa: Like the mouse in the pudding!
Ragon: Exactly. She left the pudding sauce uncovered and then a mouse drowned in it. And then she got so distracted after figuring that out that she forgot to tell Marilla about it until Marilla is about to pour out the sauce at a dinner. With a dead mouse in it.
And Marilla knew from the very beginning with Anne that that would be her work, right? Matthew’s like, she could be a companion for you. And she's like, I don't need a companion. No, I'm going to train her up.
Lisa: I feel like this is a good pivot point to the complexities of Marilla, but before we get into that, I just really want to quickly nerd out on one of my very favorite Matthew scenes from Anne of Green Gables, which is when Matthew goes to try to buy her a dress with puffed sleeves. It's just the cutest scene in both the book and the movie. He's so nervous, he totally can't talk to women. He gets to the store and unexpectedly there's a new woman behind the counter, and he's so nervous to talk about women's clothing with this woman that he just ends up getting, like, a garden rake and 20 pounds of brown sugar. He just keeps saying, "Well, how about maybe I'll get this other thing."
He finally manages to get her this dress — because Marilla only dresses her in tight brown, simple clothes while the other kids get to have pretty things with bows on them. So Anne has her heart set on this dress. It's so brave because this is the most courageous thing he could possibly do—go to a store and talk to a strange woman about a dress. But he does eventually manage it. And it's just so cute.
Kelly: It is one of our favorite scenes for that reason. One of the interesting things about it is not only is he brave, it shows how much he's observing and knowing Anne. He's scared to go into the kitchen when Anne has friends over, but he's the one who notices that Anne's dresses look different from the other little girls, and he knows how much this means to her. So he's willing to do this thing that is nightmare fuel for Matthew.
Lisa: And the puffed sleeves are indeed preposterous. If you look at it in the film, it's really quite ridiculous in the way that stuff 11-year-old girls want is often ridiculous. But he loves her. He just has to get it for her.
Kelly: He loves her and he knows she deserves it. He's teaching her that she deserves nice things.
Another wonderful example of Matthew's courage is at the beginning of the book where he stands up to Marilla and says, "No, she should stay. We can do something for this young girl and there's no reason to turn her out." That's not in his character. It seems like Matthew and Marilla have just been rubbing along—he does the farm, she does the house, never the twain shall meet—and now all of a sudden they have this big decision to make together and he takes a stand. She even tells Mrs. Rachel Lynde, "Well, Matthew felt so strongly about it, I was just sort of like okay, it’s the first thing you've ever said wanted, so I guess!"
You see Matthew have these beautiful moments of courage throughout, inspired by his relationship with Anne.
Lisa: And in reaction, we just get repeated exasperation from Marilla. She's just so annoyed. I think that even more interesting than the question, "is Matthew a father?" is the question, "is Marilla a mother?" You two did, early in your podcast, an episode about Marilla where you were talking about her as a mother. And then I was like, "I don't know if I buy that." So then we had this really interesting conversation that I'd like to surface. Is Marilla a mother? And if so, when does that happen?
Ragon: I think if you ask Marilla, "Is she Anne's mother?" she would say no. But in all the ways that end up counting, she does become her mother. She provides this safe, loving space for Anne. She provides a place for Anne to screw up and make mistakes and know that she is not going to have to leave. She provides for her future and for her education. And eventually, she allows herself to love her.
She wouldn't have allowed herself to love her earlier, but she was afraid it would get in the way of what she thinks is her duty. She thinks her duty as a parent is to provide religious and moral guidance for her. She's very convinced that her most important thing is to stamp out Anne's vanity. She's afraid if she lets herself love her, she won't have the strength to do those harder things.
I think that as a parent, the harder thing about becoming a parent is that you have this person that you love so much and you would love to be the person who does nothing but make them smile and make them happy. But as a parent, you also have to do the hard things. You have to set limits. You have to set guidance. You have to say no. You have to look at the bigger picture and not just what makes them happy today.
When Marilla learns how to balance those two things—to love Anne and also know where to set boundaries and guidance for Anne—that's what makes her a mom. At least that's my opinion.
Kelly: That was gorgeously stated. Marilla almost starts out becoming like a concerned citizen more than an aunt or a mother or a mentor. She takes Anne because she truly, sincerely believes this is her duty. This is her duty under God. God has instructed her to raise up this child.
But then as Marilla learns more about her, you start to see Marilla being guided by her own sense of care and compassion. She feels for Anne's neglect in her background, and she really wants Anne to have what she considers to be a wholesome and decent and moral childhood. I think that's some of the beginning steps into the maternal energy that we see her embody later on.
One thing that's really interesting that helps the relationship along is that Marilla becomes proud of Anne. She becomes proud of how smart she is, how ambitious she is, how high achieving she is. She wants her to have opportunities to be able to make her way in the world and do well.
Then slowly over time, in the fullness of all of those things, Marilla does allow herself to love Anne. And in that love, we see her become fully Anne's mother in every sense of the word. Anne truly is Marilla's daughter in every way that counts.
Lisa: I feel like I had always sort of thought of Marilla as becoming a mother over a slow trajectory. Does she pass through Auntiehood? Maybe kind of? She's sort of affectionate even though she's exasperated all the time. But she also is the primary caretaker the whole entire time. She's also maybe kind of passing through a sort of foster parent kind of time and then into being what also I think is totally a mother.
One of the characteristics I think that makes Marilla a mother is that she provides a place for Anne to come home to. Green Gables remains Anne's home. Whereas foster kids in our system today, so many kids age out of the foster system and then they don't have a home to come home to. You see very high rates of homelessness among young people who age out of foster care. That could have happened to Anne. Had she been on a different life trajectory, she might not have had any home to go home to. But she absolutely does. Her hometown is absolutely her place. She really belongs. Green Gables is absolutely her home.
I also feel like—and this is maybe colored somewhat by the 1985 miniseries because I watched that so many times. Now, spoiler alert for a book that was published 120 years ago! If you don’t already know the ending of the book and you want to read it, go do that first and then come back!
But I think the turning point really happens when Matthew dies. It's very, very sad. When Matthew dies, I feel like that really finally brings Anne and Marilla together in a permanent way. They have a conversation shortly after his death. It's like, "It's us. We're together. This is our family."
To me, that sort of official acknowledgement of "we are family," whether we're talking about parenthood or Auntiehood or any kind of kinship, I think that actually is a really important thing that needs to happen. At some point there needs to be a conscious acknowledgement that this relationship really matters and we’re in it for the long haul.
Ragon: What happens in that moment between Anne and Marilla is Marilla says, "I know that I don't always show it." She's recognized that Matthew was the soft one, that Matthew was the one providing love. To a certain degree, Marilla was like, "Okay, Matthew's got that part. I'm doing the practical piece." She hasn’t had to contend with what Anne means to her in this way, because up until now Matthew had that kind of covered.
She feels it. She's always loved Anne or has grown to love Anne for quite a long time. But in this moment, she's saying to Anne, "I love you as if you were my own. And I know I'm not Matthew, but this is still your home. This is still us. We are still a family even without Matthew."
Tears every single time. I can't even talk about it without getting that choke up in the back of your throat.
Lisa: It’s so beautiful. I think that brings us to the conclusion we wanted to come sweeping to, which is that this novel really does such a great job of making visible that family is socially constructed. Family is what you make. What was parenthood in late 19th century Canada? What is parenthood in early 21st century United States? What is family more broadly defined? Those are things that we kind of make up.
It can seem like motherhood, fatherhood, parenthood have these very straightforward definitions. But really, especially when we look at this particular novel, and of course many other texts and lived experiences, there's really just so much more capaciousness and gray area.
Kelly: I actually think that this is the core of Anne of Green Gables. I think it's in the title of the book. Once Anne becomes "of Green Gables," she is part of something bigger than herself. Is that a family? Is it a household? Is it a farm? We think it's a family. We think the people who live in Green Gables are working toward common cause, not just to keep the wheels on the bus, but out of a sense of care and love for each other. That's what Anne becomes a part of once she is, in fact, Anne of Green Gables.
For that time period, the definitions around family were very rigid. Matthew and Marilla probably wouldn't have used the words mother and father to describe themselves. But what the book is really doing is demonstrating that love and familial connection are not exclusive to people who are related to one another. That's part of the reason that Anne comes up with her "kindred spirits" designation. These are our found family. These are the people who we know that we are a part of and who are a part of us. We just know.
Ragon: One of the things we love so much about this book, that has really struck us when we go back and read this as an adult, is seeing the growth arcs for the adults in Anne's life and getting a chance to experience that part, not just from Anne's perspective. I think it really highlights how important that foundness is and whether L.M. Montgomery was writing a little bit of a wish fulfillment for herself of what family could look like.
Lisa: And like wish fulfillment for all of us. I mean, luckily all three of us are in a position where we have really beautiful kinship relations in our lives. But may that be so for all people — for everybody who doesn't have it.
This has been such a great conversation.
Kelly: Thank you for having us, Lisa. Oh my goodness, we've really just enjoyed the heck out of talking to you!
Lisa: Kelly and Ragon, thank you so much for doing this Substack Live with me! I just want to name that every time I do a Substack Live, I say to the people that I'm talking with, “probably nobody's going to come.” But there are a whole bunch of people here! We’re very, very grateful for those who tuned in. Thank you all for coming! We'll see you next time.
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Survey: Such Interesting Aunties
I’m planning a reader profile series here at The Auntie Bulletin, because one of the best ways we can learn to implement new behaviors and ways of living is to have lots of great examples to draw from. I’d like to interview and profile some Aunties! Will you be one of them?
Here’s the deal: You respond to the “Such Interesting Aunties” survey (red button below), made up of 7-ish questions which you can answer in as little or as much detail as you like. (Tip: If the survey doesn’t work, make sure you’re logged into Substack). It doesn’t have to be perfect or polished now; I promise to make it shiny and make you look really good later. The main thing with the survey is just to communicate to me a general idea of what your Auntiehood or alloparent role is all about.
If you’re selected to be profiled, I might send you a slightly longer questionnaire or I might see if you’re available for a quick chat over Zoom. I write up what I learn from you and publish it in a future issue of The Auntie Bulletin, and you get a 12-month paid tier subscription to the newsletter! Which is cool because I do occasionally paywall things!2
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Look, I know we’ve been talking about Anne of Green Gables, so bringing up Evil Dead II might feel like a hard pivot, but I can never contemplate anyone not having read a book or seen a movie “yet” without thinking of the scene from High Fidelity.
I challenge you to write a weekly newsletter that’s basically about the gift economy and then figure out what posts to paywall. Not easy! But the reality is that I get more paid subscriptions when I paywall stuff, and I need paid subscriptions because this is my job, and also my disability benefits are being discontinued.
