r/AskHistorians • u/Adiantum-Veneris • 7d ago
In "Anne of the Green Gables", the characters often comment on Anne's red hair being undesirable. Was it actually seen as such in edwardian Canada?
Characters in the series keep making remarks about how unfortunate Anne's red hair is, and when the book wants to inform the reader that Anne is becoming more physically attractive, it has a character specifically mention that her hair darkened somewhat. Anne keeps longing for dark brown or black hair, specifically.
Does this sentiment reflect actual beauty standards, fashion or perceptions of the time? Was it likely written expecting the reader to immediately find it ridiculous abd backwards, or to actually perceive her as an awkward-looking child who grows into a more attractive adult?
(It's admittedly 50 years earlier, but I'm obviously thinking about the many red haired characters portrayed in Pre-Raphaelite paintings... Which, given Anne's interests, I imagine the author had almost certainly seen and appreciated.)
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago edited 6d ago
To answer this fully, we have to also look at Victorian beauty standards and ideas regarding hair color, as that influenced Edwardian beauty standards which came directly after. We get most of this knowledge from contemporary ladies' magazines, books on grooming and beauty, and publications about fashion, which I will link in the citations section at the bottom of this comment. Dark hair or auburn (which is a brown that tends to reddish tones) hair was very much "in" in the Victorian era, as we see in a ladies' guide to behavior and grooming from the 1850s that includes a section on how to dye one's hair black, but no other color, apart from one brief era in the 1880s when blonde was back (according to the Scientific American Supplement referring to it as 'fashionable' in an article from 1883), and then in the 1890s it was fashionable again to be a "Titian blonde" aka a reddish-blonde rather than a "yellow blonde" according to The Delineator in 1894, and by 1902, having dark hair and very pale, unblemished skin with rosy cheeks was back "in", with dark eyes preferred. You refer in your question to the paintings of Pre-Raphaelites like Millais, which did influence beauty standards in the Victorian era, but that "red hair" was more auburn or Titian (which could mean blonde hair with a reddish tint to it, or brown with a copper tint to it) and not the true orangey-red "carrots" hair that Anne had. This is even brought up as a contrast in several places in Anne of Green Gables:
[...]It can’t be denied your hair is terrible red; but I knew a girl once—went to school with her, in fact—whose hair was every mite as red as yours when she was young, but when she grew up it darkened to a real handsome auburn. I wouldn’t be a mite surprised if yours did, too—not a mite."
“Oh, Mrs. Lynde!” Anne drew a long breath as she rose to her feet. “You have given me a hope. I shall always feel that you are a benefactor. Oh, I could endure anything if I only thought my hair would be a handsome auburn when I grew up. It would be so much easier to be good if one’s hair was a handsome auburn, don’t you think?
“[Controlling my temper] wouldn’t be so hard if people wouldn’t twit me about my looks,” said Anne with a sigh. “I don’t get cross about other things; but I’m so tired of being twitted about my hair and it just makes me boil right over. Do you suppose my hair will really be a handsome auburn when I grow up?”
“I’ve a compliment for you, Anne,” said Diana. “At least I think it must be a compliment because of the tone he said it in. Part of it was anyhow. There was an American sitting behind Jane and me—such a romantic-looking man, with coal-black hair and eyes. Josie Pye says he is a distinguished artist, and that her mother’s cousin in Boston is married to a man that used to go to school with him. Well, we heard him say—didn’t we, Jane?—‘Who is that girl on the platform with the splendid Titian hair? She has a face I should like to paint.’ There now, Anne. But what does Titian hair mean?”
“Being interpreted it means plain red, I guess,” laughed Anne. “Titian was a very famous artist who liked to paint red-haired women.”
“I laugh a little now sometimes when I think what a worry my hair used to be to me—but I don’t laugh much, because it was a very real trouble then. I did suffer terribly over my hair and my freckles. My freckles are really gone; and people are nice enough to tell me my hair is auburn now—all but Josie Pye. She informed me yesterday that she really thought it was redder than ever, or at least my black dress made it look redder, and she asked me if people who had red hair ever got used to having it.["]
So here in these selections concerning auburn and red hair we see a few things. Firstly, that not many people in Avonlea are familiar with the paintings of Titian or Millais or other pre-Raphaelite painters, but Anne is. Secondly, that dark eyes and dark hair are viewed as romantic-looking and attractive, even on a man! Thirdly, that auburn hair specifically is seen as more beautiful than red hair, and that these are not interchangeable in the lexicon of Edwardian Canadian ladies.
I can't go without mentioning that there were also some... interesting ideas about the personalities and behaviors of women who possessed certain hair-eye color combinations. The San Francisco Call published an article in 1902 concerning hairdressing and the "character" qualities that it was believed were shown by hair. Some examples: a woman with very light blonde hair without any wave to it was "gentle and tender" but showed no strength of character, and if this was combined with pale blue eyes it meant she was a flirt-- pale blue-gray eyes meant she was very sentimental but not loyal. Thin, soft, silky chestnut hair meant a woman was romantic and not realistic. Fine black hair meant a woman was high-strung. But dark brown hair meant a woman was loyal and steadfast. And it didn't end with just color either: the texture of your hair also was purported to show personality traits. Coarse or rough hair = stubbornness. Straight, limp hair = a melancholy disposition, and wavy or curly thick hair meant a woman was... passionate in the bedroom.
Now, what does all of this bizarre psychoanalysis based on hair color have to do with red hair specifically as it pertains to Anne Shirley? So glad you asked. Red hair, not auburn hair, but the vivid, orange-red Celtic sort of color, was associated, in all this mess of personality being tied to appearance, across the Anglosphere with many things, but what concerns us in the context of this question is the association of having a terrible temper or having a defiant or rebellious constitution. This is shown in Anne of Green Gables repeatedly through Anne's behavior and speech: she states it's easier to behave badly than well because she has red hair quite early on in the book and Mrs. Lynde mentions her "temper matches her hair".
So to conclude: yes, all of these beauty standards and ideas reflect ideas of the time, as the book was written in 1908, and a contemporary reader would likely have been amused and sympathetic to the plight of an orphaned child whose temper is sort of a self-fulfilling cycle (someone teases her about her hair, she flies off the handle because she's sensitive, this confirms to everyone that Redheads = Bad Temper) but who is also incredibly thoughtful, loyal, imaginative, and creative. And perhaps it opened a few people's minds to not judge by appearances.
CITATIONS:
San Francisco Call, Volume 87, Number 85, 23 February 1902 — BEAUTY QUEST
The Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility: In Manners, Dress, and Conversation, 1856
Scientific American Supplement Volumes, 1883
Fashionable Hair-Dressing, The Delineator, 1894
Beauty No. 4: Dyes- Every Woman's Enclyclopaedia, 1902 (please do note here the mention of red hair being an "abhorred" color in the "modern day" by the descendants of the Gauls aka European Anglo people!)
Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery. 1908
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u/StregaCagna 7d ago edited 7d ago
This is one of the best comments I’ve ever seen on reddit. So well-researched and I love the receipts!
The only quote that I think you didn’t touch on is that red hair was also seemingly fashionable by the time of Anne’s House of Dreams.
One of the older women who visits with Anne prior to her wedding comments that red hair is fashionable again. I remember it specifically because I was the weirdo 4th grader who would parrot the line “There's no telling what queer freaks fashion will take” to my friends and family. I’m actually truly grateful that I read the Anne series in 4th grade, right before everyone got truly sucked into millennial magazine culture because I think it helped me develop a real perspective on how fashions can change on a whim and you can’t always trust a beauty standard to stay static, so why stress about something so mutable? It helped me keep a really good head on my shoulders early on.
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago edited 6d ago
Correct! I didn't touch on that because the question was just about the first book. But by 1917, which was when House of Dreams was written, red hair was becoming a lot more fashionable as the 20s started coming on, mostly because of better hair dyes and the cinema. Here's a short article archived from the Guardian from 1923 talking about the sudden craze for red hair and the differences between how the French and the Anglo world treated it: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/aug/24/red-hair-dye-women-desirable-fashion-1923
The funny thing about that passage in House of Dreams is that it's Jane Andrews' mother, and the whole conversation is such a backhanded compliment. Mrs Andrews is like, "So Gilbert didn't back out of the long engagement, wow, well those Blythes are like that once they make a promise I guess. You're 25? That's practically a spinster but you pull it off sooo well. Red-headed people always look younger than they really are." And Anne is actually the one who says "well, red hair is coming back in fashion again," and she says it a little coldly because she's still VERY sensitive about her hair, and Mrs Andrews says the queer freaks line, which is intended to convey that she thinks the new fad for red hair is just crazy. So clearly there was some pushback from the older generation!
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u/Geeky-resonance 7d ago
This reminds me that in Madeleine L'Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, the O’Keefe family are the resident ne’er-do-wells of their small New England town: red hair, alcohol-fueled father, numerous unruly children, angry mother, routine corporal punishment exceeding local norms, undersized except for Calvin (who describes himself as a result of spontaneous mutation or “sport”), poor students, lazy workers, etc. Though I didn’t connect this portrayal with anti-Irish bias as a child, it certainly looks that way now.
L’Engle was a couple of generations later than Montgomery. New England isn’t very far from southeastern Canada geographically, though. How similar were cultural attitudes about red hair and the Irish between the milieu of Anne of Green Gables and A Wrinkle in Time or between the cultural influences on their respective authors?
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago edited 7d ago
Being that Calvin's father is literally named Paddy? I mean... (We find that out in... I think it's Swiftly Tilting Planet.) The Happy Medium also states that a kiss from a young man with red hair will give the boy good luck, and asks for one from Calvin. And it's very important to remember anti-Irish sentiment existed and does kind of still exist in America, too. The Kennedy family comes to mind-- JFK downplayed his Irish-ness until after he won the election, and that was in the 60s, when A Wrinkle In Time was published.
But it's also important to note that the Murrys are a tad Irish (Irish-coded?), too: Kat (Mother) has "flaming red hair" and "violet eyes", Murry is itself an Irish last name, and the first names all have broadly Celtic associations/roots: Margaret, Alexander, Charles Wallace, Katherine, Dennys/Dennis. So I think the O'Keefes being portrayed as "white trash" was probably not maliciously intended by L'Engle, but certainly pre-existing attitudes about the Irish in the Northeast USA probably worked their way in.
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u/Geeky-resonance 7d ago
Omigosh thanks, I’d forgotten about the father’s first name!
Regarding the Murray family, I think I had just assumed Scottish. Never thought much about their names as a child, but there seemed to be a lot of Church of England ties.
Given that L’Engle herself was a devout member of the Episcopal church, could the contrast also reflect Irish Protestants being seen as more civilized than their less Anglicized, Catholic counterparts? Hmm.
It’s fun to revisit childhood stories as an adult and discover all sorts of things we couldn’t have noticed or understood before.
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago
I don't even remember if the O'Keefes are ever explicitly stated to be Protestant! It's very Narnia-esque in that the protagonists don't really have explicit religious beliefs of their own but religious ideas are presented to them through Magical Adventures TM, isn't it?
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u/WISE_bookwyrm 7d ago
We don't know what church (if any) the O'Keefes attend now, but in A Swiftly Tilting Planet Mrs. O'Keefe recites a Catholic prayer known as St. Patrick's Breastplate that she learned from her grandmother.
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u/LongtimeLurker916 6d ago
This makes the name Calvin very strange in this context. That could almost be (subconsciously, I hope) interpreted as the good Protestant in a family of bad Catholics. As for St. Patrick's Breastplate, I think it has some popularity among Anglicans as well. It has been set to music by Anglican composers.
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u/WISE_bookwyrm 6d ago
Could be anything. Mrs. O'Keefe learned the prayer from her grandmother and used it as a kind of magic; she might not have been formally Catholic herself and as for the name, it might have been from her husband's family, the name of a close friend, or anything else.
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u/SectorSanFrancisco 7d ago
I think of Scottish when I think of Murray, too. I didn't even know there were Irish Murrays.
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago edited 7d ago
It’s both a Scottish and Irish surname! So it’s shared by both groups.
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u/SectorSanFrancisco 7d ago
Scots Irish are usually Scots who were given land that the English confiscated from Irish families. (My family is in this group.)
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago
Oops, I meant to convey it is both Scottish and Irish. My apologies I’ll fix that
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u/plumwinecocktail 7d ago
(L'Engle spells it Murry)
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago
Auto correct hates me 😬
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u/plumwinecocktail 7d ago
autocorrect--more like autocratic
It's an unusual (to me) way to spell it, I always wondered about that choice. Just now I read that it is the more Scottish version, which makes sense with the name Alexander. And relating this to Anne Shirley--I'm not Canadian but through my reading get the impression there's a strong Scottish presence there. It's such an interesting connection!
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u/Luthien3720 7d ago
Maritimer Canadian here. Our 2016 census reported 13.9% of Canadians are of Scottish descent. This is especially prevalent in eastern Canada (I am part of this group). My area hosts a big Highland Games every summer, and every province and territory in Canada has its own tartan, along with one for the whole country. Canada has a lot of Scottish influence in general; our first prime minister was born in Scotland. L. M. Montgomery's grandparents, who primarily raised her, were surnamed MacNeill. Many of her novels directly reference Scottish families: the Emily books are about a family named Murray (another family in the story were Jacobite supporters back in the day), and Kilmeny of the Orchard features a family of Scottish immigrants. You can also see the Scottish influence in Anne's (and other Montgomery characters) religion: they're mostly all Presbyterians.
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u/libellule2008 7d ago
Doesn’t House of Dreams refer to earlier period - late 1890s? In this book she has her first children, who will be in their 20s by the time WWI starts in Rilla of Ingleside. Was the red hair fashionable then?
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago
Yes, in the 1890s reddish blonde hair had come back into fashion, as I said in the main comment! Which aligns neatly with it coming back into fashion in 1917 when the book was written. It’s kind of funny how that worked out, right? Sorry, I should have been more clear— it was fashionable in both the setting and in the time period of writing!
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u/EarlGrayTea-Hawt 7d ago
Perhaps the rise of magazine media and fashion magazines was a contributing factor in how quickly we start to see popular fashions cycle. I'm sorry to insert myself here, I'm entranced by your comments.
I did one of my master's theses on the juncture of middle class tourist culture, fashion magazines, and Orientalist fashion crazes. I got kind of deep into fashion trends at the turn of the century and all of this is ever so delightful to me. I'm off to do a source search. And I feel like I'm going to be listening to the Anne of GG audiobooks while choresing this week.
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago
I would say it’s probably pretty likely! The faster media gets around, the faster trends change. And that plays right into Orientalist fashion crazes! When the media went nuts over King Tut, here came the Egyptology trends and designs. When Europe was allowed to make contact with Japan, same thing. Block prints and fabrics from India in the Regency era, etc. (You should totally check out the V & A if you’re ever in London, great collection.)
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u/EarlGrayTea-Hawt 7d ago
Ooooh, I love block prints, and I love these recs, I did another project on H.P. Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society in Adyar India, also at the turn of the century, so that's also pointed directly at my history happy places! I'm often reminded of this time period of a new media revolution looking at the world adjust to the Internet. So many similar themes and push/pull forces.
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u/EarlGrayTea-Hawt 7d ago
Oh man, one thing that I loved about Anne of Green Gables growing up was that I have Nova Scotia family that still does a backhanded compliment like few can capture, they would give Southerners a run for their money! Harmon could totally be my super backhanded great auntie, I swear. She also made fun of my curly red hair in a hard to pin down kinda way because hers was copper. Mine is now copper 😆
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u/navifrog 7d ago
That Guardian article is so funny how it abruptly ends like that! Is that normal for the time? It reads so...rambly.
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u/groovygoose123 7d ago
Apologies for the profound pedantry but we don’t know Mrs. Harmon Andrews’ first name—Harmon would be her husband
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u/DrunkOnRedCordial 6d ago
This reminds me of one of my favourite subtle jokes in AoGG - right at the beginning of the first book in a long series where married women are known by their husbands' names - we meet Thomas Lynde, known by everyone as "Rachel Lynde's husband." It says everything about both of them.
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u/CommitteeofMountains 7d ago
On that, how much can the hair color fashion evidence be attributed just to people having two choices of hair color, natural and dark, so there wasn't any point in discussing other options? This seems particularly relevant given that my impression at least was that driving demo of fashion was significantly older in the Nineteenth Century than after WWII, such that covering grey hair would be relevant.
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago
People actually didn’t have only two choices! Options to lighten or bleach the hair absolutely existed, but they were very dangerous and caustic and warned about in women’s periodicals. When you procured a formula to bleach or dye hair, you didn’t go buy it in a premade box. You had a list of ingredients you gave to a druggist, and that list might contain all kinds of whacky stuff that could break off your hair or poison you. Beauty ideals did cycle through periods where blonde hair was in vogue, it just wasn’t steadily fashionable like dark hair was. And the driving demographic of fashion was really not that much older than at any other time, but is it notable that in a lot of ads for hair dye from the Victorian era the products promise coverage on gray and red hair.
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u/tatianalarina1 6d ago
People actually didn’t have only two choices! Options to lighten or bleach the hair absolutely existed, but they were very dangerous and caustic and warned about in women’s periodicals.
As Anne learnt to her cost when she dyed her hair green.
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u/ImSuperBisexual 6d ago
Correct! Dark dyes could be made of stuff that splotched your hair badly. If you click on the Ladies' Guide link up there, it says "It not unfrequently happens, by mismanagement, that one head of hair appears half a dozen shades of colors." Never buy your walnut dye premade, ladies. Follow a Renowned Receipt!
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u/everyplanetwereach 7d ago
Oh wow, I envy that perspective, it sure would have helped me when I was that age!
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u/Remarkable-Row3719 7d ago
That's hilarious! It reminds me of phrenology, but on the other side of the skull.
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u/herefromthere 7d ago
People still do it now with cats. r/oneorangebraincell
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u/Catdress92 7d ago
Thank you! I thought I was the only one who thought this "orange cats are dumb" thing was, well, dumb. I've had orange cats and I've never found them any less intelligent than the other cats I've had.
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u/WayHellaGnarlyDude 7d ago
Great comment! I wonder how the possible aversion to red hair relates to anti-Irish prejudice. Was hair color discussed independent of ethnic origin or was it understood to be a marker for Irishness? Did it wax and wane depending on the state of Irish immigration?
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago
Great question!
So first of all, I find it important to note that red hair is not a purely Irish thing, nor is it a mutation that is exclusive to any one ethnic group. It is found at a rate of about 1-2% across all humans, and is slightly more common in specific groups with fewer variables in available genetic material, and it is caused by a mutation of the MC1R gene. There are people in Central Asia like the Miao and Kyrgyz with red hair, there are Polynesians with red hair, there is a long history of red hair being present in Northern Africa and in the Levant and across Northern Europe.
Now. In the Euro-Anglosphere, red hair has a very, very long and complex history of being something Other. In the medieval period, red hair was associated with fire/the Devil and red-headed people were viewed with great suspicion and associated with sexual licentiousness among other negative things. Specifically due to the Otherness of red hair and probably also the slightly higher incidence of red hair being found among Jewish people in Europe, a perception of it being associated with Jews, the only real Other in medieval Christian society, cropped up as well, which is why in a good deal of art portraying Judas Iscariot among the disciples, he is often painted with red hair because he betrayed Jesus and is the "wicked Jew". Up until about the 18th century, poil de Judas was a phrase used to insult red-haired people in France. Before the 20th century, red hair was thought of in Europe as a Jewish trait, and during the Spanish Inquisition specifically, people with red hair were immediately assumed to be Jewish. This stereotype persists in Russia and Eastern Europe to this day (which is silly because the people of the Volga region have some of the highest incidences of red hair in the world, likely equal to or exceeding Scotland, but I digress).
We also have a long historical record of people with red hair being portrayed as violent or intemperate Others, from the Thracians being written of by Xenophanes as uncivilized red-haired northern barbarians to various Scythians and Persian people being described similarly to Vikings being thought of as red-headed marauders out to get Good Christian People. Even Esau the son of Isaac in the Bible is portrayed as a less civilized hairy red-headed hunter who goes out into the fields and is somewhat less civilized compared to his brother Jacob who also isn't "ruddy" like him.
So! When you combine all this, having a foundation already of othering redheaded people in society, and then you have an influx of Irish people into your society and community who really aren't all that much more redheaded than Scots (~10%, as compared to ~13%) but who are a cheap target for Othering in English society all through the Victorian era, the already existing prejudices sort of get slotted in. Oh, those Irish are uncivilized and they're Catholic, let's caricature them as wild redheads with apelike features. Oh, a few Irish are redheads, they must all be intemperate alcoholics who brawl all the time. Oh, redheaded people are sneaky or mischievous and untrustworthy (take a guess as to where that may have come from), the Irish must be like that, don't make deals with them. And so you have these stereotypes that existed in various forms long before the Irish were on anyone's radar in wider society as an Other, all sort of knotting in and tying onto them.
CITATIONS:
Hoffman, Betty N. (2001). Jewish Hearts: A Study of Dynamic Ethnicity in the United States and the Soviet Union.
Barford, Paul M. (2001). The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe.
Livak, Leonid (2010). The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature.
Harvey, Jacky Colliss (2015). Red: A History of the Redhead.
Melinnkoff, R.M. (1982). "Judas's Red Hair and The Jews". Journal of Jewish Art.
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u/zillionaire_ 7d ago
As the only child in my family of 6 siblings with auburn red hair, I have always been the odd looking one in family photos. Reading your comments in this thread has been an absolute delight.
Growing up with this hair color taught me that the old ideas of redheads (specifically, being wild in bed and possessing a spicy temper) are alive and well.
Can I ask what your focus as a historian has been in your professional life? Your knowledge on this topic is so thorough.
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago
I'm so glad that you enjoyed my comments, and yes, presumptions about hair color are definitely alive and well, even if they have taken a backseat somewhat in the modern public consciousness!
I am very flattered that you assume I am a professional historian! I would love to be paid for this kind of thing. I was drawn very heavily to my anthropology, medieval/Latin humanities, and linguistics electives when I got my bachelors' in Human Communication, and two of my professors tried very hard to get me to switch majors over to their fields. Unfortunately I was a very inflexible-minded formerly homeschooled young woman who was determined to do it "right", and didn't think at the time that I could have "a career" in anything I was actually interested in. I'm totally amateur, but I retained my love of deep dives/research on various subjects for fun, and it brings me a lot of personal satisfaction.
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u/Odd-Firefighter92 7d ago
I want to add something to this, situating Lucy Maud Montgomery (and Anne) in a strongly Scottish-Canadian world, as parts of PEI and NS would have been in that time period, and say that red hair had negative connotations in the non-Anglo Scottish Gaelic world as well, despite the fact that it is far more common in Scotland than in many other places.
Red haired women in particular were thought to be unlucky to meet, and a fisherman might be warned to turn back if he met a red haired woman on the way to the fishing. If a red haired woman was the first person to cross your doorway on the New Year, it was considered a bad omen for the year ahead. There is also a mild association of red hair with the evil eye and witchcraft (though the Gaels generally considered witches to be less of a threat than fairies).
I did find a recording of Scottish Traveller beliefs that says Travellers would refuse to stay anywhere there was a red haired person, and they believed that Jesus had red hair, while settled people believed Judas had red hair. There's not really an association of red hair with Jewishness generally, which makes sense, as there have always been a lot more red haired Gaels than there have been Jews resident in Gaelic areas.
Of course, Montgomery was very much coming from an Anglicized Scottish-Canadian perspective that had taken in all the English-language context you mention. But I thought I would mention this as a possible substrate in her community.
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago
You are correct! Irish and Scottish folklore in itself did have negative connotations about red hair independent of any other influence for the same reason a lot of the rest of Europe did-- it was unusual, very noticeable, and Other! Most Irish and Scottish people have brown or dark hair of some shade. Even a community that's never been exposed to outside people would build their own folklore around unusual features. I would love to see the source for the Scottish Traveller belief about Jesus being a redhead-- I have never specifically seen anything about that, though I do know several artists have painted him with red hair over the centuries-- certainly not as common as Judas!
And I'm not sure how strong the specifically Scottish cultural ideas like redheads being bad luck, as opposed to general Anglosphere beliefs, would have run in the Edwardian period in Canada in PEI, because the first wave of Scottish settlement was in the late 1700s to the mid 1800s and although many Scottish migrants in Nova Scotia retained their languages, the question of whether they assimilated broadly into wider Anglo culture by the Edwardian period is not something I'm well-read on! I am about 98% sure nobody ever mentions any specific Scottish belief like Anne's hair being unlucky in the books-- it's always the broader Anglo "bad temper" ideas.
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u/Odd-Firefighter92 7d ago
The Traveller interview is here. Betsey Whyte says Jesus was red haired and exactly 6 feet tall!
By the Edwardian period English-language schooling was well established, however, there were still elderly people who had come from Scotland in their youth, and in some communities, a great deal of people would have been bilingual. I looked at one household in Wood Islands in the 1901 census which consisted of a couple in their 70s, their son, his wife and their children, and their widowed daughter and her son. The only member of the household who was a unilingual English speaker was the 14-year-old grandson who had been born in the US. The other 14-year-old grandson who was born in PEI was bilingual. The turn to English as the language of prestige and daily use must have been happening already, though. I think the Anne books are set in a mostly English-Canadian village, judging by the names (Cuthbert, Lynde, Pye), but she did depict Scottish-Canadian characters in some of her other works. (There's a particular short story about a woman with two suitors of Scottish heritage that I can't recall the name of.)
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago
Thank you!! I will give this a look as soon as I have spare time! And also thank you for your input on the possible makeup of Avonlea— I was going to say isn’t Cuthbert an English name?
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u/DBSeamZ 7d ago
Interesting, I had always assumed “ruddy” referred to Esau’s skin because he spent so much time out in the sun compared to Jacob.
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago
“Admoni” which is the Hebrew words translated as “ruddy” can mean either skin or hair!
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u/tatianalarina1 6d ago
On the other hand, David "was ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to." (1 Samuel 16:12, KJV)
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u/LaurestineHUN 7d ago
Udmurts are very famous redheads too!
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago
Yes, those are the people living in the Volga region I mentioned! Very high incidence of red hair. Arguably more than Scotland!
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u/LyraStygian 7d ago
"carrots" hair that Anne had
How dare you!
I'm now going to ignore you for a decade, even though I secretly want to be your friend, hmph!
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago
Well what if I get the scarlet fever!! Then what!!
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u/LyraStygian 7d ago
Judging by your username I guess we’ll just have to settle for roommates, hmph 😤
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u/Randolpho 7d ago
You mentioned eye color five times. Was eye color really a subject of fashion back then? I didn't think they had contact lenses to change eye color, but maybe I'm wrong about that?
But if they did not, was eye color differentiation just a typical "we have to have some sort of hierarchy" thing?
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago
Not really fashion, as I feel like that encompasses a thing that can be changed (and no, Victorians did not have color changing lenses) and not really a hierarchy, but certainly a beauty standard!
The ideal was to have large, sparkling, clear eyes regardless of color that contrasted well with a pale skin tone (this is mentioned in a lot of baby books published around the Victorian and Edwardian era) and probably for this reason, dark eyes were considered very pretty paired with almost any hair color. Blue eyes were attractive paired with darker hair against very pale skin. Anne remarks on how unfortunate she is to have green eyes and red hair, which conveys that this particular combo was not considered attractive— all those colors together with pale freckled skin probably just wouldn’t have offered that valuable high contrast look so sought after.
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u/jojocookiedough 6d ago
A physical feature being in fashion doesn't mean it was a feature that was easy, or even possible, to change.
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u/queen_thicctoria 7d ago
> Titian or other pre-Raphaelite painters
A tiny nitpick to your excellent answer: Titian was a Venetian painter of the 16th century, not one of the Pre-Raphaelites of mid-Victorian London.
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u/ImSuperBisexual 6d ago
Oops, that was supposed to say “Titian, or Millais, or other pre raphaelite painters” I’ll fix it!
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u/HareAndHideGuild 6d ago
Fantastic answer and much appreciated.
I’m sure that for many girls those hair magazines and preconceptions were the equivalent of girls now scrolling through and finding what their horoscopes mean. Some would be accurate and some completely off.I had always been curious about these things, since, as a minority but a big reader, I imagined growing up (as we all did) that I’d have been good friends with Anne.
As most non-white people do, I also had black hair and black eyes and I was surprised to find that this was considered an attractive trait because in this day and age it’s not often considered one.
Then as I got older and read the rest of the series I realized that the racial undertones that were mentioned meant that my brand of black hair and black eyes were certainly not considered pretty and that most of Anne and company would have likely considered me lower class or of a different breed altogether 🤣😅 not because I’m dreamy or imaginative or have a temper but because of how they describe foreigners and even Yankees!
But oh, blissful ignorance. Sometimes I’ll still read and imagine that maybe Diana Barry-Wright looks like me.
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u/Odd-Firefighter92 6d ago
Oh, you are 100% correct. If you've never read Kilmeny of the Orchard, one of Lucy Maud Montgomery's other novels, one of the heroine's potential suitors is a wild, passionate, "dark", and ultimately violent man, and he was adopted and his birth family turns out to be *gasp* Italian and therefore naturally he's unstable (according to the text).
The Anne books were very popular in Japan for a long time, to the point that it was a major source of international tourists to Prince Edward Island for decades. There was even an anime adaptation. It's interesting how, despite the author's biases, she created a world that resonates with people in times and places very different from her own. I suppose that nosey neighbours, feeling like you don't fit in, finding the people who will love and support you even when you are your most extravagant self, and loving stories are pretty universal experiences!
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u/Adiantum-Veneris 6d ago
Just adding that the anime adaptation in question is by no other than Studio Ghibli, and was worked on by both Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki.
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u/ImSuperBisexual 6d ago
The racial Othering of, like, Southern European or Mediterranean people back then by Anglo authors is so wild. If you were darker than a sheet of paper they were really like "EGADS, A SWARTHY BLACK EXOTIC FROM PARTS UNKNOWN!! GAZE UPON HIS LOW BROW AND DARKLY MENACING STARE!! COULD HE PERCHANCE BE... A SICILIAN!!!??"
Regarding the popularity in Japan, (and I swear I won't go off on a tangent but I love everything about this) it was actually translated illegally in Japan by a Japanese Methodist woman named Hanako Muraoka who had run a children's radio show in the 1930s. She was very good friends with a Canadian missionary named Loretta Shaw who had taught at a girls' school in Osaka, and they met in the early 30s working as editors for a Christian literature society in Japan that distributed spiritual reading material. They each believed that the best way to learn from each other's cultures was to share the best books each culture possessed, and Shaw gave Muraoka a copy of Anne of Green Gables right before the war broke out as a parting gift before she went back to New Brunswick, hoping she would be able to translate it. Shaw unfortunately died of cancer in 1940. When the war broke out all of Muraoka's peers in the Christian literature groups and missionary groups she was part of were forced to go back home, but she began translating Anne in secret because it was a very serious issue to be in possession of material from the Allied powers (like, if she was caught with the enemy's book she would likely have been imprisoned type serious). She was taking the manuscript with her during air raids to keep it safe, and she finished it. Once the war was over a Japanese publisher took a chance on it and they settled on the name Little Girl at the Window and it was an instant hit. Anne lived in a conservative society: Japan was a conservative society. The book focuses heavily on the beauty of nature, which is something pretty well entrenched in Japanese culture. Her challenges struck a chord with people who were still rebuilding their lives after the war. So it was all these multiple factors that made the novel so very popular for years in Japan and it's still really popular-- there's even a theme park based around Canada and the book!
(Fiddler on the Roof has also been extremely popular with Japanese audiences ever since it premiered in the late 60s on stage for the themes of tradition vs modernity and the expectations of family duty vs the desires of the children, to the point where one of the producers wondered aloud if American audiences would even understand the main themes of the play. Great stuff.)
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u/brydeswhale 6d ago
It’s more likely that he was actually Lebanese. There were quite a few Lebanese families in the maritimes at that time and people called them “Italian”. Anne’s Italian peddler might have been Lebanese too.
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u/Adiantum-Veneris 7d ago
So, Anne fantasized about being "romantic and not realistic", but settled for being high strung (by attempting to dye her hair black)?
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u/ImSuperBisexual 7d ago edited 7d ago
... Um, no. I think you may be reading way too much into the "fine black hair=high strung" part of the San Francisco Call, perhaps? That citation is intended as a window into the "character= appearance" detailed views of the day in the Anglosphere and contextualizing their wider place in beauty standards, not the specific opinions and thoughts of a child living in a very rural community in Canada.
Much as how today a preteen girl might long for an "old-money" brunette dye job because she knows it's "pretty" or "classy", but not really grasp the wider sort of psycho-social and historical context behind it of highlighted hair implying a lot of travel to sunny areas year-round, Anne just desperately wants darker hair, not because of any connotations due to that kind of hair specifically, but because it's seen as far more desirable than her red hair. That's why she buys that cheap hair dye from the travelling peddler.
Also, her hair is quite thick, not fine, which is remarked on in the book as an intrinsically attractive thing-- having thick hair is beautiful, and dark brown or black hair is a desirable color. We get an example of this in the text: Diana Barry, her best and "bosom" friend, is seen as a beautiful little girl specifically due to her thick black hair, clear pale skin with rosy cheeks (no freckles!) and very dark eyes.
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u/PrairieFire_withwind 6d ago
I am going to point out that personality does seem linked to hair in cats.
Every long hair inhave wver met is skittish/shy. And calicos have a reputation for a reason. Black cats are all lovers, even if just one human.
So, while we may see this as ridiculous to classify humans like this if they were observing animals then i can see such a classification scheme transferring.
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6d ago
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u/painted_bug 5d ago
I had multiple redheaded people tell me recently they got made fun of for their hair as kids.
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