Pilgrimage to the Land of Anne (Prince Edward Island)

By Mike Snow

Green Gables, PEI National Park

Canada's Prince Edward Island has no Eiffel tower, Empire State Building, or Big Ben to help attract tourists. But its own home grown literary phenomena, Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, stands as an invisible beacon that lures visitors in droves from all over the world.

P.E.I.'s capital, Charlottetown, is where the Fathers of the Confederation conceived Canada in 1864. But, according to recent statistics, roughly 30 percent more visitors go to Green Gables, where Anne Shirley, the book's heroine, supposedly grew up, than those who pay patriotic homage to the Fathers at their historic meeting place, Province House.

There are no billboards or other trashy forms of advertising on this green island of endless farmhouses, pastoral settings and an occasional lighthouse, rimmed by blue coves and a red shoreline that glows orange in the evening light. But the striking surroundings as well as the island's role as one of the world's leading exporters of seed potatoes are overshadowed by Anne, a fictional 11-year-old chatterbox with a penchant for big words and complicated sentences who was the brainstorm of Ms. Montgomery.

Jenna MacMillan as Anne of Green Gables

Montgomery's 1908 story of a lovable adolescent girl's search for independence from the adult world won the author an international reputation, underscored in seven later novels that described Anne's career and marriage. Montgomery based her character on her childhood experiences caring for her ill grandmother on P.E.I, where she worked as teacher and wrote short stories and poems for children's magazines. The Green Gables farmhouse at Cavendish, believed to be the scene of Montgomery's famous novel, is now a national museum.

The local fixation with Anne becomes apparent as soon as we set foot in Charlottetown, where every fourth or fifth car features license plates embossed with the girl's toothy countenance and trademark red braids. For the past 33, years, "Anne of Green Gables – the Musical," has been a hot ticket at the Charlottetown Confederation Center, the favorite hang out of 14-year-old Anne-look-alike, Jenna McMillan, who shows up prior to performances to pose for pictures and sign autographs – as Anne of Green Gables, of course – particularly to the delight of the Japanese. (More on that later).

One need venture no further than the IGA food store to find Anne of Green Gables Chips and raspberry cordial, two of the countless Anne products sold on the island. Souvenir central for all-things-Anne is actually a couple of blocks away at the Anne of Green Gables Store, where Anne-enthusiasts can load up on everything from Anne of Green Gables Dolls to Anne of Green Gables Mouse Pads. They can dine at the Bright River Cafe, tee off at the Anne of Green Gables Golf Course, stay at the Anne Shirley Bed & Breakfast, snack at Marilla's Pizza and shop Matthew's Mart – all named after people or places from the novel.

Residents of the island look upon the Anne phenomena with mixed feelings. Some are frankly sick and tired of the make believe young girl. One store posted a sign declaring itself 95 percent Anne free. And a satirical musical – Annekenstein – played five years to the acclaim of local audiences before finally closing in 1997.

"Some people see all the commercialism and go ahhhhg!!!!" said Mary Fisher, a graduate student who works as a part-time waitress at the Lucy Maud Dining Room. "But most of us appreciate that the tourism it attracts has been pretty good for the economy."

Province House in Charlottetown

Charlottetown is only the first stop for most visitors. The 30-minute drive to Cavendish (Avonlea), the setting for the novel, takes Annaphiles past endless purple lupines and lush forests where, as Montgomery put it, "the greenness of everything is something to steep your soul in." The biggest drawing card in Anne Land is the refurbished Green Gables House and barn that served as the main setting for the novel. Now part of Prince Edward Island National Park, the two-story house features turn-of-the-century furnishings and roped off sections that supposedly include Anne's room along with the rooms of Marilla and Matthew, the novel's elderly brother and sister who adopted the young orphan girl. Fans can wander through Blossom Hollow, Lover's Lane and Haunted Woods, all patterned after the fictionalized trails in the Anne books. And many stop by the grave of Montgomery, dead for 57 years, who because of the difficulty of separating fiction from reality has become something of a cult figure herself.

Also on the must-see list are various homes throughout the island once occupied by Ms. Montgomery, including the house where she was born, the house of her cousins, the house that she lived in briefly when she worked as a teacher, and the house where she was married.

Montgomery's great grandson, George Campbell, 50, owns the latter house, now a museum that doubles as a wedding mill. Campbell organizes marriages there that are patterned precisely after Lucy's Maud's own wedding. His four-hour, "deluxe package" includes limousine transportation from Charlottetown followed by a 15-minute ceremony conducted by United Church of Canada Minister Chess Boutilier in the parlor where Lucy Maud actually got married. Even the music – "the Voice of the Breathed O'er Eden" -is the same, played on the organ by Campbell's wife, Maureen, with vocalization by Sandy Clark, a local music teacher and part-time museum gardener. Another museum hired hand, Clifford Donald, 60, plays Matthew, who together with an Anne look-alike attends a reception that includes a pound cake exactly like the one enjoyed by Lucy Maud and her groom. Afterward, pictures are taken of the newlyweds before Matthew ushers them into a vintage 1905 two-seater buckboard horse-drawn buggy for a ride around the Lake of Shining Waters. Maureen Campbell provides the recipe for the pound cake to those who ask for it.

Although a "North American Package" is available, roughly 95 percent of Campbell's business comes from the Japanese. "Most of them aren't even Christian but they don't seem to mind the minister, I guess partly because many are already married and are simply restating their vows," Campbell said. "Ninety-nine percent of the time it's the woman's idea to do this, although a couple of years ago we had a 350 pound sumo wrestling champion from Osaka who talked his bride into getting married here. He had read every one of Lucy Maud's books."

Not all visitors are enthralled by their journey to the Land of Anne, especially non-Japanese males. "You mean I drove a thousand miles just for this?" complained one disgruntled Canadian man after coughing up his entry fee then strolling unimpressed through the Anne of Green Gables House with his wife. For many visitors, however, the pilgrimage to Prince Edward Island is a moving experience. "You see quite a few people just break down and cry when they get here," said one ranger at Green Gables, who noted that most of those who emote are from Japan. Many Japanese visitors seek autographs from Jenna McMillan and other local red- headed girls. Some request pictures with them and offer to buy locks of their hair. A few even smuggle out soil samples. Tsutomu and Harumi Iwasaki weren't content with a mere bag of dirt. After making the pilgrimage to P.E.I. last year, the couple plunked down $375,000 to import to their suburban Tokyo neighborhood a pre-fabricated Anne of Green Gables house they now call "House of Red Haired Anne." During the past year, Atlantic Canada Home, based on P.E.I., has sold 20 of the distinctive A-frame Anne homes to Japanese couples. The homes are made to look just like Green Gables, except for extra space for storing shoes (not worn inside Japanese home) and bathroom sliding doors.

The Japanese and P.E.I.

Why do the Japanese so revere Anne of Green Gables? The Japanese, who must travel 20 hours from halfway around the world just to get to this island of 130,000 as opposed to say, the Poles or the Swedes? (The Poles and Swedes, it turns out, are Anne freaks, too, but on P.E.I. Japanese visitors are definitely the big Kahuna). This is the kind of weighty issue ripe for intellectual discussion at the M.L. Montgomery Symposium, which annually attracts scholars from all over the world to Charlottetown to analyze Anne of Green Gables and a couple of dozen other similarly themed Montgomery books (A Canadian professor recently wrote a paper postulating that Montgomery was gay based on analysis of Anne's platonic friendship with another fictional 11-year-old in the book, Diana). The short answer, gleaned from discussions with tourism officials, Japanese visitors and would-be intellectuals, is that it's much cheaper for a Japanese couple to marry elsewhere simply because in Japan they would probably be expected to pay the travel and hotel expenses of their guests. So many from the Land of the Rising Sun decide to tie the knot in exotic settings such as castles in France or Ireland. But P.E.I. is by far their favorite destination spot for nuptials.

That's because the island manages to incorporate a number of qualities for which people from Japan happen to be particularly fond. Among these is Japanese fascination with things that are clearly non-Japanese, a characteristic that Anne (and her red hair) shares with other favorites such as Peter Rabbit and Audrey Hepburn. Add to the mix the traditional Japanese love of nature and beautiful scenery, devotion to innocence, ready identification with underdogs, appetite for those who are frank and spontaneous (in contrast to the repressive nature of Japanese society), and simple nostalgia.

Anne of Green Gables appeared in Japanese schools after World War II and ever since has been the subject of countless Japanese television shows, clubs, cartoons, and comic books. Her popularity is so great there that in 1992 the readers of a Japanese travel magazine listed Paris, London, New York, and Prince Edward Island as the places they most wanted to visit.

The Japanese fascination with Anne has not been lost on owners of P.E.I.'s Delta Hotel, where tourist brochures tout everything from special Anne dinners that include "enjoyable" time with "ANNE'" to exclusive Anne wedding packages (about 70 are sold each year) promoted by a staff that includes a surprisingly large number of Japanese employees. Elsewhere throughout the island Japanese script can be seen on signs and in restaurant advertisements, in guest books at bed & breakfasts and at various Anne sites.

Mike Snow is a Washington based journalist who contributes to top media markets including the Washington Post.