#except for gen ill always come back to gen my beloved

[stinkrascal]

todays posts r kinda boring but listen LISTEN starting tomorrow things will get interesting just u fuckin wait....... just u WAIT............

[elegantmess-southernbelle]

Anne with an E: PTSD and YA fiction

This is the age of the Adaptation. The Epoch of the Update.

From movies that resurrect and rework our childhood superheroes, to YouTube channels that modernize our favorite classic novels, we live in an age where the old is being plucked out of the attics of dull documentaries and stodgy classrooms and polished into near-hipster-ish coolness and glamour. Some of my fellow classics fans are appalled. I, however, have fallen in love with shows like Elementary, the Autobiography of Jane Eyre, and now, CBC’s Anne.

Here in the US, the show is “Anne with An E” and premiered only about a week before this posting on Netflix. It’s a short watch so far, 7 episodes, about an hour long, starring Irish-Canadian actress Amybeth McNulty as the plucky, ginger heroine steadily blooming from awkward adolescence to (hopefully, unless the show gets cancelled) wise womanhood. It’s already stirred up some controversy, namely from magazines like Vox, America-The Jesuit Review, and the Federalist, stemming from the distinctly 21st century attitudes of the writing. Many journalists seem horrified by the frank discussions of such troubles as child abuse, bullying and even puberty and sexuality. Accusations have been levied of trying too hard to update a charming and upbeat YA novel from another century.

But, maybe, it’s time for that.

First, let’s talk about the source material.

Published in 1908, Anne of Green Gables was written by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery. It’s a largely optimistic tale of an orphan, Anne Shirley, who has been bounced back and forth between orphanage and unsuitable foster home for much of her life. Due to a miscommunication worthy of Oscar Wilde, she’s delivered to the aging Cuthbert Siblings, gentle Matthew and stern Marilla, who had requested a boy to help with farm work. Despite such a rocky start, the dreamy eyed Anne wins them over and comes to stay. The rest of the book and indeed five other novels focus on her upbringing and eventual marriage and life as a wife and mother. Much humor and wisdom is derived from her clumsiness, her fanciful imagination and her streak of common sense and courage. She isn’t afraid to be smart, or to daydream and become swept away by fantasies, which gets her into a fair amount of scrapes. She’s a reader. She’s kind. She’s good with kids. And, tellingly, she’s one of the earliest examples of the frequently problematic but oft-loved trope, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

Like a Zooey Deschanel role or a Woody Allen heroine, Anne blows into the Cuthberts’ lives like a gale and shakes up their stoic and gloomy existence. She drives Marilla to distraction with her endless chatter and her wild stories, but utterly charms Matthew and nearly everyone else she meets. She even, briefly, has the dyed hair, albeit by accident. This being a time when hair dye was more likely to be sold by peddlers of varying scruples, her dreams of having elegant black hair are dashed when her red hair goes green and must be cropped off to save her reputation. The days of oil slicks and mermaid rainbows might have been a godsend to her, but we would never have gotten one of the best role models for redheads in YA fiction.

But, there has always been an unspoken undercurrent to the story, one that needs to be told. We live in an age where mental illness is no longer a taboo we can lock in the attic or attribute to mere playful notions of romance. It’s mentioned from time to time, that Anne was never more than a servant to the families that took her in. The Cuthberts are the first people to show her affection or kindness. True, she seems to only think of pretty frocks now that she isn’t in hand-me-downs or having a more romantic name than Anne (Cordelia is a reoccurring name, one that appropriately means “heart of a lion”). But, what kind of trauma must come from never having any family except one that uses you as free labor? It’s not uncommon, even in today’s world, where we supposedly have laws that keep us from making the young work when they could be studying. Of all the adaptations of the Anne books, including the scrumptious and beloved 1985 TV Movie starring Megan Follows, this is the first one to really have any eye on Anne’s mental health.

For starters, there are flashbacks to Anne’s days with the Hammonds. Mr. Hammond is an alcoholic, who abuses his wife and probably the rest of the family. Mrs. Hammond is an overworked mother of eight, who takes her frustrations out on Anne. Anne, for her part, is beaten, forced to cook and clean and tend to babies, until the death of Mr. Hammond, when she is unceremoniously shipped back to the orphanage. After all, as Mrs. Hammond coldly points out, she’s “not kin” and the family is moving in with other relatives. There’s hints that this isn’t the first time Anne’s been rejected either. Orphanages in those days were little better than a storage facility for unwanted children, with little quality of life or education. Anne’s first day of school is miserable, as she’s woefully behind in some subjects.

Her arrival at Green Gables begins with her meeting with Matthew. True to the novel, she talks a steady stream of heartfelt poetry, renaming the landscape with epithets that wouldn’t be out-of-place in a fairy tale. Matthew is utterly enchanted by her, which makes Marilla’s cold, shocked and horrified reception that much harder on her. Marilla points out that they wanted a boy, not a girl. Anne is so devastated, she falls to her knees. I can’t say I blame her. It’s not presented as the melodramatic act that the novel shows. It’s genuine defeat and misery that she can’t just bottle up. There’s a hint that she believed this was going to be the forever home she always wanted.

You see, this show is written with a clear eye for the effects of PTSD. Anne has never been shown any love. Her whole life, she’s been bullied, whether for her creative mind or simply because she was there and made a “good target”. Anne knows what love looks like, because it’s the opposite of everything she’s ever experienced. When Marilla, spurred on by the suspicions and gossip of others believes Anne to have stolen a treasured brooch, Anne lies just to be allowed to stay, only to be nearly shipped back to the orphanage. Even after Marilla accepts the truth and the Cuthberts welcome her and, symbolically, all her odd little ideas and ideals, she is so painfully eager to please that she often comes out clear on the other side. Her desperation to befriend the school bully starts a scandal when she lets it slip that she knows a bit about sex after overhearing the Hammonds. No-one apart from Matthew and Marilla seem to care that it isn’t her fault. She’s only seen as a bad influence and banished for a time from the company of other girls. If not for her bravery, quick thinking, and insatiable literacy during a fire, she might have been alone for good.

It’s also the catalyst for one of the most iconic scenes in the novel, as it translates on screen. In the novel, classmate Gilbert Blythe tugs Anne’s hair and calls her Carrots. In a fit of temper, Anne shouts him down and cracks him over the head with her slate. In this adaptation, the reasoning is expanded. Ruby, one of the other girls in class, has a huge crush on Gilbert. By their social laws, that means he’s Ruby’s and no other girl can associate with him, lest it be seen as flirting. Anne immediately decides that this means she can’t talk to him at all. However, Gilbert finds Anne too intriguing to leave alone. He fights for her attention and her reaction is less one of hate for drawing attention to her appearance and more one of fear. She doesn’t want to be shunned again, so she lashes out in alarm. It’s an act that some with PTSD might recognize, the act of overcompensating in stressful moments.

There are other changes made, characters, personalities, plot points, but the main change is the darkness of the story. This is the world according to Anne. It’s frequently terrifying, ugly and often cruel, but there is love and hope. Each episode, we can see a bit of the healing in Anne’s heart. Every kindred spirit she finds, every triumph, and every lesson fills in the cracks, taking her from a half-wild and extremely broken girl, to one who can stand on her own two feet. Her eccentricities aren’t idleness and flightiness as the early 20th century saw them, but coping mechanisms that protected her from collapsing. Her reflection in the mirror is her dearest confidante. She names and speaks to animals and trees. Frequently, she chooses to be another person in a fairy tale of her own making, the wise and beautiful Princess Cordelia. When she can’t have the beautiful gowns and hats she’s longed for, she picks wildflower crowns and drapes herself in a lace bedspread. These aren’t perfect, but, as anyone with a mental illness will tell you, coping methods rarely make sense to anyone else and are frequently inconvenient.

My point is this: Anne with An E is the kind of show that a lot of young people need these days. The times are such that we can’t lock mental illness up in an attic or dress it up and call it whimsy. We live in an age where we know more about the human mind and how to treat it, but we still have so much social stigma to break. So, maybe, with this interpretation of Anne– not a rewrite, but a retelling– we can show that this has always been here and that none of it makes the sufferer any less amazing or lovable. It’s a needful message for Millennials and Gen Y’s. “You can be loved, no matter where you wear your scars.” Anne is, as the theme song states, “ahead by a century” and maybe, secretly, she always was.