More Life

In the telescopic view of nostalgia, I think people forget that for all the Anne series’ ambient lesbian vibes, it isn’t actually very gay. Everything is ‘sort-of, not-quite’. Even considered purely as romantic friendships, Anne’s homosocial relations yield more of an ‘oh’ feeling than any sense of satiation. 

The problem isn’t actually that these relationships don’t come to any kind of fruition. Let me talk you through an example. I’ve seen twitter people celebrating how, in the first book, Anne was heartbroken about the prospect of Diana marrying. That was indeed an emotionally intense moment! But the book eases away from this position quietly, ‘naturally’. Worse still, even at the height of Anne’s passion, Diana herself is never that well characterised. She is mostly just A Girl, who Anne decides to fancy: a decent person who serves as a suitable recipient of Anne’s need to have a girlfriend. (Try to sustain a description of Diana Berry's personality for three to five sentences. I can't actually do it?) To be sure, many male characters in literature are pure 🧍‍♂️. But that sort of thing is hardly the stuff my romantic dreams are made of? I also saw someone enthusiastically recalling the interlude where Diana wanted to play a prince as though it was a hot moment of queer self-discovery. In the text, this is the most Nothing sentence/scene ever around: the least cathected thing imaginable. You have to wildly misunderstand and decontextualise this passing comment to make anything of it.

The way Anne wants Diana to be something for her seems to mirror the way queer women want these texts to be something for them. Both Anne and readers do find what they’re looking for, but largely because they are looking for it. That's not bad, but it’s also not a reading of Diana, or of the text, so much as “A Mirror for Princes(ses).” And can you meaningfully love a thing you don’t wish to actually know? Can you ‘love’ a surface on which you’re projecting your own wishes?

‘Queerness’ in Anne (especially in terms of her most celebrated ‘partner’, Diana) is a solipsistic experience rather than something pertaining to relationships, or even, meaningfully, to other people. Aisha and Jade both feel like this is a fair treatment of childhood crushes, which are often “pure Gaze/Aspiration/Longing that has little to do with the object of it”, as Aisha puts it. Jade remarks the she doesn’t “remember my first boyfriends, they were just there to be loved by me. They had no personality, I wanted to be in love and be dramatic.” I see mature romantic engagement as substantively different from these common developmental drives, however. Yet Anne’s model of queerness is the dreaded ‘phase you grow out of’.

I’m not saying there’s no sympathetic resonance for queer readers to pick up on or material for them to work with, here. Anne’s intense, Sapphic gaze is intriguing. This gaze persists even after Anne’s ‘safe arrival’ in a heterosexual marriage. But that gaze rarely settles on a given figure or figures in a way that's toothsome. And Anne has so many low-burning flames—the very unfocused multiplicity of these being, perhaps, part of the problem in terms of why I find this series’ gestures at lesbianism so chimerical. She hath every week a new sworn sister. The Anne series almost acquires the texture of a female-fronted stallion novel. Some female characters just fade to absolutely nothing, in the rout. What can I even say about Stella, who lives with Anne throughout university? She gets a few sentences of description, and then she's just, Stella: The Girl Who Was Around. Phil emerges as the female ‘love interest' of the college books, but even she and Anne aren't really affecting and changing each other in the dynamic way I want to see invested romantic partners do. 

In “Windy Poplars”, Catharine, the Miss Hardbroom of the series, casually announces things like “not that I want a lover, I hate men.” We know, Catharine. Anne mentions that she’s glad then-Katherine spells her name with a K, because (basically) K is a sexier letter than C. Catharine promptly re-Christens herself accordingly. Her whole tsundere “Anne, u ever experience clinical depression?” schtick also draws her close to the main character, who at one point threatens to spank her sulky colleague. But then Anne charms her, as Anne always manages to, and we get Catherine coyly cooing that when she goes to bed, she’ll feel wretched for having let Anne see her shimmering soul. (Gay marriage, Catherine: look into it.) Arguably there’s also an ‘only one bed’ (prepared for them by elder lesbians) trope. Catharine also mentions having learned to dance because a maid in her uncle’s house wanted to dance in the kitchen—so is Anne even Catharine’s first girlfriend? 

After Catherine, Anne moves on to marriage and to Leslie. This substantial infatuation ends in the resolution of Leslie’s desperately unhappy heterosexual marriage, which is supplanted by a new and probably considerably happier heterosexual union. “House of Dreams” is a more serious, ‘literary’ novel than its predecessors in some ways, and Anne’s compulsive fascination with Leslie could be read in that unsexualised light. (Except for how Leslie has like, easily ten predecessors.) 

In summation, I think there are two vectors of queerness in the Anne series: 

1. a subject-erasing, projective childhood model that is realistic but decidedly unromantic, and
2. an intense, persistent interest in and gaze upon other women, which gives rise to a series of charged friendships.

But neither mode is capable of generating a realised romantic inter-relation (or even, in my estimation, a friendship that asks much of Anne and shapes her life). Anne will do any material favour for a friend—but afterwards, we’ll never see these passions shaping her by so much as a degree.