SOURCE: Drain, Susan. “Community and the Individual in Anne of Green Gables: The Meaning of Belonging.” In Such a Simple Little Tale: Critical Responses to L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, edited by Mavis Reimer, pp. 119-30. Metuchen, N.J.: Children's Literature Association and Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1992.

In the following essay, Drain discusses the pattern in Anne of Green Gables of a person becoming part of a community in order to successfully individuate and withdraw from it when necessary.

Finding one's rightful place in the social fabric is part of the challenge of growing up, and as such, it is an important focus of many books for and about children. An entire tradition of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “orphan tales” is explicitly concerned with the problem of identifying and occupying that rightful place. In books like The Wide, Wide World (1850), Elsie Dinsmore (1867), and Pollyanna (1913), an orphaned or...