Imagining Spectral Beings in Anne of Green Gables

Confronting an urgent need to reconsider the nature of human influence in the current era of climate crisis, this article reexamines Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908), through the lens of posthuman ecology. With scant attention given to its posthuman aspects, this article seeks to address the gap by reading Anne of Green Gables alongside Timothy Morton’s ecological concept of spectrality proposed in Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (2017) and Edward Casey and Michael Marder’s phenomenological understanding of plants as outlined in Plants in Place: a Phenomenology of the Vegetal (2023). Anne’s storytelling communicates spectrality to suggest an elevated solidarity between Avonlea and the more-than-human world. This article thus aims to demonstrate how this storytelling renegotiates the boundaries of Avonlea beyond human dimensions. Anne’s perception of more-than-human beauty reshapes Avonlea into an amorphous place where a mutual becoming of lifeforms is an ever-emergent event.