Anne of Green Gables

1 Anne’s Body Has a Mind (and Soul) of Its Own Embodiment and the Cartesian Legacy in Anne of Green Gables Janet Wesselius Don’t you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back? —Anne of Green Gables (41) According to the eleven-year-old Anne Shirley, some poetry can affect the reader’s body. Evidently for Anne’s creator, Lucy Maud Montgom- ery, reading is an embodied activity. Indeed, embodiment is an important theme in Anne of Green Gables; Irene Gammel writes: “by involving her senses and body in her exploration of nature’s beauty, Anne blurs the boundaries between inside and outside, life and art, human and nature, physical and metaphysical” (229). In this list of boundaries, it is the last—the physical and the metaphysical—that invokes one of the deeply embedded dualisms in Western society: the mind/body. This dualism makes embodiment as a theme noticeable in a book like Anne of Green Gables. Traditionally, it is understood the mind/body problem originated with René Descartes, although in fact it has a long history in the West, stretching back to the pre-Socratics. Or rather, we should say, the as- sumption that mind and body are separate has a long history, for the separateness of mind and body was not a problem until Descartes. I do not mean that people did not have problems with unruly bodies or with unruly minds: as Lydia Kokkola points out in the Introduction, Plato says in the Phaedo that the body impedes our pursuit of the truth while Patristics Evagrius of Pontus and John Cassian wrote in the third cen- tury about the difficulties in dealing with the “bad thoughts” of an un- disciplined mind. Still it was taken as self-evident that minds and bodies interacted, however unsatisfactorily at times, even if they were separate. But Descartes’ dualism is so radical that it seems impossible to see how mind and body could interact. What has been given less attention is that the mind/body problem as articulated by Descartes implicates both childhood as a source of 22 Janet Wesselius that problem and the imagination, fueled by the senses and indulging in dreams, as another source of that problem. In the first part of this chapter, I analyze Descartes’ formulation of the mind/body problem, particularly in relation to his experience of childhood and his use of his own imagination. I also contrast his view with the Scholastic and Greek view of the mind and body to which he was responding. My point in doing so is to show that the Cartesian mind/body problem is not an inevitable development, still less a neutral, “objective,” understanding but has a contingent history of construction. I then turn to Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables as an example of subsequent ways of thinking about the mind and body, children, and the imagination that is influenced by the Cartesian formulation even in its rejection of it by reclaiming (or alluding to) pre-Cartesian ways of understanding the mind and body. The Father of Modern Philosophy and His Children René Descartes gave us the most influential formulation of the mind and body for our time. He did not invent dualism—it was widely accepted in the West that the mind and body are separate—but his was the most radical form of dualism that led to the mind/body problem. According to the standard textbook accounts, Descartes is considered the father of modern philosophy because he inaugurated the epistemological turn: the turn from ontological issues to the problems of knowledge and a turning inward to the nature of our own minds and reason. The epistemological turn intensified a focus on mind and body or, more accurately, it made the question of mind and body an epis- temic question. So, how was this new focus different from what went before? For the ancient Greeks, and for the medieval Scholastics who followed, mind and body were by no means identical—that is, they could be distinguished—but this was primarily an ontological concern, a concern over what exists (and not with how we know what exists). What might have motivated Descartes to reject the view of the mind and body that he inherited? It is the same thing that motivated him to make the epistemological turn: in a time when the authorities (ecclesias- tical, scholarly, scientific) seemed untrustworthy, Descartes resolved to trust only himself. He writes: But as soon as I had completed the course of study at the end of which one is normally admitted to the ranks of the learned … I found myself beset by so many doubts and errors that I came to think I had gained nothing from my attempts to become educated…. So, too, I reflected that we were all children before being men and had to be governed by for some time by our appetites [i.e. the body] Anne’s Body Has a Mind (and Soul) of Its Own 23 and our teachers, which were often opposed to each other and nei- ther of which, perhaps, always gave us the best advice. (I:113, 117) In other words, given all the disagreements between so-called experts, it is foolish to put one’s trust in their claims to knowledge. Children, of course, must be governed by their teachers, but as soon as they are old enough, they should seek knowledge in themselves. Here we see both the association of childhood with an immature reliance on (uncertain) authorities or the sway of the body and a rejection of those authorities in favor of relying on one’s self as the mark of adult(man)hood. And this is where the body comes in: the body, according to Des- cartes, also cannot be trusted, for senses sometimes deceive. He writes: Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true I have acquired either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once. (II:12) So, the body (with its senses) is source of error and there are no sure signs by which I can distinguish truth from error. To avoid error, Descartes decides what to do: I will suppose therefore that not God, who is supremely good and the source of truth, but rather some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that… all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment…. I shall stubbornly and firmly persist in this mediation; and, even if it is not in my power to know any truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, that is, resolutely guard against assenting to any falsehoods, so that the deceiver, however powerful and cunning he may be, will be unable to impose on me in the slightest degree. (II:15) If there is a malicious demon—and how can I know there is not?—my body does not just deceive me sometimes; I might be completely deceived all the time. The only thing I can do is resolutely guard against accept- ing any falsehoods; I can withhold assent; I can doubt. But “am I not so bound up with a body and with senses that I cannot exist without them?” (II:16). No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning [the malicious 24 Janet Wesselius demon] who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I think, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived by my mind. (II:17) Maybe I do not have a body; but I think (even if most of the thinking I am doing is doubting since doubting is a form of thinking). “But what then am I? A thing that thinks” (II:19). I cannot know for certain that I have a body or that there is a reality external to me, but I do know for certain that as long as I am thinking (doubting), I exist. And by I, I mean “a thing that thinks” because “now I know for certain both that I exist and at the same time that all such images and, in general, everything relating to the nature of the body, could be mere dreams” (II:19). So, here, we can see what was so earth-shattering about Descartes’s formulation: it was his reconceptualization of the mind as res cogitans (thinking substance, “a thing that thinks”) and the body as res extensa (extended substance). It was widely believed before Descartes that the mind and body were nonidentical; but by classifying mind and body as substances—and substances by definition are basic and have no dependent relations on anything else—he sundered the two completely. Philosophers before Descartes were for the most part dualists, but Des- cartes inaugurated a radical dualism, a dualism that cut to the root of what a human being is. It is important to note here that Descartes completely identifies himself with his mind (the res cogitans); he may or may not have a body, but as long as he is thinking (doubting), he exists.

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