An Orphan Girl’s Quest For Identity

Lucy Maud Montgomery is regarded as one of the most brilliant female writers in Canada in the nineteenth century, and one of the most outstanding and prolific writer in the world. Her monumental work is the Anne series, among which her first book Anne of Green Gables is the most well-known and wins great popularity around the world. The thesis aims to explore the issue of identity of the orphan girl Anne in Anne of Green Gables through the perspectives of Post-Colonial study and Feminist literary criticism and also by conducting a comparative way of study on the orphan girl in this book and in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. The thesis first introduces briefly L. M. Montgomery’s contribution to Canadian literature, and provides an overview of relevant criticism on the novel Anne of Green Gables home and abroad. Through an analysis of the characterization of the orphan girl Anne in Anne of Green Gables, her life experience, her unique character of fantasy and imagination, her optimism and independence, the thesis indicates the significance of Anne’s image in literature. The thesis mainly studies Anne’s quest for identity in a colonial and patriarchal society from the post-colonial perspective and feminist perspective. It reveals the significance of Anne’s consciousness of independence and female awareness in her pursuit of identity. By comparing Anne in Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Nell Trent in Charles Dickens’The Old Curiosity Shop, the thesis intends to disclose differences between male author and female author’s creations on the same topic of orphan girls and to explore the implications behind the differences in term of questing for identity.