There’s been plenty of talk in social network and the media about the cancelling of Netflix show Anne with an E. This is a show based on the works of Lucy Maud Montgomery, which follow the life of Anne, a red-haired orphan who accidentally ends up at the Cuthbert household after Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, siblings, decided to adopt a boy to help Matthew with the farm work. The first book of the series, Anne of Green Gables, was released in 1908, and its popularity has made it into one of those classics that everyone hears about, at one point or another of their lives. Proof of this popularity is that there have been several adaptations before Anne with an E came to life,
There are several elements that distinguish Anne in the universe of literary heroines and make her one of the most well-known and recognisable, but the most evident of them might well be her trademark red hair. I’m an avid reader of those so-called Classics and enjoy them very much, but fact is that there are not many red-haired heroines. Especially not in 19th and early 20th century scenarios. When we first meet Anne, the author gives us a description:
«A child of about eleven, garbed in a very short, very tight, very ugly dress of yellowish-gray wincey. She wore a faded brown sailor hat and beneath the hat, extending down her back, were two braids of very thick, decidedly red hair. Her face was small, white and thin, also much freckled; her mouth was large and so were her eyes, which looked green in some lights and moods and gray in others.» (Page 15-16)
This particular shade of red hair does change through the course of the novel, however:
«’Your complexion is just as fair as Ruby’s,’ said Diana earnestly, ‘and your hair is ever so much darker than it used to be before you cut it.’
‘Oh, do you really think so?’ exclaimed Anne, flushing sensitively with delight. ‘I’ve sometimes thought it was myself – but I never dared to ask anyone for fear she would tell me it wasn’t. Do you think it could be called auburn now, Diana?’
‘Yes, and I think it is real pretty,’ said Diana, looking admiringly at the short, silky curls that clustered over Anne’s head and were held in place by a very jaunty black velvet ribbon and bow.» (277-278)
«I laugh a little now sometimes when I think what a worry my hair used to be to me – but I don’t laugh MUCH, because it was a very real trouble then. I did suffer terribly over my hair and my freckles. My freckles are really gone; and people are nice enough to tell me my hair is auburn now – all but Josie Pye. She informed me yesterday that she really thought it was redder than ever, or at least my black dress made it look redder, and she asked me if people who had red hair ever got used to having it.» (373-374)
There are countless references to Anne’s red hair throughout the novel. At first, it seems to be seen as something undesirable, especially by Anne herself. Her relationship with Mrs. Lynde even improves when she tells her a story of a girl who had red hair which darkened to auburn as she grew up. It is the trigger for her entire relationship with Gilbert Blythe, because he calls her Carrots, which she finds very offensive. Even at the end, Anne finds contentment with her situation, but that contentment is partly related to the fact that her hair has, in fact, darkened.
Her joy when Diana acknowledges it makes it evident. Anne sets a huge importance in her physical appearance in the first book. She wants to be pretty, and has a very fixed idea of what being pretty is. Darker hair – or any colour but red, really – and no freckles, and, if possible, all that together with pretty puff-sleeve dresses. Anne is shown as vain throughout at least the first half of Anne of Green Gables, and sets a huge importance in how she looks like. Everyone will say “But that is shallow, that is so wrong!” Well, “let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone”, and all of that. Everyone is different, but many of us did care immensely about our appearance during those awkward teenage years, and even afterwards. The fact that Anne is vain is what makes her so real. You cannot have a hero without flaws. Well, you can, but it’s highly doubtful that people can relate to them much.
But back to her red hair. Most of 19th-20th century heroines, whether good or bad, sweet and delicate or strong and fierce, do not have red hair. Let’s look at a few examples. Les Misérables, for example, written in the 19th century by Victor Hugo. The driving character of it all is, to me, Jéan Valjean, but there are four female characters who play an important role: Fantine, Cosette, Éponine and Madame Thénardier. How are they presented?
Fantine is a blonde. This is actually presented as one of her defining characteristics, as she is known as The Blonde.
«Fantine was beautiful (…). She was a lovely blonde, with fine teeth. She had gold and pearls for her dowry; but her gold was on her head, and her pearls were in her mouth.» (213-214)
«As for Fantine, she was a joy to behold. Her splendid teeth had evidently received an office from God, – laughter. She preferred to carry her little hat of sewed straw, with its long white strings, in her hand rather than on her head. Her thick blond hair, which was inclined to wave, and which easily uncoiled, and which it was necessary to fasten up incessantly, seemed made for the flight of Galatea under the willows.» (219)
Cosette, her daughter, is a light brunette.
«She had wonderful brown hair, shaded with threads of gold, a brow that seemed made of marble, cheeks that seemed of rose-leaf, a pale flush, an agitated whiteness, an exquisite mouth, whence smiles darted like sunbeams, and words like music, a head such as Raphael would have given to Mary, set upon a neck that Jean Goujon would have attributed to a Venus.» (1195)
Éponine’s hair colour is not presented to us when she gets a longer description. But when Fantine and Cosette first meet Thénardier and her children, we know they both have brown hair.
«The two children, who were dressed prettily and with some elegance, were radiant with pleasure; one would have said that they were two roses amid old iron; their eyes were a triumph; their fresh cheeks were full of laughter. One had chestnut hair; the other, brown.» (253)
Thénardier, on the other hand, is a ginger. Hair colour is something that can go a little amiss in translation.
«This Madame Thenardier was a sandy-complexioned woman, thin and angular – the type of soldier’s wife in all its unpleasantness; and what was odd, with a languishing air, which she owed to her perusal of romances.» (259; in the original, the quote is – Cette madame Thénardier était une femme rousse, charnue, anguleuse. Rousse usually translates as red-haired.)
These four women are all representative of human suffering, in their own way, but the connotations of their personalities and ending vary. Fantine, the Blonde, was a devoted mother with the misfortune of falling in love with a man who abandoned her. She ends up selling her teeth, her hair, and entering the world of prostitution. She is presented as a type of fallen angel, a woman who was genuinely good and caring and suffered all types of misfortune because of Mankind. Éponine, the brunette, started her life in a fortunate position, but thanks to her father’s actions, she ends up in misery and poverty, rejected by the man she falls in love with and protects. Cosette seems like a classical “good angel of the family” type of character; her existence moves the plot along, but not her actions, and her ultimate destiny is to be happy and make Marius happy in return; a chestnut brown-haired lady. Thénardier, the most morally flawed of the lot, is red-haired.
Light and dark hair are a constant in 19th century literature and each have their particular connotations and glowing periods. Anne Martin-Fugier, in Philippe Ariés and Georges Duby’s edition of History of Private Life, lightly touches the subject, stating that during the height of the Romantic Period, brunettes are preferred (238); later in the century, judging by other 19th century authors, it seems blondes make a strong comeback. But literary heroines and red-hair mingle very little. Another such example is seen in the Count of Monte-Cristo, with the three main figures: Mercédes, Valentine and Haydée. I’m skipping Eugenie Danglars, as she is not as relevant as the others in the life of Édmond Dantes.
Mercedes, the Catalan brunette:
«A young and beautiful girl, with hair as black as jet, her eyes as velvety as the gazelle’s, was leaning with her back against the wainscot, rubbing in her slender delicately moulded fingers a bunch of heath blossoms, the flowers of which she was picking off and strewing on the floor; her arms, bare to the elbow, brown, and modelled after those of the Arlesian Venus, moved with a kind of restless impatience, and she tapped the earth with her arched and supple foot, so as to display the pure and full shape of her well-turned leg, in its red cotton, gray and blue clocked, stocking.» (8)
Valentine de Villefort, the pale chestnut :
«Valentine, whom we have in the rapid march of our narrative presented to our readers without formally introducing her, was a tall and graceful girl of nineteen, with bright chestnut hair, deep blue eyes, and that reposeful air of quiet distinction which characterized her mother». She is described as having the «gracefulness of a swan.» (216)
Haidée, a Greek beauty:
«Tilted on one side of her head she had a small cap of gold-colored silk, embroidered with pearls; while on the other a purple rose mingled its glowing colors with the luxuriant masses of her hair, of which the blackness was so intense that it was tinged with blue.» (207)
In this case, both of the main hero’s love interests are black-haired women, and both are presented as good women, although Mércedes is a victim of the plot against her beloved, just as much as he is. Her decision to marry Férnand Mondego, not long after Édmond disappeared, ultimately determined that she was not to keep her wealth and status, but the author does not punish her too hard for this choice. She is a victim of Fate, to an extent, but she is always presented as a good woman who loved Édmond and who loved her son, and who suffered misfortune in her own right. Her ultimate fate of being an impoverished mother who worries about her absent son is dramatic, but in all extent, honourable.
Black-haired heroines, however, are not always kept in the most favourable light. There are two blatant examples: Anna Karenina and Scarlett O’Hara.
Anna:
«She took off her kerchief and her hat, and catching it in a lock of her black hair, which was a mass of curls, she tossed her head and shook her hair down.» (146)
«On her head, among her black hair – her own, with no false additions – was a little wreath of pansies, and a bouquet of the same in the black ribbon of her sash among white lace. Her coiffure was not striking. All that was noticeable was the little wilful tendrils of her curly hair that would always break free about her neck and temples.» (172)
Anna’s dark hair is especially striking when compared to that of Kitty Shtcherbatskaya:
«When he thought of her, he could call up a vivid picture of her to himself, especially the charm of that little fair head, so freely set on the shapely girlish shoulders, and so full of childish brightness and good humour.» (64)
Anna and Kitty are often compared. Even though Anna is the main character, Kitty is, to an extent, her counterpart, and the most well-developed female character in Anna Karenina next to Anna herself. Anna’s fate is the one so well-known: she suicides in the end of the book. Kitty, on the other hand, is the good-natured, although naïve and often childish heroine, who endures a growth process and ends up finding happiness with her husband, Levin. Anna enters a spiral into her ultimate downfall, and we are invited to question ourselves about this character, her feelings and her motivations, whether she had been truly good from the start, whether she kept her good feelings, where did it all go so wrong.
This is not the case for Scarlett O’Hara. Unlike Anna, Scarlett never has deep moral reflections. In fact, Scarlett doesn’t have deep reflections of any kind. She just lives. It is interesting that while the book opens with nothing other than Scarlett O’Hara’s physical description, there is nothing to mention her hair colour until much later on:
‘Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin – that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.» (1)
«But for all the modesty of her spreading skirts, the demureness of hair netted smoothly into a chignon and the quietness of small white hands folded in her lap, her true self was poorly concealed.»
We only get the confirmation of Scarlett’s black hair later on:
«If only she were Scarlett O’Hara again, out there on the floor in an apple-green dress with dark-green velvet ribbons dangling from her bosom and tuberoses in her black hair – she’d lead that reel.» (77)
«If only Rhett had not been so silly and burned the false curls she bought to augment her knot of Indian-straight hair from the rear of these little hats!» (228)
This is a trait she will share with her favourite daughter, born Eugenie Victoria, better known as Bonnie:
«People were always in their front yards or on their porches at sunset and, as Bonnie was such a friendly, pretty child, with her tangle of black curls and her bright blue eyes, few could resist talking to her.» (32)
Curiously enough, Gone with the Wind is one of the books with greater hair-colour variety where classic books are regarded, both in the feminine and the masculine department. There are the Tarleton twins, «with sunburned faces and deep auburn hair» (3), Ashley Wilkes («his drowsy gray eyes wide with a smile and the sun so bright on his blond hair that it seemed like a cap of shining silver», 10; «There was no one there so handsome, thought Scarlett, as she marked how graceful was his negligent pose and how the sun gleamed on his gold hair and mustache», 45), Gerald O’Hara («he was sixty years old and his crisp curly hair was silver-white», 13); and, of course, the timeless Rhett Butler («his hair was jet black, and his black mustache was small and closely clipped, almost foreign looking compared with the dashing, swooping mustaches of the cavalrymen near by», 75).
In the ladies’ department, there is Ellen O’Hara, with black hair described as «luxuriant» (15), and then all the red-haired Tarleton ladies: Beatrice Tarleton («frail, fine-boned, so white of skin that her flaming hair seemed to have drawn all the color from her face into its vital burnished mass; 28) and her four girls («all shades of red hair were represented beneath these hats, Hetty’s plain red hair, Camilla’s strawberry blonde, Randa’s coppery auburn and small Betsy’s carrot top, 30); then, a few blondes, like India Wilkes («Poor India! It would be bad enough to have pale hair and eyelashes and a jutting chin that meant a stubborn disposition, without being twenty years old and an old maid in the bargain», 37. Thanks, Scarlett.), Scarlett’s youngest sister Carreen «The day came when his pale blue eyes, perfectly cognizant of his surroundings, fell upon Carreen sitting beside him, telling her rosary beads, the morning sun shining through her fair hair», 143). There’s also Belle Watling, the «woman with red hair», «flaming hair», the town’s “bad woman”, as Scarlett says, who ends up being better than so many by donating money for war efforts, protecting the men of Atlanta during their scrapes, and worrying about Melly’s good name, and is defended by Melly herself.
But the most striking physical description of a female character, aside from Scarlett O’Hara, goes to Melanie.
«She was a tiny, frailly built girl, who gave the appearance of a child masquerading in her mother’s enormous hoop skirts – an illusion that was heightened by the shy, almost frightened look in her too large brown eyes. She had a cloud of curly dark hair which was so sternly repressed beneath its net that no vagrant tendrils escaped, and this dark mass, with tis long widow’s peak, accentuated the heart shape of her face. Too wide across the cheek bones, too pointed at the chin, it was a sweet, timid face but a plain one, and she had no feminine tricks of allure to make observers forget its plainness.» (39).
The two main female characters of Gone with the Wind both have dark hair. Melly has brown, Scarlett has black. The few blondes are secondary, albeit important characters, and the big difference here is the amount of red-haired people, and the fact that red hair always has a positive connotation, even in Belle Wattling’s case: while Scarlett and many others are dedicated to judging her under false pretence of morality, Belle, who is perceived as a fallen woman by that 19th century society, shows her truly good nature, one which is acknowledged by popular black-haired rake Rhett Buttler, of whom she, in all likelihood, has a son.
And yet, throughout all these books, with more or less variety, there is not a single red-haired heroine. Many of them don’t even have women as main characters, but as counterparts to a hero. Those who do have female heroines as leads, such as Anna Karenina, don’t give them red hair. And yet, there is an absurd amount of time and dedication to physical description of characters in these books, and hair is one of the most frequently found details. Why not red?
There’s a blatant difference between literature and art in this regard. A quick search in Wikipedia (link below!) will show you the immense amount of prejudice against red-haired people through time, especially during the Middle Ages. The article gives detail, for instance, of Montague Summers, who translated the Malleus Maleficarum, a book regarding witchcraft published in 1487, which states that «those whose hair is red, of a certain peculiar shade, are unmistakably vampires»; red hair was associated to witchcraft and the supernatural. Even today, there is bullying, even though we have so many examples of popular, beautiful red-haired (natural or dyed, doesn’t matter!), such as Emma Stone, Amy Adams, Isla Fisher, Juliane Moore, and, of course, Amybeth McNulty, the star of Anne with an E. It seems that this vibrant, wonderful colour, which has always drawn so much attraction, has also brought a lot of problems to the bearers.
But not all is bad. If literature – and writers of books on Witchcraft Prevention – were not the biggest fans, artistic movements seem to have felt otherwise. Paintings represent life, imagery occurring before us, and many, many painters felt attracted to red-hair hues. This was particularly true in that very same 19th century in which red-haired heroines were cast aside. Look, for instance, at John William Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott (1888), or Edmund Leighton’s The Accolade (1901).
There were others, long before them, who saw the beauty of red hair, especially Renaissance painters. Red was all en-vogue. However, back then, it was all about the golden red, the strawberry blonde, as seen in Botticelli’s many paintings. Even through the efforts of these painters, it would take many more years for red hair to be seen as fashionable. But if Venus herself is red-haired, how can anyone counter that?
Lucy Maud Montgomery’s heroine is singular in many ways, which I would prefer leaving to a later post, as Anne’s personality and evolution deserves an article of its own. But one thing is striking: following her first few adventures at Green Gables, Mrs. Rachel states that «her temper matches her hair» (85). Anne’s red hair is more than just a physical characteristic. The colour seems to have been purposefully chosen to reflect her inner self. And yet, as the book progresses, this fiery, extroverted Anne transforms into a quiet, introspective and far quieter person, but her hair remains just as red. She proves that one should not judge a book by its cover – on these grounds, Scarlett O’Hara should have the brightest red of all. Anne with an E has not followed the book to its every detail, and most good adaptations don’t – that’s why it’s called an adaptation. I will confess myself a book purist, whose greatest dream is usually for a series or film to follow each microscopic detail of the original work, even though this is obviously impossible. However, this did not bother me in the slightest while watching Anne with an E. That’s when I realised that perhaps the issue with adaptation detours is not that they’ve changed the original work, but the way in which they change it. Anne with an E changed it in the best possible way. Anne’s growth as a person is easy to observe, but her sunny and lively personality remains with her throughout. There’s nothing wrong with being an introvert, especially when the world is placing so much pressure on people to be extroverted, whether they enjoy it or not. But I find this creative option particularly charming. This show portrays a time period in which women are often told to keep quiet, be silent, keep their opinions to themselves, problems that have not completely disappeared in the 21st century, but the show gave Anne, especially older Anne, a voice. She wants to be herself and to be heard, she wants to enjoy life and her friends and family, and she doesn’t want to follow a pattern of being a woman that society has imposed to her. Being a woman – being a person, doesn’t have a pattern. Just like a hair colour does not say who you are. I’ve had every hair colour in the spectre, including bright red hair. I was not a better nor worse person for it. But one thing is certain. Red hair is awesome, and red-haired heroines are still heavily underrepresented. Cheers to the hope of more in the future.
Saluete
Important links: I’m listing all the books below in PDF, Free Access, as an incentive to reading.
Anne of Green Gables: https://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/anne-of-green-gables.pdf
Les Misérables: https://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/les-miserables.pdf
Anna Karenina: https://planetpdf.com/planetpdf/pdfs/free_ebooks/Anna_Karenina_NT.pdf
The Count of Monte Cristo:
http://msdl.cs.mcgill.ca/people/tfeng/books/The%20Count%20of%20Monte%20Cristo.pdf
Gone with the Wind:
http://biblioteka.kijowski.pl/mitchell%20margaret/gone%20with%20the%20wind.pdf
Wikipedia article on red hair:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair
Other interesting bibliography (give it a go if you have the time and find it):
A History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby. I used Volume 4 of the Portuguese translation, published in 1990.
The Historian Chronicles 
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