Home as Middle Ground in Adaptations of Anne of Green Gables and Jalna

Homi Bhabha begins 'The World and the Home,' his essay about nationalism, postcolonialism, and the unhomely, with a discussion of a book with a house in its title. Houses are equally prominent in the titles of two early twentieth-century Canadian middlebrow novels: L. M. Montgomery's 1908 Anne of Green Gables and Mazo de la Roche's 1927 Jalna. Both books, indeed, centre their characters in a specific and particular house as well as a specific and particular country, and in so doing present the home as microcosm of the nation. As suggested by the continued reinvention of Montgomery's and de la Roche's books through repeated international translations and popular culture adaptations, however, these fictional Canadian homes provide a middle ground that allows for complex and sometimes unsettling movements among the local, national, and transnational. These works and their international adoptions and film and television adaptations transform the complexities of Canada's internal and external social and political relations into an imagined middle ground, located somewhere between Canada and the rest of the world. Home becomes something unhomely: still blurrily recognizable, but distorted and defamiliarized because home ground has shifted to the global. Adapted from the source document.