The depths of despair

The depths of despair is a signature expression of Anne Shirley, the orphan girl at the heart of Lucy Maud Montgomery's novel. The phrase captures her habit of experiencing emotional pain with theatrical intensity and of naming that pain in language borrowed from romantic fiction. It appears at several critical junctures in the story, each time marking a moment when Anne's hopes are shattered and her resilience is tested to its limit. More than a mere figure of speech, the phrase becomes a measure of Anne's emotional growth: early in the book she inhabits the depths of despair as a genuine, crushing reality; later she uses the same words with a self-awareness that signals her gradual maturation.

First Appearance and Definition

Anne first introduces the phrase on the night of her arrival at Green Gables, when she learns that the Cuthberts had wanted a boy, not a girl. "You don't want me!" she cries, and then, after a storm of tears, tells Marilla Cuthbert, "Oh, this is the most TRAGICAL thing that ever happened to me!" When Marilla asks if she can eat while in such a state, Anne replies, "I can't. I'm in the depths of despair. Can you eat when you are in the depths of despair?" Marilla, who has never been in such a condition, cannot answer. Anne then explains that when one tries to eat in despair, "a lump comes right up in your throat and you can't swallow anything, not even if it was a chocolate caramel." The phrase is thus established as Anne's own coinage for a state of absolute misery, one that she feels physically as well as emotionally.

Recurrence and Variation

The depths of despair return whenever Anne faces a major disappointment. The morning after her arrival, though she is no longer in the depths, she tells Marilla, "I'm not in the depths of despair this morning. I never can be in the morning." This qualification—that despair is a nighttime affliction—shows Anne's growing ability to distinguish between temporary sadness and the more profound state she had named. Later, when Mrs. Rachel Lynde calls her "terrible skinny and homely" and comments on her red hair, Anne flies into a rage, and afterward tells Marilla, "I'm in the depths of despair" again, though this time the despair is mixed with anger and a sense of injustice. When Diana Barry is forbidden to play with her after the currant wine incident, Anne sobs to Marilla, "My heart is broken. The stars in their courses fight against me." And when she is forbidden to attend the Sunday-school picnic after her false confession about the amethyst brooch, she flings herself on the bed, "crying and writhing in an utter abandonment of disappointment and despair." Each recurrence reinforces the phrase as Anne's default vocabulary for profound unhappiness.

The Phrase as a Marker of Growth

As Anne matures, her use of the phrase becomes more self-conscious and even playful. When she dyes her hair green and must have it cut off, she tells Marilla, "I'm in the depths of despair and I don't care who gets head in class or writes the best composition or sings in the Sunday-school choir any more." But the despair is now tempered by a rueful awareness of her own folly. Later, when she breaks her ankle walking a ridgepole on a dare, she tells Marilla, "I am an afflicted mortal. But I'll try to bear it all bravely if only you won't be cross with me." The depths of despair have become a familiar, almost comfortable, emotional territory, one she can inhabit without being destroyed by it. By the end of the novel, when she decides to give up the Avery scholarship to stay with Marilla, she does not speak of despair at all; instead, she speaks of "the bend in the road" and the unknown beauties that lie beyond it. The phrase has been outgrown.

Thematic Significance

The depths of despair is more than a catchphrase; it is a window into Anne's psychology and into the novel's broader themes. Anne's tendency to experience emotions at full intensity is both her greatest vulnerability and her greatest strength. It makes her susceptible to crushing disappointment, but it also allows her to feel joy with equal force. The phrase also reflects Anne's literary imagination: she borrows the language of romantic fiction to make sense of her own experience, and in doing so, she transforms ordinary setbacks into dramatic narratives. The depths of despair are, in a sense, a performance—but a performance that is also genuinely felt. As Anne herself says, "There is so much more scope for imagination" in a phrase like that than in a plain statement of unhappiness. The phrase thus encapsulates the novel's central tension between the real and the imagined, between the ordinary world of Avonlea and the extraordinary world of Anne's mind.