White Way of Delight

The White Way of Delight is the name Anne Shirley gives to the Avenue, a stretch of road four or five hundred yards long near Newbridge, completely arched over by huge, wide-spreading apple trees planted years ago by an eccentric old farmer. When Anne first sees it on her drive from Bright River to Green Gables, she is struck dumb by its beauty—overhead is one long canopy of snowy fragrant bloom, and below the boughs the air is full of a purple twilight, with a glimpse of painted sunset sky shining like a great rose window at the end of a cathedral aisle. She leans back in the buggy, her thin hands clasped before her, her face lifted rapturously to the white splendor, and remains silent for miles afterward, lost in a reverie that even the bustling village of Newbridge cannot break.

Naming and Significance

When Matthew Cuthbert tells her the place is called the Avenue, Anne protests that there is no meaning in a name like that. She renames it the White Way of Delight, explaining that when she does not like the name of a place or a person she always imagines a new one and thinks of them so. The name captures the essence of the experience: it is the first thing she has ever seen that cannot be improved upon by imagination. She tells Matthew that it made a queer funny ache in her breast, yet a pleasant ache—a feeling she recognizes whenever she sees anything royally beautiful. The White Way of Delight thus becomes a touchstone for Anne's aesthetic and emotional life, a place where the real world meets and even surpasses the power of her own fancy.

Role in Anne's Spiritual Life

The White Way of Delight enters Anne's private prayers. On her first night at Green Gables, when Marilla Cuthbert insists she say her prayers, Anne kneels and thanks God for the White Way of Delight and the Lake of Shining Waters, along with Bonny the geranium and the Snow Queen cherry tree. She tells Marilla that these are all the blessings she can think of to thank God for at that moment. The place thus becomes not merely a scenic spot but a gift she consciously counts among the good things in her life, a marker of the beauty that has come to her after years of deprivation in orphanages and hard homes.

Contrast with the Asylum and the Past

The White Way of Delight stands in stark contrast to the world Anne has left behind. At the asylum in Hopeton, there were only a few poor little trees out front with little whitewashed cagey things about them, which she says looked like orphans themselves. She used to tell them she knew just how they felt. The Avenue, by contrast, is a place of wild, unconfined natural beauty, and Anne's ability to rename it and claim it as her own is part of her larger movement from a life of neglect to one of belonging and imaginative freedom. When she later reproaches Matthew for not telling her at the station that she was not wanted, she says that if she had not seen the White Way of Delight and the Lake of Shining Waters it would not be so hard to go back. The memory of the place has already become a source of both joy and pain, a beauty that makes the prospect of losing it unbearable.

Enduring Presence

Though the White Way of Delight is a physical location, its significance in Anne's life is primarily imaginative and emotional. It appears in her first prayer, in her confessions of disappointment, and in her ongoing habit of renaming the world around her. It is one of the first things that makes Green Gables feel like home, and it remains a symbol of the kind of beauty that satisfies her completely—a beauty that even her own powerful imagination cannot improve upon.