mouse

The mouse in Anne of Green Gables is a small creature that carries an outsized weight of embarrassment, warning, and domestic mishap. It appears most dramatically when Anne, lost in a romantic daydream, forgets to cover a pitcher of pudding sauce and later discovers a mouse drowned in it—an incident that unfolds before the stylish Mrs. Chester Ross and leaves Anne mortified. The mouse also surfaces in Mrs. Rachel Lynde's cautionary tales about orphan asylum children, in the material details of Anne's early life at the asylum, and in the fabric of the plain, serviceable dresses Marilla provides. Though never a character in its own right, the mouse functions as a recurring emblem of the disorder that Anne's imagination and inexperience introduce into the orderly world of Green Gables.

The Drowned Mouse and the Pudding Sauce

The mouse's most vivid appearance comes during Anne's early efforts at housekeeping. Marilla had left a plum pudding and a pitcher of sauce from Tuesday's dinner, instructing Anne to cover it and set it on the pantry shelf. Anne meant to obey, but as she carried the sauce into the pantry she was imagining herself a nun taking the veil to bury a broken heart in cloistered seclusion. She forgot all about covering the sauce. The next morning she ran to the pantry and found a mouse drowned in it. Anne lifted the mouse out with a spoon, threw it into the yard, and washed the spoon in three waters. She fully intended to ask Marilla whether she should give the sauce to the pigs, but when Marilla came in from milking, Anne was imagining herself a frost fairy going through the woods turning the trees red and yellow, and she never thought of the pudding sauce again. Later that day, when the stylish Mr. and Mrs. Chester Ross from Spencervale came to dinner, Marilla served the plum pudding with the sauce warmed up. Anne remembered everything and shrieked out the truth at the table. Mrs. Chester Ross, a perfect housekeeper, simply looked at Anne, and Anne thought she would sink through the floor with mortification. Marilla turned red as fire but carried the sauce and pudding out and brought in strawberry preserves. After the guests left, Marilla gave Anne a dreadful scolding. The mouse, though never seen alive, becomes the agent of Anne's most humiliating social blunder.

The Mouse in Mrs. Lynde's Warnings

Before Anne ever arrived at Green Gables, the mouse figured in Mrs. Rachel Lynde's warnings to Marilla about the dangers of adopting an orphan asylum child. Mrs. Lynde cited a case she had read in the paper of a man and his wife out west of the Island who took a boy from an orphan asylum and he set fire to the house at night, nearly burning them to a crisp in their beds. She also knew of another case where an adopted boy used to suck the eggs—they could not break him of it. Then she warned that if Anne burned Green Gables down or put strychnine in the well—she had heard of a case over in New Brunswick where an orphan asylum child did that and the whole family died in fearful agonies, though it was a girl in that instance. Marilla replied that they were not getting a girl, as if poisoning wells were a purely feminine accomplishment. The mouse here is not a real creature but a rhetorical one, part of the folklore of fear that surrounds the orphan asylum child.

The Mouse in the Material World of Green Gables

The mouse also appears indirectly in the material culture of Anne's life at Green Gables. The skimpy nightgowns the asylum matron made for Anne were so inadequate that Anne hated them, but she consoled herself that one could dream just as well in them as in lovely trailing ones with frills around the neck. The plain, serviceable dresses Marilla made for Anne—the snuffy colored gingham, the black-and-white checkered sateen, the stiff ugly blue print—were all made alike, with plain skirts fulled tightly to plain waists and sleeves as plain as could be. Anne longed for puffed sleeves, which were so fashionable. The mouse is absent from these descriptions, but the same ethos of thrift and practicality that produced those dresses also governed the pantry where the mouse drowned. Marilla's treasured amethyst brooch, an old-fashioned oval containing a braid of her mother's hair surrounded by a border of very fine amethysts, was kept in a pincushion and later found caught in her black lace shawl. Matthew's gift of a brown gloria dress with puffed sleeves, which Anne received on Christmas morning, represented a departure from that thrift. The mouse, like the skimpy nightgowns and the plain dresses, belongs to the world of scarcity and practicality that Anne's imagination constantly struggles against.

The Mouse as a Symbol of Domestic Disorder

The mouse in the pudding sauce is not an isolated incident but part of a pattern. Anne's imagination repeatedly leads her to neglect her domestic duties. She forgot to put the flour in a cake because she was thinking of a story about nursing Diana through smallpox. She forgot to put the tea to draw because she was trying to think of a name for Violet Vale. She starched Matthew's handkerchiefs and burned a pie because she was imagining herself an enchanted princess. The mouse is the most dramatic instance of this pattern, the moment when Anne's imaginative life collides most publicly with the practical demands of housekeeping. The mouse is not malicious; it is simply a creature that, like Anne, finds itself in the wrong place at the wrong time. But its presence in the sauce transforms a minor oversight into a social catastrophe, one that Anne will remember with a shudder long afterward. The mouse, in this sense, is the physical embodiment of the disorder that Anne's imagination introduces into the orderly world of Green Gables—a disorder that Marilla tries to train out of her, but that Matthew, in his shy way, encourages her to keep.