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Originally Posted by Catlady
The whole idea of adopting a child to be a servant is upsetting in the first place, though I suppose it wasn't unusual. Marilla and Matthew wanted unpaid labor, not a child to love--as apparently Anne's previous "parents" also did. It's also pretty horrifying that an orphan would just be sent out somewhere, with no vetting of any kind on either side. I guess there was no official adoption either, or any sort of follow-up, which I suppose would mean Anne could have been sent back at any time and had absolutely no recourse if she'd been maltreated (except poison in the well).
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It occurs to me to wonder at Matthew’s and Marilla’s motivations in adopting a boy. The putative reason, of course, was that the typical French hired hand wasn’t reliable, with implications of being both not hard working and also, presumably, willing to walk away. Whereas I have to assume that an adopted boy would be both cheaper (food and clothing only and you know that he’d have had to miss school during spring planting and harvest time), but also more “tied,” with the perhaps even explicit threat of being sent back if he didn’t shape up. The implications are worse than they appeared to me at first.