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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage is the chapter's quiet engine of self-doubt, and it rewards rhetorical attention. L'Engle balances an antithesis — Meg looks up 'half in loving admiration, half in sullen resentment' — and lists her mother's beauty in a polished tricolon ('flaming red hair, creamy skin, and violet eyes') so that the mother's spectacular ease throws Meg's 'outrageous plainness' into sharp relief. The word 'outrageous' even lets Meg's own exaggeration bleed into the narration (criteria A, B, C, and D).
Mrs. Murry gently touched Meg’s bruised cheek. Meg looked up at her mother, half in loving admiration, half in sullen resentment. It was not an advantage to have a mother who was a scientist and a bea...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Give a concise summary of the chapter, then identify the single most important sentence or moment. Explain why it matters to the novel as a whole and what it reveals about L'Engle's larger argument about human nature.
Discussion Questions
- Meg sees herself one way alone in the attic and another way once she is back in the kitchen with her family. What does that contrast suggest about how a person comes to know who she is, and why might the idea hold or fail? Point to the strongest support or resistance you see in the chapter.
- L'Engle could have told this chapter from Mrs. Murry's calm vantage or from a more distant narrator. Instead she keeps us close to Meg's anxious way of seeing. What does the novel gain, and what does it risk, by making Meg our lens, and why does that choice matter? Argue from specific moments in the chapter.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Quietly bad-tempered and brooding — the resentment Meg feels even while admiring her mother.
Item 2
So unpleasant it causes disgust; the cruel word Meg turns on her own looks.
Item 3
Shockingly excessive or beyond all reason, as in Meg's exaggerated 'outrageous plainness.'
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Critical Thinking
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