Anne of Green Gables — Chapter 10

Narration Prompt

Recount Chapter 10 with attention to its three movements: the breakfast-table conference between Marilla and Matthew, Matthew's clandestine visit to the east gable, and the procession to and from Mrs. Rachel Lynde's. What does each movement contribute to the chapter's argument about discipline, consent, and the difference between submission and conversion?

Discussion Questions

1. Marilla labors to impress Matthew with 'a due sense of the enormity of Anne's behaviour,' yet within minutes Matthew has called Mrs. Rachel 'a meddlesome old gossip' and pleaded that Anne 'hasn't ever had any one to teach her right.' Trace the rhetorical strategies on each side of this kitchen exchange — Marilla's appeal to enormity and precedent, Matthew's appeal to circumstance and mercy — and ask what Montgomery is dramatizing about the difference between justice administered in absentia (Marilla and Matthew adjudicating Anne upstairs) and justice that requires the offender's consent. Does the scene endorse one Cuthbert's view, or does it argue that domestic justice requires both voices?
2. Matthew's secret journey to the east gable is described with extraordinary care: he 'gravitated between the kitchen and the little bedroom,' had 'never been upstairs in his own house since the spring he helped Marilla paper the spare bedroom,' and now creeps in 'with the air of a burglar.' Why does Montgomery insist on the spatial estrangement of Matthew from the upper floor of his own home? What is she suggesting about the topography of male reticence in a Cuthbert household — and about the moral weight of a man crossing a threshold he has avoided for four years to whisper, 'Just go and smooth it over—that's a good girl'?

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