Anne of Green Gables — Chapter 11

Narration Prompt

Reconstruct the chapter as a study of competing pedagogies: Marilla's plain-dresses utilitarianism, Mr. Bell's perfunctory invocation, Miss Rogerson's catechism-by-stare, and Anne's improvisational Romanticism at the window. Whose curriculum forms the child more deeply, and how does Montgomery weight the verdict?

Discussion Questions

1. Anne tells Marilla that Mr. Bell 'was talking to God and he didn't seem to be very much interested in it, either. I think he thought God was too far off to make it worth while.' Set this critique against Augustine's claim in the Confessions that prayer is restless until it rests in God, against Pascal's wager-prayer, and against Hopkins's 'World is charged with the grandeur of God.' Where does Montgomery place Anne theologically — as naive immanentist, as unschooled mystic, as Wordsworthian pantheist, or as something the categories miss? What does the narrator's refusal to correct Anne reveal about Montgomery's own theology?
2. Marilla refuses to make any of the three dresses with puffed sleeves on the grounds that 'I don't believe in pampering vanity.' Anne counters: 'I'd rather look ridiculous when everybody else does than plain and sensible all by myself.' Whose moral reasoning is sounder? Marilla's is rooted in a Calvinist suspicion of adornment and a frugality born of scarcity; Anne's anticipates the modern claim that conspicuous nonconformity is itself a vanity, and that fitting in is a legitimate childhood need. How should a guardian adjudicate between sumptuary virtue and the social cost of standing out?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide