Anne of Green Gables — Chapter 12

About This Passage

This is Montgomery's set-piece description of the Barry garden, the chapter's lyric apex. The catalogue technique — bleeding-hearts, peonies, narcissi, columbines, scarlet-lightning, musk-flowers — borrows from the garden poetry of Marvell, Tennyson, and the King James Song of Solomon, while the syntax (long compound subjects, rhythmic adjectival pairs) gives the prose a near-Whitmanian breath. Copying the passage trains the eye to see how a Romantic catalogue functions narratively as well as decoratively, framing the imminent bosom-friend vow with abundance and sanctified beauty.

Narration Prompt

Reconstruct Chapter 12 as a five-movement structure: Marilla's Friday scolding, Anne's tearful asylum-speech, the visit to Orchard Slope, the bosom-friend vow with Diana, and Matthew's chocolate sweeties followed by Marilla's avowal. Identify which movements serve plot, which serve characterization, and which serve thematic argument.

Discussion Questions

1. Anne's bosom-friend vow imports the cadences of medieval covenant ('as long as the sun and moon shall endure'), the running-water requirement of folk and biblical oath-making, and the joined-hand gesture of feudal homage into a children's friendship rite at the edge of an Avonlea garden. Set this against Augustine's account of friendship in the Confessions, Aristotle's three kinds of friendship (utility, pleasure, virtue) in the Nicomachean Ethics, and Montaigne's essay 'On Friendship.' Where does Anne's instinct fit, and what is Montgomery claiming about the seriousness of childhood philia?
2. The narrator's gentle aside — 'Marilla was not to be drawn from the safe concrete into dubious paths of the abstract' — diagnoses two distinct moral-reasoning styles. Anne argues from principle (what is the categorical difference between flowers on a hat and flowers on a dress); Marilla argues from social consequence (people stared, Mrs. Rachel Lynde nearly sank through the floor). Compare this to the Burkean defence of inherited custom against rationalist abstraction, and to John Stuart Mill's contrary insistence on bringing every custom under examination. Which mode does Montgomery's chapter ultimately validate, and where in the text is the validation registered?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide