Anne of Green Gables — Chapter 13

Narration Prompt

Restate Chapter 13 on three levels. First, summarize the surface plot — Marilla's call, the picnic announcement, the kiss, the Idlewild monologue, the wet Saturday and Sunday minister's announcement, and the closing brooch description. Second, summarize what the chapter is structurally doing — refusing to reach the picnic, dwelling instead in a week of anticipation, and ending on an unanswered question. Third, name what is happening, off-page and beneath language, in Marilla — the conversion of duty into love expressed sideways through baked baskets, mourning brooches, and a kiss she cannot accept aloud.

Discussion Questions

1. Read Anne's defense of anticipation against Mrs. Lynde's stoic proverb. Position both within their philosophical genealogies — Mrs. Lynde inherits from Stoic apatheia, Pauline contentment, and Pope's 'expect nothing'; Anne argues something close to Aquinas on hope as a passion of the soul, or Kierkegaard on hope as the passion for the possible. Which view does the chapter ultimately endorse, and what cost does it accept in doing so?
2. Marilla's brusque 'never mind your kissing nonsense' is the back of her secret pleasure. Examine this as a moral psychology of repression. Drawing on Augustine on the divided will, Aristotle on ethos as habituation, and the Calvinist inheritance of Maritime Presbyterian culture, account for why Marilla cannot accept the kiss aloud — and whether the inability is a vice, a form of dignity, or a tragic structure that Anne is in process of healing.

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide