Anne of Green Gables — Chapter 14

About This Passage

Anne's Wednesday-morning confession in full — the chapter's most morally complicated speech and one of the great set-pieces of the novel. Six Tier 2 words gather here (irresistible, temptation, lengthen, slipped, sparkling, beneath), and the passage rewards close attention to its rhetorical architecture. Notice how the confession opens with three concessions ('I didn't mean to take it,' 'It did look so beautiful,' 'I was overcome by an irresistible temptation') that establish Anne as a candid, even self-incriminating witness — and how that established candor then licenses the wholly invented climax, the brooch sinking 'all purply-sparkling, and sank forever more beneath the Lake of Shining Waters.' The speech is, formally, a small masterpiece of persuasion by a child who has spent the previous night composing it under bedclothes, and Montgomery presents it without authorial intrusion, trusting the reader to feel both its literary triumph and its moral failure simultaneously.

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 14 in five movements: (1) Marilla discovers the brooch missing on Monday evening, Anne admits trying it on but denies losing it; (2) Anne is sent to her room and persists in denial through Tuesday; (3) Wednesday morning Anne delivers her rehearsed confession about Lady Cordelia Fitzgerald and the brooch sinking 'all purply-sparkling' beneath the lake; (4) Marilla refuses the picnic anyway, Anne collapses in 'an utter abandonment of disappointment and despair,' the household endures a dismal lunch; (5) Marilla finds the brooch caught in her lace shawl, asks forgiveness, and Anne flies to the picnic and returns 'in a state of beatification impossible to describe.' Hold each movement in mind separately — the chapter's argument depends on the order.

Discussion Questions

1. Augustine's Confessions distinguishes between an act done from pure malice (stealing pears one does not want) and an act done from a deformed but recognizable good (stealing what one desires). Anne's invented confession is offered for an end Anne values intensely — the picnic, ice-cream, the rowboat on the lake. By Augustine's framework, what kind of falsehood is Anne's confession, and does naming it correctly change how we should weigh it morally?
2. Marilla's interior monologue while shelling peas is an extended exercise in motivated reasoning. She begins with a hypothesis ('She must have taken it') and arrives, within a paragraph, at a verdict on Anne's character ('Slyness and untruthfulness — that's what she has displayed'). Trace the inferential moves and identify the precise sentence at which hypothesis becomes verdict. What does the chapter argue, through this exact movement of thought, about the epistemic vulnerability of even disciplined moral reasoners?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide