Anne of Green Gables — Chapter 14

About This Passage

Marilla's interior monologue while shelling peas — the moral center of the first half of the chapter. Montgomery gives us, in close third person, Marilla's full case against Anne: the brooch is gone, the child denies it, the lying is worse than the loss. The passage rehearses every word that will turn out to be unjust ('slyness and untruthfulness — that's what she has displayed') and so the reader, on first reading, hears it as Marilla's reasonable verdict and, on second reading, as the chapter's central irony. Eight Tier 2 words land here (nervously, imagination, punished, falsehoods, fearful, responsibility, slyness, untruthfulness), and the passage models how an honest mind can construct a coherent, persuasive, and entirely wrong account of someone else.

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 14 in five movements: (1) Marilla discovers the brooch missing on Monday evening; (2) Anne denies, is sent to her room, and refuses to confess through Tuesday; (3) Wednesday morning Anne delivers her invented confession about Lady Cordelia Fitzgerald and the brooch sinking 'all purply-sparkling' beneath the lake; (4) Marilla still refuses the picnic, Anne collapses, the household endures a dismal lunch; (5) Marilla finds the brooch caught in her lace shawl, apologizes, and Anne flies to the picnic. Hold each movement in mind separately — the chapter's whole moral structure depends on the order in which these scenes occur.

Discussion Questions

1. Anne's confession is a deliberate, rehearsed piece of literary composition — she says she 'thought out a confession last night after I went to bed and made it as interesting as I could.' Is the confession a lie in the same moral category as a self-protective denial would be, or is it something else — an artifact, a story, a desperate child's escape hatch? Where does Montgomery's narrator stand on this question, and how can you tell?
2. Marilla's interior monologue while shelling the peas is the chapter's most carefully constructed misjudgement. Trace the steps of her reasoning — what assumptions does she begin with, what evidence does she weigh, what evidence does she fail to weigh, and at which exact step does she go wrong? What does the chapter suggest about how good people arrive at confident wrong answers?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide