Anne of Green Gables — Chapter 2

About This Passage

Lucy Maud Montgomery deploys explicitly sacred vocabulary — “canopy,” “twilight,” “rose window,” “cathedral aisle,” “rapt face,” “splendour” — on a country road planted by an eccentric old farmer, and then breaks the speech of the most talkative character in the chapter. The passage rewards copying because the sentences are doing two things at once: they describe a particular landscape, and they install the rhetorical-religious register that will license every later moment in the novel where Anne falls silent in a beautiful place. The vocabulary words splendidly, rapturously, and eccentric are all present in this passage, and the passage’s closing sentence — “She could keep silence, it was evident, as energetically as she could talk” — is the structural correction Lucy Maud Montgomery has been preparing the reader to receive.

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 2 in six or seven sentences, attending to Matthew Cuthbert’s arrival at the Bright River station, his discovery of the orphan girl on the platform, his decision to defer the explanation of the mistake, the long monologue she delivers in the buggy, the silence that overcomes her inside the Avenue, the renaming of Barry’s Pond as the Lake of Shining Waters, and the chapter’s closing comparison of the rejection to come to the killing of an innocent lamb.

Discussion Questions

1. Lucy Maud Montgomery introduces the orphan girl through the device of “the ordinary observer” and “the extraordinary observer,” and Matthew Cuthbert is positioned closer to the ordinary observer at the moment of first sight on the Bright River platform. Examine how the device functions as the chapter’s structural argument about reading, and consider how Matthew’s movement across the chapter from ordinary to discerning observer enacts the very revision the device is asking the reader to perform.
2. Inside the Avenue the orphan girl falls silent and remains silent for several miles. The narrator records her silence in distinctly religious vocabulary — “rapt,” “splendour,” “cathedral aisle,” “white” — and the chapter’s most paradoxical sentence claims she keeps silence “as energetically as she could talk.” Examine the rhetorical work this sacred register performs at this moment, and consider what Lucy Maud Montgomery is committing the reader to feel about both the road and the child who is silent in it.

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide