Anne of Green Gables — Chapter 2

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 2 in seven or eight sentences, attending to Matthew Cuthbert’s drive to the Bright River station, the discovery of the orphan girl on the platform shingles, Mrs. Spencer’s prior delivery of the child to the station-master, the deferral of the explanation to Marilla, the long buggy monologue, the renaming of Barry’s Pond and the Avenue, the silence inside the Avenue, and the chapter’s closing image of the lamb.

Discussion Questions

1. Lucy Maud Montgomery introduces the orphan girl through the device of “the ordinary observer” and “the extraordinary observer” before any character has spoken to her, and Matthew Cuthbert is positioned closer to the ordinary observer at the moment of first sight on the Bright River platform. Examine the rhetorical and ethical work this device performs as an inaugural figure for the novel — a structural argument that all reading is double, that the second pass is the morally adequate one, and that Matthew’s arc across the chapter from ordinary to discerning observer is the reader’s own. Consider how this Levinasian or Bakhtinian reading of the device would be supported or qualified by attention to Lucy Maud Montgomery’s diction at the moments of revision.
2. The orphan girl’s monologue on the buggy seat — the wincey dress, the asylum, the imagined pale blue silk, the wild plum, the renaming of Barry’s Pond as the Lake of Shining Waters — reads at first as cheerful chatter and on a second pass as a precise psychological strategy by which a homeless child has learned to render the world inhabitable. Reconstruct that strategy in detail, and consider how it relates to Iris Murdoch’s account of attention as a moral act, to Martha Nussbaum’s defense of imagination as ethical equipment, and to William James’s account of habit as the cement that lets a self survive what is unbearable. Address whether the chapter is offering it as a virtue, as a defense Anne will eventually need to outgrow, or as something more complicated than either reading admits.

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