Anne of Green Gables — Chapter 3

About This Passage

Montgomery fuses the bare gable room with Anne’s emotional desolation: the diction (painfully bare, rigidity, marrow, tempestuous) treats furniture as feeling. A single paragraph rehearses the chapter’s pattern of physical setting standing in for inner state, while Marilla’s offstage approach with the candle reasserts the adult order Anne is hiding from.

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 3 in roughly six to eight sentences with attention to the four shifts of emotional register: Marilla’s initial astonishment, Anne’s collapse and the name negotiation, supper and the gable-room scene, and the kitchen conversation between Marilla and Matthew. Note where the chapter’s judgment of each adult appears to settle.

Discussion Questions

1. Montgomery describes the gable room as having “a rigidity not to be described in words” that “sent a shiver to the very marrow of Anne’s bones.” How does her diction throughout that passage — “painfully bare,” “ache over their own bareness,” “skimpy,” “tempestuous appearance of the bed” — fuse the room with Anne’s emotional state, and what does this fusion reveal about the narrator’s sympathies?
2. Marilla picks up Anne’s scattered clothes and places them “neatly on a prim yellow chair,” then says “Good night” “a little awkwardly, but not unkindly.” What does this small, unforced action — set against her stated decision to send Anne back — disclose about Marilla that her speech alone has not?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide