Anne of Green Gables — Chapter 3

About This Passage

The post-supper kitchen scene is the chapter's quiet, decisive exchange. Lucy Maud Montgomery sets Marilla's wrathful pragmatism beside Matthew's hesitant moral reaching, then closes on a comic simile (a 'predilection for standing on his head') that disarms Marilla's shock without dismissing it. The passage holds three pathfinders vocabulary words — perturbation, astonishment, predilection — and shows the apprentice writer how a chapter can stage its central argument almost entirely through dialogue, with only the lightest narrative scaffolding. Verbatim copying trains attention to Lucy Maud Montgomery's careful punctuation and the way she lets Matthew's rural cadence ('Well now') do the ethical work.

Narration Prompt

Retell the chapter from the moment Matthew opens the Green Gables door to the final image of Anne crying in the east gable room. Cover Marilla's first words, Anne's outburst at the supper table, the Cordelia request and the spelling-with-an-e demand, the gable bedroom's rigidity, and the kitchen dialogue between Matthew and Marilla in which the chapter's central argument is laid down without resolution.

Discussion Questions

1. Lucy Maud Montgomery stages chapter three as a series of two-person scenes — Marilla and Matthew at the door, Marilla and Anne at the table, Marilla and Anne in the gable bedroom, then Marilla and Matthew alone in the kitchen. Trace the chapter's argument scene by scene. What does the choice to keep the cast at exactly two people in each scene let the chapter do that a crowded scene could not?
2. Anne tells Marilla she is 'in the depths of despair' and calls the situation 'the most tragical thing that ever happened to me.' Anne's diction at age eleven is enormous — bigger than her vocabulary in a quiet drawing room would be. What is Lucy Maud Montgomery showing the reader about how Anne uses language under pressure, and how does this style of speech make a strict reader, like Marilla, see Anne more clearly rather than less clearly?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide