Anne of Green Gables — Chapter 3

Narration Prompt

Reconstruct Chapter 3 in a paragraph that distinguishes its four movements: Marilla’s shock at the kitchen door, Anne’s collapse into tears and the negotiation over names, the silent retreat into the gable room, and the kitchen exchange that closes with Marilla’s verdict overturned by no one but contradicted by the chapter’s last image. Note where the narrator’s sympathies attach themselves.

Discussion Questions

1. Montgomery places the chapter’s decisive moral utterance — “We might be some good to her” — in the mouth of a man the narrator describes as “driven into a corner for his precise meaning,” and she frames it as arriving “suddenly and unexpectedly.” How does this staging — ethical insight surfacing through inarticulacy rather than rhetoric — inform Montgomery’s implicit theory of where moral knowledge comes from in this novel?
2. The chapter’s prose ascribes feeling to inanimate things (walls that “ache,” a smile “rusty from long disuse,” a bed of “tempestuous appearance”) while Marilla’s direct speech relentlessly reduces feeling to fact (“Fudge,” “Fiddlesticks,” “What good would she be to us?”). What does this asymmetry between narratorial sympathy and dialogic austerity argue — about the limits of plain speech, about who in the household is permitted to feel out loud, and about the kind of reader Montgomery is training?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide