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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage achieves something rare: philosophical depth through a child's voice. Anne's personification of nature ('calling to me') is followed immediately by a protective withdrawal, then by an admission that the withdrawal is impossible. The rhetorical questions at the end are genuine — Anne does not know the answers. The dash-interrupted flow mimics the oscillation between desire and self-protection that defines her psychology in this chapter.
I want to go out so much — everything seems to be calling to me, 'Anne, Anne, come out to us. Anne, Anne, we want a playmate' — but it's better not. There is no use in loving things if you have to be ...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize this chapter, then explain what you think the author most wanted the reader to notice or feel. What techniques did the author use?
Discussion Questions
- Anne declares she will not go outside to protect herself from loving things she will lose, yet within minutes she names the geranium Bonny and the cherry tree Snow Queen. Is Montgomery presenting Anne's self-protective strategy as genuinely impossible, or as a pose Anne adopts because performing resignation is itself a form of imaginative engagement?
- Marilla sees the cherry tree as producing 'small and wormy' fruit; Anne sees it blooming 'as if it meant it.' These are not merely different opinions but different epistemologies — different ways of knowing what a thing IS. What does the chapter's structure suggest about which epistemology Montgomery endorses, and what would someone who disagreed with you argue?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
The quality of continuing firmly in a course of action despite obstacles — Matthew's silent determination operates through this quality rather than through argument
Item 2
Possessing great force or effectiveness — Montgomery applies this word to silence rather than speech, inverting conventional expectations about persuasion
Item 3
Withdrawn from immediate reality into private thought — Anne eating 'mechanically' while her spirit inhabits 'some remote airy cloudland'
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Critical Thinking
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