Anne of Green Gables — Chapter 5

Narration Prompt

Reconstruct the chapter as a four-stage rhetorical act: Anne's announced will to enjoy, the bald-fact recital under Marilla's directive, the crucial paragraph in which Anne defends the women who failed her, and the unmarked juxtaposition in which Marilla's pity stirs without comment from the narrator. Note how each stage is structurally enabled by the one before it.

Discussion Questions

1. Anne's stray sentence — "I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it" — embeds, in passing, an eleven-year-old's rejection of the nominalist position Shakespeare's Juliet famously articulates and which much modern philosophy of language assumes. Montgomery does not flag the sentence, develop the position, or defend it; she lets it surface and disappear inside a child's prattle. What does Montgomery accomplish by refusing to ennoble this metaphysics into a thesis, and what does the embedded form ask of a reader who is willing to recognize what has just been claimed?
2. Marilla orders Anne to "stick to bald facts" and forbids imaginings; the bald facts that follow — both parents dead within four days of fever, Mrs. Thomas's drunken husband, the Hammonds' eight children including twins three times in succession, the Hope-town asylum that did not want her — produce the most devastating speech in the chapter, while Marilla's own response (reading between the lines, divining the truth) is recognizably an act of the imagination she has just forbidden. What is Montgomery arguing, through this near-perfect inversion, about the porous border between fact and imagination, and about which character in this scene is actually performing which act?

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