Anne of Green Gables — Chapter 9

Narration Prompt

Recap the chapter's tripartite structure — Anne's fortnight of solitary exploration at Green Gables, the kitchen confrontation between Mrs. Rachel and Anne, and Marilla's subsequent interview with Anne in the east gable — and identify which of these movements you take to be the chapter's true emotional center.

Discussion Questions

1. Lucy Maud Montgomery's free indirect style is at full strength in this chapter: 'delightful and popular,' 'visitations of Providence,' 'amiable suggestion of the birch switch,' 'reprehensible desire to laugh' — all phrases the village would assent to but the narrator is not endorsing. What kind of moral discipline does this technique ask of the reader, and is it a discipline a contemporary audience, schooled by social media's louder ironies, can still reliably perform?
2. Marilla's defense of Anne ('You shouldn't have twitted her about her looks, Rachel') escapes her before she has audited it. The novel will later attribute many of Marilla's deepest commitments to such unauthorized speech-acts. Discuss whether the novel's theory of moral life — that we discover what we love by being trapped into expressing it — is descriptively accurate, prescriptively desirable, or both, and whether it survives translation into adult institutional life (workplaces, marriages, civic memberships).

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide