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Copywork
About This Passage
Burnett stages a miniature contest of wills between a housekeeper accustomed to obedience and a child who refuses to supply any response at all. The passage shows how Mary's silence has acquired a kind of power she does not yet understand — her 'unresponsive little face' disarms an adult. Copying the rhythm trains the ear to Burnett's habit of building psychology through conversational failure rather than exposition.
“Humph,” muttered Mrs. Medlock, staring at her queer, unresponsive little face. She did not say any more for a few moments and then she began again. “I suppose you might as well be told something—to ...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Narrate Chapter 2 as a sequence of relocations: the clergyman's crowded bungalow and the naming by Basil, the journey to London under Colonel McGrew's wife's indifferent supervision, the handover to Mrs. Medlock at the hotel, the train to Yorkshire, the slow unfolding of Misselthwaite's legend, and the rain on the window as Mary falls asleep.
Discussion Questions
- Basil invents the nickname 'Mistress Mary Quite Contrary' from a Mother Goose rhyme Mary has evidently never heard. Burnett makes a peer — a seven-year-old boy with 'impudent blue eyes' — the agent who fixes Mary's identity in language. Analyze how peer naming operates differently from adult naming in this chapter (Barney's 'poor little kid' in Chapter 1, now Basil's taunt in Chapter 2), and consider what the nickname commits Mary to carrying into Yorkshire.
- Mrs. Medlock delivers the description of Misselthwaite Manor in fragments: 'six hundred years old,' 'near a hundred rooms,' 'most of them's shut up and locked,' 'there's pictures and fine old furniture,' and then the sudden retraction 'But there's nothing else.' Examine the rhetorical shape of this inventory — its additive momentum and abrupt negation — and argue how it prepares the reader for a novel in which a locked garden will turn out to be the thing that is not nothing.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Failing or refusing to react, engage, or signal acknowledgment in the expected way.
Item 2
Made uneasy, disconcerted, or thwarted, especially in the midst of a social attempt.
Item 3
A settled absence of interest or concern, carrying implications of distance or withholding.
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Critical Thinking
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