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Copywork
About This Passage
The narrator names the pedagogical event directly: Mary has never heard the truth about herself. Burnett frames the moment almost like a medical note — 'plain speaking,' 'she felt uncomfortable' — and lets the self-examination proceed in three escalating questions, each more interior than the last. The pivot from looks to disposition ('nasty tempered') is where honest perception begins doing its moral work.
This was plain speaking, and Mary Lennox had never heard the truth about herself in her life. Native servants always salaamed and submitted to you, whatever you did. She had never thought much about h...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize Chapter 4 in one paragraph of six to eight sentences. Trace the arc from the tapestry-hung bedroom, through Martha's Yorkshire candor, Mrs. Medlock's absent authority, the walled gardens, and Ben Weatherstaff's blunt mirror, to Mary's first unguarded sentence to the robin. Identify the turning point and defend your choice in one sentence.
Discussion Questions
- Martha tells Mary, 'I think tha' art a sour young 'un,' and Ben Weatherstaff says Mary and he were 'wove out of th' same cloth.' Burnett gives Mary two mirrors in one chapter — a young servant and an old gardener. Why does Mary resist Martha's judgment but go 'uncomfortable' under Ben's? What does this tell us about whose authority Mary is beginning to grant?
- The narrator intrudes after Mary's outburst to observe, 'It is a Yorkshire habit to say what you think with blunt frankness, and old Ben Weatherstaff was a Yorkshire moor man.' What is Burnett doing philosophically by locating honesty in a region and a class — that is, by making truth-telling a feature of soil rather than of individuals? What assumptions about character and place does the sentence commit the novel to?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Greeted or showed deference with a low bow accompanied by a hand-to-forehead gesture, a formal salutation in parts of South Asia and the Middle East.
Item 2
Yielded to the authority or will of another; accepted control without resistance.
Item 3
Not pleasing in appearance or character; lacking qualities that draw interest or affection.
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Critical Thinking
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