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Copywork
About This Passage
Frances Hodgson Burnett stages the chapter's pivot with exact care. The stillness breaks; Mary names what she hears; she reaches out blindly to a tapestry; the tapestry, improbably, is the covering of a hidden door — and the first adult to appear behind that door is Mrs. Medlock with keys in her hand. Burnett uses the Gothic grammar of tapestried walls and concealed passages to make an architectural claim about Misselthwaite: the house is a system of hidden entrances, and Mary has just accidentally put her hand on one. The italicized is — Burnett's own emphasis — carries the whole epistemology of the scene.
It was while she was standing here and just after she had said this that the stillness was broken by a sound. It was another cry, but not quite like the one she had heard last night; it was only a sho...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize Chapter 6 in three paragraphs worthy of a seminar-room recap: Martha's secondhand portrait of Dickon and the moor cottage; Mary's first self-directed tour of Misselthwaite — gallery, cabinet of ivory elephants, mother mouse in the velvet cushion; and the second crying, the tapestried door, Mrs. Medlock's enforcement, and Mary's private rage on the hearth-rug.
Discussion Questions
- Burnett withholds Dickon's physical appearance in this chapter and delivers him exclusively through Martha's dialect-anecdotes — Soot the crow, the half-drowned fox cub, his rainy-day seeing. What argument is Burnett making about the kind of knowledge Mary (and the reader) should acquire first about a person? How does this ordering — reputation before encounter — shape the character Dickon is about to become on the page?
- The cabinet of ivory elephants is easy to overlook as atmospheric detail, but Mary recognises the elephants — she had seen carved ivory in India. Burnett has placed a piece of Mary's old life inside the most buried cabinet of her new one. What is Burnett doing with this deliberate collision of Misselthwaite and India, and how does it rewrite the opening chapters' account of what Mary has left behind?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
inclined to complain or cry in a peevish, irritable way; marked by small, restless distress, as of a young child who cannot be soothed.
Item 2
deadened or softened in sound by something intervening — cloth, walls, or distance — so that the sound reaches the ear blurred and quieter than it was at its source.
Item 3
a heavy textile, typically woven or embroidered with figurative scenes, hung on the walls of great houses as both decoration and insulation; historically also used to conceal doors and passages.
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Critical Thinking
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