Saturday, August 13, 2011

Chapter 20: In which imagination gets out of control

Not much happens in this chapter; it's more of a vignette that demonstrates that Anne is still Anne -- in this case, because she totally lets her imagination get the better of her in the matter of the Haunted Wood.

Besides that, we get a look at Avonlea childhood customs:
"Charlie Sloane dared Arty Gillis to jump over it, and Arty did because he wouldn't take a dare. Nobody would in school. It is very FASHIONABLE to dare."
And the use of questionable verbs:
"After the Mayflowers came the violets, and Violet Vale was empurpled with them."
And a look at how Anne's bedroom has changed:
"In all essential respects the little gable chamber was unchanged. The walls were as white, the pincushion as hard, the chairs as stiffly and yellowly upright as ever. Yet the whole character of the room was altered. It was full of a new vital, pulsing personality that seemed to pervade it and to be quite independent of schoolgirl books and dresses and ribbons, and even of the cracked blue jug full of apple blossoms on the table. It was as if all the dreams, sleeping and waking, of its vivid occupant had taken a visible although unmaterial form and had tapestried the bare room with splendid filmy tissues of rainbow and moonshine."
And a sign of how Marilla has changed:
"'No, I can't say I'm sorry,' said Marilla, who sometimes wondered how she could have lived before Anne came to Green Gables, 'no, not exactly sorry. If you've finished your lessons, Anne, I want you to run over and ask Mrs. Barry if she'll lend me Diana's apron pattern.'"
(Post pic: Obviously, live oaks and Spanish moss are not among the flora of Prince Edward Island. But can you think of anything that is more mood-setting in a picture of woods?)

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