What happens in Chapter 2 of A Wrinkle in Time?
The morning after the mysterious midnight visit from Mrs. Whatsit, Meg wakes up to find her little brother Charles Wallace already in the kitchen, preparing breakfast as if he has an almost eerie intuition. Their mother, Mrs. Murry, soon joins them — a beautiful and composed scientist who works from a lab set up in their home, hinting at the family's unconventional lifestyle. Charles Wallace announces his plan to visit their neighbor, Mrs. Whatsit, and he and Meg head out across the frost-hardened fields, picking up their schoolmate Calvin O'Keefe along the way. Calvin, a popular athlete, admits he felt a strange pull to the woods without knowing why — he describes it as a premonition. The children reach a rundown farmhouse, surrounded by rumors, where they meet another quirky old woman: Mrs. Who, who communicates almost entirely through quotes from writers, philosophers, and scripture, seldom relying on her own words. She cautions the children that Mrs. Whatsit is stretching herself too thin and that time is running out. The chapter ends with an increasing sense of urgency and the hint that something immense and perilous is on the horizon, though its exact nature remains unclear.
Analysis
Madeleine L'Engle uses Chapter 2 to broaden her cast and establish the novel's central tension between the everyday and the profoundly strange. The introduction of Calvin O'Keefe is a deliberate narrative choice: he arrives not by chance but by necessity, a concept L'Engle later terms tessering — the notion that the universe bends toward what must happen. His status as both an outsider and an insider (popular yet lonely) reflects Meg's own situation, and their coming together initiates the novel's subtle argument that belonging is something we choose rather than something given.
Mrs. Who stands out as L'Engle's most literary creation in this chapter. Her use of quotes from Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and the Bible is both humorous and thematically rich. She struggles to trust her own words, yet the borrowed phrases she uses carry significant weight; L'Engle suggests that truth is collective, built up over centuries, and that no single voice can claim it. This theme foreshadows the novel's later critique of conformity and groupthink.
The farmhouse setting serves as a gothic symbol — peeling, remote, and the subject of whispers — but L'Engle twists this trope: the real danger lies not within the house but in the vast universe outside it. The domestic space, no matter how rundown, remains a place of warmth and preparation. The tonal shifts are quick and intentional: the warmth of the Murry kitchen transitions to the cold fields, and then to the dim farmhouse, each shift tightening the atmosphere without fully escalating into menace. L'Engle keeps the strangeness just within the limits of being understandable.
Key quotes from Chapter 2
“I don't think I'm very nice, really. I'm not very good at being a person.”
Meg confesses her self-doubt to Calvin during their walk to the farmhouse, crystallizing her arc-long struggle with self-worth.
“"Fools," said I, "you do not know / Silence like a cancer grows."”
Mrs. Who quotes Simon & Garfunkel's 'The Sound of Silence' — one of her more contemporary borrowings — as a warning about the creeping darkness threatening the universe.
“She [Mrs. Who] had a habit of talking in quotes, as though she found it easier to use other people's words than her own.”
L'Engle's narratorial aside introduces Mrs. Who's defining characteristic and frames it as both limitation and accumulated wisdom.