What happens in Chapter 27 of Anne of Green Gables?
Chapter 27 opens with Anne bubbling over with excitement. She's finally convinced Marilla to let her dye her dreaded red hair with a peddler's dye that claims to turn it a chic raven black. Unfortunately, the outcome is a disaster — her hair ends up a ghastly, muddy green. After a careful look, Marilla delivers her verdict with her usual bluntness, leaving Anne with no choice but to cut her hair off completely. She takes the shearing in stride, covering her short hair with a handkerchief at school and deflecting Diana's shocked questions with a touch of dark humor. The chapter wraps up with Anne declaring, with a bit of effort, that she will renounce vanity as a sin from now on — a promise that Marilla receives with a healthy dose of skepticism, having seen too many of Anne's dramatic moral transformations to take this one seriously.
Analysis
Montgomery crafts this chapter as a sharp comic set-piece, but the real skill lies in how much emotional truth she weaves into the farce. Anne's fixation on her hair has been a persistent issue since Chapter 1; here, Montgomery allows her to act on that fixation, leading to consequences that are both humorous and quietly punishing. The peddler serves as a fairy-tale tempter—a stranger offering transformation for a price—and the green hair is a grotesque twist on the raven beauty Anne desired, illustrating the idea that vanity distorts rather than enhances.
The chapter’s tonal structure is deliberate: Marilla's dialogue is brief and unsentimental, providing a comic counterpoint to Anne's elaborate self-criticism. Montgomery prevents Anne's suffering from becoming overly sentimental; instead, she maintains a lightly ironic tone, which feels more impactful than sympathy would. Anne's choice to cut her hair is depicted without melodrama, and that restraint indicates real character growth—the girl who once cried for hours over being called "carrots" now submits to the shears in near-silence.
The title, drawn from Ecclesiastes, carries significant thematic weight: "vanity" reflects both its biblical meaning (futile striving) and its everyday one (pride in appearance), blending the comic and the moral into one term. Montgomery's reference is clever rather than didactic, trusting readers to grasp the dual meaning without needing it spelled out. Ultimately, the chapter underscores a central theme of the novel: Anne's imagination, her greatest asset, is also the source of her most significant troubles.
Key quotes from Chapter 27
“I thought nothing could be as bad as red hair. But now I know it's ten times worse to have green hair.”
Anne delivers her verdict on the dye's disastrous result, her hyperbolic self-pity played here for maximum comic effect.
“Marilla, with a grim enjoyment of Anne's crestfallen appearance, said that she supposed she would have to cut it off.”
Montgomery's narratorial aside captures Marilla's unsentimental satisfaction, undercutting any slide toward melodrama.
“I have learned a great lesson and I am going to be a different Anne henceforth.”
Anne's solemn reformation speech, delivered with characteristic grandeur, which Marilla — and the reader — has every reason to doubt.
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