When you get rheumatism in your soul, you might as well go and pick out your coffin

When you get rheumatism in your soul, you might as well go and pick out your coffin is Aunt Jamesina’s wry aphorism about the difference between bodily pain and inward despair. In a brief exchange with Anne Shirley, it makes spiritual dejection sound more ominous than an ordinary physical ailment while keeping the warning buoyant with humor.

Definition and Meaning

Aunt Jamesina first says that she has rheumatism in her leg, prompting Anne to object that only old people should suffer from it. Aunt Jamesina corrects her: anyone may get rheumatism in the legs, but only old people should have it in their souls. She adds that she is thankful never to have experienced that condition, then delivers the coffin image as its consequence. The joke depends on the contrast between a familiar bodily complaint and a soul supposedly so worn down that death seems the next step.

Scene and Context

The exchange takes place as Aunt Jamesina urges Anne to go outside for fresh air and tells her to take an umbrella because she expects rain. Anne’s playful protest about age and rheumatism gives Aunt Jamesina an opening to turn practical advice into a comic maxim. The line’s extravagant ending is not presented as a literal prediction; its force comes from the sudden escalation from an aching leg to the prospect of a coffin.

Resonance in the Narrative

The remark sits beside a moment when Anne is not in her usual spirits. In November, after returning to Redmond for her third year, she roams through the park’s pineland alleys and lets the wind blow the fogs out of her soul. The contrast gives Aunt Jamesina’s phrase an added resonance: the narrative distinguishes temporary gloom, which Anne can imagine the wind clearing, from the more permanent spiritual weariness the joke names. The aphorism joins comic speech to the chapter’s concern with a change in Anne’s inward weather without suggesting that she has reached Aunt Jamesina’s dire condition.