Read the following passage:
"For three winters, Mrs. Hallowell had sat by the east-facing bay window, her fingers moving with a mechanical, almost desperate precision over the linen warp of the tapestry. The design was meant to depict a pastoral valley, lush with summer clover and populated by sheep grazing under a benevolent sun. Yet, she had worked only in shades of grey and indigo, rendering the meadow in tones of ash and the sky in the bruised hues of an approaching storm. Her daughter, Clara, often begged her to introduce the gold thread that lay coiled, untouched, at the bottom of the wicker basket. Mrs. Hallowell would merely look down at her stained fingertips and murmur that the sky was not yet ready for gold. As the years progressed, the pastoral valley grew increasingly crowded with dense, tangled briars that choked the margins of the frame, creeping inward toward the sheep until the animals seemed less like peaceful inhabitants of a pasture and more like prisoners cornered by the wilderness. One evening, Clara found her mother asleep in her chair, the needle still threaded with dark grey yarn, resting over a patch of canvas that had been repeatedly unpicked and restitched until the fibers were frayed to the point of breaking."
Based on the passage, the unfinished tapestry functions primarily as a symbol of which of the following?
- Athe historical decline of textile production and domestic arts in Victorian households
- Bthe daughter’s persistent attempts to learn her mother's weaving technique
- the mother’s internal struggle with grief and psychological confinementAnswer
- Dthe author's personal disdain for traditional pastoral representations of nature
- Ea universal struggle of human civilization attempting to conquer the wild frontier