[The following passage is from Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel *Great Expectations*. In this scene, the narrator, Pip, visits the home of Mr. Wemmick, a clerk at the London law firm of Jaggers.]
Wemmick’s house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns.
'My own doing,' said Wemmick. 'Looks pretty; don't it?'
I highly applauded it. I think it was the smallest house I ever saw; with the queerest gothic windows (to say nothing of a gothic door), and a gothic bridge, to establish a comparison with which, would be to lay down a pipe-path.
'Then at the back, there’s a pig, and there’s fowls, and there’s a rabbit; and I should like to show you my tortoise-shell cat, and it’s a holiday to look at ’em. ...'
'Lord!' said Wemmick, ... 'when I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me. ...'
Which of the following best describes the function of Wemmick’s Walworth subplot in relation to Pip’s main narrative arc?
- AIt details the chronological sequence of Pip's visits to Walworth and Wemmick's eventual marriage.
- BIt functions as an independent comedy segment that provides relief from the novel's main events without connecting to Pip's moral development.
- It mirrors Pip’s inner conflict by showing how Wemmick successfully separates his cold professional life from his warm, moral domestic sphere.Answer
- DIt conveys the author's personal recommendation that all city workers should move to rural cottages to escape urban corruption.
- EIt represents a simple battle between Wemmick's purely evil office persona and his purely good domestic persona.