Read the following passage:
The morning-room at Elmwood Grange was crowded with the silent witnesses of a busy accumulation: heavy mahogany cabinets, stuffed with the dried specimens of some forgotten botanical craze; thick wool-work cushions representing stiff, unnatural lilies; and, on the mantelpiece, a bronze clock representing Chronos, his scythe poised perpetually over a gilded hour that never turned. Clara stood by the narrow bay window, where the leaded panes permitted only a grey, fractured view of the gravel drive. A single branch of ivy, swollen by the damp spring, beat a rhythmic, soft tattoo against the glass, like a hand seeking entrance to a vault. Inside, the air smelled of beeswax, coal-dust, and the faint, sweet decay of old potpourri—an atmosphere so thick with the past that she felt as though she were breathing in the dust of her ancestors' very thoughts, leaving no room for her own.
In the passage, the detailed description of the morning-room's interior decoration serves primarily to do which of the following?
- AThey document the gradual physical deterioration of the estate over several generations.
- BThey illustrate Clara's intellectual preoccupation with botany and historical horology.
- CThey summarize the sequence of domestic chores that Clara is expected to perform.
- They evoke a sense of stagnation and historical weight that corresponds to Clara's feelings of personal and intellectual confinement.Cevap
- EThey express the narrator's overt aesthetic disapproval of nineteenth-century domestic interior design.