Read the passage carefully:
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death.
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard's name leading the list of "killed." He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.
She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.
There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.
She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.
A student analyzing the passage argues that Mrs. Mallard’s response to her husband’s death represents a transition from social confinement to individual liberation. Which of the following best describes how the author develops a line of reasoning that supports this thesis?
- The narrative transitions from documenting Mrs. Mallard's physical collapse and isolation to detailing the vital, active natural world outside, illustrating her subconscious shift toward autonomy.Cevap
- BThe description of the weather and the peddler establishes that the story takes place in a busy, urban setting that distracts Mrs. Mallard from her deep personal tragedy.
- CThe author chronologically lists the steps of receiving the news of the railroad disaster, weeping in Josephine's arms, and retiring to the bedroom to show the standard sequence of grief.
- DThe narrator emphasizes Mrs. Mallard's heart trouble to argue that her husband's death was a deliberate shock intended to cause her physical harm.
- EThe author uses the character of Josephine to directly voice the author's own feminist critique of traditional nineteenth-century marriages.