How To Answer The Comparative and Contextual Study Questions (OCR A Level English Literature): Exam Questions

Write a critical appreciation of this passage, relating your discussion to your reading of American Literature 1880–1940.

Mrs Ferris Lowell had let it be known, without appearing to let anything be known at all, that the pearls were new. This was the whole art of the thing: to be seen to possess without being seen to display, so that the possession seemed less a purchase than a birthright quietly resumed. She stood now at the head of her own staircase, one gloved hand resting on the banister as though for a support she did not need, and received her guests with a smile calibrated to the exact degree of warmth each deserved — which was to say, to the exact figure of their incomes, their connections, and their usefulness to her in the season to come.

Newland watched her from the foot of the stairs and thought, not for the first time, that she was the most honest woman he knew. Everyone else in the great bright house was lying — about their affection, their fortunes, their reasons for being there — but Mrs Lowell lied about nothing, because she believed in nothing that could be disproved. She believed in the pearls. She believed in the forty covers laid for dinner, in the orchids sent up from the conservatory that morning, in the orchestra half hidden behind its screen of palms. These were facts. One could stand upon them.

The rooms filled. The talk rose and thickened, a sound like water over stones, and beneath it ran the other conversation, the real one, conducted entirely in glances — who had come, who had not, who had come with whom. A young woman in unfashionable grey stood a little apart near the window, and Newland saw the room take note of her and, in the same instant, decide against her: a slight cooling, a turning of shoulders, as unanimous and wordless as a shoal of fish changing course.

He knew, in the vague way one knows such things, how she had come to be there at all. Somebody’s cousin; a favour owed to somebody’s mother; a name put on a list in September and regretted in November. The house kept a hundred small mechanisms for the correction of such errors, and all of them were running now. A footman would not quite see her. The woman beside her would turn to answer a question no one had asked. By the time the dinner cards were read she would find that hers had been mislaid, and there would be apologies of a warmth exactly calculated to make a second visit impossible. None of it would be cruel. Cruelty required attention, and attention was the one thing the room had already withdrawn.

He knew the mechanism. He had watched it work upon others for thirty years and had, on occasion, worked the lever himself. What he had not expected — what took him now by the throat with a sensation almost like fear — was to find that he could no longer admire it. The grey girl lifted her chin and looked out at the lit avenue, at the carriages steaming in the cold, and there was in the set of her mouth something that had gone out of everyone else in the room: the capacity to want a thing that could not be bought at Tiffany’s and laid, cool and perfect, against the collarbone.

Mrs Lowell came down at last, trailing scent and consequence, and took his arm. “You are dreaming, Newland,” she said. “It is very rude of you. Come and be charming to the Vandergraves; he means to build a railway.”

He allowed himself to be led. Behind him the window held the grey girl a moment longer, and then the crowd closed over the place where she had been, as the sea closes, leaving no mark.

This passage is set in New York high society at the turn of the century. Mrs Ferris Lowell is receiving guests at an evening reception in her own house. Newland, an old acquaintance, watches from the foot of the staircase.

[30 marks]

Write a critical appreciation of this passage, relating your discussion to your reading of The Gothic.

The house did not want them; Isabel had known it from the gravel. Other houses received a car with a kind of blank patience, but this one seemed to gather itself as they came up the drive, the way a person gathers themselves when a stranger sits too close. She said nothing of this to Gerald, who was already talking about the guttering, the acreage, the astonishing cheapness of it, and who had not once, in the whole slow approach, looked up at the windows.

She had looked. And she was almost sure that one of them, on the second floor, at the end of what must be the long gallery the agent’s letter had mentioned, had been open when they turned in at the gate, and was shut now.

Inside, the hall smelled of cold stone and something sweetish underneath, like flowers a day past their best. Their footsteps went ahead of them and came back changed. Gerald strode about opening doors and pronouncing the house “sound, essentially sound,” and his voice in those rooms was too loud and too small at once, a boy whistling. Isabel stood in the middle of the hall and felt the house arrange itself around her attention, so that wherever she did not look seemed to be exactly where something was.

The letter from the agent had run to four pages and had said almost nothing. It described the acreage and the roof and the year of the porch, and it used the word opportunity twice, and it mentioned, in a subordinate clause near the foot of the third page, that the property had stood unoccupied since the war. Isabel had read it through twice on the train and found afterwards that she could not remember whether it had given the reason. Gerald said there was no reason. Houses this size went cheap now, everybody knew it, there was no mystery in a tax bill. He had said so three times between the station and the gate, which was twice more than a man says a thing he believes.

“You’ll want to see the gallery,” said the woman who kept the keys.

Isabel had not heard her come. She was old, and dressed with the careful neatness of someone who has no one left to be neat for, and she was already climbing, so that there was nothing to do but follow. The stairs turned, and turned again. The light from the tall window fell across them grey and grainy, the colour of a photograph of light rather than light itself.

The gallery ran the whole length of the house. Portraits hung along it, too high and too dim to read as faces — only the pale ovals where faces would be, and the darker mass of old clothes, and here and there the small cold gleam of a painted ring or buckle catching what little there was to catch. At the far end was the window. It was shut. Of course it was shut.

“They don’t like it aired,” the old woman said, though Isabel had asked nothing. “The pictures. The damp gets into them.”

And she smiled, and it was a perfectly ordinary smile, a housekeeper’s smile, except that it went on a fraction too long — the way the house’s welcome had gone on too long, the way the grey light lay too long across the stairs — and Isabel understood, with a calm that frightened her more than fear would have, that she had already agreed to stay, days ago, in a room in London, over the deeds, and that some things once agreed to cannot be got out of by the simple expedient of changing one’s mind.

Below, Gerald called up that the cellars were dry. His voice came very far away.

Isabel and her husband Gerald have bought an old country house which neither of them has yet seen. In this passage they arrive for the first time and are shown round by the woman who keeps the keys.

[30 marks]

Write a critical appreciation of this passage, relating your discussion to your reading of The Gothic.

For three days now the key had turned on the outside, and Cassandra had made herself a study of the antechamber as a prisoner makes a study of a cell: not from interest, but because the mind, denied the world, will fasten upon whatever is left it. There was the yellow paper, faded to the colour of old teeth, and stained near the window with a long brown weeping that might have been rain, or might have been something the house was ashamed of. There was the single chair. There was the door.

She would not call it dread. Dread was for housemaids and for the heroines of the novels her aunt confiscated. What she felt, she told herself, was merely attention, sharpened by idleness — and yet her attention had begun to play her tricks. The paper, she was nearly certain, had shown eleven of the little faded medallions along the cornice when she was first brought here, and now showed twelve; and the twelfth stood directly above the door, where she was sure, quite sure, there had been only blank wall.

Her husband — she still, from habit, gave him the word — came at noon and at dusk. He was gentle. That was the horror of it, that he was so gentle. He would set down the tray and take the single chair while she stood, and he would ask after her nerves in the voice one uses to a sick child or a nervous mare, and he would explain, again, with the patience of a man explaining water to a fish, that it was all for her own good; that a season of quiet would restore her; that the physician was very pleased. And she would smile, because she had learned that smiling shortened the visits, and would hate herself for the smiling.

The physician had come once, on the first day, and had asked her nine questions. She had counted them, as she counted everything now. Three concerned her sleep, two her appetite, and the remaining four her feelings towards her husband, which she answered carefully and which he wrote down without once looking up. He did not ask what she read, or what she thought, or whether she had any occupation at all; and when she offered that she had been used to keeping the accounts for her father’s business, he set down his pen and looked at her with great kindness and said that this was precisely the sort of strain they must now put behind them. She had understood then that there was no answer she could give which would not be entered as a symptom.

But this evening he was late, and the light was going, and in the failing of it the yellow paper seemed to soften and to stir, as though it breathed. She stood very still. Somewhere in the wall, or behind it, there was a small persistent sound, a scratching, patient and unhurried, like a nail drawn slowly down plaster — or like a woman, perhaps, in some farther room, who had also made her study of the paper, and had at last begun, very quietly, very reasonably, to try the only exit left to her.

The key turned. She composed her face.

“You are standing in the dark, my dear,” he said, and set down the lamp; and the medallions on the paper leapt suddenly into their places along the cornice, and she counted them, while he spoke of the weather, and there were thirteen.

This novel is set in an English country house late in the nineteenth century. Cassandra has been confined to an upstairs room by her husband, who says that a period of rest will restore her nerves. In the extract she has been locked in for three days.

[30 marks]

Write a critical appreciation of this passage, relating your discussion to your reading of Dystopia.

The notice had gone up in the stairwell overnight, as the notices always did, so that no one could say they had seen it being put up, or by whom. RESIDENTS ARE REMINDED THAT CIVIC FEELING IS BEST EXPRESSED IN COMMON. Below it, in smaller type, a time and a place. Alden read it twice on his way down, not because it was difficult but because it was expected that one should be seen to read such things with attention; and the stairwell, like every stairwell, had its eye — a small grey lens set high in the corner where the wall met the ceiling, patient as a spider, and about as loved.

He did not look at the lens. Looking at the lens was not forbidden; almost nothing was forbidden, which was the whole genius of the arrangement. It was simply that people who looked at the lens were, in time, spoken of, and people who were spoken of were, in time, spoken to, and no one Alden had ever known had come back quite the same from being spoken to. So he kept his eyes on the notice, and arranged his face into the expression the notice seemed to want — a mild, agreeing warmth, the look of a man glad to be reminded of his own good feeling — and he held it until he was certain it had set.

In the street the loudspeakers were already at their morning work, and the figures on the pavement moved to the rhythm of them without seeming to hear them at all, the way a body breathes without being told. Alden moved with them. This was the thing he had never managed to explain to Perel, before Perel stopped being someone one could explain things to: that the terror was not the lens, nor the loudspeaker, nor even the men who came at four in the morning, of whom everyone spoke and whom no one had seen. The terror was how little any of it was needed. The State had built a great machine for the manufacture of obedience, and had then discovered, to what must have been its own surprise, that the citizens had been manufacturing it themselves all along, for nothing, and better.

Perel had argued the other way, that first winter, in the room above the tram sheds where four of them used to meet and where it had still seemed possible to argue about anything at all. Take the lenses down, Perel said, and inside a month the city would be itself again. Alden had answered that the city was already itself, and that this was the whole of the difficulty. They had not settled it. Two of the four stopped coming by the spring. Perel was given a post in the northern districts, which everyone agreed was a promotion, and wrote twice, briefly, in a hand that was recognisably his own and a voice that was not. Alden had kept the letters for a while. He did not know, now, what he had done with them.

He reached the corner and stopped with the others at the barrier, and it was then, in the ordinary press of shoulders, that he felt the small folded paper pushed into his hand.

He did not look down. Every instinct he had spent forty years perfecting told him not to look down. He closed his fingers upon it — paper, real paper, warm from another hand — and he kept his face in its mild civic warmth, and his heart began to go like a fist upon a door; and above him, from its high grey corner, the patient lens looked down upon a man who appeared, in every particular, to be thinking nothing at all.

This passage is set in a city governed by a one-party state, where public notices and loudspeakers direct daily life and residents are watched by cameras. Alden is on his way to work.

[30 marks]

Write a critical appreciation of this passage, relating your discussion to your reading of Dystopia.

They came down out of the hills in the last of the light because the light was the only clock left that could be trusted. The man went first and the boy came after in his footprints, which was a thing the man had taught him without words, the way he taught him everything now, by doing it slowly enough to be copied. The valley below them had been a lake once. You could see where the water had stood by the pale ring it had left on the hills, high up, a tideline drawn by a hand no one living had seen at work.

Nothing moved down there. That was good. Movement was the thing you learned to distrust first, before hunger, before the cold, before the dark; a moving thing wanted something, and in a country with nothing left to want but what you carried, there was only one thing left to want, and it was you.

The boy said, without stopping, “Was there fish in it.” He did not make it a question. He had learned that too, that questions cost breath and got nothing.

“There was fish in it,” the man said.

“What kind.”

The man considered. He found that he could not remember the names, or that the names, remembered, would be a cruelty — words for a thing the boy would never see, hung in a mind that had no shelf to set them on. So he said only, “Silver ones. They came up in the evening, when the flies were on the water.”

The boy was quiet, walking. Then he said, “Flies,” in the tone of a child turning over a coin he has never spent, and the man understood that this too was gone: that the boy had been born into the after, and that everything the man had loved he could only hand across to him as a story, worn smooth with the handling, and that a story was not the thing but the shape the thing had left behind — the ring on the hill where the water had stood.

There were other things he had not told him and did not intend to. That there had been a time when you could stand in a lit room at night with the curtains open and think nothing of it. That the roads had once been for going somewhere. That the boy had a name because a woman had chosen it out of a book, in a house with a door that locked, and had said it aloud twice to hear how it sounded before she would write it down. The man had decided early that he would hand over the useful things and keep the rest, on the grounds that a boy cannot miss what he has never been given. He was less certain of that now than he had been. But the ground was going and the light was going with it, and he kept walking.

They stopped where a culvert opened black under the dead road, and the man went in first and struck the light he was afraid to strike and would not have struck if there had been any other way, and the small flame stood up trembling and showed them the concrete, the dark stain of old water, the far mouth of the pipe. It was empty. He let the breath go out of him.

“We’ll sleep here,” he said. “You did well today.”

The boy said nothing, but in the failing flame the man saw him hear it — saw the words go in and be kept — and thought: that is all I have to give him now. That, and the footprints. And the names of the fish, which I will remember, tonight, if it takes me until morning.

This novel takes place some years after an environmental collapse has emptied much of the country. A man and his son are travelling on foot with what they can carry. In the extract they come down towards a valley at dusk.

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