501 Critical Reading Questions

(Sean Pound) #1
and then says I can see now—(lines 38–39) suggesting that she
can understand now how Mrs. Wright must have felt.


  1. d.Mrs. Hale describes Mr. Wright as a hard manwho was like a raw
    wind that gets to the bone(lines 51–52). Mrs. Wright’s loneliness
    would be deepened by living with a man who was quiet and cold.

  2. b.The punctuation here—the dashes between each word—sug-
    gest that Mrs. Wright changed from the sweet, fluttery woman
    she was to a bitter, unhappy person over the years. The
    emphasis on her loneliness and the dead husband and bird add
    to this impression.

  3. d.The women decide to take the quilt to Mrs. Wright to keep her
    busy; it would give her something to do, something familiar and
    comforting

  4. c. Because her house was so lonely, Mrs. Wright would have wanted
    the company of a pet—and a pet that shared some qualities with
    her (or with her younger self) would have been particularly
    appealing. She would have liked the bird’s singing to ease the
    quiet in the house, and she also used to sing real pretty herself(line


10) and would have felt a real connection with the bird.


  1. b.The clues in the passage—the violently broken bird cage, the
    dead bird lovingly wrapped in silk and put in a pretty box, the
    description of John Wright as a hard and cold man—suggest that
    he killed the bird and that Mrs. Wright in turn killed him for
    destroying her companion.

  2. d.The fact that Mrs. Hale slips box under quilt piecessuggests that she
    will not share her discovery with the men.

  3. c. Frankenstein asks his listener to [l]earn from me [... ] how danger-
    ous is the acquirement of knowledge(lines 6–8). He is telling his tale
    as a warning and does not want to lead his listener into the same
    kind of destruction and infallible misery(line 6).

  4. a. The context reveals that Frankenstein was prepared for a multi-
    tude of reversesor setbacks that would hinder his operations.

  5. e.Frankenstein describes himself as pursuing his undertaking with
    unremitting ardourand that his cheek had grown pale with study, and
    [his] person had become emaciated with confinement(lines 45–47). He
    also says that a resistless, and almost frantic, impulse urged me for-
    ward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit
    (lines 56–58). These are the marks of a man obsessed.

  6. b.Moreau states in lines 22–24 that this extraordinary branch of knowl-
    edge has never been sought as an end, [... ] until I took it up!, and in
    lines 28–30, he states that he was the first man to take up this ques-
    tion armed with antiseptic surgery, and with a really scientific knowledge

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