Conquer It

For this final assessment, you will analyze the quotes for each of the three themes and explain what the text reveals about that particular theme.  Reference the quotes below as you complete the three questions in the final assessment activity.

Theme #1: Insecurity

  • "It was her appalling inadequacy; her cowardice; her mean water-sprinkled blood that depressed her."
  • "But she could not see them like that, not other people. She saw herself like that—she was a fly, but the others were dragonflies, butterflies, beautiful insects, dancing, fluttering, skimming while she alone dragged herself up out of the saucer."
  • "She had always been a fretful, weak, unsatisfactory mother, a wobbly wife, lolling about in a kind of twilight existence with nothing very clear or very bold, or more one thing than another,"

Theme #2 - Alienation and Loneliness

  • "now and then, thought Mabel Waring, left alone on the blue sofa, punching the cushion in order to look occupied, for she would not join Charles Burt and Rose Shaw, chattering like magpies and possible laughing at her by the fireplace."
  • "it made her furious to be treated like a house agent or messenger boy, to be made use of. Not to have value, that was it, she thought, trying to grasp something hard, something real."
  • "And it was still odder, this thing, this Mabel Waring, was separate, quite disconnected."

Theme#3 - Social Class Expectations

  • "But it was not her fault altogether, after all. It was being one of a family of ten; never having money enough, always skimping and paring; and her mother carrying great cans, and he linoleum worn on the stair edges, and one sordid little domestic tragedy after another—nothing catastrophic, the sheep farm failing, but not utterly; her brother marrying beneath her, but not much."
  • "But my dear, it’s perfectly charming!" Rose Shaw said, looking her up and down with that little satirical pucker of the lips which she expected—Rose herself being dressed in the height of fashion, precisely like everybody else, always.
  • For a party makes things either much more real, or much less real, she thought, she saw in a flash to the bottom of Robert Haydon’s heart; she saw through everything. She saw the truth. THIS was true, this drawing-room, this self, and the other false.