PrepTest 109, Section 2, Question 12
The autobiographical narrative Incidents in the Life of(463 more words not shown)
The author describes Jacobs's narrative(16 more words not shown)
- AJacobs's protagonist does(7 more words not shown)
- BJacobs's protagonist is(5 more words not shown)
- CJacobs's narrative reveals(13 more words not shown)
- DJacobs's narrative implicitly(12 more words not shown)
- EJacobs's narrative condemns(12 more words not shown)
Reading the passage
Why call it an antidomestic novel when Jacobs wants a home and family? Think about what happens to those goals in her story. She sends her lover away to protect him, then gains freedom at the cost of separation from family. These are not the conventional resolutions of a domestic novel.
What we’re looking for
The label marks that difference. It does not mean she has stopped wanting the things her free readers want.
Working the answers
- A
We are not told that she feels no loss when separated from her family. The author describes the separation as the price of freedom, not evidence that family is unimportant to her.
- B
She is not disinclined toward those aspirations. The final sentence says she willingly embraces the genre’s aims (paragraph 2). Wanting something she cannot obtain is different from not wanting it.
- CCorrect
Check the explanation immediately after antidomestic: the genre’s ranking of priorities fails from an enslaved woman’s perspective (paragraph 2). Its familiar priorities cannot simply be carried over to her situation. How does she protect the man she loves? By sending him away. How does she gain freedom? By leaving family behind. Those choices expose the limits of the conventional domestic framework.
- D
The problem is the constraints imposed by slavery. The author does not blame her desire for a home and family for her plight.
- E
This turns the argument into a criticism of domestic values themselves. Jacobs does not condemn those values for blocking her personal development; her story shows how slavery prevents her from pursuing them as free women can.
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