GMAT Reading Comprehension - Recent Criticism has Sought to Align Sarah Orne Jewett

Reading Passage Question

Recent criticism has sought to align Sarah Orne Jewett, a notable writer of regional fiction in the nineteenth-century United States, with the domestic novelists of the previous generation. Her work does resemble the domestic novels of the 1850s in its focus on women, their domestic occupations, and their social interactions, with men relegated to the periphery. But it also differs markedly from these antecedents. The world depicted in the latter revolves around children. Young children play prominent roles in domestic novels and the work of child-rearing—the struggle to instill a mother’s values in a child’s character—is their chief source of drama. By contrast, children and child-rearing are almost entirely absent from the world of Jewett’s fiction. Even more strikingly, while the literary world of the earlier domestic novelists is insistently religious, grounded in the structures of Protestant religious belief, to turn from these writers to Jewett is to encounter an almost wholly secular world.

To the extent that these differences do not merely reflect the personal preferences of the authors, we might attribute them to such historical transformations as the migration of the rural young to cities or the increasing secularization of society. But while such factors may help to explain the differences, it can be argued that these differences ultimately reflect different conceptions of the nature and purpose of fiction. The domestic novel of the mid-nineteenth century is based on a conception of fiction as part of a continuum that also included writings devoted to piety and domestic instruction, bound together by a common goal of promoting domestic morality and religious belief. It was not uncommon for the same multipurpose book to be indistinguishably a novel, a child-rearing manual, and a tract on Christian duty. The more didactic aims are absent from Jewett’s writing, which rather embodies the late nineteenth-century “high-cultural” conception of fiction as an autonomous sphere with value in and of itself.

This high-cultural aesthetic was one among several conceptions of fiction operative in the United States in the 1850s and 1860s, but it became the dominant one later in the nineteenth century and remained so for most of the twentieth. On this conception, fiction came to be seen as pure art: a work was to be viewed in isolation and valued for the formal arrangement of its elements rather than for its larger social connections or the promotion of extraliterary goods. Thus, unlike the domestic novelists, Jewett intended her works not as a means to an end but as an end in themselves. This fundamental difference should be given more weight in assessing their affinities than any superficial similarity in subject matter.

Reading Passage Question:

‘Recent criticism has sought to align Sarah Orne Jewett’ is a GMAT reading comprehension passage with answers. Candidates need a strong knowledge of English GMAT reading comprehension.

This GMAT Reading Comprehension consists of 7 comprehension questions.

The GMAT Reading Comprehension questions are designed for the purpose of testing candidates’ abilities in understanding, analyzing, and applying information or concepts. Candidates can actively prepare with the help of GMAT Reading Comprehension Practice Questions.

Questions and Solutions

1. The passage most helps to answer which one of the following questions?

(A) Did any men write domestic novels in the 1850s?
(B) Were any widely read domestic novels written after the 1860s?
(C) How did the migration to urban areas affect the development of domestic fiction in the 1850s?
(D) What is an effect that Jewett’s conception of literary art had on her fiction?
(E) With what region of the United States were at least some of Jewett’s writings concerned?

2. It can be inferred from the passage that the author would be most likely to view the “recent criticism” mentioned in (Highlighted text)

(A) advocating a position that is essentially correct even though some powerful arguments can be made against it
(B) making a true claim about Jewett, but for the wrong reasons
(C) making a claim that is based on some reasonable evidence and is initially plausible but ultimately mistaken
(D) questionable, because it relies on a currently dominant literary aesthetic that takes too narrow a view of the proper goals of fiction
(E) based on speculation for which there is no reasonable support, and therefore worthy of dismissal

3. In saying that domestic fiction was based on a conception of fiction as part of a “continuum” mentioned in (Highlighted text), the author most likely means which one of the following?

(A) Domestic fiction was part of an ongoing tradition stretching back into the past.
(B) Fiction was not treated as clearly distinct from other categories of writing.
(C) Domestic fiction was often published in serial form.
(D) Fiction is constantly evolving.
(E) Domestic fiction promoted cohesiveness and hence the continuity of society

4. Which one of the following most accurately states the primary function of the passage?

(A) It proposes and defends a radical redefinition of several historical categories of literary style.
(B) It proposes an evaluation of a particular style of writing, of which one writer’s work is cited as a paradigmatic case.
(C) It argues for a reappraisal of a set of long-held assumptions about the historical connections among a group of writers.
(D) It weighs the merits of two opposing conceptions of the nature of fiction.
(E) It rejects a way of classifying a particular writer’s work and defends an alternative view.

5. Which one of the following most accurately represents the structure of the second paragraph?

(A) The author considers and rejects a number of possible explanations for a phenomenon, concluding that any attempt at explanation does violence to the unity of the phenomenon.
(B) The author shows that two explanatory hypotheses are incompatible with each other and gives reasons for preferring one of them.
(C) The author describes several explanatory hypotheses and argues that they are not really distinct from one another.
(D) The author proposes two versions of a classificatory hypothesis, indicates the need for some such hypothesis, and then sets out a counterargument in preparation for rejecting that counterargument in the following paragraph.
(E) The author mentions a number of explanatory hypotheses, gives a mildly favorable comment on them, and then advocates and elaborates another explanation that the author considers to be more fundamental.

6. The differing conceptions of fiction held by Jewett and the domestic novelists can most reasonably be taken as providing an answer to which one of the following questions?

(A) Why was Jewett unwilling to feature children and religious themes as prominently in her works as the domestic novelists featured them in theirs?
(B) Why did both Jewett and the domestic novelists focus primarily on rural as opposed to urban concerns?
(C) Why was Jewett not constrained to feature children and religion as prominently in her works as domestic novelists were?
(D) Why did both Jewett and the domestic novelists focus predominantly on women and their concerns?
(E) Why was Jewett unable to feature children or religion as prominently in her works as the domestic novelists featured them in theirs?

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