CST Practice Questions

1. c

2. a

3. d

4. a

5. c 

6. a

7. b

8. b

9.  b

10. b

11. a

12. d

13. d

14. A

15. D

16. D

17. C

18. B

Practice Test

Practice Test 

I. True-False- Mark each statement either “A” true or “B” false. 

___A__ 1. Jim was superstitious and believed in witches. 

___B__ 2. Huck thought he was doing a virtuous deed by helping JIm to freedom. 

___B__ 3. The Duke and Dauphin were displaced royalty. 

___A__ 4. Huck preferred the Widow Douglasʼ God over Miss Watsonʼs. 

___A_ 5. Huckleberry Finn contains a social comment deeper than a simple adventure 

story. 

__B___ 6. Tom Sawyer believed in doing everything the easiest way. 

__B___ 7. Tomʼs gang followed through on the orders contained in the oath. 

__A__ 8. Jim thought he would become rich someday. 

__A__ 9. More money was made on the third performance of the “Royal Nonesuch” 

than on the first two. 

___B__ 10. Huck told the Duke and Dauphin the truth about himself and Jim. 

II. Multiple Choice- Choose the word or phrase which best completes each statement. 

___C__ 11. Jim didnʼt want Huck to see the dead manʼs face in the flooded house 

because (a) it was a mess, (b) it was Tomʼs father, (c) it was Pap, (d) heʼd been shot in 

the face. 

____B_ 12. Huck justified his stealing by saying (a) he needed it, (b) he was just 

borrowing, (c) Tom Sawyer did it, (d) the owner didnʼt need it. 

___A__ 13. Huck finally got rid of the Duke and the Dauphin when (a) they sold Jim, (b) 

they were lynched, (c) he shoved them overboard, (d) he gave them the “slip.” 

____B_ 14. The gang “ambuscaded” an encampment of A-rabs, which turned out to be 

(a) a boy scout outing, (b) a Ladiesʼ Aid tea, (c) a Sunday School picnic, (d) a circus. 

___B__ 15. Tomʼs prized trophy from the “evasion” was (a) a tin pan, (b) a bullet, (c) the 

reward money, (d) Jimʼs freedom 

___B__ 16. Huck and Jim attributed their bad luck to (a) the work of witches, (b) touching 

a snakeskin, (c) killing a spider, (d) looking at the new moon. 

___D__ 17. Peter Wilksʼ money was hidden in (a) the cellar, (b) a straw tick, (c) a coffin, 

(d) all of these. 

___B__ 18. Whenever Huck thought about helping Jim to freedom he felt (a) proud, (b) 

confused and ashamed, (c) apathetic (d) happy. 

___D__ 19. The feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons was caused by 

(a) cowardice, (b) a water rights dispute, (c) Miss Emmelineʼs marriage, (d) none of 

these. 

___D__ 20. Huck first gains respect for Jim when (a) he finds out he is free, (b) he finds 

him on the island, (c) Jim tells his fortune, (d) he played the trick on Jim. 

III. Characters: Write the name of the character described by each quote or phrase 

below. Refer to the character list and spell names correctly. Some names are used 

more than once. Not all are used. 

___Peter Wilks________________ 21. a man who is buried with a sack of gold on his chest. 

______Buck Grangerford_____________ 22. “he come in gaping and digging one fist into his eyes, and 

he was dragging a gun along with the other one” 

_________Mrs. Judith Loftus__________ 23. explains to Huck how a real girl would act 

________Jim___________24. believes his hairy chest will bring him wealth 

__________________ 25. Huck reckons “that with her disposition, (this girl) was having 

a better time in the graveyard.” 

________Colonel Sherburn___________26. believes most men are cowards who act out of fear when 

they join a mob 

_________Jack_________ 27. a slave who shows Huck a “stack of water moccasins” 

_________Miss Watson_________ 28. frees Jim in her will 

_______Tom Swayer__________  29. must do everything in a complicated way according to the 

books 

_____Doctor Robinson____________ 30. the first person to accuse the king and the duke of being 

frauds trying to cheat Peter Wilksʼ rightful heirs 

_________Boggs________ 31. a drunkard shot down in the street at 1 p.m. 

_________Joanna Wilks________ 32. the sister with the harelip

_________Harney Shepherdson________ 33. leaves a note for his girlfriend in a Bible in church 

________The king_________ 34. cheats people out of their money by impersonating a reformed 

pirate 

_________________ 35. Huck says, “And when it comes to beauty and goodness too, 

she lays over them all.” 

__________Huckelberry Finn_______36. he canʼt pray a lie 

______Pap Finn__________ 37. a man whose corpse Jim wonʼt let Huck see 

________________38. decides to “light out for the territory” to escape civilization 

____________Aunt Sally___ 39. wonders what has happened to her silver spoons 

______Levi Bell_________ 40. the lawyer who suggests digging up a corpse 

______Sophia Grangerford_________ 41. like Juliet, she falls in love with a member of a family that her 

own family hates 

______Miss Watson_________ 42. caretaker of Huckʼs money 

_______________ 43. if the advice of this fraud had been followed, he and partner 

would have made away with almost $6,000 

_______________ 44. her appearance at the Phelpsʼ farm ends the impersonating of 

Huck and Tom 

_______________ 45. wears a bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch 

______Pap_________ 46. a man who makes Huck want to go to school 

________The Duke of Bridgewater _______ 47. gives vital information to the king so that the king can 

impersonate a Wilks brother 

______Jim Turner___________ 48. one of the men whose greed leaves him aboard a sinking 

ship. 

Character List 

Huck Finn" " " " " The Duke of Bridgewater 

Pap Finn" " " " " The King 

Tom Sawyer" " " " " Boggs 

Judge Thatcher" " " " Colonel Sherburn 

Miss Watson"" " " " Tim Collins 

Widow Douglas" " " " “Adolphus” 

“Sarah Mary Williams”" " " Peter Wilks 

“George Peters”" " " " George Wilks 

Mrs. Judith Loftus" " " " Harvey Wilks 

Jim Turner" " " " " William Wilks 

Jake Packard" " " " Mary Jane Wilks 

Bill" " " " " " Joanna Wilks 

“George Jackson”" " " " Levi Bell 

Colonel Grangerford" " " Dr. Robinson 

Buck Grangerford" " " " Aunt Sally 

Emmeline Grangerford" " " Silas Phelps 

Sophia Grangerford"" " " “William Thompson” 

Harney Shepherdson" " " “Tom Sawyer” 

Jack" " " " " " “Sid Sawyer” 

Jim

Satire

*Look up satire in your dictionary.*

satire |ˈsaˌtīr|

noun

the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.

*Give five examples of satire from The Onion.*

1. Gay Teen Worried He Might Be Christian: In the religion of Christianity being guy is looked down upon. 

2. Shaq Misses Entire Second Half With Pulled Pork Sandwich : he should in the game not eating.

3. "This is such a shame. A pulled pork sandwich this severe was the last thing Shaq needed at this point in the season,"

4. "There's a chance that Shaq could have gone back into the game, but with a pulled pork sandwich of that magnitude you can't be too careful..."

5.  "During his third season with the Miami Heat, his effectiveness is thought to have been hampered by his attempts to play despite numerous pulled pork sandwiches. "

Dear, Norman Mailer....

Kamri Allshouse

Sofia Lara

Dear, Mr. Norman Mailer

I think that your obscure perception of books written by woman is not adequate especially because of your refusal to read books by woman. You are much like the men in my book ,which you would not of read, but may of been highly educated by its knowledge of the interaction of men and woman throughout the years. This in it’s own way could be considered deep even for the brainless male population that seems to inhabit and control the world. In my book A Room of One's Own it expresses the exact flaw in which you make of woman. Inside my book I suggest a curios question to the readers of how a woman would have been treated if Shakespeare had a sister. The truth is that the poor girl with many trapped thoughts never had the chance to unleash her skills she possessed in herself. It  would’ve not even mattered,  if she was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as Shakespeare was because it’s men like you that don’t give woman the chance. Not really allowing them to brake away from the typical male perspective of woman involved in literature. I can respect a few men’s opinions toward woman because they actually gave and took the time to analyze a woman’s intellectual capacity towards literature. I don’t agree with their opinions most of the time, but at least they gave woman a chance, not like you Mr. Mailer.  I conclude my letter by saying that maybe if you gave woman a chance, you may never know. You may be surprised of how wrong you are with your poor judgement of woman that are intellectual, even though you don’t agree. Again, like I have stated before you really have no right to judge me or any other woman that tries to unleash thoughts in this masculinist judged world. 

Sincerely, Virginia Wolf

A Room of One's Own

A Room of One's Own 

by Virginia Woolf1 

(Shakespeare's sister) 

It was disappointing not to have brought back in the evening some important statement, some 

authentic fact. Women are poorer than men because - this or that. Perhaps now it would be better 

to give up seeking the truth, and receiving on one's head an avalanche of opinion hot as lava, 

discoloured as dish-water. It would be better to draw the curtains; to shut out distractions; to light 

the lamp; to narrow the inquiry and to ask the historian, who records not opinions but fact, to 

describe under what conditions women lived, not throughout the ages, but in England, say in the 

time of Elizabeth. 

She wants to hear the facts about woman’s weaknesses and not just the opinions. She wants to open the door to all of the weaknesses of what woman are seen as by men.

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when 

every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which 

women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble 

upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly 

perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; 

Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web 

is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are 

not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are 

attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. 

Virginia asks herself on why men were the only ones that were able to express their feelings in different inspirational manners . Why woman didn’t have any drop of writing that was respected like that of Shakespeare.

I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took down one of the latest, Professor 

Trevelyan's History of England. Once more I looked up "Women", found "position of," and 

turned to the pages indicated. "Wife-beating," I read, "was a recognized right of man, and was 

practiced without shame by high as well as low....Similarly," the historian goes on, "the daughter 

who refused to marry the gentleman of her parents' choice was liable to be locked up, beaten and 

flung about the room, without any shock being inflicted on public opinion. Marriage was not an 

affair of personal affection, but of family avarice, particularly in the 'chivalrous' upper classes.... 

Betrothal often took place while one or both of the parties was in the cradle, and marriage when 

they were scarcely out of the nurses' charge." That was about 1470, soon after Chaucer's time. 

The next reference to the position of women is some two hundred years later, in the time of the 

Stuarts. "It was still the exception for women of the upper and middle class to choose their own 

husbands, and when the husband had been assigned, he was lord and master, so far at least as law 

and custom could make him. Yet even so," Professor Trevelyan concludes, "neither 

Shakespeare's women nor those of authentic seventeenth-century memoirs...seem wanting in 

personality and character."...Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by 

men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; 

splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some 

think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she 

was locked up, beaten and flung about the room. 

She is just amazed in disgust in how awful woman were treated and still being seen down upon. It seems like the men felt dominant with lots of machismo, only because they were men. With all of these descriptions of the treatment of woman are nothing and only some kind of rag that you can toss where ever you demand. 

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; 

practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but 

absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was 

the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired 

words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could 

hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband. 

Stating that woman were a key factor in writing being displayed as some kind of porcelain doll, but yet they were not able to learn key factors of knowledge.

It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians first and the poets 

afterwards - a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up 

suet. But these monsters, however amusing to the imagination, have no existence in fact. What 

one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same 

moment, thus keeping in touch with fact - that she is Mrs. Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in 

blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fiction either - that she is a 

vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually. The moment, 

however, that one tries this method with the Elizabethan woman, one branch of illumination 

fails; one is held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true 

and substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her...Occasionally an individual woman is 

mentioned, an Elizabeth or a Mary; a queen or a great lady. But by no possible means could 

middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in 

any one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian's view of the 

past. Nor shall we find her in any collection of anecdotes. Aubrey hardly mentions her. She never 

writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her letters in existence. 

She left no plays or poems by which we can judge her. What one wants, I thought - and why does 

not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it? - is a mass of information; at what 

age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; what was her house like; had she a room 

to herself; did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie 

somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average 

Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a book of 

it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring, I thought, looking about the shelves for books that 

were not there, to suggest to the students of those famous colleges that they should re-write 

history, though I own that it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided; but why should 

they not add a supplement to history? Calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous name so that 

women might figure there without impropriety? For one often catches a glimpse of them in the 

lives of the great, whisking away into the background, concealing, I sometimes think, a wink, a 

laugh, perhaps a tear...But what I find deplorable, is that nothing is known about women before 

the eighteenth century. I have no model in my mind to turn about this way and that. Here am I 

asking why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure how they were 

educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting-rooms to themselves; how 

many women had children before they were twenty-one; what, in short, they did from eight in 

the morning till eight at night. They had no money evidently; according to Professor Trevelyan 

they were married whether they liked it or not before they were out of the nursery, at fifteen or 

sixteen very likely. It would have been extremely odd, even upon this showing, had one of them 

suddenly written the plays of Shakespeare, I concluded, and I thought of that old gentleman, who 

is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, 

present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it. He also 

told a lady who applied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of fact go to heaven, 

though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save 

one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. 

Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.

Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, 

that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, 

for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me 

imagine, since the facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had 

a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably - 

his mother was an heiress - to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin - Ovid, 

Virgin and Horace - and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy 

who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to 

marry a woman in the neighborhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That 

escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he 

began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a 

successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, 

practicing his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the 

palace of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at 

home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was 

not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace 

and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few 

pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not 

moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were 

substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter - 

indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father's eye. Perhaps she scribbled some 

pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, 

however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighboring 

wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten 

by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame 

him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; 

and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? 

The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let 

herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. 

The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, 

a gift like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood 

at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager - a fat, 

loose-lipped man - guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting - 

no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted - you can imagine what. She could 

get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at 

midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and 

women and the study of their ways. At last - for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the 

poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows - at last Nick Greene the actor- 

manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so - who shall 

measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body? - 

killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses now 

stop outside the Elephant and Castle. 

Virginia clearly states that it wouldn’t matter if Shakespeare had a sister because she wouldn’t be treated any differently because it would simply come down to the fact that she was a girl. She states that sooner or/ later she would attempt something drastic because she wouldn’t be able to take her non-used knowledge (that kills her to express it all) out. 

That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare's day had had 

Shakespeare's genius. But for my part, I agree with the deceased bishop, if such he was - it is 

unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare's day should have had Shakespeare's genius. For 

genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was not 

born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born today among the working 

classes. How, then, could it have been born among women whose work began, according to 

Professor Trevelyan, almost before they were out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their 

parents and held to it by all the power of law and custom? Yet genius of a sort must have existed 

among women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily 

Bronte or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to 

paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a 

wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we 

are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, 

some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the 

highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess 

that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. It was a woman 

Edward Fitzgerald, I think, suggested who made the ballads and the folk-songs, crooning them to 

her children, beguiling her spinning with them, on the length of the winter's night. 

This may be true or it may be false - who can say? - but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, 

reviewing the story of Shakespeare's sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great 

gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in 

some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it 

needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for 

poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder 

by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. No girl 

could have walked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of 

actor-managers without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may have been 

irrational - for chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons - but 

were none the less inevitable. Chastity has then, it has even now, a religious importance in a 

woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and 

bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest. To have lived a free life in London in 

the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was a poet and playwright a nervous 

stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had 

written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination. 

And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work 

would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the 

sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century. Currer 

Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought 

ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the 

convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them, that 

publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood.... 

Re-states how a woman would have not been respected as a writer.

Aphra Behn (seventeenth century novelist and dramatist) proved that money could be made by 

writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing became 

not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind, but was of practical importance. A husband 

might die, or some disaster overtake the family. Hundreds of women began as the eighteenth 

century drew on to add to their pin money, or to come to the rescue of their families by making 

translations or writing the innumerable bad novels which have ceased to be recorded even in 

textbooks....The extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth century 

among women - the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the 

translating of the classics - was founded on the solid fact that women could make money by 

writing. Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for. It might still be well to sneer at "blue 

stockings with an itch for scribbling," but it could not be denied that they could put money in 

their purses. Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I 

were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the 

Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write....Without those 

forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than 

Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer 

without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. 

For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of 

thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is 

behind the single voice....All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra 

Behn which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminister Abbey, for it was she 

who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she - shady and amorphous as she was - 

who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight; Earn five hundred a year by your 

wits.... 

It was the begining of woman to have the chance to be free, to write their feelings out onto a paper.

Next I think that you may object that in all this I have made too much of the importance of 

material things. Even allowing a generous margin for symbolism, that five hundred a year stands 

for the power to contemplate, that a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself, still 

you may say that the mind should rise above such things; and that great poets have often been 

poor men. Let me then quote to you the words of your own Professor of Literature, who knows 

better than I do what goes to the making of a poet. Sir Arthur Quiller-Coach writes: "The poor 

poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance...a poor child in 

England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that 

intellectual freedom of which great writings are born." That is it. Intellectual freedom depends 

upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been 

poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less 

intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance 

of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.... 

Stating that woman have been cursed with the luck of being poor, so that they could not express their feelings with freedom (since the beginning of time) of releasing energy.  

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir 

Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young - alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried 

where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet 

who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, 

and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and 

putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing 

presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I 

think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another 

century or so - I am taking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate 

lives which we live as individuals - and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our 

own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we 

escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation 

to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in 

themselves; if we look past Milton's hogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we 

face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our 

relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the 

opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body 

which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her 

fore-runners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that 

preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born 

again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would 

be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, 

even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while. \

She sums everything up and states directly to all woman that we should stand up and write our thoughts out and then will we be seen as people with intellectual knowledge.

From 

Woolf, Virginia; A Room of One's Own. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1929.

Norman Mailer's View of Women Writers

What is his view? 

What are his prejudices and stereotypes? Do you agree with any of his ideas? What ideas do you disagree with?

"...I do not seem able to read them. Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale. At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquille in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn....

First of all I disagree with all of his judgement on woman. His views towards woman are very strong and stereotypical to woman. I can find it very insulting, but yet again till this I don't know or think that he even read a woman's book before his death. He really has no right to say such horrible discriminatory words to woman. I don't know, but maybe when he wrote this he may of thought that it was bringing woman's strength to try and go on dow. The truth is that woman have suffered to much and they were not going to stop writing, just because a man that hadn't even read any woman's books. All he was doing was giving them all the strength to prove him and the many other judgmental men that they did and still do have had talent, also.

Questions for The Hours

1.Describe the three female characters in great detail? What do they have in common? 

How do they differ? How does their era influence who they are? 

 *Susix England:  she hears voices she can’t take something anymore. She is going crazy she is Virginia Wolf. She likes to write with great thought and analyzation. Virginia lives in the past first. Seems like she is depressed or/ stressed out of something. She lives, eats, and sleeps her writing. She is the writer of the book.

She is a maybe jelous of her sister’s family. She kisses her own sister in the mix of her sister leaving with her two boys and little girl that saw them kissing. 

*Los angeles: She is very quite, but a little mysterious. She doesn’t talk much. She seems like she is depressed or/ stressed, too.  She is reading the book. She kinda sees herself inside the book as she reads it. She kisses her friend on the lips.Her name is Laura. She decides to live instead of committing suicide or something else. 

*New York: Her partner is a woman. Her name is Mrs.  Clarrisa Dalaway. It seems like he is hiding something and depressed. She has a lover that does actually loves her. The man knows that she is just using him as an excuse, so that she doesn’t think of her own life and also because she cares for him. She has the name of Virginia’s book. Braking down in the kitchen. The little boy in the other story is the ex-lover of hers. The guy is explaining to Clarrisa that she must let him go. So, he kills himself, happily.

2. Compare/Contrast these female characters with the female characters from the literature weʼve read.

*In the "Hours"*

All of these three woman seems like they have some kind of interest towards woman. Seems like all three of them space off and go into their other world. Where they think and analyze things into detail. They all have some kind of secret that they hide and they hide it by other distractions in their lives. 

*Books we have read*

In the books we have read it seems like there is always one woman that is correct for the main character of the book. Then on the other hand there is a woman that isn't such a bright idea to mesh with her. In the books there are some what hidden secrets. Most likely there are always punishments for taking the path that there hearts want (this is mostly only for the woman character that is considered the "good girl") in life. 

The Yellow Wallpaper

*What happened to the narrator of the story?*

~ The narrator basically became crazy as the story went on.

~ As the story progressed she became more aware of her life style because as she saw the images on the wallpaper she was really seeing her non-freedom life style. 

~ She finally in some kind of looney way releases the soul, thus in a way releasing her own.

*List 10 concrete details the author uses to show what happened to the narrator.*

1. ~ "... absolutely forbidden to 'work..."

2. ~ "... John says the very worst thing I can do is think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad."

3. ~ "... it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern..."

4. ~ "... here are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?"

5. ~ It focuses exclusively on her own thoughts, feelings, and perceptions.

6. ~  The narrator is in a state of anxiety for much of the story, with flashes of sarcasm, anger, and desperation.

7. ~ The struggle between the narrator and her husband, who is also her doctor, over the nature and treatment of her illness leads to a conflict within the narrator’s mind. 

8. ~  The narrator decides to keep a secret journal, in which she describes her forced passivity and expresses her dislike for her bedroom wallpaper.

9. ~ The narrator completely identifies herself with the woman imprisoned in the wallpaper.

10. ~  The narrator spends her time crawling on all fours around the room because she identifies herself to the lady in the . Her husband discovers her and collapses in shock, and she keeps crawling, right over his fallen body.