2019 AP® ENGLISH LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS
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Question 2
(Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.)
Carefully read the following excerpt from William Dean Howells’ novel The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Then, in
a well-constructed essay, analyze how the author portrays the complex experience of two sisters, Penelope and Irene,
within their family and society. You may wish to consider such literary elements as style, tone, and selection of
detail.
They were not girls who embroidered or
abandoned themselves to needle-work. Irene spent her
abundant leisure in shopping for herself and her
Line mother, of whom both daughters made a kind of idol,
5 buying her caps and laces out of their pin-money,1
and getting her dresses far beyond her capacity to
wear. Irene dressed herself very stylishly, and spent
hours on her toilet2 every day. Her sister had a
simpler taste, and, if she had done altogether as she
10 liked, might even have slighted dress. They all three
took long naps every day, and sat hours together
minutely discussing what they saw out of the window.
In her self-guided search for self-improvement, the
elder sister went to many church lectures on a vast
15 variety of secular subjects, and usually came home
with a comic account of them, and that made more
matter of talk for the whole family. She could make
fun of nearly everything; Irene complained that she
scared away the young men whom they got
20 acquainted with at the dancing-school sociables.
They were, perhaps, not the wisest young men.
The girls had learned to dance at Papanti’s; 3 but
they had not belonged to the private classes. They did
not even know of them, and a great gulf divided them
25 from those who did. Their father did not like
company, except such as came informally in their
way; and their mother had remained too rustic to
know how to attract it in the sophisticated city
fashion. None of them had grasped the idea of
30 European travel; but they had gone about to mountain
and sea-side resorts, the mother and the two girls,
where they witnessed the spectacle which such resorts
present throughout New England, of multitudes of
girls, lovely, accomplished, exquisitely dressed,
35 humbly glad of the presence of any sort of young
man; but the Laphams had no skill or courage to make
themselves noticed, far less courted by the solitary
invalid, or clergyman, or artist. They lurked helplessly
about in the hotel parlors, looking on and not knowing
40 how to put themselves forward. Perhaps they did not
care a great deal to do so. They had not a conceit of
themselves, but a sort of content in their own ways
that one may notice in certain families. The very
strength of their mutual affection was a barrier to
45 worldly knowledge; they dressed for one another;
they equipped their house for their own satisfaction;
they lived richly to themselves, not because they were
selfish, but because they did not know how to do
otherwise. The elder daughter did not care for society,
50 apparently. The younger, who was but three years
younger, was not yet quite old enough to be ambitious
of it. With all her wonderful beauty, she had an
innocence almost vegetable. When her beauty, which
in its immaturity was crude and harsh, suddenly
55 ripened, she bloomed and glowed with the
unconsciousness of a flower; she not merely did
not feel herself admired, but hardly knew herself
discovered. If she dressed well, perhaps too well, it
was because she had the instinct of dress; but till
60 she met this young man who was so nice to her at
Baie St. Joan,4 she had scarcely lived a detached,
individual life, so wholly had she depended on her
mother and her sister for her opinions, almost her
sensations. She took account of everything he did and
65 said, pondering it, and trying to make out exactly
what he meant, to the inflection of a syllable, the
slightest movement or gesture. In this way she began
for the first time to form ideas which she had not
derived from her family, and they were none the
70 less her own because they were often mistaken.