Symbol and Imagery in Fiction: Practice Questions (English Literature 7.5)

Answer: (D). The caged bird, the sealed window and the order to stay indoors recur as images of enclosure, converging on an idea.

• (A) is wrong: there is no flow of thought.
• (B) is wrong: no earlier time is recounted.
• (C) is wrong: there is no contrast between two characters.

Answer: (D). Polish suggests order and care, “old letters” suggest the past, and the “dry” tick like a cough suggests age and discomfort.

• (A) is irrelevant to the sensory effect.
• (B) contradicts the tone of the details.
• (C) takes “cough” as plot information instead of as a simile for the sound.

Answer: (C). The family’s silence and lowered voices show that the attic is associated with an unspoken matter. The behaviour of the characters gives it symbolic weight.

• (A) ignores the characters’ reactions.
• (B) is unsupported.
• (D) conflicts with the tone of hushed avoidance.

Answer: (B). In the story the House of Usher is both a building and a family line, so a crack in the building suggests a weakness in both, and the final collapse confirms it.

• (A) reads the detail literally and ignores the way the house stands for the family.
• (C) has no basis in the text.
• (D) contradicts the sense of age and decay.

Answer: (C). Common associations are a starting point; the argument must rest on details of how this text presents the garden and why.

• (A) adds general information but not evidence from the text.
• (B) abandons the claim without testing it.
• (D) ignores the need for textual evidence.

Answer: (C). The recurring pink ribbon, with the name “Faith”, merges wife and religious faith, and Brown’s cry covers both.

• (A) reduces the image to a plot event.
• (B) is a literal reading that the story leaves open.
• (D) is irrelevant to the effect.

Model response. The imagery establishes a mood of weary resignation. The smell of “tar and cold iron” and the “grey sky” and “grey water” give the harbour a heavy, sunless quality, and the metaphor of gulls that “stitched” the sky to the water suggests a world held together by habit. The simile of boats nodding “like old men who have said everything already” gives the scene a tired silence that matches Maud’s state. The final detail, that she counts the bell “as she had counted everything since the funeral”, links the setting to her grief and shows that counting is how she gets through the day. The sensory details of smell, sight and sound therefore make her mourning visible without naming it directly.

Suggested Marlbridge rubric (6 points).

Model response. The motif is the key. In the first moment, keys at the Steward’s belt are a sign of authority and the right to open and close. In the second, the key is hidden, which turns it into a sign of secrecy or resistance, since she keeps what she should not. In the third, handing over the key “as though it weighed a stone” suggests that the authority now carries a burden. The motif emphasises ideas of control and trust, and its movement from open display to concealment to heavy transfer shows power changing hands at a cost.

Suggested Marlbridge rubric (4 points). One point for identifying the recurring object; one for stating an idea it emphasises (authority, control, trust); one for tracing the change across at least two moments with evidence; one for explaining what the pattern shows about the story (power shifting, burden of authority). Other well-supported ideas, such as freedom and confinement, earn credit.

Model response (The Fall of the House of Usher). Poe’s House of Usher is first presented through oppressive atmosphere: low clouds, a “dreary tract of country” and a “melancholy” house. The narrator then observes that “House of Usher” names both the building and the family, so the house becomes a symbol of the family’s line. The “fissure” running down the wall suggests a weakness within, and the sullen tarn into which the crack leads suggests an end beneath the surface. When the house finally splits and sinks into the tarn as the last of the family dies, the symbolic setting and the family’s fate coincide. The building comes to represent inherited decay and the inability to escape it, and the setting therefore carries the story’s central idea.

Suggested Marlbridge rubric (4 points). One point for evidence that the setting carries weight (atmosphere, repetition, reaction); one for stating what it represents; one for tying the setting to character or plot; one for explaining the function. Any well-supported story earns credit.