OCR A Level English Literature Comparative and contextual study June 2022 question paper H472/02

Write a critical appreciation of this passage, relating your discussion to your reading of American

Literature 1880–1940.

This passage is set in the Wild West in 1885. The local men have heard that one of their number has been killed by cattle thieves. The Baptist minister, Reverend Osgood, is afraid that they are forming a lynch mob to go after the cattle thieves, and is trying to restrain them.

Osgood suddenly went out to the two men by the horse. He went busily, as if
he didn’t want to, but was making himself. His bald head was pale in the sun.
The wind fluttered his coat and the legs of his trousers. He looked helpless
and timid. I knew he was trying to do what he thought was right, but he had no
heart in his effort.
‘Farnley,’ he said, in a voice which was too high from being forced,
‘Farnley, if such an awful thing has actually occurred, it is the more reason that
we should retain our self-possession. In such a position, Farnley, we are likely
to lose our reason and our sense of justice.’
‘Men,’ he orated to us, ‘let us not act hastily; let us not do that which
we will regret. We must act, certainly, but we must act in a reasoned and
legitimate manner, not as a lawless mob. It is not mere blood that we want; we
are not Indians, savages to be content with a miserable, sneaking revenge.
We desire justice, and justice has never been obtained in haste and strong
feeling.’ I thought he intended to say more, but he stopped there and looked at
us pathetically. He talked with no more conviction than he walked.
The men at the edge of the walk stirred and spit and felt their faces. It was
not Osgood, really, who was delaying them, but uncertainty, and perhaps the
fear that they were going to hurt somebody they knew. They had been careful
a long time.
Farnley paid no attention, but having admitted he would wait, just sat his
saddle rigidly. His horse knew something was wrong, and kept swinging his
stern, his heels chopping. Farnley let him pivot. He reared a little and swung
his tail back toward the Reverend. Osgood backed away hurriedly. One of the
men laughed. Osgood did look queer, feinting and wavering out there. Moore
looked back at us angrily. Farnley’s back had gone stiff under the cowhide
vest. The man who had laughed pulled his hat down and muttered.
‘We’ll organise a posse right here, Jeff,’ Moore promised. ‘If we go right,
we’ll get what we’re after.’ For Moore, that was begging. He waited, looking up
at Farnley.
Then Farnley pulled his horse around slowly, so he sat facing us.
‘Well, make your posse,’ he said. He sat watching us as if he hated us all.
His cheeks were twitching.
Canby was still leaning in the door behind us, his towel in his hand.
‘Somebody had better get the sheriff, first thing,’ he advised. He didn’t sound
as if it mattered to him whether we got the sheriff or not.
‘And Judge Tyler,’ Osgood said. He was impressed by the suggestion,
and came over to stand in front of us, closer. ‘Judge Tyler must be notified,’ he
said.

‘To hell with that,’ somebody told him. That started others. ‘We know what that’ll mean,’ yelled another. A third shouted, ‘We know what that’ll mean is right. We don’t need no trial for this business. We’ve heard enough of Tyler and his trials.’ The disturbance spread. Men began to get on their horses.

Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Ox-Bow Incident (1940)

In your answer to Question 2, you must compare at least two texts from the following list. At least one of these must be taken from the two texts given at the top of the list in bold type.

F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

‘In American literature, success is often worshipped for its own sake.’

By comparing The Great Gatsby with at least one other text prescribed for this topic, discuss

how far you agree with this view.

John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath

‘American literature shows that people are better off in groups than as individuals.’

By comparing The Grapes of Wrath with at least one other text prescribed for this topic,

discuss how far you agree with this view.

‘In American literature, suffering is often undeserved.’

By comparing at least two texts prescribed for this topic, discuss how far you have found this to be the case.

In your answer you must include discussion of either The Great Gatsby and/or The Grapes

of Wrath.

The Gothic

Answer Question 3.

Then answer one question from 4 (a), 4 (b) or 4 (c). You should spend 1 hour and 15 minutes on each question.

3 Write a critical appreciation of this passage, relating your discussion to your reading of the

Gothic.

This passage is set in New England, now part of the United States, early in the eighteenth century.

The moonbeams came through two deep and narrow windows and showed
a spacious chamber richly furnished in an antique fashion. From one lattice
the shadow of the diamond panes was thrown upon the floor; the ghostly light
through the other slept upon a bed, falling between the heavy silken curtains
and illuminating the face of a young man. But how quietly the slumberer lay!
how pale his features! And how like a shroud the sheet was wound about his
frame! Yes, it was a corpse in its burial-clothes.

Suddenly the fixed features seemed to move with dark emotion. Strange
fantasy! It was but the shadow of the fringed curtain waving betwixt the
dead face and the moonlight as the door of the chamber opened and a girl
stole softly to the bedside. Was there delusion in the moonbeams, or did her
gesture and her eye betray a gleam of triumph as she bent over the pale
corpse, pale as itself, and pressed her living lips to the cold ones of the dead?
As she drew back from that long kiss her features writhed as if a proud heart
were fighting with its anguish. Again it seemed that the features of the corpse
had moved responsive to her own. Still an illusion. The silken curtains had
waved a second time betwixt the dead face and the moonlight as another fair
young girl unclosed the door and glided ghostlike to the bedside. There the
two maidens stood, both beautiful, with the pale beauty of the dead between
them. But she who had first entered was proud and stately, and the other a
soft and fragile thing.

“Away!” cried the lofty one. “Thou hadst him living; the dead is mine.”

“Thine!” returned the other, shuddering. “Well hast thou spoken; the dead is thine.”

The proud girl started and stared into her face with a ghastly look, but a wild
and mournful expression passed across the features of the gentle one, and,
weak and helpless, she sank down on the bed, her head pillowed beside that
of the corpse and her hair mingling with his dark locks. A creature of hope and
joy, the first draught of sorrow had bewildered her.

“Edith!” cried her rival.

Edith groaned as with a sudden compression of the heart, and, removing her cheek from the dead youth’s pillow, she stood upright, fearfully encountering the eyes of the lofty girl.

“Wilt thou betray me?” said the latter, calmly.

“Till the dead bid me speak I will be silent,” answered Edith. “Leave us alone
together. Go and live many years, and then return and tell me of thy life. He
too will be here. Then, if thou tellest of sufferings more than death, we will both
forgive thee.”

“And what shall be the token?” asked the proud girl, as if her heart acknowledged a meaning in these wild words.

“This lock of hair,” said Edith, lifting one of the dark clustering curls that lay heavily on the dead man’s brow.

The two maidens joined their hands over the bosom of the corpse and
appointed a day and hour far, far in time to come for their next meeting in that
chamber.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘The White Old Maid’ (1835)

In your answer to Question 4, you must compare at least two texts from the following list. At least one of these must be taken from the two texts given at the top of the list in bold type.

*Candidates writing about The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories should select material from the whole text.

Either

Bram Stoker: Dracula

‘In Gothic literature, there is no escape from the past.’

Consider how far you agree with this statement by comparing Dracula with at least one other

text prescribed for this topic.

Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories *

‘Gothic fiction suggests that very primitive forces lie beneath civilised life.’

By comparing The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories * with at least one other text

prescribed for this topic, discuss how far you agree with this view.

‘Gothic literature explores the fascination for what is forbidden.’

By comparing at least two texts prescribed for this topic, discuss how far you have found this to be the case.

In your answer you must include discussion of either Dracula and/or The Bloody Chamber

and Other Stories *.

Dystopia

Answer Question 5.

Then answer one question from 6 (a), 6 (b) or 6 (c). You should spend 1 hour and 15 minutes on each question.

5 Write a critical appreciation of this passage, relating your discussion to your reading of dystopian

literature.

This passage is set in the city of Darwin C in a totalitarian regime where reproduction is controlled by the ruling powers, known as the Protectors. In this passage, citizens are punished for enabling a birth to take place outside of state control.

Heads bent, the prisoners are pushed into the room. Prisoners 730004, 730005, 730006, 730007 are pushed into the room, and they nod their recognition quickly, not wanting to incriminate each other.

Prisoner 730004 lifts her head and sees before her the servants of the
Protectors, called Protection Scientists. Half a dozen men, hard and vital, the
beneficiaries of intensive courses of gene therapy. They are the elite guardians
of this civilisation; they act to protect the species – their actions justified by this
aim. Their lofty phrases, all those phrases they threaded around her, as they
are threaded about Darwin C, woven across a thousand walls – they believe
them all, coldly, rigidly. To Prisoner 730004, they look alike, as she glances at
their faces one by one – her glance rushed and nervous, because she knows
they have come to condemn her. Perhaps she thinks they are alike because
their faces phrase the same attitude of mind, this absolute conviction. Nothing
will shatter this conviction, she thinks, as she scans them with her weary eyes.
They do not look at her. The Head Scientist – taller and sterner still – appears
among them, wearing a grey robe. He is old, but he has been repeatedly
rejuvenated, his cells replaced; he is a hybrid, an ageing body filled with
borrowed life. Now one of the Scientists says, ‘Line them up.’ And the guards
obey them. Prisoner 730004 can barely stand, fear has softened her limbs, but
a guard grabs her and she is lined up anyway.

Another Protection Scientist says, ‘We regret to inform you, Prisoners, that you have been found guilty of conspiring against the survival of the species, and therefore you will be processed and conveyed elsewhere.’

Involuntarily they gasp. Elsewhere means the mass-scale farms, or an
Institution for the Improvement of the Reason. They will be dispersed; there
are innumerable such places. Prisoner 730004 looks at Oscar, sees he has
been numbered 730005, and she wants to fling her arms around him, weep
with him – but her hands are tied. His eyes are on the floor; he looks too
shocked and broken to raise his head.

‘You should be grateful for the compassion and clemency of the Protectors,’ a
Protection Scientist is saying. ‘In other, less advanced civilisations your crimes
would be punishable by death.’
‘There is something else,’ says another of the Protection Scientists. Very
slowly, enunciating his words clearly, so there can be no mistake, he says,
‘Your co-conspirator, the egg donor you called Birgitta, has been found. The
Protection Agents tried to protect her, but she died in the struggle.’

‘She has been killed?’ says Prisoner 730004, too horrified now to stay silent. She sees Oscar slump forward as if a weight has fallen on his back, and for a moment she closes her eyes. It is too much to imagine.

Joanna Kavenna, The Birth of Love (2010)

In your answer to Question 6, you must compare at least two texts from the following list. At least one of these must be taken from the two texts given at the top of the list in bold type.

George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four

‘The regimes in dystopian fiction show little respect for the truth.’

By comparing Nineteen Eighty-Four with at least one other text prescribed for this topic,

discuss how far you agree with this view.

Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale

‘Dystopian fiction shows us the shock of losing freedoms which have been taken for granted.’

By comparing The Handmaid’s Tale with at least one other text prescribed for this topic,

discuss how far you agree with this view.

‘In dystopian literature, the emphasis is too much on disaster, and not enough on hope.’

By comparing at least two texts prescribed for this topic, explore how far you agree with this view.

In your answer you must include discussion of either Nineteen Eighty-Four and/or The

Handmaid’s Tale.

Women in Literature

Answer Question 7.

Then answer one question from 8 (a), 8 (b) or 8 (c). You should spend 1 hour and 15 minutes on each question.

7 Write a critical appreciation of this passage, relating your discussion to your reading concerning

Women in Literature.

This passage is set in the United States. The girl’s father has started to build an extra, unnecessary barn on the farm, although the family’s own accommodation is basic and inadequate. He has refused to discuss his decision.

The girl went to the sink, and began to wash the dishes that were piled up
there. Her mother came promptly out of the pantry, and shoved her aside. “You
wipe ’em,” said she; “I’ll wash. There’s a good many this mornin’.”
The mother plunged her hands vigorously into the water, the girl wiped
the plates slowly and dreamily. “Mother,” said she, “don’t you think it’s too bad
father’s goin’ to build that new barn, much as we need a decent house to live
in?”
Her mother scrubbed a dish fiercely. “You ain’t found out yet we’re
women-folks, Nanny Penn,” said she. “You ain’t seen enough of men-folks yet
to. One of these days you’ll find it out, an’ then you’ll know that we know only
what men-folks think we do, so far as any use of it goes, an’ how we’d ought
to reckon men-folks in with Providence an’ not complain of what they do any
more than we do of the weather.”
“I don’t care; I don’t believe George is anything like that, anyhow,” said
Nanny. Her delicate face flushed pink, her lips pouted softly, as if she were
going to cry.
“You wait an’ see. I guess George Eastman ain’t no better than other
men. You hadn’t ought to judge father, though. He can’t help it, ’cause he don’t
look at things jest the way we do. An’ we’ve been pretty comfortable here, after
all. The roof don’t leak – ain’t never but once – that’s one thing. Father kept it
shingled right up.”
“I do wish we had a parlor.”
“I guess it won’t hurt George Eastman any to come to see you in a nice
clean kitchen. I guess a good many girls don’t have as good a place as this.
Nobody’s ever heard me complain.”
“I ain’t complained either, mother.”
“Well, I don’t think you’d better, a good father an’ a good home as you’ve
got. S’pose your father made you go out an’ work for your livin’? Lots of girls
have to that ain’t no stronger an’ better able to than you be.”
Sarah Penn washed the frying-pan with a conclusive air. She scrubbed
the outside of it as faithfully as the inside. She was a masterly keeper of her
box of a house. Her one living-room never seemed to have in it any of the dust
which the friction of life with inanimate matter produces. She swept, and there
seemed to be no dirt to go before the broom; she cleaned, and one could
see no difference. She was like an artist so perfect that he has apparently no
art. To-day she got out a mixing bowl and a board, and rolled some pies, and
there was no more flour upon her than upon her daughter who was doing finer
work. Nanny was to be married in the fall, and she was sewing on some white
cambric and embroidery. She sewed industriously while her mother cooked,
her soft milk-white hands and wrists showed whiter than her delicate work.

Mary E Wilkins Freeman, ‘The Revolt of “Mother”’ (1891)

In your answer to Question 8, you must compare at least two texts from the following list. At least one of these must be taken from the two texts given at the top of the list in bold type.

Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility

‘Fiction by and about women suggests that lives are often shaped by romance.’

By comparing Sense and Sensibility with at least one other text prescribed for this topic,

discuss how far you have found this to be the case.

Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway

‘Women are often portrayed as in control of the social world and social gatherings.’

By comparing Mrs Dalloway with at least one other text prescribed for this topic, discuss how

far you agree with this view.

‘Female figures in literature have to settle for what life offers them.’

By comparing at least two texts prescribed for this topic, explore how far you agree with this claim.

In your answer you must include discussion of either Sense and Sensibility and/or Mrs

Dalloway.

The Immigrant Experience

Answer Question 9.

Then answer one question from 10 (a), 10 (b) or 10 (c). You should spend 1 hour and 15 minutes on each question.

9 Write a critical appreciation of this passage, relating your discussion to your reading concerning

the Immigrant Experience.

In this passage, Aunty Uju has moved from Lagos in Nigeria to New York, and is hoping to qualify as a medical practitioner. Her niece Ifemelu has joined her from Nigeria, and is spending the summer babysitting for her cousin Dike before starting a university degree. Ifemelu’s boyfriend, Obinze, has remained in Nigeria.

finally, Aunty Uju’s result came. Ifemelu brought in the envelope from the
mailbox, so slight, so ordinary, United States Medical Licensing Examination
printed on it in even script, and held it in her hand for a long time, willing it to
be good news. She raised it up as soon as Aunty Uju walked indoors. Aunty
Uju gasped. “Is it thick? Is it thick?” she asked.
“What? ?¹” Ifemelu asked.
Gini
“Is it thick?” Aunty Uju asked again, letting her handbag slip to the floor
and moving forward, her hand outstretched, her face savage with hope. She
took the envelope and shouted, “I made it!” and then opened it to make sure,
peering at the thin sheet of paper. “If you fail, they send you a thick envelope
so that you can reregister.”
“Aunty! I knew it! Congratulations!” Ifemelu said.
Aunty Uju hugged her, both of them leaning into each other, hearing each
other’s breathing, and it brought to Ifemelu a warm memory of Lagos.
“Where’s Dike?” Aunty Uju asked, as though he was not already in bed
when she came home from her second job. She went into the kitchen, stood
under the bright ceiling light and looked, again, at the result, her eyes wet. “So
I will be a family physician in this America,” she said, almost in a whisper. She
opened a can of Coke and left it undrunk.
Later, she said, “I have to take my braids out for my interviews and relax
my hair. Kemi told me that I shouldn’t wear braids to the interview. If you have
braids, they will think you are unprofessional.”
“So there are no doctors with braided hair in America?” Ifemelu asked.
“I have told you what they told me. You are in a country that is not your
own. You do what you have to do if you want to succeed.”
There it was again, the strange naïveté with which Aunty Uju had covered
herself like a blanket. Sometimes, while having a conversation, it would occur
to Ifemelu that Aunty Uju had deliberately left behind something of herself,
something essential, in a distant and forgotten place. Obinze said it was the
exaggerated gratitude that came with immigrant insecurity. Obinze, so like
him to have an explanation. Obinze, who anchored her through that summer
of waiting—his steady voice over the phone, his long letters in blue airmail
envelopes—and who understood, as summer was ending, the new gnawing
in her stomach. She wanted to start school, to find the real America, and
yet there was that gnawing in her stomach, an anxiety, and a new, aching
nostalgia for the Brooklyn summer that had become familiar: children on
bicycles, sinewy black men in tight white tank tops, ice cream vans tinkling,
loud music from roofless cars, sun shining into night, and things rotting and
smelling in the humid heat. She did not want to leave Dike—the mere thought
brought a sense of treasure already lost—and yet she wanted to leave Aunty
Uju’s apartment, and begin a life in which she alone determined the margins.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013)

¹ – The family speaks both Igbo and English; ‘Gini’ is the Igbo word for ‘What’. Gini?

In your answer to Question 10, you must compare at least two texts from the following list. At least one of these must be taken from the two texts given at the top of the list in bold type.

Henry Roth: Call It Sleep

‘The literature of immigration explores the importance of a sense of community.’

By comparing Call It Sleep with at least one other text prescribed for this topic, discuss how

far you agree with this view.

Mohsin Hamid: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

‘Immigration narratives often feature hostility on the part of immigrants towards their host nation.’

By comparing The Reluctant Fundamentalist with at least one other text prescribed for this

topic, discuss how far you agree with this view.

‘The literature of immigration reflects the point of view of the outsider.’

By comparing at least two texts prescribed for this topic, discuss how far you agree with this view.

In your answer you must include discussion of either Call It Sleep and/or The Reluctant

Fundamentalist.