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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Dr. LeMinier give Maude?

2. What does Roland say to Blackadder after the meeting?

3. What does Christabel ask for when she first comes to Sabine's home?

4. What difference between himself and Maud makes Roland feel as if he is in a romance novel?

5. Who does Euan say he is advising?

Short Essay Questions

1. What happens at Sabine's house when Christabel disappears?

2. What does Beatrice Nest overhear?

3. What is Maud and Roland's relationship in France like?

4. How does the medium in the poem introduce her practices to the apprentice?

5. What are Cropper's relationships with the Ash family like?

6. What does the knight tell Melusine when he first sees her?

7. What are all the things Ellen puts in the box?

8. Where has Euan located Cropper and Hildebrand?

9. What similarities are there between Christabel and Ash's trip and Roland and Maud's trip?

10. What does Roland think about Blackadder's letter?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Discuss the structure of the novel.

1) Why and how does the novel use letters, excerpts of poems, and journal entries in its telling of the story?

2) How does the novel gradually reveal the story of Ash and Maud?

3) How do the characters of Roland and Maud change over the course of the novel?

Essay Topic 2

Discus the role of objects in the story, and how they are and are not invested with meaning.

1) What gives an object meaning? How do the letters that Roland finds have meaning, and why is the meaning only identified when Roland reads the letters?

2) How does context relate to meaning? Why can Maud only interpret Christabel's doll poem correctly in the context of Christabel's room? What other examples are there in the novel of context giving meaning to objects or words?

3) What meanings do the physical objects in Ash's box have? How are these meanings different for different people, in different contexts?

Essay Topic 3

The novel addresses how truth is defined, and that includes the characters definitions of themselves. Discuss how the characters define themselves.

1) How does Maud's hair define her and relate to her identity? Why does her hair have meaning? What meanings does it have, and to whom?

2) How does Roland define himself? How does his definition of himself change over the course of the novel?

3) How does Cropper define himself? How is Cropper's identity related to Ash?

(see the answer keys)

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