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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. In what year was Sedgwick first published?

2. In what month does Mononotto attack Bethel?

3. To which Biblical patriarch is Martha Fletcher compared as she accompanies William to the area of Springfield (61)?

4. Whom does Everell injure at Bethel?

5. Which of the following does Karcher remark was a major reason settlers gave for dispossessing Native Americans in what is now New England (30)?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the primary rhetorical appeal made in Karcher’s discussion of Sedgwick’s Redwood (17-18), and why is it the primary appeal?

2. What does Sedgwick remark would be a gratifying result of reading her novel (49)?

3. With what do Everell and Digby entertain themselves while on watch against attack (92)?

4. Why does Karcher relate one early critic as stating that Sedgwick provides for early American women writers (10)?

5. Which historical antecedent does Karcher identify for Faith Leslie?

6. How is Bertha Grafton described at her first appearance in the novel (74)?

7. What does Karcher note as the fate of Sedgwick’s mother?

8. What does Karcher note as Sedgwick’s refocusing of “the emergent national literature” of her era (12)?

9. What does Karcher identify as the primary thrust of the Unitarianism to which Sedgwick converts (16)?

10. What does Karcher identify as the primary thrust of the Calvinist theology under which Sedgwick was raised (15)?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

The narrator remarks that “we believe that the experience of every family, and individual, will attest the cluttering of joys or woes at marked periods” (362). Are the periods marked because of the clusters, or do the clusters occur due to the marking? What in the novel and in experience suggests as much, and how does it do so?

Essay Topic 2

Karcher remarks that one of Sedgwick’s characters in an earlier novel identifies Calvinist doctrine as promoting crimes, since neither good nor evil actions matter for salvation (16). Does Hope Leslie support that assertion? What in the text indicates that it does or not, and how does it indicate it?

Essay Topic 3

Karcher notes that “The main imperative of Sedgwick’s era was to create a national literature that differentiated itself from British and European precedents by capitalizing on what made America unique: its landscape, history, folk heroes, regional idiosyncracies [sic], potpourri of races and ethnic groups, and democratic social structure” (12). Does the novel successfully contribute to that imperative? What in the text indicates whether it does or not, and how does it do so?

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