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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 do Maud and Roland do when they find other scholars have followed the trail to France?

2. Where did Christabel have her baby?

3. What does Val say that she's not very good at?

4. Who do Maud and Roland see walking together in France?

5. How long have Maud and Roland been in France before the other scholars arrive?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What do Leonora and Blackadder do when Cropper's Mercedes passes them on the road?

3. Describe Cropper's lectures.

4. What does Maud tell Roland about other people's perceptions of what the two are doing?

5. How does Ellen Ash feel about Christabel?

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

7. What is Ash's opinion on spiritualist mediums?

8. How does Val feel about her new relationship?

9. How does Ash show Christabel that she is not a possession?

10. What offer does Blackadder make to Roland?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

The novel follows two parallel stories, one in the past and one in the present. Discuss the relationship of the past and the present in the novel.

1) How is communication possible between the past and the present?

2) What drives the characters to try to understand the past? Why does Roland study the past?

3) What do parallels between the past and the present say about human experience?

Essay Topic 2

Discuss understanding a text through an intermediary, such as Cropper's biography of Ash.

1) How does Cropper create a different reality of Ash, by imposing himself in Ash's story?

2) How does Maud interpret The Great Ventriloquist? How does she separate Cropper from Ash in what she reads? What meanings does the title The Great Ventriloquist take on in this context?

3) How do Blackadder's writings on Ash differ from Croppers? How does Blackadder try to keep his personal self out of his interpretive readings, and is this possible?

Essay Topic 3

In the novel, reading is an active experience, which is greatly influenced by not only the writer's perspective but the reader's perspective. Discuss the role of the reader's bias in the novel.

1) How does Roland's life influence how he interprets Ash? How does this dynamic cause Blackadder, Roland, and Cropper to all have distinctive experiences of Ash?

2) How do the characters' readings of Ash and LaMotte change over the course of the novel, not because of what they learn about the poets, but because of changes in themselves? How do the characters' personal experiences and biases prevent objective understandings of the authors' intentions?

3) How do formal perspectives, like feminism, create a group bias in the reading of LaMotte? What other examples of this dynamic are there in the novel?

(see the answer keys)

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