Essay Prompts For the 2009 Senior Advanced Placement High School English Exam for Women

1. In the novel The Great Gatsby, the character of Daisy hopes that her daughter will be “a beautiful little fool.” What is F. Scott Fitzgerald saying through his character’s speech about the position of women during the era when this novel takes place? Also, why are you a fool?

2. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina share the trope of the suicidal female. What is your favorite nail polish color and why?

3. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, how does the physical female body become a placeholder for the collective female unconscious? Now, look around the room and write down the name of all of the girls you think are too fat.

4. In the space provided, draw a picture of a cute bunny.

5. Read the following passage from Tillie Olson’s I Stand Here Ironing, and then answer the question below:

She was a beautiful baby: the first and only one of our five who was beautiful at birth. You do not guess how new and uneasy her tenancy in her now-loveliness. You did not know her all those years she was thought homely, or see her poring over her baby pictures making me tell her over and over again how beautiful she had been − and would be, I would tell her − and was now, to the seeing eye. But the seeing eyes were few or non-existent, including mine.

In the passage, the speaker refers to her daughter as “homely.” Write an essay making fun of her, then post it on Facebook.