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FINAL EXAM REVISION GRADE 8 FOUNTAINHEAD

 At a Glance

In “The Gift of the Magi,” Della is determined to give her husband a Christmas gift. In order to afford
the fob for her husband's watch, she sells her long, beautiful hair, only to learn that he has sold his
beloved watch to buy her a set of combs.

“The Gift of the Magi” summary key points:

o Della Young decides to sell her beautiful hair to buy a watch fob for her husband’s
beloved watch.
o When Jim comes home, he is saddened and surprised to see Della’s beautiful hair
missing. He offers her his gift: bejeweled combs that she no longer needs.
o Della offers her gift to Jim. He looks at her and admits that he has sold his watch to
buy her the combs.
o The two are overcome with love as they realize they have sacrificed their most prized
possessions for one another.

Summary

(COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO SHORT STORIES, CRITICAL EDITI

Della Young is a devoted young married woman. Christmas Eve finds her in possession of a meager
one dollar and eighty-seven cents, the sum total of her savings, with which she wants to buy a gift for
her husband, Jim. A recent cut in the family income, from an ample thirty dollars a week to a stingy
twenty dollars a week, has turned Della’s frugality into parsimony. Although she lives in an eight-
dollar-a-week flat and her general surroundings, even by the greatest stretch of the imagination, do not
meet the standards of genteel poverty, Della determines that she cannot live through Christmas
without giving Jim a tangible reminder of the season.

Distraught, she clutches the one dollar and eighty-seven cents in her hand as she moves
discontentedly about her tiny home. Suddenly, catching a glance of herself in the cheap pier glass
mirror, a maneuver possible only for the slender and agile viewer, the perfect solution suggests itself.
Whirling about with happiness, she lets down her long, beautiful hair. It is like brown sable and falls
in caressing folds to below her knees. After a moment’s self-admiration, and another half-moment’s
reservation, during which time a tear streaks down her face, she resolutely puts on her old hat and
jacket and leaves the flat.

Della’s quick steps take her to the shop of Madame Sofronie, an establishment that trades in hair
goods of all kinds. Entering quickly, lest her nerve desert her, she offers to sell her hair. Madame
Sofronie surveys the luxuriant tresses, unceremoniously slices them off, and hands Della twenty
dollars. For the next two hours, Della feels herself in paradise, temporarily luxuriating in the
knowledge that she can buy anything she wants. She decides on a watch fob for Jim’s beautiful old
watch. If there are two treasures in the world of which James and Della Dillingham Young are
inordinately and justly proud, they are her hair (lately and gladly sacrificed) and Jim’s revered gold
watch, handed down to him by his grandfather.

She finally sees exactly what she wants, a platinum watch fob that costs twenty-one dollars. She
excitedly anticipates Jim’s reaction when he sees a proper chain for his watch. Until now, he has been
using an old leather strap, which, despite the watch’s elegance, has forced him to look at the time
surreptitiously.
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Arriving back at the flat, breathless but triumphant, Della remembers her newly bobbed appearance.
She reaches for the curling irons and soon a mass of close-cropped curls adorns her shorn head. She
stares at herself anxiously in the mirror, hoping that her husband will still love her. As is her usual
custom, she prepares dinner for the always punctual Jim and sits down to await his arrival. The
precious gift is tightly clutched in her hand. She mutters an imprecation to God so that Jim will think
she is still pretty.

At precisely seven o’clock, she hears Jim’s familiar step on the stairs, his key in the door. He is a
careworn young man, only twenty-two and already burdened with many responsibilities. He opens the
door, sees Della, and an indiscernible look, neither sorrow nor surprise, overtakes him. His face can
only be described as bearing a mask of melancholy disbelief. Even though Della rushes to assure him
that her hair grows fast and that she will soon be back to normal, Jim cannot seem to be persuaded
that her beautiful hair is really gone. Della implores him to understand that she simply could not have
lived through Christmas without buying him a gift; she begs him, for her sake, as well as the season’s,
to be happy.

Jim, as if waking from a trance, embraces her and readily tells her that there is nothing a shampoo or
haircut could do to Della that would alter his love for her. In the excitement he has forgotten to give
her gift, and now he offers her a paper-wrapped package. Tearing at it eagerly, Della finds a set of
combs, tortoise shell, bejewelled combs that she has so often admired in a shop on Broadway, combs
whose color combines perfectly with her own vanished tresses. Her immense joy turns to tears but
quickly returns when she remembers just how fast her hair grows.

Jim has not yet seen his beautiful present. She holds it out to him, and the precious metal catches all
the nuances of light in the room. It is indeed a beautiful specimen of a watch chain, and Della insists
on attaching it to Jim’s watch. Jim looks at her with infinite love and patience and suggests that they
both put away their presents—for a while. Jim has sold his watch in order to buy the combs for Della
even as she has sold her hair to buy the watch chain for Jim.

Like the Magi, those wise men who invented the tradition of Christmas giving, both Della and Jim
have unwisely sacrificed the greatest treasures of their house for each other. However, of all those
who give gifts, these two are inevitably the wisest.

Henry, through a third person narrative, adopts a sentimental tone in this story. He clearly has a
fondness for the characters and he wishes the reader to share this sentiment. The language used
throughout has a warm and pleasant quality, and there is hardly any reference to darkness, except of a
reference to Jim's 'dark assertion', but even this is dismissed to be dealt with later.

The most prominent theme in “The Gift of the Magi” is love. Jim and Della are willing to part with
their most prized possessions to make each other happy, demonstrating that a wealth of love makes up
for material poverty. Some additional themes are generosity, selflessness, and poverty.

There are two ways in which to answer this question and they are both symbolic.
First, there is a conflict of love. Both Jim and Della want to outdo one another in love. They want to
express their love in a way that accurately shows the depth of their love for one another. So, they both
sell what they prize the most to express and show their love to one another. Della sells her hair and
gives to Jim a chain for his watch and Jim sells his watch to give Della combs for her hair. In light of
this, they sought to show love in extravagant ways.
Second, what made these acts of love difficult was that they were poor. The open lines of the story
shows their poverty, as Della counts the pennies that she possessed and saved.
In the end, both win. This is the irony of the story or to use the language of O. Henry, this is why they
are magi. They found the beauty of giving.
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Mood : Sadness, pity, heavy

At the Border" is an autobiographical poem by Dr. Choman Hardi, a Kurdish immigrant refugee from
Iran who lives and writes in the UK.
The poem is defined by its free-verse structure; there are no rhymes or rhythmic elements, and instead
the poem is presented as the fragmented recollection of the five-year-old Hardi, who twice had to flee
persecution. The poem describes Hardi and her family waiting at a border to be let across to their
homeland, and how the land itself is unchanged by the border, only the idea of a border to prevent
people from crossing freely. The guards check their papers and faces; the implication is that they
might be refused entry, to be caught by whatever peril they flee. The poem is deliberately free-verse,
and has no implicit structure besides the simple, mono-syllabic narration (a very deliberate choice by
Hardi). This serves to showcase how the small child standing at the border thinks about the situation;
not about the political and social issues, but about the immediate here-and-now.
Now our mothers were crying. I was five years old
standing by the check-in point
comparing both sides of the border.
The autumn soil continued on the other side
with the same colour, the same texture.
It rained on both sides of the chain.
(Hardi, "At the Border," kurdmedia.com)
Here, the narrator's attention is struck by two contrasting stimuli: first, her mother is crying, which she
cannot understand as everyone is telling her that the country across the border is better than the one
they are leaving. To the narrator, the event should be happy, but she cannot yet understand the horrors
that her mother may have witnessed, and the powerful emotion of relief to finally be safe. Secondly,
and perhaps more interestingly, the young narrator notices that the ground and weather are the same
"on both sides of the chain." Why, then, is there a barrier at all? Are not all people the same just as all
the land is the same? Why should some people remain on this side while others are allowed to pass?
In this way, Hardi encourages the reader to explore the history of oppression and refugees, using her
own experiences as a learning experience.

 The poem ‘Refugee’ is allusory to the historical moment of China occupying

Tibet. The Tibetans became completely homeless and had to immigrate to

the neighboring country India. Due to the massive immigration, many

suffered problems like identity crisis and rootlessness.

The speaker in the poem voices the pain of his countrymen who struggled

for establishment. The narrator here is a school going boy. He painfully

recounts the fact that his mother told him that he was a refugee. In addition,

the road side tent in which they are living metaphorically symbolizes

aimless life of the refugees.

The trauma of the boy continues even in his school. His teacher teasingly

remarks at him that the letter ‘R’ has been engraved on his forehead. The
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letter ‘R’ in this context refers to the painful state of being a refugee. The

struggle of the boy to break out of the crisis is emphasized when he says

he tried to scratch his forehead. But all his efforts go in vain with a result of

‘red brash’.

The problem of the boy’s crisis is heightened when he recounts the

languages he has known namely: his mother tongue to sing in joy, English

and Hindi for survival. Even the boy’s language suffers crisis as it is

sandwiched between two foreign languages Hindi and English.

The sole consolation for the boy in the midst of all the adverse

circumstances is that his name RAMZEN retains the Tibetan flavor.

Excepting the name, the boy’s identity seems to have been completely

engulfed by events over which he has no control.

 500 Pounds and a Room of One's Own

Woolf repeatedly insists upon the necessity of an inheritance that requires no obligations and of the
privacy of one's own room for the promotion of creative genius. She gives an historical argument that
lack of money and privacy have prevented women from writing with genius in the past. Without
money, women are slavishly dependent on men; without privacy, constant interruptions block their
creativity. Freedom of thought is hampered as women consume themselves with thoughts of gender.
They write out of anger or insecurity, and such emotions make them think about themselves rather
than about their subjects. Aphra Behn is the first female writer to earn her own money from writing.
She paved the way for 19th-century novelists like Jane Austen who were able to write despite the lack
of privacy in their family sitting-rooms. Woolf believes that contemporary female writers still
generally operate out of anger or insecurity, but that in the future, with money and privacy, their
minds will be freed and their genius will blossom.

Coleridge's Androgynous Mind

Woolf adapts Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's idea that the "androgynous" mind is a pure
vessel for thought that inspires the most objective and creative relationship with reality. Woolf does
not view androgyny as asexual, but rather as a union of male and female minds, which she believes
are different. She encourages this differentiation but sees their fusion as a necessity; both genders
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have a blind spot about their own and the opposite sex, and are dependent on each other to flesh out
an accurate portrayal of humanity (she also contends that the sexes are dependent on each other to
renew creative power). For instance, Woolf believes a female writer must find a sentence for
womanly needs. Ultimately, the androgynous mind, like Shakespeare's, is unconcerned with its
owner's petty grievances; it rises beyond and filters out its personality as its genius shines
incandescently upon the world.

The Aggression of Men

Woolf posits that men historically belittle women as a means of asserting their own superiority. In her
metaphor of a looking-glass relationship, men, threatened by the thought of losing their power, reduce
women to enlarge themselves. However, just as women's writing suffers from the emotions of anger
and fear, men's writing suffers from this aggression. The men the narrator reviews do not write
"dispassionate," detached arguments that would otherwise convince the reader, but expose their own
prejudices. In the end, their writing revolves around them rather than around their subject. Woolf
points out that war is a greater societal byproduct of this consuming aggression and defensiveness.

Institutionalized sexism

Much of "A Room of One's Own" is dedicated to an analysis of the patriarchal English society that
has limited women's opportunity. Woolf reflects upon how men, the only gender allowed to keep their
own money, have historically fed resources back into the universities and like institutions that helped
them gain power in the first place; in contrast, the women's university the narrator stays at had to
scrap together funds when it was chartered. Woolf compares the effect of the relative wealth of the
male and female universities: the luxurious lunch at the men's college provokes pleasant intellectual
banter, while the mediocre dinner at the female college hampers thought. Women are not even
allowed in the library at the men's college without special permission, or to cross the lawn. Woolf
stretches back to Elizabethan times to give a fictional-historical example of sexism: Judith
Shakespeare, imagined sister of William, leads a tragic life of unrealized genius as society scorns her
attempts to make something of her brilliant mind. Woolf traces such obstacles against women writers
through the modern day; beyond her main treatment of money and privacy (see 500 Pounds and a
Room of One's Own, above), she touches upon topics such as the masculine derogation of female
books, subjects, and prose style.

Metaphorical conceit of light

Woolf threads a conceit throughout "A Room of One's Own" of light and purity as a metaphor for
genius. The word most frequently associated with genius is "incandescence"; for Woolf, genius
objectively illuminates the reality of the world while not concerning itself with its owner's personal
grievances. The flexibility of light as a metaphor allows Woolf room to couch more subtle ideas
within her words; when she says that Mary Carmichael's depiction of a female friendship may allow
her to "light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been," the possible image of female
genitalia serves notice of both Carmichael's potential genius and revolutionary subject matter.
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"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe first published in 1843. It follows an
unnamed narrator who insists on his sanity after murdering an old man with a "vulture eye". The
murder is carefully calculated, and the murderer hides the body by cutting it into pieces and hiding it
under the floorboards. Ultimately the narrator's guilt manifests itself in the hallucination that the man's
heart is still beating under the floorboards.

It is unclear what relationship, if any, the old man and his murderer share. It has been suggested that
the old man is a father figure or, perhaps, that his vulture eye represents some sort of veiled secret.
The ambiguity and lack of details about the two main characters stand in stark contrast to the specific
plot details leading up to the murder.

The story was first published in James Russell Lowell's The Pioneer in January 1843. "The Tell-Tale
Heart" is widely considered a classic of the Gothic fiction genre and one of Poe's most famous short
stories. It has been adapted or served as an inspiration for a variety of media.

A nameless person explains that he is and was extremely nervous, but is not and was not insane.
Rather, the narrator has a "disease" which makes all his senses, especially his hearing, very sensitive.
To prove that he isn't insane, the narrator shares an event from his past. Let's jump into his tale:

The narrator has an idea that he can't shake. He loves the old man and has nothing against him.
Except…his horrible eye, which is "pale blue […] with a film over it" (2). The narrator hates the eye
and decides to kill the old man to be free of it.

To that end, the narrator goes to the old man's room every night at 12am, for seven days. Each night
the narrator opens the man's door and puts in a lantern (the kind they don't make anymore, with panels
that can be adjusted to release more or less light). After the lantern, the narrator puts his head through
the doorway, extremely slowly, and then opens the lantern so a tiny beam of light shines on the old
man's eye. Each night the old man doesn't open his eye, so the narrator feels that he can't kill him.

On the eighth night, the old man hears the narrator at the door and wakes up. The narrator hangs out
there in the dark for a long time, then, with a scream, plunges into the totally dark room, opening the
lantern, and shining light on the old man's eye. The narrator drags the old man, who has only
screamed once, off the bed, and then pulls the bed on top of the man. When the narrator hears the
man's heart stop beating, he removes the bed and checks to make sure the old man is really dead,
which he is. So the narrator cuts him up and hides his remains under the floor.

Then three policemen come. A neighbor had heard a scream and called them. The narrator says he
screamed while sleeping, and claims that the old man is out of town. After convincing the cops
nothing bad is going down, the narrator brings them into the old man's bedroom, and they all sit down
to chat. While they are all shooting the breeze, the narrator starts hearing a terrible ticking noise,
which gets louder and louder until the narrator freaks out, confesses, and points the police to the old
man's body, stating that the sound is coming from the old man's heart.


The narrator is intensely nervous, but claims that he isn't insane.
 The narrator explains to us that he has a "disease" that makes his "senses" super powerful.
According to him, this is different than an insane person, whose senses are completely gone,
or at least very weak.
 "Hearing" is the narrator's most intensified sense, and claims to be able to
hear everything going on in "heaven," "earth," and most of what's going on in "hell."
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 Now, the narrator will further prove his sanity by telling the following story.
 (Note: When the narrator says "Hearken!" he means listen up.)
 The narrator's story begins with an "idea," an idea that turns into an obsession. (He doesn't yet
reveal to us what this idea is.)
 There's no reason for it. In fact, the narrator "loved the old man," who has always been really
cool. It isn't about the old man's money either.
 See, the narrator thinks it might have been the old man's freaky eye that started the idea: "He
had the eye of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it" (2).
 Whenever the old man's eye looks at the narrator, the narrator's blood freezes.
 This has gotten to be too much for the narrator to handle. He decides that the old man had to
die, so the narrator won't have to ever see the eye again.
 Now the narrator begins defending his sanity again.
 This time the argument is that insane people don't have any knowledge or skill, whereas the
narrator plans everything well and is extremely careful.
 (In the text, "foresight" means you can predict things, or see them before they happen.
"Dissimilation" means acting a certain way to hide the true feelings.)
 The narrator is super-sweet to the old man all week before the killing goes down.
 Each night of the week, at almost 12am, the narrator goes to the old man's room and cracks
the door enough to put in a "a dark lantern" (3).
 The narrator's lantern is lit, but it has plates around it that can be opened and closed to control
the amount of light coming out. The narrator has it closed so no light shines out.
 After the lantern, the narrator pokes in his head through the door.
 He's afraid of waking the old man, so it takes an hour for him to stick his head in the room.
 The narrator argues that this is proof that he's not insane. How could the he be insane, he asks,
and be so careful at the same time?
 Next, the narrator opens the lantern, just enough to let a tiny bit of light shine on the old man's
eye.
 But the narrator can't kill the old man, because he won't open up his eye. See, it's the man's
"Evil Eye" the narrator has a problem with, not the man himself.
 Every morning, the narrator comes into the old man's room, and asks him how he slept.
 The old man would have had to be pretty "profound" (deep) to guess that the narrator had
been spying on him while he sleeps.
 On the eighth night, the narrator repeats the process, opening the door more carefully than
usual.
 He feels at the height of his "power" and can't even believe his own "sagacity."
 ("Sagacity" means quick and clever thinking. It also means an excellent sense of smell. These
days, the word is only rarely used in that second way, but considering what the narrator said
about his heightened senses, both meanings might apply.)
 Anyhow, the narrator feels intensely that he's going to win this game, and is really enjoying
the fact that the old man is asleep and had no idea what the narrator is doing.
 The old man moves in his bed.
 The narrator doesn't draw back. The old man is afraid of "robbers" and keeps his "shutters"
closed. The room is so dark that there is no way the old man can see the door opening.
 Just as the narrator gets his head through the door and is about to shine the light, he makes a
little noise, and the old man jumps up and says, "Who's there?"
 So the narrator doesn't move for an hour. The man must still be sitting up, listening
("hearkening") to "the death watches in the wall" (4).
 ("Death watches" are beetles that often live in tunnels they make inside of walls. They hit
their heads on the tunnel walls to attract mates. For more info, click here.)
 Then the narrator hears a "groan of mortal terror" (5). He knows it's a groan of terror because
the narrator groans like that, too.
 He feels sorry for the man, but is laughing inside, knowing the old man is scared out of his
mind and had been trying to convince himself there is nothing to fear.
 But, according to the narrator, the man knows there really issomething to fear, and knows he's
about to die.
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 The narrator waits and waits, and then decides to open his lantern just a little bit. He opens it
"stealthily" (that is, "sneakily") and then trains the beam on the man's "vulture eye" (6).
 It's open. The eye is open. The narrator gets mad when he sees it. Then he can hear, due to his
heightened senses, the old man's heart beating dully.
 So the narrator doesn't move. He just keeps the light shining on the old man's scary eye.
 The heartbeat gets louder and faster as the old man gets more and more scared.
 The narrator reminds us to "mark" (or notice) that he was and still is a nervous person.
 Finally, the noise gets so loud the narrator is afraid the neighbors are going to hear it.
 So the narrator screams, opens the lantern all the way, then jumps into the old man's room.
 The old man only screams one time, and the narrator drags him off the bed and then yanks
"the heavy bed over him" (7).
 The narrator smiles. The heartbeat continues, but soon stops. The old man is dead.
 The narrator moves the bed and checks out the body, just to be sure.
 He's definitely dead.
 The narrator says that if you still think he's insane, you won't after hearing what he does with
the body.
 First the narrator cuts the arms, legs, and head off the body, then hide the body parts under
some loose boards in the floor. ("The scantlings" means the limited space under the
floorboards.)
 There isn't even any blood on the floor, because the narrator is too smart for that and cuts up
the body in a bathtub.
 By then it's 4am and still dark.
 There's a knock on the door.
 Not worried, the narrator answers the door.
 Three policemen come in. The neighbor heard a scream and thought something bad was going
on and called them.
 The narrator tells them he screamed during his sleep. He claims the old man is out of town
and invites the officers to search the place, which they do.
 Finally, the narrator takes them to "the old man's chamber" (or bedroom) and even brings in
some chairs for them all to sit down.
 The narrator puts his chair on top of the place where the body is hidden.
 The cops aren't suspicious anymore, and the narrator chats with them happily, but soon gets
tired and wants them to go away.
 His head is really hurting, and there is "a ringing in [his] ears" (9).
 It gets louder and louder and the narrator talks to try to get rid of the sound. The police
officers drone on.
 Uh-oh. The noise isn't coming from the narrator's ears at all.
 As the noise gets louder, the narrator talks more and more wildly. It sounds like the ticking of
a watch wrapped up in cloth.
 The policemen don't seem to notice the noise.
 The sound torments the narrator, who starts getting out of control, arguing with the police
officers, making wild "gesticulations" (or gestures), pacing, etc.
 But the noise just keeps getting louder.
 The narrator can't take it. He is convinced the police officers know everything and are just
toying with him.
 The noise gets so bad the narrator will to do anything to make it stop, and to stop the lying
police officers from smiling at him, pretending not to know what's going on.
 So the narrator blurts out, "Villains! [D]issemble no more! I admit the deed! – tear up the
planks! here, here! – It is the beating of his hideous heart!'"
 (To "dissemble" is to pretend not to see or notice something.)
 And that's the end of the narrator's story – his proof that he's not insane.


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The Tell-Tale Heart Themes

Versions of Reality
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" disrupts our versions of reality, even as we identify with it in
ways we might not want to admit. Something sparks our curiosity and forces us to follow the...

Cunning and Cleverness

The main character of "The Tell-Tale Heart" promises us a tale of cunning and cleverness, and
delivers. At the onset, we doubt the cleverness; maybe we even feel cleverer than the story. But as
Edg...

The Home
"Home is where the heart is." Edgar Allan Poe makes a mockery of this shopworn phrase in "The
Tell-Tale Heart," expressing some deep anxieties toward the very idea of "home" (as in the place one
ha...

Mortality
"The Tell-Heart" is a murder mystery, the kind where we know who the killer is (sort of), but can't
really understand his motives. This story deals with the fear of death, with dying, and the quest...

Time
"The Tell-Tale Heart" is jammed with references to time and clocks. One could even say it's obsessed
with time. The time structure seems fairly straightforward at first, but, through all the aforem...


 Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" disrupts our versions of reality, even as we identify
with it in ways we might not want to admit. Something sparks our curiosity and forces us to
follow the narrator through the chilling maze of his mind. We hear the story of murder
through words, and through his version of reality.