American Literature / Unit 19 AML 1817 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Drill 3: The Theme of the Passage
The idea
The board prints Douglass on his mistress, who began as a kind and tender-hearted woman treating him as one human being ought to treat another, and under slaveholding's influence became stone, her lamblike disposition giving way to a tigerlike fierceness. The question asks for the theme. The answer is that slaveholders were corrupted by the unchecked power of slaveholding. The passage's own structure proves it: it insists she was genuinely kind first, then names the influence, then gives the result. Reject the alternatives against that structure. Slaveholders naturally cruel fails, because the passage says she began kind. Women as cruel as men is true elsewhere but is not this passage's claim. Never to be trusted mistakes an outcome for a cause.
In practice
Kind first, then the influence, then stone.
Where people slip
The strongest distractor says slaveholders were not to be trusted however kind they seemed. It describes the same events and gets the cause wrong, and the cause is what a theme question asks for.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
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