Explain how ONE of the following works debunks the myth of a male monopoly on truth: Ibsen’s A Doll House, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” or Hurston’s “Sweat.”
Directions: Choose any TWO prompts from the following list and write short responses to each in which you use quotes and mention details from the texts in support of your observations. You should spend about 45 minutes on each prompt you choose. Be sure to record the number of your chosen prompts with your responses.2. Reread the final paragraph of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, where the narrator’s perspective shifts to that of the British District Commissioner:In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting down a dead man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.5. One of the persistent criticisms of patriarchy by feminist thinkers is that men usurp the truth. Because of age-old myths that men are more intellectual, and perhaps because until recently the vast majority of scientists have been men, men have tended to assume that their own point of view is objective, while women are supposedly limited, subjective, and emotionally biased. Explain how ONE of the following works debunks the myth of a male monopoly on truth: Ibsen’s A Doll House, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” or Hurston’s “Sweat.”
