Exercise 3

Now you can compare your suggestions with the original texts.

1. The Romantic hero is isolated and so is Roderick. His friend has had to ride for a whole day through a singularly dreary tract of country" before reaching the house of Usher (277). He rode alone and does not tell us about meeting any people on the road. In Roderick's room the windows are 'altogether inaccessible from within' (232), suggesting that he cannot get out of the house. Roderick is, however, not only physically isolated, the isolation is also psychological. The narrator recalls that he had always been reserved and now he finds that Roderick has not been out of the house for several years, and thus he has not met other people.
2. It is the argument of this essay that stability symbolised by the estate is threatened in various ways. In order to study the threats the essay will bring forth characteristics of a good landowner and contrast them with those of a bad landowner, as a bad landowner would inflict instability on his estate. Changes in contemporary society will also be studied. For this purpose I will use two novels, The Bride of Lammermoor written by Sir Walter Scott and Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. First, however, we will look at the sociological background during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Scott’s novel is set round 1700 and Austen’s novel one hundred years later.
3. A nation's story is not, or should not be, solely about wealth or power, but about the quality of the community's existence. Britain's loss of power need not damage that quality, unless this is measured only in material terms. (McDowal: An Illustrated History of Britain, p. 159).
4. By this time Britain had an army of over five million men, but by this time over 750,000 had died, and another two million had been seriously wounded. About fifty times more people had died than in the twenty-year war against napoleon. Public opinion demanded no mercy for Germany. (McDowal:An Illustrated History of Britain, p. 161).