MCAT READING PRACTICE TESTS (1)

Those examples of poetic justice that occur in medieval and Elizabethan literature, and that seem so
satisfying, have encouraged a whole school of twentieth-century scholars to "find" further examples.
In fact, these scholars have merely forced victimized character into a moral framework by which the
injustices inflicted on them are, somehow or other, justified. Such scholars deny that the sufferers in
a tragedy are innocent; they blame the victims themselves for their tragic fates. Any misdoing is
enough to subject a character to critical whips. Thus, there are long essays about the misdemeanors
of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, who defined her brothers, and he behavior of Shakespeare’s
Desdemona, who disobeyed her father.\n\nYet it should be remembered that the Renaissance
writer Matteo Bandello strongly protests the injustice of the severe penalties issued to women for
acts of disobedience that men could, and did, commit with virtual impunity. And Shakespeare,
Chaucer, and Webster often enlist their readers on the side of their tragic heroines by describing
injustices so cruel that readers cannot but join in protest. By portraying Griselda, in the Clerk’s Tale,
as a meek, gentle victim who does not criticize, much less rebel against the prosecutor, her husband
Waltter, Chaucer incites readers to espouse Griselda’s cause against Walter’s oppression. Thus,
efforts to supply historical and theological rationalization for Walter’s persecutions tend to turn
Chaucer’s fable upside down, to deny its most obvious effect on reader’s sympathies. Similarly, to
assert that Webster’s Duchess deserved torture and death because she chose to marry the man she
loved and to bear their children is, in effect to join forces with her tyrannical brothers, and so to
confound the operation of poetic justice, of which readers should approve, with precisely those
examples of social injustice that Webster does everything in his power to make readers condemn.
Indeed. Webster has his heroin so heroically lead the resistance to tyranny that she may well in spire
members of the audience to imaginatively join forces with her against the cruelty and hypocritical
morality of her brothers. Thus Chaucer and Webster, in their different ways, attack injustice, argue
on behalf of the victims, and prosecute the persecutors. Their readers serve them as a court of
appeal that remains free to rule, as the evidence requires, and as common humanity requires, in
favour of the innocent and injured parties. For, to paraphrase the noted eighteenth-century scholar,
Samuel Johnson, despite all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, it is by the
common sense and compassion of readers who are uncorrupted by the characters and situations in
mereval and Dlizabetahn literature, as in any other literature, can best be judged.

Woodraw Wilson was referring to the liberal idea of the economic market when he said that the free
enterprise system is the most efficient economic system. Maximum freedom means maximum
productiveness; our "openness" is to be the measure of our stability. Fascination with this ideal has
made Americans defy the "Old World" categories of settled possessiveness versus unsettling
deprivation., the cupidity of retention versus the cupidity of seizure, a "status quo" defended of
attacked. The United States, it was believed, had no status quo ante. Our only "station" was the
turning of a stationary wheel, spinning faster and faster. We did not base our system on property
but opportunity-which meant we based it not on stability but on mobility. The more things changed,
that is, the more rapidly the wheel turned, the steadier we would be. The conventional picture of
class politics is composed of the Haves, who want a stability to keep what they have, and Have-Nots,
who want a touch of instability and change in which to scramble for the things they have not. But
Americans imagined a condition in which speculators, self-makers, runners are always using the new
opportunities given by our land. These economic leaders (front-runners) would thus be mainly
agents of Change. The nonstarters were considered the ones who wanted stability, a strong referee
to give them some position in the race, a regulative hand to calm manic speculation; an authority
that can call things to a half begin things again from compensatorily staggered "starting
lines".:Reform" in America has been sterile because it can imagine no change except through the
extension of this metaphor of the race, wider inclusion of competitors, "a piece of the action." As it
were, of the disenfranchised. There is no attempt to call off the race. Since our only stability is
change. America seems not to honor the quite work that achieves social interdependence and
stability. There is, in our legends, no heroism of the office clerk, no stable industrial work force of the
people who actually make the system work. There is no pride in being an employee (Wilson asked
for a return to the time when everyone was an employer). There has been no boasting about our
social workers-they are need; empty boasts from the past make us ashamed of our present
achievements, make us try to forget or deny the, move away from them. There is no honor but in
the wonderland race we must all run, all trying to win, none winning in the end (for there is no end).