English Final Study Guide

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper

Louisa May Alcott

Little Women

William Faulkner

As I Lay Dying

Ralph Ellison

Battle Royal (from Invisible Man)

James Baldwin

My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew

Alice Walker

Everyday Use

August Wilson

The Piano Lesson

Kendrick Lamar

i

Cormac McCarthy

The Road

George Miller

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Yellow Wallpaper summary

• A woman with what we’d now call postpartum depression is confined by her physician husband John under a “rest cure” - no work, no writing

• She becomes obsessed with the wallpaper and eventually sees a woman creeping/trapped behind the pattern, then identifies with her and tears the paper down

• Honors reading: John dismissing her feelings as “fancies” represents the medical establishment’s gendered authority over women’s experience - patriarchy that silences women in the name of “caring” for them. Her final act is both madness and a kind of liberation

Little Women summary

• Four March sisters: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy

• Jo refuses Laurie’s marriage proposal

• Honors reading: her refusal reflects her commitment to her own ambition and unwillingness to take a life defined by marriage to a familiar friend - not dislike of Laurie or money (she later marries Professor Bhaer)

As I Lay Dying summary

• The Bundren family carries their mother Addie’s coffin to the town of Jefferson to bury her

• Told through stream of consciousness with many narrators. Addie gets only one chapter - her voice speaks from beyond death

• Watch for Vardaman’s line “my mother is a fish” - grief expressed through a child’s broken logic

Battle Royal from Invisible Man summary

• The narrator is invited to give a graduation speech but is forced into a brutal, blindfolded boxing match for white men’s entertainment

• His grandfather’s deathbed advice: “overcome ‘em with yesses, undermine ‘em with grins”

• Honors reading: the grandfather’s advice is a subversive survival strategy - outward compliance hiding inward resistance, not sincere submission. During his speech the narrator accidentally says “social equality” rather than “social responsibility,” and the white men instantly turn hostile

My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew summary

• A letter to his nephew (also named James) about growing up Black in America

• Honors reading: Baldwin states the cruelty of racism bluntly so his nephew can name the lie of the society and live inside it without believing it - and still love. Integration, for Baldwin, means accepting white Americans “with love”

Everyday Use summary

• Dee returns home, renames herself “Wangero,” and wants the family quilts to hang on the wall as art. Mama gives them to Maggie, who would actually use them

• Honors reading: the story treats Dee’s gesture with irony - she claims heritage in the abstract while dismissing the living people (Mama, Maggie) who actually carry it. The theme: honoring heritage vs living it

The Piano Lesson summary

• Berneice vs Boy Willie fight over a piano carved with the faces of enslaved ancestors. Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy the land their family worked as slaves, Berneice wants to keep it

• the ghost of the white landowner Sutter haunts the piano

• Honors reading: the piano stages the conflict between preserving the past and spending it to claim a future

i summary

• Opens with testimony about trials and faith, resolves into a refrain of self-love

• honors reading: it echoes the Black church/ blued/ spiritual tradition of testimony - bearing witness to suffering as the precondition for declaring deliverance

The Road summary

• An unnamed man and his son travel south through a post-apocalyptic wasteland toward the coast

• the phrase “carrying the fire” recurs

• honors reading: “carrying the fire” is a moral/ almost theological mythology - the belief that some essential human goodness persists in a ruined world and must be passed to the next generation. The father sees the boy as sacred (“the word of God”)

Mad Max: Fury Road summary

• Furiosa smuggles Immortan Joe’s captive “breeders” - the Wives (the Five Wives) - out of the Citadel toward the “Green Place.” When the Green Place turns out to be gone, she chooses to ride back and reclaim the Citadel

• Honors reading: the reversal suggests salvation requires returning to confront and reclaim the corrupted center, not fleeing it

Yellow Wallpaper: the narrator sees a woman _____ behind the pattern

creeping

Little Women sisters

Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy

As I Lay Dying destination

Jefferson

Washington’s Speech

Atlanta Compromise

Battle Royal: Social equality < ——- social _____

responsibility

Baldwin’s nephew

James

Everyday Use heirloom

quilts

Piano Lesson ghost

Sutter

The Road destination

the coast, sea, south

Fury Road captives

the Wives

Washington Ideas

• vocational training

• economic self-help

• accomodation

DuBois ideas

• full civil rights

• political agitation

• higher education for the Talented Tenth

“I’ve got out at last… I’ve pulled off most of the paper”

Yellow Wallpaper, narrator

“My mother is a fish”

As I Lay Dying, Vardaman

“overcome ‘em with yesses, undermine ‘em with grins”

Battle Royal/ Invisible Man, the grandfather

“I tell you this because I love you, please don’t you ever forget it”

My Dungeon Shook, Baldwin, to James

“If he is not the word of God God never spoke”

The Road, the father about his son