<p>Text:
To speak disrespectfully of love is, I know, high treason against sentiment and fine feelings; but I wish to speak the simple language of truth, and rather to address the head than the heart. To endeavour to reason love out of the world, would be to out Quixote Cervantes, and equally offend against common sense; but an endeavour to restrain this tumultuous passion, and to prove that it should not be allowed to dethrone superior powers, or to usurp the sceptre which the understanding should ever coolly wield, appears less wild.</p>
<p>Youth is the season for love in both sexes; but in those days of thoughtless enjoyment, provision should be made for the more important years of life, when reflection takes place of sensation. But Rousseau, and most of the male writers who have followed his steps, have warmly inculcated that the whole tendency of female education ought to be directed to one point to render them pleasing.</p>
<p>Let me reason with the supporters of this opinion, who have any knowledge of human nature, do they imagine that marriage can eradicate the habitude of life? The woman who has only been taught to please, will soon find that her charms are oblique sun-beams, and that they cannot have much effect on her husband's heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is past and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties? or, is it not more rational to expect, that she will try to please other men; and, in the emotions raised by the expectation of new conquests, endeavour to forget the mortification her love or pride has received? When the husband ceases to be a lover--and the time will inevitably come, her desire of pleasing will then grow languid, or become a spring of bitterness; and love, perhaps, the most evanescent of all passions, gives place to jealousy or vanity.</p>
<p>I now speak of women who are restrained by principle or prejudice; such women though they would shrink from an intrigue with real abhorrence, yet, nevertheless, wish to be convinced by the homage of gallantry, that they are cruelly neglected by their husbands; or, days and weeks are spent in dreaming of the happiness enjoyed by congenial souls, till the health is undermined and the spirits broken by discontent. How then can the great art of pleasing be such a necessary study? it is only useful to a mistress; the chaste wife, and serious mother, should only consider her power to please as the polish of her virtues, and the affection of her husband as one of the comforts that render her task less difficult, and her life happier. But, whether she be loved or neglected, her first wish should be to make herself respectable, and not rely for all her happiness on a being subject to like infirmities with herself.</p>
<p>Question: The author appears to believe most firmly that
(A) passion and reason should be exercised equally
(B) love is the highest level of fulfillment
(C) all passions, but especially love, must be subject to reason
(D) young women should delay marriage until their passions have cooled
(E) young men should seek wives who have been educated by women</p>
<p>Yup, this is an AP lang comp level question....</p>
<p>The answer is C, but I changed my answer from C to A and got the question wrong..
I am not so sure where this emphatic "but especially love" comes from.. and I am equally unsure as to how the "all passions" generalization came to be..
Can someone please substantiate why C is right to me?
Why is A wrong? Doesn't she half-endorse love in an ambivalent way in the first paragraph when she talks about how quixotic it is to lambast love wholly?</p>
<p>Or since her tone is very strong and emphatic, am I to find flaw with A..?</p>
<p>Please help! Thanx in ADVANCE :)</p>
help…</p>