How to Find a LSAT Reading Comprehension Analogy Using LawHub Reading Comprehension Drill Set #3

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LSAC LawHub LSAT Reading Comprehension Drill Set 3, Passage 1:

While best known for her fiction, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) also wrote extensively on architecture and decor. Her focus was on the "designed" who must work within the confined of an existing house, producing a good design upon the background of a faulty and illogical structure. This led to an extended meditation on the aesthetics of enclosed spaces, in which the very limitations that constrain artistic expression are seen as providing the framework that makes it possible. This theme of enclosure appears in her fiction as well, serving there as a metaphor for the multifarious constraints imposed by society and tradition.

Around the turn of the century these constraints were nowhere more evident than in the position of women in society. Although her fiction dealt compassionately with the intricacies and tragedies of middle-class women's lives, Wharton, unlike many feminists of her time, was pessimistic about the possibility of shattering the traditional barriers to women's advancement. Instead she pursued a different but still feminist path, in the belief that women's best hope lay in gaining economic self-sufficiency within the confines of traditional society. To this end, she made herself an astute, self-reliant manager of her own career. She supported herself by writing at a time when most women writers were either unable to do so or were forced, unlike Wharton, to write under male pseudonyms. Her skepticism about the value of more radical social change reflected a basic faith in many aspects of traditional society. The metaphor of enclosure expressed her ambivalence toward a society that she perceived as both confining and at the same time providing needed structure.

This ambivalence was expressed in Wharton's aesthetic vision as well. In her architectural writings her sympathies lay more with the interior designer who has to work within the given constraints to make a house livable, than with the architect who is given a much freer hand and, in her opinion, too often produces unlivable spaces in the name of artistic autonomy. This preference is in keeping with her vehement rejection of those artists and movements that, on the surface at least, most represented change, and that called for, among other things, the abandonment of the closed forms of mainstream genres. In her own fiction, Wharton frequently chose to adapt to the predetermined literary conventions--such as a fast-paced beginning and a dramatic conclusion--that the public expected. At the same time, she recognized that stories must to some extent dictate their own structures. Since the competing claims of tradition and individual autonomy constitute a recurring theme in Wharton's short stories, form reflects content in this case by incorporating the same dialectic enclosure.

6. The contrast between interior designer and architect in the third paragraph is presented as analogous to the contrast

A) between artistic and social values in literature
B) between artists working within traditional genres and more experimental artists (Correct)
C) between the short story and other, more open, literary forms
D) between the constraints that Wharton felt in her life and the freedom she experienced in her fiction
E) between feminists seeking financial self-sufficiency and those advocating more radical social change