HKDSE Literature in English Paper 1 Mock Paper (2027) — Questions, Model Answers & Marking Scheme

A1 model answer: ‘In Rebecca, the dead have more power than the living.’ (about 380 words)

Du Maurier builds Rebecca on a paradox: the title character dies before the novel begins, yet she governs every room at Manderley. The novel opens with the narrator’s dream — ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’ — and that sentence establishes the pattern of the whole book, in which the past is more vivid, more solid and more authoritative than the present.

The most obvious instrument of the dead woman’s power is Mrs Danvers, who preserves Rebecca’s bedroom as a shrine and uses it against the second wife: the narrator is made to feel that she is occupying a life that belongs to someone else. Rebecca’s power works through objects and handwriting as much as through people — the monogrammed handkerchief, the sloping signature in a hotel register, the notepaper — so that the narrator’s own identity is constantly measured against a rival who cannot answer back.

Yet it is Maxim, not Rebecca, who gives her this power, because he refuses to speak about her. His silence is what the second wife fills with fantasy; the more he withholds, the larger Rebecca grows. When he finally confesses, the confession collapses the myth: ‘Rebecca’ becomes a corrupt and dying woman rather than a goddess. The final fire at Manderley completes that movement. The dead do have more power than the living for almost the whole novel — but the ending shows that this power was manufactured by the living, and it burns with the house.

Examiner’s note: this sits at Level 5: a clear thesis (the dead woman’s power is manufactured by the living), accurate quotation, and the key word ‘power’ is addressed. For 5**, add one or two more precise details (for example what Mrs Danvers actually says about Rebecca) and explore the contradiction between sympathy and horror that the power creates.

B1 model answer: ‘Shylock is as much a victim of Venice as he is a villain within it.’ (about 380 words)

Shakespeare makes it impossible to separate Shylock’s cruelty from the cruelty he has endured. Venice needs his money but despises his religion; the play shows this double standard before it shows the bond. Shylock’s own defence — ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ — turns the Christian rhetoric of mercy back on the court, and its force comes from the fact that it is factually true.

The bond of ‘an equal pound of your fair flesh’ is, however, genuinely monstrous, and Shakespeare does not soften it: Shylock sharpens his knife in open court and refuses every offer of repayment. If he is a victim, he is also a man who has chosen revenge over the mercy he has so often been denied — and the play insists that he was taught this lesson by Antonio’s insults and Jessica’s betrayal.

What finally condemns Venice rather than Shylock is the sentence. The court strips him of his wealth and forces his conversion, then treats this as mercy: Gratiano’s jeering at a broken man shows the Christians winning in the least Christian way possible. Portia’s ‘The quality of mercy is not strained’ is true as an idea and hollow as a practice.

Shylock is therefore both villain and victim because Venice creates the conditions for both. The play neither acquits nor excuses him; it exposes the society that demands his conversion while never accepting him.

Examiner’s note: the word ‘both’ is the hinge of the question. A 5** answer would also hold two contradictions together — Jessica’s theft of the ring (‘I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor’) alongside Shylock’s earlier wish that his daughter ‘were dead at my foot’.

C1 model answer: how irony exposes what the characters cannot see (about 380 words)

Both stories end with a reversal that punishes a character for the very knowledge he or she believes to possess, but the writers place the irony differently.

Dahl’s irony is structural and dramatic: the reader understands before Boggis does that he has talked himself out of a fortune. By insisting that the commode is ‘firewood’ except for its legs, Boggis supplies the farmer with the logic that destroys the treasure — the legs are sawn off and the rest of the piece is chopped up before he returns. The comedy is the comedy of self-defeat: the trickster is beaten by his own script, and the reader’s pleasure lies in watching the trap close on the man who set it.

Chopin’s irony is quieter and works against the reader’s expectation. Mrs Mallard’s ‘Free! Body and soul free!’ is not presented as wickedness but as liberation, and the story refuses to punish her for it until the doctor’s final diagnosis: she dies ‘of heart disease — of joy that kills’. The irony is that her death is misread even as it is recorded: the freedom that killed her is named as joy.

Both writers therefore expose a gap between what characters perceive and what their worlds assume. Dahl’s gap is moral and comic, aimed at Boggis’s greed and at the rural family’s innocence; Chopin’s gap is social, aimed at the institution of marriage and at the medical language that closes over a woman’s inner life. In both, irony is not decoration but the argument itself.

Examiner’s note: comparison questions live or die on a single axis — here, ‘who is the irony aimed at?’ For 5**, add one sentence on the different kinds of irony: Dahl’s is dramatic (the reader knows first), Chopin’s is situational (the reader is deceived too).