On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of N
orthern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her. She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears.
A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth.
It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College.
The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest.
from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (1920)
10
The passage contains an allusion to Camelot, which is a reference to the legend of King Arthur. The myth originated around the twelfth century, and it is most commonly associated with romance and great feats of heroism. In the last paragraph, what is the effect of comparing the American Middlewest to Camelot?
A.
The Middlewest is represented as fictional and imaginary.
B.
The Middlewest is characterized as hard and difficult.
C.
The Middlewest is portrayed as adventurous and risky.
D.
The Middlewest is depicted as uncivilized and barbaric.
