单选题
Our lives are not only dominated by the inanities of our contemporaries but also by those of men who have been dead for generations. This is important to stress because it shows us that even in the areas where society apparently allows us some choice the powerful hand of the past narrows down this choice even further. Let us take for example, a scene in which a pair of lovers are silting in the moonlight. Let us further imagine that this moonlight session turns out to be the decisive one, in which a proposal of marriage is made and accepted. They who are dead have long ago written the script for almost every move that is made. The notion that sexual attraction can be translated into romantic emotion was cooked up by misty-voiced minstrels titillating the imagination of aristocratic ladies about the 12th century or thereabouts. The idea that a man should fixate his sexual drive permanently and exclusively on one single woman, with whom he is to share a bed, bathroom and the boredom of a thousand bleary-eyed breakfasts, was produced by misanthropic theologians some time before that. And the assumption that the initiative in the establishment of this wondrous arrangement should be in the hands of the male, with the female graciously succumbing to the impetuous onslaught of his wooing, goes back right to prehistoric times when savage warriors first descended on some peaceful matriarchal hamlet and dragged away its screaming daughters to their marital cots. Just as all these hoary ancients have decided the basic framework within which the passions of our exemplary couple will develop, so each step in their courtship has been predefined, prefabricated—if you like, "fixed". It is not only that they are supposed to fall in love and to enter into a monogamous marriage in which she gives up her name and he his solvency, but this love must be manufactured at all cost or the marriage will seem insincere to all concerned. Each step in their courtship is laid down in social ritual also, and, although there is always some leeway for improvisations, too much ad-libbing is likely to risk the success of the whole operation. In this way, our couple progresses predictably from movie dates to church dates to meeting-the-family dates, from holding hands to tentative explorations to what they originally planned to save for afterwards, from planning their evening to planning their suburban ranch house—with the scene in the moonlight put in its proper place in this ceremonial sequence. Neither of them has invented this game or any part of it. They have only decided that it is with each other, rather than with other possible partners, that they will play it. Family, friends, clergy, salesmen of jewelry and of life insuranee, florists and interior decorators ensure that the remainder of the game will also be played by the established rules. Nor, indeed, do all these guardians of tradition have to exert much pressure on the principal players, since the expectations of their social world have long ago been built into their own projections of the future—they want precisely that which society expects of them.
单选题
In the sentence "...with whom he is to share a bed, bathroom and the boredom of a thousand bleary-eyed breakfasts..., " the writer uses the literary device______.