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Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
Key Examples in A Room of One's Own
Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Professor von X:
In Chapter 2, the narrator uses satire to describe the works male authors have written about women, using an ironic tone to criticize male writers' misplaced sense of authority. In the following passage, she imagines a fictive scholar named "Professor von X" penning a misogynistic diatribe:
I had been drawing a face, a figure. It was the face and the figure of Professor von X. engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. He was not in my picture a man attractive to women. [...] He was very red in the face. His
expression suggested that he was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—The Factory:
At the beginning of Chapter 2, the narrator walks to the British Museum to conduct research on "Women and Fiction," finding herself beset with masculine rhetoric on all sides. As she approaches the museum, she utilizes both simile and metaphor to remark on her surroundings:
Unlock with LitCharts A+London was like a workshop. London was like a machine. We were all being shot backwards and forwards on this plain foundation to make some pattern. The British Museum was another department of the factory.
Related Themes:
