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Irony
Definition of Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor can be stated explicitly, as... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other... read full definition
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Like a Play:
In Chapter 1, Helen describes the Wilcoxes and Howards End to Margaret in a letter, using a metaphor that compares life to a play:
I inflict all this on you because once you said that life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t’other from which, and up to now I have always put that down as “Meg’s clever nonsense.” But this morning, it really does seem not life but a play, and it did amuse me enormously to watch the W’s. Now Mrs. Wilcox has come in.
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Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Nonsense:
In this passage from Chapter 4 of Howards End, Helen Schlegel's character undergoes a brief, situationally ironic transformation. This is described as a metaphorical “toppling” of her personal values:
Unlock with LitCharts A+She had liked giving in to Mr. Wilcox, or Evie, or Charles; she had liked being told that her notions of life were sheltered or academic; that Equality was nonsense, Votes for Women nonsense, Socialism nonsense, Art and Literature, except when conducive to strengthening the character, nonsense. One by one the Schlegel fetiches had been overthrown, and, though professing to defend them, she had rejoiced.
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Explanation and Analysis—A Wall:
In this passage from Chapter 4, Helen expresses her concerns about the Wilcoxes' conservatism and Englishness to Margaret following her stay at Howards End. She uses the metaphor of the Wilcoxes being a "wall" of modern things, which stands in opposition to the more romantic and old-fashioned Schlegels:
Unlock with LitCharts A+“Somehow, when that kind of man looks frightened it is too awful. It is all right for us to be frightened, or for men of another sort—Father, for instance; but for men like that! When I saw all the others so placid, and Paul mad with terror in case I said the wrong thing, I felt for a moment that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness.”
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Explanation and Analysis—Clap of Thunder:
In Chapter 4, Forster uses a combination of simile, metaphor, and auditory imagery to compare Helen's sudden infatuation with the Wilcoxes of Howards End to a "thunder clap.” This outlines the suddenness and intensity of her feelings:
Unlock with LitCharts A+[...] Helen was a more serious patient. New ideas had burst upon her like a thunder clap, and by them and by their reverberations she had been stunned.
The truth was that she had fallen in love, not with an individual, but with a family.
Chapter 11
Explanation and Analysis—The Internment:
In Chapter 11, the woodcutter observing Mrs. Wilcox's funeral in the churchyard muses on the majesty of the scene and then departs, leaving the lonely grave. Forster employs visual imagery and the metaphor of a ship to describe the scene of this burial:
Unlock with LitCharts A+After him came silence absolute. [...] Hour after hour the scene of the interment remained without an eye to witness it. Clouds drifted over it from the west; or the church may have been a ship, high-prowed, steering with all its company towards infinity.
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Chapter 12
Explanation and Analysis—Mrs. Wilcox's Death:
Margaret is overwhelmed by Mrs. Wilcox's death in Chapter 12. Forster uses the metaphor of bodies of water and the visual imagery of the ocean to describe the importance of the Wilcoxes' presence in Margaret's life:
Unlock with LitCharts A+She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second time. Paul and his mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out of it for ever. The ripple had left no traces behind: the wave had strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide. Her friend had vanished in agony, but not, she believed, in degradation.
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Chapter 19
Explanation and Analysis—England was Alive:
Helen's musings about England in Chapter 19 weave a rich tapestry of imagery and metaphor. Forster evokes the country’s natural majesty and personifies its geography:
Unlock with LitCharts A+England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls [...] For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world’s fleet accompanying her towards eternity?
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Explanation and Analysis—Swelling Imagination:
In this passage from Chapter 1, Forster’s narrator employs visual imagery and oceanic similes and metaphors to depict the overwhelming experience of looking at England from afar:
Unlock with LitCharts A+How many villages appear in this view! How many castles! How many churches, vanished or triumphant! How many ships, railways, and roads! What incredible variety of men working beneath that lucent sky to what final end! The reason fails, like a wave on the Swanage beach; the imagination swells, spreads, and deepens, until it becomes geographic and encircles England.
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Chapter 20
Explanation and Analysis—Flux of London:
In this passage from Chapter 20 Margaret expresses her distaste for the city of London and its constant movement and change. She uses vivid imagery to compare London to a river, rushing forward relentlessly and formlessly:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I hate this continual flux of London. It is an epitome of us at our worst—eternal formlessness; all the qualities, good, bad, and indifferent, streaming away—streaming, streaming for ever. That’s why I dread it so. I mistrust rivers, even in scenery. Now, the sea—
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Explanation and Analysis—Fortress and Mountain:
In Chapter 20, Forster describes the contrast between the personalities of Margaret Schlegel and Henry Wilcox using a pair of metaphors that align them, respectively, with a mountain and a fortress:
Unlock with LitCharts A+A younger woman might have resented his masterly ways, but Margaret had too firm a grip of life to make a fuss. She was, in her own way, as masterly. If he was a fortress she was a mountain peak, whom all might tread, but whom the snows made nightly virginal.
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Chapter 23
Explanation and Analysis—A Helping of Africa:
In Chapter 23, Margaret walks around the offices in Howards End where Henry Wilcox does his work for the West Africa Rubber Company and sees a map. Forster alludes to the colonial “Scramble for Africa” of the early 20th century in this passage, using metaphor and simile to characterize Africa as a meal or an animal that can be carved up:
Unlock with LitCharts A+[...] though the map over the fireplace did depict a helping of West Africa, it was a very ordinary map. Another map hung opposite, on which the whole continent appeared, looking like a whale marked out for blubber.
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Explanation and Analysis—Wilcox Estate:
In Chapter 23, when Margaret arrives at the Wilcox estate by herself for the first time, the scene features vivid visual and tactile imagery as well as simile and metaphor:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Then the car turned away, and it was as if a curtain had risen. [...] Tulips were a tray of jewels. She could not see the wych-elm tree, but a branch of the celebrated vine, studded with velvet knobs, had covered the porch. She had seldom been in a garden where the flowers looked so well, and even the weeds she was idly plucking out of the porch were intensely green.
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Chapter 31
Explanation and Analysis—A Corpse:
In this passage from Chapter 31, Forster personifies the Schlegels' house, Wickham Place, as a living entity, describing its death as if it were a human being. He also uses the metaphor of a corpse to describe the “death” of the Schlegels' childhood home:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Houses have their own ways of dying, falling as variously as the generations of men, some with a tragic roar, some quietly, but to an after-life in the city of ghosts, while from others—and thus was the death of Wickham Place—the spirit slips before the body perishes. [...] By September it was a corpse, void of emotion, and scarcely hallowed by the memories of thirty years of happiness.
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Chapter 43
Explanation and Analysis—Life was a Deep River:
In Chapter 43 after the tragic accident with Leonard Bast, Margaret mourns for him and reflects on the nature of life and death. She does so through a series of metaphors and images that stack on top of each other. This language is powerful, varied, and sometimes contradictory, which reflects Margaret's complex emotional state:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Here Leonard lay dead in the garden, from natural causes; yet life was a deep, deep river, death a blue sky, life was a house, death a wisp of hay, a flower, a tower, life and death were anything and everything, except this ordered insanity, where the king takes the queen, and the ace the king. Ah, no; there was beauty and adventure behind, such as the man at her feet had yearned for; there was hope this side of the grave; there were truer relationships beyond the limits that fetter us now.
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