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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
Key Examples in Mrs Dalloway
Section 1
Explanation and Analysis—Leaden Circles:
In this passage, the narrative metaphorically presents the reverberations of Big Ben's gongs as heavy "circles" that stretch out over London but slowly fade away:
Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—The Open Air:
As Clarissa Dalloway sets out in the morning to buy flowers for her party, she recalls the feeling of setting out for the day when she was 18 and still living in Bourton. As she thinks about how "fresh" the morning air always feels to her, the narrative uses auditory and tactile imagery to metaphorically compare going outside to "plung[ing]" into refreshing water:
Unlock with LitCharts A+What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, [...].
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Section 2
Explanation and Analysis—The Ripple:
When Clarissa is out buying flowers, a car cuts through the congestion of Bond Street, and because everyone thinks somebody important is inside it, the car itself changes the entire atmosphere along the street. To express this palpable change in Clarissa's immediate environment, the novel uses a metaphor comparing the car's influence to a "ripple":
Unlock with LitCharts A+The car had gone, but it had left a slight ripple which flowed through glove shops and hat shops and tailors’ shops on both sides of Bond Street.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Fading Rockets:
Wanting a break from her husband's nonsensical ravings, Lucrezia Smith steps away from him in the park and tries to admire the fountain. But she can't, because she compares it to a fountain in her home city of Milan, and it pales in comparison. She says, "'For you should see the Milan gardens,'" but there's nobody around to hear her. The narrative then uses a simile that accentuates her feeling of loneliness:
Unlock with LitCharts A+There was nobody. Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and towers; [...].
Related Themes:
Section 7
Explanation and Analysis—The Ramrod:
In its satirization of 1920s upper-class British society, Mrs Dalloway frequently focuses on Lady Bruton and highlights her sense of self-importance. Lady Bruton has invited Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread for lunch, but she gets impatient because she wants to stop talking about what she sees as "trifling" matters so that she can get to what she really wants, which is for Hugh to write a letter about emigration to the London Times on her behalf. The narrative uses a metaphor to both show how important the issue of emigration is to Lady Bruton and to poke fun at her obsession with a topic that isn't all that pressing:
Unlock with LitCharts A+She was getting impatient; the whole of her being was setting positively, undeniably [...] upon that subject which engaged her attention, and not merely her attention, but that fibre which was the ramrod of her soul, that essential part of her without which Millicent Bruton would not have been Millicent Bruton; [...]
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—The Flowering Tree:
After the psychiatrist Sir William Bradshaw insists that Septimus should go by himself to convalesce in the countryside, Lucrezia privately promises her husband that, regardless of what Bradshaw has said, she will come with him. She also refuses, when Septimus asks, to burn the papers containing many of his wild, hallucinatory writings, saying that some of them are actually quite beautiful. Filled, it seems, with appreciation, Septimus then sees her as a beautiful tree:
Unlock with LitCharts A+She was a flowering tree; and through her branches looked out the face of a lawgiver, who had reached a sanctuary where she feared no one; not Holmes; not Bradshaw; a miracle, a triumph, the last and greatest. Staggering he saw her mount the appalling staircase, laden with Holmes and Bradshaw, men who never weighed less than eleven stone six, who sent their wives to Court, men who made ten thousand a year and talked of proportion; [...]
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Explanation and Analysis—The Thin Thread:
After Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread leave Lady Bruton's luncheon, she lies down to take a nap, and the narrative metaphorically focuses on what happens to their relational connection as she sinks into sleep and the two men recede into the distance:
Unlock with LitCharts A+And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London
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