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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 North and South
Similes
Explanation and Analysis—Mother-Animal:
After Mrs. Hale dies, Mr. Hale strokes his late wife’s face and makes soft noises like “some mother-animal caressing her young.” The simile underscores the characterization of Mr. Hale as relatively weak and passive and as more feminine than masculine.
Related Themes:
Chapter 17
Explanation and Analysis—A Breath of Country Air:
After Margaret pays Bessy a visit, Bessy compares her to fresh air and an angel:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I wonder if there are many folk like her down South. She's like a breath of country air, somehow. She freshens me up above a bit. Who'd ha' thought that face—as bright and as strong as the angel I dream of—could have known the sorrow she speaks on?
Related Themes:
Chapter 19
Explanation and Analysis—Hounds, Bees, and Wolves:
The novel uses a motif of people being described as groups of animals; both sides, employers and employees, do this, showing how class antagonism gets expressed in dehumanizing ways by all parties in Milton.
Related Themes:
Chapter 27
Explanation and Analysis—The Old Stone Wall:
Mr. Hale reminisces about the Hales' garden in Helstone, prompting Margaret to recall the spot in greater detail and to feel grief for their old home. The passage uses minute imagery, including the simile of a map, to convey the intensity with which she loves and misses home:
Unlock with LitCharts A+"Do you remember the matted-up currant bushes, Margaret, at the corner of the west-wall in the garden at home?"
Did she not? Did she not remember every weather-stain on the old stone wall; the grey and yellow lichens that marked it like a map; the little crane's-bill that grew in the crevices? [...] and, somehow, these careless words of her father's, touching on the remembrance of the sunny times of old, made her start up[.]
Related Themes:
Chapter 28
Explanation and Analysis—Truth like Sheet-Iron:
Nicholas Higgins is telling Mr. Hale about an occasion when his former employer offered him a book of economic theory as a way of shutting down Higgins's complaints about his job. Higgins uses a simile to compare truth to a factory-produced sheet of iron:
Unlock with LitCharts A+“I’m not one who [thinks] truth can be shaped out in words, all neat and clean, as th’ men at th’ foundry cut out sheet-iron [… ]. Folk who sets up to doctor th’ world wi’ their truth, [must] suit different for different minds.”
Related Themes:
Chapter 46
Explanation and Analysis—Like Fruit Fully Ripe:
On the evening of her visit to Helstone, Margaret reflects on what she's seen that day, and the novel uses a simile comparing death to ripened fruit dropping to the ground.
Unlock with LitCharts A+There was change everywhere; slight, yet pervading all. Households were changed by absence, or death, or marriage, or the natural mutations brought by days and months and years, which carry us on imperceptibly from childhood to youth, and thence through manhood to age, whence we drop like fruit, fully ripe, into the quiet mother earth.
Related Themes:
