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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
Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Like a Bombshell:
Near the beginning of the novel, before Archer knows Ellen, he defends her when his family gossips about her potential divorce. The narrator uses a simile in this moment to capture the way that divorce was seen as scandalous in 1870s New York society:
“I hear she means to get a divorce,” said Janey boldly.
“I hope she will!” Archer exclaimed.
The word had fallen like a bombshell in the pure and tranquil atmosphere of the Archer dining-room. Mrs. Archer raised her delicate eye-brows in the particular curve that signified: “The butler—” and the young man, himself mindful of the bad taste of discussing such intimate matters in public, hastily branched off into an account of his visit to old Mrs. Mingott.
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Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Like an Image in Snow:
Near the beginning of the novel, Archer reflects bitterly on the “purity” of unmarried women, using a simile in the process:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent, it was full of the twists and turns and defenses of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of a factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.
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Chapter 9
Explanation and Analysis—Like a Caged Animal:
Before Archer falls in love with Ellen, he already feels suffocated in his relationship with May. This comes across in a simile Archer uses after a day spent visiting different members of May’s family:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Packed in the family landau they rolled from one tribal doorstep to another, and Archer, when the afternoon’s round was over, parted from his betrothed with the feeling that he had been shown off like a wild animal cunningly trapped. He supposed that his readings in anthropology caused him to take such a coarse view of what was after all a simple and natural demonstration of family feeling.
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Chapter 15
Explanation and Analysis—Archer’s Bleak Future:
After Archer spends time with Ellen at Skuytercliff and becomes more and more enamored of her, he feels stifled back at home in his normal life. The narrator captures Archer’s inner torment using a pair of similes:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The next two or three days dragged by heavily. The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future. He heard nothing of the Countess Olenska, or of the perfect little house.
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Chapter 26
Explanation and Analysis—Absent-minded Archer:
During the period in which Archer is in love with Ellen but doesn’t see her for four months, he lives more in his fantasies of her than in his reality (in which he is unhappily married to May). The narrator captures Archer’s lack of connection to reality in this time using a simile:
Unlock with LitCharts A+[H]e moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent—that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.
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Chapter 31
Explanation and Analysis—Like a Vine Spiral:
When Archer and Ellen visit the Metropolitan Museum together near the end of the novel, the narrator describes Ellen’s appearance in close detail, using a simile in the process:
Unlock with LitCharts A+She stood up and wandered across the room. Archer, remaining seated, watched the light movements of her figure, so girlish even under its heavy furs, the cleverly planted heron wing in her fur cap, and the way a dark curl lay like a flattened vine spiral on each cheek above the ear. His mind, as always when they first met, was wholly absorbed in the delicious details that made her herself and no other.
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Chapter 33
Explanation and Analysis—At the Farewell Dinner:
When Archer is at Ellen’s farewell dinner, he becomes aware that everyone at the party (including May) believes that he and Ellen are lovers but are acting as if they do not. The narrator uses a metaphor and a simile to capture Archer’s experience in this scene:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Archer once more disengaged the fact that New York believed him to be Madame Olenska’s lover […] [F]or the first time understood that [May] shared the belief. The discovery roused a laughter of inner devils that reverberated through all his efforts to discuss the Martha Washington ball with Mrs. Reggie Chivers and little Mrs. Newland; and so the evening swept on, running and running like a senseless river that did not know how to stop.
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