The Blithedale Romance: Imagery 2 key examples

Visual imagery helps elucidate the symbolic meaning of each character's costume in the masquerade scene. When Coverdale goes walking in Chapters 24 and 25, he stumbles upon the inhabitants of Blithedale dressed up in the forest:

Hollingsworth was in his ordinary working-dress. Priscilla wore a pretty and simple gown, with a kerchief about her neck, and a calash, which she had flung back from her head, leaving it suspended by the strings. But Zenobia (whose part among the masquers, as may be supposed, was no inferior one) appeared in a costume of fanciful magnificence, with her jewelled flower as the central ornament of what resembled a leafy crown, or coronet. She represented the Oriental princess, by whose name we were accustomed to know her.

Cite this Quote

Visual imagery heightens the emotional impact of Zenobia's suicide. In Chapter 27, Coverdale describes what she looked like when they found her in the water:

Of all modes of death, methinks it is the ugliest. Her wet garments swathed limbs of terrible inflexibility. She was the marble image of a death-agony. Her arms had grown rigid in the act of struggling, and were bent before her, with clenched hands; her knees, too, were bent, and—thank God for it!—in the attitude of prayer. Ah, that rigidity! It is impossible to bear the terror of it. It seemed—I must needs impart so much of my own miserable idea—it seemed as if her body must keep the same position in the coffin, and that her skeleton would keep it in the grave, and that when Zenobia rose, at the Day of Judgment, it would be in just the same attitude as now!

Cite this Quote