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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
Book 1: Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Debt and Debut:
Lily reminisces about her debut in society and how it was clouded by financial troubles. During this flashback, Wharton uses a metaphor of stormy weather to describe the effect of financial insecurity on Lily's youth, ultimately foreshadowing her troubles to come:
Lily was nineteen when circumstances caused her to revise her view of the universe. The previous year she had made a dazzling debut fringed by a heavy thunder-cloud of bills. The light of the debut still lingered on the horizon, but the cloud had thickened; and suddenly it broke. The suddenness added to the horror; and there were still times when Lily relived with painful vividness every detail of the day on which the blow fell.
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Book 1: Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Little Black Prison-House:
As Lily's financial and social ambitions and her feelings for Selden collide, Wharton uses a metaphor suggesting she has split into two “beings” to illustrate her internal conflict:
Unlock with LitCharts A+There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears.
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Book 1: Chapter 14
Explanation and Analysis—A Mild Beam:
In Book 2, Chapter 14, Gerty reflects on Selden’s attentions towards her. The narrator employs a metaphor of illumination to describe Selden’s effect on her, supporting this description with visual imagery of light and shadow:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Now she was the centre of a little illumination of her own: a mild but unmistakable beam, compounded of Lawrence Selden's growing kindness to herself and the discovery that he extended his liking to Lily Bart. If these two factors seem incompatible to the student of feminine psychology, it must be remembered that Gerty had always been a parasite in the moral order, living on the crumbs of other tables, and content to look through the window at the banquet spread for her friends.
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Explanation and Analysis—The Waters Everywhere:
Gerty is overwhelmed when she realizes the depth of Selden's affection for Lily. In this passage, Wharton invokes the novel's motif of metaphors describing water and drowning to illustrate Gerty's extreme emotions. In addition to this, she uses vivid sensory language, invoking hearing and touch to represent Gerty's total lack of control over her romantic situation:
Unlock with LitCharts A+She tried to follow what he was saying, to cling to her own part in the talk—but it was all as meaningless as the boom of waves in a drowning head, and she felt, as the drowning may feel, that to sink would be nothing beside the pain of struggling to keep up.
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Explanation and Analysis—Brush Off its Bloom:
Gerty Farish reflects—or tries not to reflect—on the kindness shown to her by her cousin, Lawrence Selden. In this passage, Wharton uses a metaphor likening Selden's attention to the delicate wings of a butterfly that Gerty is unwilling to crush:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Gerty would no more have dared to define it than she would have tried to learn a butterfly's colors by knocking the dust from its wings. To seize on the wonder would be to brush off its bloom, and perhaps see it fade and stiffen in her hand: better the sense of beauty palpitating out of reach, while she held her breath and watched where it would alight.
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Book 2: Chapter 13
Explanation and Analysis—Old Life Lace:
Wharton layers similes and metaphors referring to letters and time passing as she depicts Lily going through her belongings after meeting Nettie Struther unexpectedly. Everything in her trunk of remaining belongings leads Lily to reflect on her past:
Unlock with LitCharts A+An association lurked in every fold: each fall of lace and gleam of embroidery was like a letter in the record of her past. She was startled to find how the atmosphere of her old life enveloped her. But, after all, it was the life she had been made for: every dawning tendency in her had been carefully directed toward it, all her interests and activities had been taught to centre around it. She was like some rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her beauty.
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Explanation and Analysis—Mere Spin-Drift:
At the end of the novel, Lily reflects on her now-realized fears of poverty and solitude, which make her feel rootless and ephemeral. Wharton uses a simile comparing Lily to a plant pulled from the ground, and this simile is accompanied by a metaphor of flooding water:
Unlock with LitCharts A+It was indeed miserable to be poor—to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle-age, leading by dreary degrees of economy and self-denial to gradual absorption in the dingy communal existence of the boarding-house. But there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the headless current of the years. That was the feeling which possessed her now—the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them.
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