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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 The House of Mirth
Book 1: Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Manacles, Bracelets:
Using a simile, the narrator compares the bracelet that Lily wears to the figurative kind of imprisonment that early 20th-century American society imposed on women:
She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.
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Book 1: Chapter 14
Explanation and Analysis—Strewn with Wreckage:
In this passage, a miserable Lily goes to see Gerty to try and escape her crushing unhappiness at her Aunt Julia’s house. Wharton uses an oceanic simile to depict the conflicted, beautiful expression on Lily’s face as she puts on a brave front for Gerty:
Unlock with LitCharts A+She rose, stretching her arms as if in utter physical weariness. “Go to bed, dear! You work hard and get up early. I'll watch here by the fire, and you'll leave the light, and your door open. All I want is to feel that you are near me.” She laid both hands on Gerty's shoulders, with a smile that was like sunrise on a sea strewn with wreckage.
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Book 2: Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Hurt Traveler:
In Book 2, Chapter 1, Lawrence Selden discovers from Carry Fisher that Lily Bart is also on the French Riviera, and he realizes the lingering pain from their relationship. Wharton uses a simile comparing him to a traveler to illustrate this discomfort:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The feeling he had nourished and given prominence to was one of thankfulness for his escape: he was like a traveler so grateful for rescue from a dangerous accident that at first, he is hardly conscious of his bruises. Now he suddenly felt the latent ache, and realized that after all he had not come off unhurt.
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Book 2: Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Gleam of a Knife:
In Book 2, Chapter 2, Lily Bart and Bertha Dorset have a conversation on the yacht that touches upon a strained aspect of their relationship. The tension is palpable, and Wharton’s use of simile and tactile imagery help to convey the emotional undercurrents of the scene:
Unlock with LitCharts A+A chill of fear passed over Miss Bart: a sense of remembered treachery that was like the gleam of a knife in the dusk.
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Book 2: Chapter 11
Explanation and Analysis—An Anemone:
Late in the novel, when Lily has been consigned to a boarding-house, Wharton utilizes the simile of a sea-anemone to depict her vulnerability and lack of agency:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock.
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Book 2: Chapter 13
Explanation and Analysis—The Reynolds Dress:
As Lily unpacks her trunk in the boarding house, Wharton employs an allusion to the artist Joshua Reynolds, a simile evoking the glamorous evening of the Tableaux Vivants, and strong scent imagery to demonstrate Lily’s fall from grace:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Last of all, she drew forth from the bottom of her trunk a heap of white drapery which fell shapelessly across her arm. It was the Reynolds dress she had worn in the Bry TABLEAUX. It had been impossible for her to give it away, but she had never seen it since that night, and the long flexible folds, as she shook them out, gave forth an odour of violets which came to her like a breath from the flower-edged fountain where she had stood with Lawrence Selden and disowned her fate.
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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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