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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 Scarlet Letter
The Custom House
Explanation and Analysis—Ruined Fortress:
In "The Custom House," the narrator uses a simile to describe an old general he used to see sitting by the fire:
To observe and define his character, however, under such disadvantages, was as difficult a task as to trace out and build up anew, in imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga, from a view of its gray and broken ruins. Here and there, perchance, the walls may remain almost complete, but elsewhere may be only a shapeless mound, cumbrous with its very strength, and overgrown, through long years of peace and neglect, with grass and alien weeds.
Explanation and Analysis—Headless Horseman:
In "The Custom House," the narrator describes how he was ousted from his position as Surveyor. To make sense of what happened, he uses a simile alluding to Washington Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow":
Unlock with LitCharts A+Meanwhile the press had taken up my affair, and kept me, for a week or two, careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like Irving's Headless Horseman; ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried, as a politically dead man ought. So much for my figurative self. The real human being, all this time, with his head safely on his shoulders, had brought himself to the comfortable conclusion that everything was for the best; and, making an investment in ink, paper, and steel-pens, had opened his long-disused writing-desk, and was again a literary man.
Related Themes:
Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Shame as Death:
In Chapter 2, the narrator notes that Hester's punishment for adultery (standing on the scaffold and wearing the scarlet A) is more severe than what 19th-century readers might expect her to face. Using a simile, the narrator compares shame for the Puritans to death for anyone else:
Unlock with LitCharts A+[...] [A] penalty, which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.
Related Themes:
Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Pearl's Otherworldliness:
Pearl is often described as an "elf-child" and has a mystical quality about her that even Hester recognizes. The narrator uses a simile in Chapter 6 to describe Hester's thoughts on Pearl's otherworldly nature:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Hester could not help questioning, at such moments, whether Pearl were a human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage floor, would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and intangibility; it was as if she were hovering in the air and might vanish, like a glimmering light, that comes we know not whence, and goes we know not whither.
Related Themes:
