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Situational Irony
Key Examples in The Scarlet Letter
The Custom House
Explanation and Analysis:
The novel's style is characterized by figurative language and long, meandering sentences. One example of a long, descriptive sentence that trips through shifting similes and metaphors occurs in "The Custom House":
My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance.
Related Themes:
Chapter 8
Explanation and Analysis:
The novel's style is characterized by figurative language and long, meandering sentences. One example of a long, descriptive sentence that trips through shifting similes and metaphors occurs in "The Custom House":
Unlock with LitCharts A+My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance.
Related Themes:
