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Imagery
Explanation and Analysis—Brooding Bodies:
As she wanders miserably through the grounds of Wragby Hall, Connie's emotional turmoil stands in stark contrast to the vitality of the spring around her. The author employs lush visual and tactile imagery to juxtapose Connie’s gray mood with the greening world:
Yet it was spring, and the bluebells were coming in the wood, and the leaf-buds on the hazels were opening like the spatter of green rain. How terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything cold-hearted, cold-hearted. Only the hens, fluffed so wonderfully on the eggs, were warm with their hot, brooding female bodies! Connie felt herself living on the brink of fainting all the time.
The vibrant imagery of this passage makes the Wragby woods seem like a rural paradise. The budding hazels and bluebells bursting into life, however, don’t cheer Connie up as she hopes they will. She is so tremendously unhappy that they only serve to make her feel worse, as this riot of color and life goes on and she can’t enjoy it. This environment brimming with sparkling green freshness just accentuates her feelings of despair and longing. Nothing helps, she remains sad and static, and "yet" the world around her is barreling upward with vivacious growth.
Lawrence then uses tactile imagery to further this contrast. Connie feels that she is “cold-hearted” and that everything else is too, until she notices the hens brooding on their newly laid eggs. The way the narrator describes the hens makes them seem like protective wrapping around a glowing heat source, radiating fertility and energy from within. These "hot, brooding female bodies" are juxtaposed against the “cold-heartedness” of Connie’s own childless life. This distinction highlights her yearning for the kind of warmth and intimacy represented by the nurturing hens. Her sense of being on the verge of fainting also emphasizes this. She’s so lacking in warmth and vitality that she regularly feels she might actually pass out from the “cold-heartedness” of everything.
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