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Get every literary device explanation for To the LighthousePlus so much more...
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Imagery
Explanation and Analysis—Mrs. Ramsay's Inner Ocean:
After the climactic dinner party in Chapter 19 of "The Window," Mrs. Ramsay gradually begins to reflect on the dinner conversation. She conveys her thoughts on the night through a beautiful combination of visual imagery and metaphor:
And she waited a little, knitting, wondering, and slowly those words they had said at dinner, 'the China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the honey bee,' began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically, and as they washed, words, like little shaded lights, one red, one blue, one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind...
As Mrs. Ramsay reflects, Woolf uses the movement and imagery of the ocean to portray how her thoughts move around her head—side to side, lapping like little waves. At the same time, Woolf also uses color imagery to evoke how the words of the conversation come back to Mrs. Ramsay. As the words blink like colored lights, this synesthetic simile recalls the twinkling lights of a city or an ocean liner far out at sea.
Ocean imagery and metaphor can be found tucked into almost every corner of To the Lighthouse, and here Woolf uses the ocean to bring the outside in: the internal life of Mrs. Ramsay mirrors the surrounding ocean environment of the Isle of Skye.
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