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Metaphor
Explanation and Analysis—Schoolboy as Crusoe:
When Marian and Walter go into the village near Limmeridge to inquire about the identity of the person who sent the anonymous letter to Laura, they end up at the local school. Seeking the schoolmaster, they walk in on one of the boys being punished, and Walter uses a metaphor to describe him:
The schoolmaster was sitting at his high desk, with his back to me, apparently haranguing the pupils, who were all gathered together in front of him, with one exception. The one exception was a sturdy white-headed boy, standing apart from all the rest on a stool in a corner—a forlorn little Crusoe, isolated in his own desert island of solitary penal disgrace.
The metaphor of the "forlorn little Crusoe" is an allusion to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, one of the earliest English-language novels. Published in 1719, the novel tells the story of how its eponymous main character and narrator ends up stranded on a desert island—and how he survived to tell the tale. Walter compares the schoolboy to exaggerate his separation from the crowd of other schoolboys. Over the course of his life on the island, Crusoe comes to see his isolation as Providence's way of delivering him from a life of sin. The schoolmaster has similarly isolated the boy on his stool to compel him to see the error of his ways. His reason for being punished is that he claims to have seen a ghost the night before. And not just any ghost—the ghost of Mrs. Fairlie. The boy stubbornly maintains this claim.
It turns out that the little Crusoe is being punished for telling the truth—though he may not have seen the ghost of Mrs. Fairlie like he claims, he did see the ghostly Woman in White. Through this, he ends up giving Marian and Walter an indispensable clue that brings them one step closer to solving the mystery.
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