The House of Mirth (Blog 11)

By: Edith Wharton

As I have been annotating throughout my book, I labeled some of the literary techniques that I notice.  The ones that I feel like I take note of the most are similes.  A simile is a "figure of speech that makes an explicit comparison between two unlike things, using words such as like, as, than, or resembles."  (Thank you for that definition, Mr. Costello!)  I have noticed that Wharton uses a ton of similes, and I think that her mastery in crafting them makes her writing more meaningful.  Personally, I have found her similes to help me with two main things while I read.  The first is understanding the personalities and thoughts of the characters more deeply.  I like this because it gives readers the chance to really become connected to the characters.  A second is that they help me better understand the emotions that the characters experience in different situations.  Sometimes words do not sufficiently explain how a character feels, so inserting a simile (in either the text or dialogue) benefits me in interpreting how he/she really feels.

An example of a simile that helped me better understand the personality and/or thoughts of characters was in chapter 1 of Book 2.  "'That's Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she oversleeps herself or goes off on a picnic'" (Wharton, 152).  This quote was given by Mrs. Carry Fisher.  Carry is describing how Lily takes advantage of many situations and ultimately ruins them for herself.  For example, Lily was going to marry a wealthy Italian prince; however, she ruined this when she flirted with the prince's step-son.  Although, it wasn't very difficult to understand why Carry found this annoying, her simile helped me better understand Lily's personality as a whole.  From the simile, I found that Lily doesn't understand the true meaning of work.  Whenever she finally is working towards something positive for herself, she ruins it with leisurely things or dumb choices.  I would not have been able to understand this as deeply if Wharton had not included the simile.

The second major use I have found in the strategy of similes is that they help one closer relate to the emotions of characters.  I found a demonstration of this after Lily finally gets away from Gus Trenor the night she was tricked into visiting him at his house in chapter 13.  Lily spends a great deal of time trying to get away from Gus, but he gets extremely angry.  Lily is legitimately afraid of him, but he suddenly calms down and soon tells her to leave.  When Lily walks out of his house, she feels a sense of freedom.  "On the doorstep, with the street before her, she felt a mad throb of liberation, intoxicating as the prisoner's first draught of free air..." (Wharton, 120).  This simile explains that Lily actually felt like a prisoner finally leaving jail.  She must have felt like her time in Mr. Trenor's house lasted an eternity, so I can only imagine how relieved she must have been to leave.  If Wharton had not used this simile, I probably could have figured out that she felt free.  However, I would not have understood how liberating it was for her to escape Gus and his seemingly bipolar mood.

Although these are only two quotes that show Wharton's craftsmanship of similes, I think that they are great examples of how she makes her readers better understand situations by using them.  She weaves them throughout the entire novel, and I think that they are one of her defining literary techniques.  I definitely have found them to be handy throughout the entire book so far!