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Setting
Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Door Without a Lock:
Mitchell uses a simile in a passage that describes Scarlett's strong though inexplicable attraction to the intellectual and dreamy Ashley, a son of the neighboring Wilkes family:
He looked on life and was neither heartened nor saddened. He accepted the universe and his place in it for what they were and, shrugging, turned to his music and books and his better world. Why he should have captivated Scarlett when his mind was a stranger to hers she did not know. The very mystery of him excited her curiosity like a door that had neither lock nor key. The things about him which she could not understand only made her love him more, and his odd, restrained courtship only served to increase her determination to have him for her own.
Explanation and Analysis—Body and Soul :
Mitchell uses a simile in a situationally ironic passage that suggests that Mammy, an enslaved woman, "owned" her enslavers, the O'Hara family. When Scarlett attempts to conceal her horror at the rumor that Ashley has gotten engaged to Melanie, Mitchell writes:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Scarlett heard Mammy’s lumbering tread shaking the floor of the hall and she hastily untucked her foot and tried to rearrange her face in more placid lines. It would never do for Mammy to suspect that anything was wrong. Mammy felt that she owned the O’Haras, body and soul, and their secrets were her secrets; and even a hint of a mystery was enough to set her upon the trail as relentlessly as a bloodhound. Scarlett knew from experience that, if Mammy’s curiosity were not immediately satisfied, she would take up the matter with Ellen [...]
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Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Melanie:
When Scarlett arrives at the home of Miss Pittypat Hamilton, who is to serve as her guardian in Atlanta, she encounters Melanie, who is described in a series of similes:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Too wide across the cheek bones, too pointed at the chin, it was a sweet, timid face but a plain face, and she had no feminine tricks of allure to make observers forget its plainness. She looked—and was—as simple as earth, as good as bread, as transparent as spring water. But for all her plainness of feature and smallness of stature, there was a sedate dignity about her movements that was oddly touching and far older than her seventeen years.
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Chapter 8
Explanation and Analysis—Soft as a Bird's Nest :
When Scarlett begins to live with the family of her late husband, Charles, in Atlanta, Mitchell uses a simile that compares Miss Pittypat Hamilton's home to a bird's nest:
Unlock with LitCharts A+From the two he loved best, Charles had received no toughening influences, learned nothing of harshness or reality, and the home in which he grew to manhood was as soft as a bird’s nest. It was such a quiet, old-fashioned, gentle home compared with Tara. To Scarlett, this house cried out for the masculine smells of brandy, tobacco and Macassar oil, for hoarse voices and occasional curses, for guns, for whiskers, for saddles and bridles and for hounds underfoot. She missed the sounds of quarreling voices that were always heard at Tara when Ellen’s back was turned [...]
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Chapter 9
Explanation and Analysis—The Father and the Son :
At the charity bazaar, Scarlett realizes that she does not truly care about the cause of the Confederacy, unlike the other attendees, who glow with a fanatic zeal as they cheer on their soldiers. When Scarlett looks "glumly" at her surroundings, Mitchell uses both allusion and simile:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Scarlett sat and looked glumly around the room. Even the banked flowers below the pictures of Mr. Davis and Mr. Stephens displeased her. “It looks like an altar,” she sniffed. “And the way they all carry on about those two, they might as well be the Father and the Son!” Then smitten with sudden fright at her irreverence she began hastily to cross herself by way of apology but caught herself in time.
“Well, it’s true,” she argued with her conscience. “Everybody carries on like they were holy and they aren’t anything but men, and mighty unattractive looking ones at that.”
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Chapter 26
Explanation and Analysis—Like a Drumbeat :
Mitchell uses both imagery and a simile in a pivotal scene in which Scarlett shoots and kills a Union soldier whom she believes has come to loot Tara:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Yes, he was dead. Undoubtedly. She had killed a man. The smoke curled slowly to the ceiling and the red streams widened about her feet. For a timeless moment she stood there and in the still hot hush of the summer morning every irrelevant sound and scent seemed magnified, the quick thudding of her heart, like a drumbeat, the slight rough rustling of the magnolia leaves, the far-off plaintive sound of a swamp bird and the sweet smell of the flowers outside the window.
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Chapter 36
Explanation and Analysis—Like a Man:
After marrying Scarlett, Frank becomes increasingly aware of her true, cunning nature. In a simile, he describes her as being "like a man" for her direct manner and interest in business:
Unlock with LitCharts A+In the brief period of the courtship, he thought he had never known a woman more attractively feminine in her reactions to life, ignorant, timid and helpless. Now her reactions were all masculine. Despite her pink cheeks and dimples and pretty smiles, she talked and acted like a man. Her voice was brisk and decisive and she made up her mind instantly and with no girlish shilly-shallying. She knew what she wanted and she went after it by the shortest route, like a man, not by the hidden and circuitous routes peculiar to women.
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Chapter 54
Explanation and Analysis—Nervous as a Bride:
After a passionate evening, during which Rhett confronts Scarlett about her ongoing love for Ashley, Scarlett compares herself to a bride in a simile:
Unlock with LitCharts A+For one night, he had had her at his mercy but now she knew the weakness of his armor. From now on she had him where she wanted him. She had smarted under his jeers for a long time, but now she had him where she could make him jump through any hoops she cared to hold. When she thought of meeting him again, face to face in the sober light of day, a nervous tingling embarrassment that carried with it an exciting pleasure enveloped her. “I’m nervous as a bride,” she thought. “And about Rhett!” And, at the idea she fell to giggling foolishly.
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Chapter 63
Explanation and Analysis—Like a Whip:
In the final scene of the novel, Scarlett and Rhett have a long overdue conversation about their marriage. Wearied after the deaths of Bonnie Blue and Melanie, Rhett abandons his old games and speaks frankly with Scarlett, using a simile as he acknowledges the love that he once felt for her:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Did it ever occur to you that I loved you as much as a man can love a woman? Loved you for years before I finally got you? During the war I’d go away and try to forget you, but I couldn’t and I always had to come back. After the war I risked arrest, just to come back and find you [...] I loved you but I couldn’t let you know it. You’re so brutal to those who love you, Scarlett. You take their love and hold it over their heads like a whip.
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