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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
Part 1: Effia
Explanation and Analysis—Like a Dying Animal:
Forcibly estranged from their own people, Effia and the other Black wives often while away the time on the decks of the Castle speaking about their husbands. During one such day, Eccoah broaches a difficult subject with a simile:
“My husband comes up from the dungeons stinking like a dying animal,” Eccoah said softly.
They all looked away. No one ever mentioned the dungeons.
A simile that might in other contexts pass as banal—a man who stinks “like a dying animal”—takes an unnerving turn on the ramparts above the dungeons. If Eccoah’s White husband already smells from paying a visit underground, he offers no more than a passing whiff of the full hellishness below. The “dying animal” of Eccoah’s husband smells nowhere near as badly as the untold numbers who waste away beneath them. Some merely stink; others have long surpassed that point. The simile underscores through its use of understatement, emphasizing the horror of the dungeon’s conditions by drawing an equivalence that seems almost tame by comparison.
Read in a different light, the comparison also undermines the humanity of Eccoah’s own husband. In “stinking like a dying animal,” the man himself has lost his own sense of dignity. He stinks so much that he is described as no longer human. Just as the simile directs attention to the conditions of those below, it dissolves the line between human cruelty and animality in the eyes of slavery’s prime perpetrators.
Related Themes:
