Unit 7 · Topic 7.6

7.6 Symbolic settings, motifs, similes and personification

A setting becomes symbolic when the story ties it to feelings, beliefs or ideas. A motif is a pattern of images or objects that keeps coming back to stress an idea. Similes and personification matter too: notice why a writer picks the two things being compared, and what it suggests when a person is described as an object, animal or force.

Key terms

symbolic setting
motif
simile
personification
figurative language

Symbolic settings

A setting becomes symbolic when the text links it to something beyond the physical place. A locked room can stand for a trapped life; a dead-end street can stand for going nowhere. Look for settings that get unusual attention, recur, or match a character's inner state.

Some settings carry associations so old and widespread that readers bring them to almost any text: a garden suggests innocence or paradise, a dark forest suggests danger, temptation or the unknown, and a storm suggests turmoil. A story can lean on those associations, as Hawthorne's forest does in "Young Goodman Brown," or play against them.

Joyce's "Araby" begins: "North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street." A blind street is a dead end. In a story about a boy whose dreams lead nowhere, the dead-end street quietly predicts the ending.

Motifs: patterns that repeat

A motif is a recurring image, object or idea. One appearance is a detail; a pattern of appearances is a motif. In "Araby," light and darkness keep returning: the dark street, the girl lit by a lamp, the dark bazaar where "the light was out." By the end, darkness stands for the loss of the boy's illusions.

In "The Story of an Hour," Louise sits facing an "open window" with trees "aquiver with the new spring life." Openness, air and spring return throughout her hour alone, so they build a motif of new life and freedom, which makes the closed, sudden ending hit harder.

Similes and personification

With a simile, ask why the writer chose this comparison and not another. What qualities carry over? In "The Story of an Hour," Louise sobs "as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams." The simile suggests her grief is real but already fading, as automatic as a sleeping child's.

Personification gives human qualities to things. In "Araby," the houses, "conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces." The street seems smug and judgmental, the kind of place that values respectability over feeling.

The reverse also matters: describing a person as an object, animal or force. In "Araby," the boy says, "my body was like a harp," with the girl's words like fingers on its strings. He pictures himself as an instrument she plays, which shows how completely he has given himself over to his fantasy.

Telling the tools apart

Tool	How to spot it	Question to ask
Symbolic setting	A place linked to an idea, often by emphasis or repetition	What idea does this place stand for, and does that change?
Motif	An image, object or idea that recurs in a pattern	What idea does the pattern build each time it returns?
Simile	A comparison using like or as	Why these two things? What qualities carry over?
Personification	Human qualities given to something nonhuman	What attitude or mood does it create?
Person as object, animal or force	A person described in nonhuman terms	What does it suggest about how they are seen or how they see themselves?

Worked examples

Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.

Example 1
Analyzing personification and a symbolic setting
Explain how the opening of "Araby" uses setting and figurative language to prepare for the story's ending: "North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces."
Show the solutionHide the solution
1. Step 1: Find the setting details: a "blind" (dead-end) street, an empty house at the end, houses that are brown and calm.
2. Step 2: Find the figurative language: the houses are personified as "conscious" and "gazed at one another," with "imperturbable faces," meaning calm and impossible to upset.
3. Step 3: Interpret: the street is closed off and self-satisfied. The only freedom mentioned is when school lets out.
4. Step 4: Connect to the ending: the boy's romantic quest ends in disappointment in a dark hall, a dead end like his street.
Answer: Sample answer: Joyce opens with a street that predicts the boy's story. "Blind" means dead-end, and an "uninhabited house" sits at its end, so the setting suggests a place where hopes go nowhere. By personifying the other houses as "conscious of decent lives within them" and gazing with "imperturbable faces," Joyce gives the street the smug calm of a respectable neighbor who disapproves of strong feeling. Against that backdrop, the boy's passionate quest is bound to look foolish, and the ending, where he stands in a darkened hall and judges himself, arrives at a dead end the first sentence promised.

Common mistakes

Calling a single appearance of an object a motif. A motif needs a pattern.
Naming a simile without explaining what qualities carry over from one thing to the other.
Overlooking descriptions of people as objects or animals. They often reveal how a character is seen or sees themselves.

On the exam

Multiple-choice questions often ask what a comparison suggests or what a recurring image emphasizes. Choose the answer that fits the passage's context, not a general meaning of the image.
In the prose fiction essay, tracing one motif through a passage gives your essay a built-in line of reasoning: early, middle, end.

Connected topics

Videos

"What is a Motif?": A Literary Guide for English Students and Teachers
OSU School of Writing, Literature and FilmWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
Theme, Atmosphere, Symbol & Allegory in Young Goodman Brown
Nathaniel LloydWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
Figurative language | Reading | Khan Academy
Khan AcademyWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
Motif in Literature
Rachel CastilloWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
"What is a Simile?": A Literary Guide for English Students and Teachers
OSU School of Writing, Literature and FilmWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Check yourself

5 questions on 7.6 Symbolic settings, motifs, similes and personification. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.

Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up and down. Across a long field that had been seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds, he could see the public highway along which went a wagon filled with berry pickers returning from the fields. The berry pickers, youths and maidens, laughed and shouted boisterously. A boy clad in a blue shirt leaped from the wagon and attempted to drag after him one of the maidens, who screamed and protested shrilly. The feet of the boy in the road kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the face of the departing sun. Over the long field came a thin girlish voice. “Oh, you Wing Biddlebaum, comb your hair, it’s falling into your eyes,” commanded the voice to the man, who was bald and whose nervous little hands fiddled about the bare white forehead as though arranging a mass of tangled locks.

Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts, did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years. Among all the people of Winesburg but one had come close to him. With George Willard, son of Tom Willard, the proprietor of the New Willard House, he had formed something like a friendship. George Willard was the reporter on the Winesburg Eagle and sometimes in the evenings he walked out along the highway to Wing Biddlebaum’s house. Now as the old man walked up and down on the veranda, his hands moving nervously about, he was hoping that George Willard would come and spend the evening with him. After the wagon containing the berry pickers had passed, he went across the field through the tall mustard weeds and climbing a rail fence peered anxiously along the road to the town. For a moment he stood thus, rubbing his hands together and looking up and down the road, and then, fear overcoming him, ran back to walk again upon the porch on his own house.

In the presence of George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum, who for twenty years had been the town mystery, lost something of his timidity, and his shadowy personality, submerged in a sea of doubts, came forth to look at the world. With the young reporter at his side, he ventured in the light of day into Main Street or strode up and down on the rickety front porch of his own house, talking excitedly. The voice that had been low and trembling became shrill and loud. The bent figure straightened. With a kind of wriggle, like a fish returned to the brook by the fisherman, Biddlebaum the silent began to talk, striving to put into words the ideas that had been accumulated by his mind during long years of silence.

Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands. The slender expressive fingers, forever active, forever striving to conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of his machinery of expression.

The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it. The hands alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away and looked with amazement at the quiet inexpressive hands of other men who worked beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on country roads.

When he talked to George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum closed his fists and beat with them upon a table or on the walls of his house. The action made him more comfortable. If the desire to talk came to him when the two were walking in the fields, he sought out a stump or the top board of a fence and with his hands pounding busily talked with renewed ease.

The story of Wing Biddlebaum’s hands is worth a book in itself. Sympathetically set forth it would tap many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men. It is a job for a poet. In Winesburg the hands had attracted attention merely because of their activity. With them Wing Biddlebaum had picked as high as a hundred and forty quarts of strawberries in a day. They became his distinguishing feature, the source of his fame. Also they made more grotesque an already grotesque and elusive individuality. Winesburg was proud of the hands of Wing Biddlebaum in the same spirit in which it was proud of Banker White’s new stone house and Wesley Moyer’s bay stallion, Tony Tip, that had won the two-fifteen trot at the fall races in Cleveland.

Sherwood Anderson, "Hands," Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Question 1 of 5

The simile in paragraph 3, “like a fish returned to the brook by the fisherman,” conveys

Question 2 of 5

The repeated references to Wing’s hands throughout the passage work mainly as

A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners—two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. At a short remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the uniform of his rank, armed. He was a captain. A sentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the position known as "support," that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest—a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the centre of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.

Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight; the railroad ran straight away into a forest for a hundred yards, then, curving, was lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost farther along. The other bank of the stream was open ground—a gentle acclivity topped with a stockade of vertical tree trunks, loop-holed for rifles, with a single embrasure through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon commanding the bridge. Mid-way of the slope between bridge and fort were the spectators—a single company of infantry in line, at "parade rest," the butts of the rifles on the ground, the barrels inclining slightly backward against the right shoulder, the hands crossed upon the stock. A lieutenant stood at the right of the line, the point of his sword upon the ground, his left hand resting upon his right. Excepting the group of four at the centre of the bridge, not a man moved. The company faced the bridge, staring stonily, motionless. The sentinels, facing the banks of the stream, might have been statues to adorn the bridge. The captain stood with folded arms, silent, observing the work of his subordinates, but making no sign. Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.

The man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of age. He was a civilian, if one might judge from his habit, which was that of a planter. His features were good—a straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, dark hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar of his well-fitting frock-coat. He wore a mustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark gray, and had a kindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one whose neck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin. The liberal military code makes provision for hanging many kinds of persons, and gentlemen are not excluded.

The preparations being complete, the two private soldiers stepped aside and each drew away the plank upon which he had been standing. The sergeant turned to the captain, saluted and placed himself immediately behind that officer, who in turn moved apart one pace. These movements left the condemned man and the sergeant standing on the two ends of the same plank, which spanned three of the cross-ties of the bridge. The end upon which the civilian stood almost, but not quite, reached a fourth. This plank had been held in place by the weight of the captain; it was now held by that of the sergeant. At a signal from the former the latter would step aside, the plank would tilt and the condemned man go down between two ties. The arrangement commended itself to his judgment as simple and effective. His face had not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment at his "unsteadfast footing," then let his gaze wander to the swirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to move! What a sluggish stream!

He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children. The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift—all had distracted him. And now he became conscious of a new disturbance. Striking through the thought of his dear ones was a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith's hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or near by—it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each stroke with impatience and—he knew not why—apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the thrust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch.

He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. "If I could free my hands," he thought, "I might throw off the noose and spring into the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home. My home, thank God, is as yet outside their lines; my wife and little ones are still beyond the invader's farthest advance."

As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man's brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant stepped aside.

Ambrose Bierce, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890), Part I

Question 3 of 5

The statement in paragraph 2 that “Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect” uses personification to

At home in Moscow everything was in its winter routine; the stoves were heated, and in the morning it was still dark when the children were having breakfast and getting ready for school, and the nurse would light the lamp for a short time. The frosts had begun already. When the first snow has fallen, on the first day of sledge-driving it is pleasant to see the white earth, the white roofs, to draw soft, delicious breath, and the season brings back the days of one's youth. The old limes and birches, white with hoar-frost, have a good-natured expression; they are nearer to one's heart than cypresses and palms, and near them one doesn't want to be thinking of the sea and the mountains.

Gurov was Moscow born; he arrived in Moscow on a fine frosty day, and when he put on his fur coat and warm gloves, and walked along Petrovka, and when on Saturday evening he heard the ringing of the bells, his recent trip and the places he had seen lost all charm for him. Little by little he became absorbed in Moscow life, greedily read three newspapers a day, and declared he did not read the Moscow papers on principle! He already felt a longing to go to restaurants, clubs, dinner-parties, anniversary celebrations, and he felt flattered at entertaining distinguished lawyers and artists, and at playing cards with a professor at the doctors' club. He could already eat a whole plateful of salt fish and cabbage.

In another month, he fancied, the image of Anna Sergeyevna would be shrouded in a mist in his memory, and only from time to time would visit him in his dreams with a touching smile as others did. But more than a month passed, real winter had come, and everything was still clear in his memory as though he had parted with Anna Sergeyevna only the day before. And his memories glowed more and more vividly. When in the evening stillness he heard from his study the voices of his children, preparing their lessons, or when he listened to a song or the organ at the restaurant, or the storm howled in the chimney, suddenly everything would rise up in his memory: what had happened on the groyne, and the early morning with the mist on the mountains, and the steamer coming from Theodosia, and the kisses. He would pace a long time about his room, remembering it all and smiling; then his memories passed into dreams, and in his fancy the past was mingled with what was to come. Anna Sergeyevna did not visit him in dreams, but followed him about everywhere like a shadow and haunted him. When he shut his eyes he saw her as though she were living before him, and she seemed to him lovelier, younger, tenderer than she was; and he imagined himself finer than he had been in Yalta. In the evenings she peeped out at him from the bookcase, from the fireplace, from the corner—he heard her breathing, the caressing rustle of her dress. In the street he watched the women, looking for some one like her.

He was tormented by an intense desire to confide his memories to some one. But in his home it was impossible to talk of his love, and he had no one outside; he could not talk to his tenants nor to any one at the bank. And what had he to talk of? Had he been in love, then? Had there been anything beautiful, poetical, or edifying or simply interesting in his relations with Anna Sergeyevna? And there was nothing for him but to talk vaguely of love, of woman, and no one guessed what it meant; only his wife twitched her black eyebrows, and said:

"The part of a lady-killer does not suit you at all, Dimitri."

One evening, coming out of the doctors' club with an official with whom he had been playing cards, he could not resist saying:

"If only you knew what a fascinating woman I made the acquaintance of in Yalta!"

The official got into his sledge and was driving away, but turned suddenly and shouted:

"Dmitri Dmitritch!"

"What?"

"You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit too strong!"

These words, so ordinary, for some reason moved Gurov to indignation, and struck him as degrading and unclean. What savage manners, what people! What senseless nights, what uninteresting, uneventful days! The rage for card-playing, the gluttony, the drunkenness, the continual talk always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.

Gurov did not sleep all night, and was filled with indignation. And he had a headache all next day. And the next night he slept badly; he sat up in bed, thinking, or paced up and down his room. He was sick of his children, sick of the bank; he had no desire to go anywhere or to talk of anything.

In the holidays in December he prepared for a journey, and told his wife he was going to Petersburg to do something in the interests of a young friend—and he set off for S——. What for? He did not very well know himself. He wanted to see Anna Sergeyevna and to talk with her—to arrange a meeting, if possible.

Anton Chekhov, "The Lady with the Dog" (1899), Part III, translated by Constance Garnett (1917)

Question 4 of 5

The statement that Anna Sergeyevna “followed him about everywhere like a shadow and haunted him” (paragraph 3) suggests that

Question 5 of 5

The comparison of Gurov’s life to being “in a madhouse or a prison” (paragraph 12) chiefly

0 of 5 answered