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Definition of Hyperbole
Hyperbole is a figure of speech in which a writer or speaker exaggerates for the sake of emphasis. Hyperbolic statements are usually quite obvious exaggerations intended to emphasize a point... read full definition
Hyperbole is a figure of speech in which a writer or speaker exaggerates for the sake of emphasis. Hyperbolic statements are usually quite obvious exaggerations... read full definition
Hyperbole is a figure of speech in which a writer or speaker exaggerates for the sake of emphasis. Hyperbolic statements... read full definition
Letter 1
Explanation and Analysis—School is in the Air:
At the beginning of Letters from an American Farmer, in Letter 1, James expresses his insecurity at the prospect of writing to his well-educated friend F. B. James sees himself as a simple farmer without much to say—or a good way to say it—and his wife hyperbolically agrees:
My wife (and I never do anything without consulting her) laughs and tells me that you cannot be in earnest. "What!" says she; "James, would'st thee pretend to send epistles to a great European man who hath lived abundance of time in that big house called Cambridge, where, they say, that worldly learning is so abundant that people get it only by breathing the air of a place?"
This bit of hyperbole reinforces the perceived disparity between the agrarian society of the American colonies and the educated elites in England: one can't help but learn just by breathing at Cambridge University, whereas James has no such education to lend weight to his words.
James's insecurity about his education and his status as a farmer—despite his hope that America can become a country free of the vicious social stratification of England—informs his perspective throughout his story. From James's initial reluctance to put pen to paper and his plain style of writing through to his focus on various communities' preferred methods of farming and hunting and his lasting derision for elitist magistrates and lawyers, it is precisely his position as a common farmer that lends him his authority.
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Letter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Love Island:
In Letter 6, James turns his attention to Martha's Vineyard and the unique nature of life on both Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. James sees these islands as wonderful examples of an ideal American environment, with their hard-working sailors and small, peaceful towns. He uses hyperbole to describe the idyllic nature of the two islands:
Their climate is so favourable to population that marriage is the object of every man's earliest wish; and it is a blessing so easily obtained that great numbers are obliged to quit their native land and go to some other countries in quest of subsistence.
In this passage, it is the family planning practices of the islanders that James exaggerates to the point of hyperbole—the conditions of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket are apparently so hospitable to settlement that the very first thing a man hopes for is to be married and start a family.
Hyperbole is an essential device to James's account of colonial life in America. Letters from an American Farmer is a cornerstone of early American myth, and hyperbole enables Crèvecoeur to paint the country as a land of borderline edenic splendor using a bit of mythic language that stretches beyond the bounds of historical reality.
Letter 9
Explanation and Analysis—The Slaveholder's Power:
In Letter 9, James turns his attention to the practice of slavery in Charles Town, South Carolina (modern-day Charleston). James finds the practice utterly detestable, at least as encountered in the American South, and uses hyperbole and metaphor to better portray the horrors of slavery and the cruelty of all those who are involved in the practice.
These unfortunate creatures cry and weep like their parents, without a possibility of relief; the very instinct of the brute, so laudable, so irresistible, runs counter here to their master's interest; and to that god, all the laws of Nature must give way.
This hyperbolic and metaphorical language paints slaveholders—"masters"—as gods in their own right—to the divine will of "that god," he observes, even Nature herself must "give way." The power of slaveholders over the people that they owned was absolute to the point that they behaved as though they were godlike. Indeed, quite a few slaveholders believed that the right to own slaves was divinely ordained. James considers this attitude to be an abomination as he encounters it in Charles Town, but it is left unclear to the reader exactly what he thinks of the practice as a whole (after all, he refers to children of the enslaved as "creatures," rather than children). Notably, James goes to some length to excuse the practice of slavery in the northern colonies, which he sees as a lesser evil.
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Explanation and Analysis—The Living Spectre:
At the end of Letter 9, after a letter spent exploring colonial Charles Town, South Carolina and explaining the institution of chattel slavery in the Southern colonies, James is confronted with the horrors of slavery firsthand. He comes across an enslaved man trapped in a cage in the forest, left to die as punishment for killing the overseer at the plantation where the man had worked. To capture the full power of this scene, de Crèvecoeur laces his language with personification, hyperbole, and pathos:
The living spectre, though deprived of his eyes, could still distinctly hear, and in his uncouth dialect begged me to give him some water to allay his thirst. Humanity herself would have recoiled back with horror; she would have balanced whether to lessen such reliefless distress or mercifully with one blow to end this dreadful scene of agonizing torture!
First, to appeal to the reader's sympathy, de Crèvecoeur personifies the whole of humanity as an individual woman: faced with a scene this horrific, even Humanity, the arbiter of mercy, would have wondered whether to end the man's life and relieve him of this agony. This awful deliberation and the description of the man as a phantom-like "living spectre" are both examples of hyperbole that de Crèvecoeur uses to further stoke the emotional appeal (pathos) of the scene. As such, the passage reads as an explicit plea with the reader to stand against the practice of slavery.
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