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Literary Devices
Flashbacks
Explanation and Analysis—Meringue Shell:
The flashback to the strained interactions Josephine and Constantia have with their nephew Cyril is an important moment in the Colonel’s characterization. Mansfield uses a simile referring to a meringue-shell during a flashback to illustrate the old man’s mean, crotchety personality, as Cyril and the Colonel’s two daughters pay him a visit in his bedroom:
They knocked at the door, and Cyril followed his aunts into grandfather's hot, sweetish room.[...] He was sitting in front of a roaring fire, clasping his stick. [...] Grandfather Pinner shot his eyes at Cyril in the way he was famous for. Where was Auntie Con? She stood on the other side of Aunt Josephine [...] She never took her eyes off grandfather.
"Eh?" said Grandfather Pinner, curving his hand like a purple meringue-shell over one ear.
There’s a thick, discomfiting tension radiating from Josephine and Constantia when they are in the Colonel's presence. The atmosphere in his room is both literally and figuratively oppressive, the air stiflingly “hot” and “sweetish.” Even in this flashback, which is happening in Constantia’s mind, the sense of pressure she feels from being around her father takes on a physical quality. Though he’s dead, even the memory of him feels stifling.
Mansfield further emphasizes that the Colonel is a fragile and unstable character using a simile comparing his hand to a "purple meringue-shell." Meringues are delicate, brittle, and not very long-lasting. Like a meringue, the Colonel is not long for this world and is in constant danger of crumbling away. The simile subtly conveys both his physical fragility and the suffocating sweetness of his sickroom. It mirrors the decaying state of the Colonel himself and points to the nervousness and delicacy with which his daughters handle him.
Related Themes:
