The Daughters of the Late Colonel: Similes 4 key examples

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.

The slippers and gowns Mansfield describes here are more than clothes and shoes—they are indications of the sisters' personalities. In a world where their personal choices are as limited as the one inside the Pinner house, their choice of colors is one of the only indications of their identities. Josephine's “dark-red” suggests her relatively bold character, while Constantia's preference for an "indefinite" green might represent a more passive, “indefinite” nature. The shift from red and green to black, therefore, suggests a loss of individuality and the overshadowing of their personalities by the all-consuming reality of their father's death. This imagined color change is a visual metaphor for Josephine’s bleak vision of their future, where their “green” and “red” identities are dulled and oppressed by the conventions of mourning.

Despite their color choices, neither of the women are particularly “bold” in their personal lives. Mansfield uses a simile to emphasize this, as Josephine imagines what might happen as they lose their "green" and "red" to mourning black. She thinks the change will make them “creep” around like “black cats.” The women had been forced to "creep" around the house carefully when their father was alive, and Josephine worries that switching to black clothes will make this even worse after his death. This comparison does more than evoke the visual of cautious, secretive movement, however. Black cats are a symbol of both bad and good luck in British culture, depending on the circumstances in which one sees them. In their “black cat” robes, the women will become physical manifestations of their own uncertain future.

The simile "like the doors in dreams" conveys Constantia's sense of disorientation and the surreal atmosphere of the room. Mansfield is talking about dream-logic here, where things might not always follow the rules of physics. The women feel like they can pass through the door without opening it, which is physically impossible. This comparison illustrates the difficulty the sisters have in grappling with their new reality without their father. Entering the bedroom previously would have been a taboo act. Now that it has become a necessity, it feels surreal.

Once they’ve completed this dream-like transportation into the Colonel’s room, Mansfield uses visual and tactile imagery to describe the room’s coldness and whiteness for the reader. The room is filled with covered objects, and the blinds are drawn. The space feels untouched and preserved, like a tomb or a house shut up for a period of absence. When Constantia tentatively reaches into the air, she is half-expecting a snowflake to fall. The aura of the room is so chilling and death-laden that it feels like winter inside the house. Josephine's imagined sensation of a tingling nose from the cold only adds to this. Their sense of intrusion and wrongness at being in their father's bedroom is so strong that it manifests physically as these wintry chills.

The simile that Mansfield uses here, "camels [unwinding] like a thread of wool" illustrates Constantia's wish to distance herself from her current surroundings. The tense atmosphere of meals with only her sister and Nurse Andrews is so unbearable to her that she has to find an imaginative way to escape them. Here, she envisions a gaping desert in front of her, with a column of camels in the distance undertaking a slow and laborious journey. They’re far away enough in the distance to seem like a “thread of wool,” as if they are only visible as a line rather than distinct animals.

This imagery invites readers to visualize Constantia's strained, intense attitude toward all of her interactions. Even in her imagined world, things are indistinct and mundane, “camels” changed to “wool” on the horizon. She can’t tell the Nurse to leave, or be rude to her in any way, because doing so would violate her own social contract. She’s forced to sit and bear her, no matter what she says or does. By envisioning a desert, Constantia also—perhaps unknowingly—creates a mental landscape of isolation. It’s the opposite of the table’s oppressive chatter, contrasting sharply with the discomfort of her immediate environment. This metaphor emphasizes the stark difference between her inner world and the reality of her situation.