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Definition of Imagery
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After Apple-Picking" contain imagery that engages... read full definition
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After... read full definition
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines... read full definition
Chapter 2: Georgia
Explanation and Analysis—Big Anthony's Death:
On the Randall plantation, Big Anthony’s death partly compels Cora to escape. A failed escape attempt sends Big Anthony to the stocks, custom-made at Terrance Randall’s behest. Through imagery, the novel casts his execution as another display of gruesome, unspeakable inhumanity:
They gathered on the front lawn. Randall’s visitors sipped spiced rum as Big Anthony was doused with oil and roasted. The witnesses were spared his screams, as his manhood had been cut off on the first day, stuffed in his mouth, and sewn in. The stocks smoked, charred, and burned, the figures in the wood twisting in the flames as if alive.
The sequence of Big Anthony’s punishment develops its grisliness through a succession of verbs. The captured runaway is “doused with oil and roasted,” while the stocks get “smoked, charred, and burned”—an elaborate sequence of torture that lies beyond the reach of any description. The narrator even imagines the wooden figures “twisting” as though alive. Here, action is enough to communicate the shocking cruelty of his execution.
The terms here are just as much culinary ones, and their associations with taste lend Big Anthony’s punishment to an even more disturbing contrast. Terrance Randall invites guests onto his plantation during this three-day execution, and those in attendance savor turtle delicacies and mutton as the runaway writhes on the verge of his life. More than the gruesome account of Big Anthony’s castration, the greatest horror may be the nonchalance with which his guests sip rum while watching the enslaved man roast. In some subtle sense, the cooking-inspired account of Big Anthony’s execution advances a veiled suggestion that the guests have begun consuming the enslaved man themselves.
Related Themes:
Chapter 6: North Carolina
Explanation and Analysis—Rotting Ornaments:
Following an escape from South Carolina that takes her to the end of the underground railroad, Cora arrives in North Carolina greeted by a terrifying scene:
The corpses hung from trees as rotting ornaments. Some of them were naked, others partially clothed, the trousers black where their bowels emptied when their necks snapped. Gross wounds and injuries marked the flesh of those closest to her, the two caught by the station agent’s lantern. One had been castrated, an ugly mouth gaping where his manhood had been. The other was a woman. Her belly curved. Cora had never been good at knowing if a body was with a child. Their bulging eyes seemed to rebuke her stares, but what were the attentions of one girl, disturbing their rest, compared to how the world had scourged them since the day they were brought into it?
The scene is horrific in its catalog of details: the “naked” dead bodies strung along the Freedom Trail have emptied bowels, “gaping” mouths, and “bulging” eyes that present racism’s injustices in their most direct, viscerally disturbing forms. This passage’s particular emphasis on the crude unsightliness of the body—some “castrated,” other with “curving,” still-pregnant bellies—create lavishly grotesque descriptions that are only fitting to the white violence of Cora’s surroundings. The narrator lingers over the trail entrance to deliver through images what words alone cannot, capturing violence at its most absurd extremes to critique the world that has trapped them.
Related Themes:
Chapter 8: Tennessee
Explanation and Analysis—Black Tennessee Trees:
Imagery grants a bleak first glimpse of Tennessee, as Ridgeway and Cora enter the state after her capture. The chapter opens with a survey of the ravaged hinterlands:
Crows glided over. The world was scorched and harrowed as far as they could see, a sea of ash and char from the flat planes of the fields up to the hills and mountains. Black trees tilted, stunted black arms pointing as if to a distant place untouched by flame. They rode past the blackened bone of houses and barns without number, chimneys sticking up like grave markers, the husked stone walls of ravaged mills and granaries. Scorched fences marked where cattle had grazed; it was not possible the animals survived.
Tennessee’s scorched, desolate landscape introduces the reader to a deep feeling of hopelessness. The chapter sketches the scenery in apocalyptic terms: the “sea of ash and char,” the “tilted, stunted” black trees, and chimneys “like grave markers” speak powerfully to the death and destruction around them. The surroundings are otherworldly in their morbid, windswept ghastliness.
Still, the “ravaged mills and granaries” merely preview a descent into ever more despair. The trail itself, Ridgeway reminds Boseman, is paved by the bodies of displaced Cherokee people. Plagues circulate from one town to the next, and, as the wagon cuts deeper into the state, Cora and the others pass starving families with “demented expressions,” “singed” clothes, and “rags tied around burns.”
In this land nihilistically bereft of hope, Ridgeway advances a brutal philosophy of white power. Placed against this backdrop of death, the struggle for life sanctions the survival of the strongest. Might makes right, because only those who manage to live are able “to destroy what needs to be destroyed”; the weak deserve to be “weeded out.” The slave catcher portrays genocide and slavery as part of the natural order:
Better weep for one of those burned cornfields, or this steer swimming in our soup. You do what’s required to survive.
Tennessee’s unforgiving, deathly terrain turns the will to life into the will to power. Through its grim imagery, the novel reveals a barren world whose brokenness justifies predation, oppression, and injustice.
Related Themes:
