“a pattern of obedience”
Trollope is a very effective writer when it comes to utilizing figurative language to describe the many characters that populate his novels. This metaphor more than adequately delineates the overarching character trait of Susan Grantly. She is a woman who
“knows how to assume the full privileges of her rank and express her own mind in becoming tone and place. But Mrs. Grantly’s sway, if sway she has, is easy and beneficent. She never shames her husband; before the world she is a pattern of obedience; …. her voice is never loud, nor her looks sharp: doubtless she values power, and has not unsuccessfully striven to acquire it; but she knows what should be the limits of a woman’s rule.”
Bullying
The ever-faithful Mrs. Quiverful finally has enough of influential men abusing their power by bullying her husband and is finally moved to put into plainly metaphorical terms exactly how he is being bullied:
“These men, when they want you, they use you like a cat’s paw; and when they want you no longer, they throw you aside like an old shoe. This is twice they have treated you so."
The limitations of the imagery strongly indicates the limited potential for education for a woman busy giving birth to more than a dozen kids.
Spoiled Meathead
Another prime example of Trollope’s talent for using metaphor as character description is the one single line which occurs within a robust paragraph of descriptive prose giving a portrait of Mr. Slope. After learning he is tall, broad-chested and never appears in public unshaven, Trollope tells the reader something about him that brushes aside all this extraneous detail to reveal his one memorable physical trait:
“His face is nearly of the same colour as his hair, though perhaps a little redder: it is not unlike beef—beef, however, one would say, of a bad quality.”
Madeline Neroni
Trollope does not always depend on the direct use of metaphor to provide mere physical description of his characters. He is judicious in his choice of when to insert a simile into the description of action in order to intensify and heighten the reader’s understanding of the underlying psychology.
“`Oh, Madeline, I will only love you' and again he caught her hand and devoured it with kisses. Now she did not draw it from him, but sat there as he kissed it, looking at him with her great eyes, just as a great spider would look at a great fly that was quite securely caught.”
The Father of Falsehood
Madeline’s response to the assertion by the man declaring his love whom she views from the perspective of a spider toward a fly is a world-weary rejection of the idealistic promises of being ready to sacrifice the entire world in the name of love. Mr. Slope, a chaplain with the slick skills of a politician turns to hyperbole when Madeline accuses him of falsely declaring the depths of his love and immediately turns to a Biblical metaphor, upping the ante of his hyperbole by suggesting she may as well be accusing of him of being the devil himself:
“False? Of course it is false, false as the father of falsehood—if indeed falsehoods need a sire and are not self-begotten since the world began.”
