Blodgett College
The narrator informs the reader early on that “Blodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis. It is a bulwark of sound religion.” What is meant by “sound religion” in this case is straight-up middle-American Protestantism which doesn’t truck with idolatry of Catholicism any more than it does with Eastern spiritualism. On the optimistic side, one could replace the metaphorical bulwark of “sound religion” with “traditional values.” A more realistic substitution will prove to be a bulwark of “narrow-minded petty judgmental religious beliefs.”
“They were shelters for sparrows, not homes for warm laughing people.”
Carol Kennicott arrives in her new husband’s hometown of Gopher Prairie with high hopes and expectations. One 32-minute walk covering the entire length of the town later, she already knows any hopes have been dashed and all expectations must be lowered. Even the homes of the small town—all the small brown houses—fill her with despair as she imagines them barely suitable for the tiniest of bird, much less people enjoying themselves.
The Village Virus
“Village Virus” is a metaphorical concept coined by one of the residents of Gopher Prairie to describe the symbolic sickness of living in a small town and gradually being overcome by the propensity to conform to local expectations. It is a metaphor for such things as the loss of grand ambitions and settling for the merely attainable rather than dreaming of the possible.
Mr. Blausser: Camelephant
One of the most creative similes the author uses to describe a character—a frequent and popular use of the device—successfully conveys just about everything one would need to know to construct an accurate image in their mind without learning anything else about the man:
“Mr. Blausser reared up like an elephant with a camel's neck--red faced, red eyed, heavy fisted, slightly belching--a born leader, divinely intended to be a congressman but deflected to the more lucrative honors of real-estate.”
“yearning for a 'Prince Charming' like a bachfisch of sixteen!”
A simile is normally adopted by a writer to make a comparison that is easily understood; that is the whole point, in fact. A writer usually turns to a simile to draw a distinction between two like things in order to make a point more efficiently than could be made otherwise. As Carol Kennicott is considering the possibility of cheating on her husband, she is auditing a debate within herself as running commentary of stream of consciousness thinking in which she makes an obvious comparison—Prince Charming—followed by a problematic simile. While context is helpful for figuring out what a bachfisch is, it is still a foreign and archaic enough word to dutifully raise its questionability for use in a simile. So what is she yearning like when she compares her yearning to that of a bachfisch? A teenage virgin.
