Taste
Miss Birdseye is an elderly woman active in the earliest days of the abolitionist movement. She cares not for things, having made social issues the material gain of her existence. She does cling tightly to one secret shared with no one else. Miss Birdseye’s “most poignant suffering came from the injury of her taste. She had tried to kill that nerve, to persuade herself that taste was only frivolity in the disguise of knowledge.” The use of metaphor is appropriate for describing this particular example of suffering. She is a woman who has devoted her life to serious purpose and has rightly earned her good reputation as a result.
Leadership
Olive Chancellor finds the phrase “leader of society” odious. But she is willing even to overlook Miss Birdseye’s bad taste in speaking it out loud because the old woman is otherwise such an icon. More than an icon, the older woman “was heroic, she was sublime, the whole moral history of Boston was reflected in her displaced spectacles.” This hero-worship of the member of the younger generation inspired by Birdseye takes note of the impact of aging on the older woman. In this metaphorical description is also to be found a hint of irony. That literal bad vision is Miss Birdseye’s cross to bear seems distinctly unfair considering that she has metaphorically stood tall as a woman of keen vision much quicker to identify the evils of slavery than her brethren.
Social responsibility
Olive Chancellor feels the call to social action. She is moved by the plight of the unfortunate and arrives at a singular turning point in her life which she casts in the crucible of metaphor. The lingering question is to what dreadful image is she referring. Olive supplies the answer explicitly. It is “the image of the unhappiness of women” and their suffering in silence that stimulates her move toward radical activism.