Sensory Imagery: Smell
Imagery is very often used to convey sensory experience. This is a device which helps put the reader into the shoes of the character of the as the scene plays out. Suggestions of the way something smells stimulate the reader into actually recalling that odor or bouquet and intensify an appreciation of the description of what it looks or feels like:
“In the funeral chamber the scent of tuberoses, lilies and candles, whose tallow dripped down the silver candelabra, mingled with a bitter, captivating and intimate smell, as if the secret humors of the dead girl’s body were starting to warm up under her skin. This was the first sign of the decomposition her figure, at one time so coveted and admired, could expect once it was in the shadow of the earth.”
Making the Intangible Tangible
Concrete imagery is used by a character in thoughtful reflection. Regrets flood and overwhelm, producing a torrent of memories which are defined as intangible, yet ironically become, in the description, absolutely tangible through the power of imagery:
“Above all I shall miss the intangible things. The taste of blood, as it flowed warm and salty from my wounds when I fell on the rocks, the sear of the sun, the burn of the sea when it opened its belly for me, the spray of the waves and the bitterness of the coco plum snatched from over the hedge. I shall regret the heat from Toussine, my mare, and the ridge of her back as we galloped together over the savanna.”
Portrait of Submission
Razye is a ragamuffin foundling brought into the Gagneur family fold and worshipped by Cathy. For Hubert, however, the relationship is considerably different. It is a classic case of master/slave submission conveyed through imagery:
“The master treated him like a plaything. He taught him the words to the most obscene biguines. He split his sides with laughter at the sight of him shaking his behind and thrusting forward his sex as he danced. He encouraged him to masquerade as a carnival mas’ à congo or a mas’ à goudron. He had him imitate animal sounds: squeal like a pig, bray like a don- key, cackle like a hen that’s just laid an egg, and moo like a cow.”
Cathy II
In this version, Cathy and Heathcliff produce a child. In keeping with the confusion of the original, however, both mother and daughter have the same name. The maturation of the second Cathy is made manifest using imagery as physical description which also foreshadows at the maturation of her psychological makeup:
“Cathy was a serious girl for her fifteen years and a half, sombre even, subject to fits of exuberance that made everyone dizzy. The nuns…wrote in red ink on her quarterly reports: `Capricious.' In appearance she seemed to have expelled all the whiteness of the Linsseuils and her mother in favor of her distant black heritage. In the dry season, when the sun roasts creatures and objects alike, she became as ark and juicy as a capresse with her black braid coiled like a snake down her back.”
