Thursday, 2 August 2012

How does Harper Lee use imagery to describe life in the town of Maycomb in To Kill A Mockingbird?

is
description that uses the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.


Lee uses a good deal of imagery to make the town of Maycomb come alive for the reader,
building a picture of it as a real place. She has a talent for finding images that stick in a
reader's mind, such as when she sets the scene of the slow, hot summer in Depression-era Maycomb
by providing such detail as the following:

Ladies bathed
before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with
frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

This conveys how hot
it is in Maycomb in summerthe ladies bathe twiceas well as how slow life moves therethe ladies
have time to bathe twice a day. It also communicates how soft these ladies are, inside and out,
probably a bit overweight and also not prone to have been toughened up morally, when she
compares them to "soft teacakes."

Lee uses sparer imagery to help
characterizewhen she describes his office as follows:


Atticuss...

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