Parenting
The parenting paradigm is always an efficient metaphorical arena in which to operate. A good writer is capable of transforming any relationship having absolutely nothing to do with actual parenting come off as an example of that very thing:
"Education became a type of wish fulfillment; it would prove that the political party that had been chosen electorally had the best formula for Puerto Rican improvement—the Commonwealth—and that the United States was indeed a beneficent superpower that would help its adopted `child' Puerto Rico, to take its first 'baby steps' toward adulthood.”
The Literary Allusion
Another go-to method for metaphorically representing a situation is allusion to a literary event. The problem here, of course, is that not all readers may be familiar with the referenced event. One can get around that first making the allusion and then explaining it:
“Mistral’s personal life was in shambles. Her adopted son, Juan Miguel Godoy, had died only two years before. Apparently exhausted by an overly emotional existence, Juan Miguel committed suicide in a most sentimental way. Like the nineteenth-century heroine Emma Bovary, he ingested a lethal dose of arsenic, dying a slow and painful death.”
Confronting the Metaphor
Sometimes a metaphor is so broadly applied that it serves a much bigger purpose than a single sentence. At that point, it may become necessary to expound upon the nature of the metaphor so it can be placed into a specific context that illuminates the theme of the book:
“Change is necessary, Mistral argues; sometimes the society created by the sons and must be radically different from that created by their parents. The metaphor of nation as family naturalizes the changes that are, in fact, instituted in a fairly impersonal, bureaucratic way, and with ultimate recourse to force.”
Education is Sexism
It appears that with very few dedicated exceptions—England comes to mind—the career path of schoolteacher is unified globally with sexist discrimination. In this particular case, however, the level of misogyny requires more extreme than usual metaphorical imagery to put the point the across:
“The schoolteacher was a transitional object, and a potentially murdered object, intellectually speaking.”
The Body as Motherland
The author explains that the philosophy espoused by the protagonist of the book sees the native women of any indigenous culture as the key to racial purity. Much more so than the indigenous men. This idea is derived directly from a quote by Mistral that is arguably the most elegantly constructed metaphorical image in the book:
“You have been told that your purity is a religious virtue. It is also a civic virtue: your womb sustains the race; the citizen masses are born out of your breast quietly, with the eternal flowing of the springs of your fatherland.”
