Flowers
A recurring use of metaphor in the short stories of Maupassant is the comparison of women to flowers. More precisely, he often uses the metaphor for the purposes of symbolizing femininity as a gender concept upon in relation to external entities:
"The girl was simply a puzzle to me. She was a mystery. She lived amid those infamous surroundings with a quiet, tranquil ease that was either terribly criminal or else the result of innocence. She sprang from the filth of that class like a beautiful flower fed on corruption."
Mirror
Mirrors populate Maupassant’s stories almost as much as references to flowers. Although often symbolic, however, mirrors are not often the stuff of metaphorical imagery. One notable exception occurs in “Diary of a Madman.”
“A human being—what is a human being? Through thought it is a reflection of all that is; through memory and science it is an abridged edition of the universe whose history it represents, a mirror of things and of nations, each human being becomes a microcosm in the macrocosm.”
The Horla
The Horla is the title character of a horror story. Its most striking physical characteristic is that it is a force which cannot be seen. Thus, the terror of the being is conveyed almost exclusively through figurative language which alludes to its powers. All these metaphors and similes climax in a paragraph that is nearly nothing, but such imagery of resemblance:
“The vulture has eaten the pigeon, the wolf has eaten the lamb; the lion has devoured the buffalo with sharp horns; man has killed the lion with an arrow, with a sword, with gunpowder; but the Horla will make of man what we have made of the horse and of the ox: his chattel, his slave and his food, by the mere power of his will.”
Opening Lines
Maupassant is fond of opening his stories with figurative language. Metaphor and similes help set the stage by conveying important information about character or setting. Occasionally, the metaphorical language even lays out a template for the pursuit of the narrative’s storyline itself:
“Crazy people attract me. They live in a mysterious land of weird dreams, in that impenetrable cloud of dementia where all that they have witnessed in their previous life, all they have loved, is reproduced for them in an imaginary existence, outside of all laws that govern the things of this life and control human thought.”
Closing Lines
Somewhat less frequently, Maupassant turns to the power of the metaphorical image to sum up a story at its conclusion. One of the most robust examples that almost feels like it may have been written before much of what precedes it, is the metaphorical summary of the story just told reinvented as myth:
“Here is an instance of modern love, grotesque and yet heroic. The Homer who should sing of this new Helen and the adventure of her Menelaus must be gifted with the soul of a Paul de Kock. And yet the hero of this deserted woman was brave, daring, handsome, strong as Achilles and more cunning than Ulysses.”
