Because a Human Doesn't Have Nine Lives
A story in the collection offers advice in the form of metaphor which might be considered the “Arabian” version of look before you leap, only it is much more poetic and resonates with greater complexity. It is also more straightforward than possibly misconceived notion about cats:
“Curiosity is a vice, when it is attended by too much danger.”
Melville's Chimney
One may well feel compelled to wonder what a story about the author of Moby-Dick is doing in a collection of 19th century homosexual literature. Unless one knows that Melville is one of the great symbolists of all time. Melville’s story is titled “I and My Chimney” and if the narrative’s context of a wife standing between a man and his peculiar relationship with his chimney doesn’t get the point of the metaphor controlling the story across, then perhaps the most striking figurative exchange in the tale will:
"Now, dear old man,” said she, softening down, and a little shifting the subject, "when you think of that old kinsman of yours, you know there must be a secret closet in this chimney."
“Secret ash-hole, wife, why don’t you have it? Yes, I dare say there is a secret ash-hole in the chimney; for where do all the ashes go to that we drop down the queer hole yonder?”
Character Description
Few will be surprised to find Sarah Orne Jewett in this compendium; she certain seems more likely to be found than Melville. Jewett’s language in notable for elegantly metaphorical character description, such as this example from “Martha’s Lady.”
“She was unconsciously beautiful like a saint, like the picturesqueness of a lonely tree which lives to shelter unnumbered lives and to stand quietly in its place.”
Personification
Personification is a popular and very accessible means of using metaphor as a shortcut to make a point, especially when used to juxtapose opposites, such as in this example where the imagery of light and dark helps to expand upon the meaning:
“There was no light in the old cottage that night; the heart of its occupant was dark and cheerless.”
Subtly Subversive Metaphor
“There was an autumnal languor in the air, and a dreamy haze softened the dark green of the distant pines and the deep blue of the Southern sky.”
If appearing in the works of Melville or Jewett or, indeed, any of the other authors included in this volume, the above example would be simply an example of straightforward use of metaphorical imagery. In the brilliant hands of the first African-American author to ever actually make a living writing fiction—Charles Chesnutt—the poetry is lost and the language is transformed into corrosively bitter irony and exceptionally subtle satire. This line is written by the de facto narrator white northerner narrator of a very serious candidate for the greatest American short story ever written: “Dave’s Neckliss.” While the young white man is the narrator of the story, the bulk of that story is a tale-within-a-tale told in thick dialect by a former slave recounting the implausible story of another slave who thought he had actually become a ham.
The intent of the metaphorical descriptions of the surrounding landscape becomes clear when one learns that Chesnutt wrote his dialect stories for the express purpose of exploding the plantation myth being engendered by white writers trying to revise history and present slave owners as decent people and slaves as happy workers. The very kind of descriptive prose quoted above is found in those works, but lacking any irony or even the self-awareness of irony on the part of the authors.
