“Penny refused to take his hand, and evaded like an eel his efforts to grasp her.”
This simile appears in the story “Mermaids on the Golf Course.” The peculiarly particular comparison to an eel as imagery effectively conveys the slippery relationship between not just Penny and the man attempting to grasp her, but the evasiveness of every one of the characters.
“The garden was like a jungle or a forest.”
This simile from the story “Ming’s Biggest Prey” may seem like just a very simple and overly familiar comparison that bears little distinction. Actually, it is representative of the way Highsmith occasionally precedes an extended bit of description prose with a terse metaphorical intro. Immediately following this simile, the narrator proceeds to describe in detail the tall mango and avocado trees rising amongst the orchids and magnolias and camellias in which nesting birds are singing and fluttering their wings.
“His anger, like a poison, was out of his blood.”
The title adventure of “Djemal’s Revenge” draws to a conclusion with the title character experiencing something rather rare in the dark world of Patricia Highsmith’s short stories. This story is found in a thematic collection in which the murders involve animals in one way or another. In this particular instance, Djemal is a camel whose revenge arrives in the form of intentionally killing his cruel master. Djemal enjoys the kind of catharsis that typically eludes her human killers.
"There are lots of girls like Mildred”
Not many sentences serve so effectively as a metaphor for an entire collection of Highsmith’s as the opening line of her story “The Mobile Bed-Object.” That story can be found within a collection of stories about girls like Mildred quite appropriately titled Little Tales of Misogyny. Misogyny is defined as an ingrained contempt for all women and if ever a set of stories rigidly adhered to its title, it would be those contained in this collection. But of all the female characters who are the target of contempt, mistrust and dislike, none are worthier of being called the queen of the collection than the much-enjoyed and intensely ill-fated Mildred. Truly, there are lots of girls like her and quite a few of them are her sisters each with their own little tale of misogyny to tell.
“And now, the truly awful thing, the terrifying fact that her life had wound up like a classic tragedy played rather behind the scenes instead of on a stage in view of lots of people.”
Unlike the above example in which the simile becomes a metaphor for a single volume of stories, the metaphor toyed with here from the story “Under a Dark Angel’s Eye” could easily be applied to the author's entire body of work of short fiction. Characters are constantly finding themselves in conflict with strangers in a way capable of transforming them from the star of their own drama into a secondary character in someone else’s tragedy.
