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Jane Austen has fun with figures of speech from her juvenilia onwards. Excessively sentimental similes are satirized and differences between characters are humorously illustrated by clashes between literal and figurative styles of speaking. In addition, close attention to her final, unfinished fragment suggests that Austen is also very aware of the underlying creative potential of figurative language. Metaphor and metonymy in particular are crucial in representing the tensions at the heart of Sanditon. While the metaphor of social life as a circle captures something of the quiet desperation in which characters in the resort find themselves, the optimism of its developer Mr. Parker is highlighted by Sanditon’s skillful exploration of metonymy, specifically the metonymic power of names. In highlighting how Mr. Parker’s confidence in names is called into question and how their references and associations can be more complex than he assumes, Austen experiments towards the end of her career with the pervasive figure of metonymy and with the disruption and confusion that it can generate.
Austen’s juvenilia evinces a playfulness with figures of speech that was to persist throughout her career. In the epistolary Lesley Castle, for example, Charlotte Lutterell describes to her correspondent Margaret Lesley an unexpected interruption to her preparations for her sister’s wedding: “‘Indeed my dear Friend, I never remember suffering any vexation equal to what I experienced on last Monday when my Sister came running to me in the Store-room with her face as White as a Whipt syllabub, and told me that Hervey had been thrown from his Horse, had fractured his Scull and was pronounced by his Surgeon to be in the most emminent Danger’” ( Juvenilia 146). “White as a Whipt syllabub” is not the only food-based simile used by Charlotte in her correspondence with Margaret; a later letter recalls that “‘I was as cool as a Cream-cheese’” (165) at her sister’s standoffish behavior. Similes of a more sentimental kind are the target elsewhere in the juvenilia, for example in Love and Freindship as Laura tries to take Sophia’s mind off her imprisoned husband Augustus by desiring her “‘to admire the Noble Grandeur of the Elms which Sheltered us from the Eastern Zephyr,’” only to earn this rebuke: “‘Do not again wound my...