Discussion Topic
Literary Techniques and Elements in Black Beauty
Summary:
Black Beauty employs various literary techniques and elements, including first-person narrative, anthropomorphism, and vivid imagery. The story is told from the perspective of the horse, Black Beauty, which allows readers to empathize with animals. Through detailed descriptions and personification, the novel highlights themes of kindness, cruelty, and the moral treatment of animals.
What literary techniques are used in chapters 18 and 20 of Black Beauty?
Throughout Black Beauty, anthropomorphism is employed to make the narrator, a horse, understand and share the point of view of the human characters. This technique is particularly stressed in chapter 18, when Black Beauty has to take John to fetch the doctor for Mrs. Gordon. Black Beauty understands perfectly well what is at stake and makes a supreme effort to save the life of his mistress. In doing so, he makes himself ill. When he returns home, he is dripping with perspiration and steaming "like a pot on the fire." This simile and other vivid descriptive language show how hard he has exerted himself and how ill he becomes.
Various types of repetition are used in both chapter 18 and chapter 20 for emphasis and heightened drama. In chapter 20, John repeats the phrase "you did right, my boy" at the beginning and end of his remarks to Joe,...
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who has intervened to stop a man from flogging his horses to death. This aligns the points of view held by John, Joe, the narrator, and the author, since one of the major themes of the novel is the cruelty with which horses were routinely treated in Victorian England. One ofAnna Sewell's motives in writing the book was to draw attention to and seek to remedy this state of affairs.
What literary elements are used in Black Beauty?
While Ann Sewell's Black Beauty became famous for the poignant story of a beautiful and gentle horse as well as the novel's effecting the promotion of humane treatment of horses, the most salient of literary elements in its narrative is the original idea of having the horse as narrator. This personification of Beauty intrigues the young reader who follows the internalizing of the horse's observations and feelings. Personification is used by Beauty himself as, for instance, he describes his experiences with a train: "A terrible creature" that "shrieks and groans."
Along with personification, Sewell also makes frequent use of simile. For example, in Chapter 1, Beauty describes Old Daniel who is "as gentle as our master." Then, in Chapter 3, Beauty describes the feel of the bit: "A great piece of hard steel as thick as a man's finger." And, again in Chapter 5, Beauty describes how the groomsman used to make his mane and tail "almost as smooth as a lady's hair." In Chapter 33 Beauty writes that
Polly, [Jerry's] wife was just as good a match as a man could have.
Of course, there are horse metaphors employed in this narrative such as "the touch of the rein" which means the slight movements and signals that are given by an experience rider who knows how to manipulate the horse's reins. Sewell's theme is stated in Jerry Baker's remark whichemploys metaphor:
"My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or srong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt"
There is irony in Black Beauty. In Chapter 7, Ginger relates her history to Beauty, and she tells him,
"Then one man dragged me along by the halter, another flogging behind, and this was the first experience I had of men's kindness..."