Student Question
What are examples of imagery in The Diary of a Young Girl?
Quick answer:
Examples of imagery in The Diary of a Young Girl include Anne Frank describing her cat rubbing against her legs and her birthday gifts, such as a blue blouse and a bottle of grape juice that tastes like wine. Another instance occurs on July 8, 1942, when she vividly describes the layers of clothing she wore and the warm rain as her family went into hiding.
I don't have exact page numbers, and pagination might differ anyway, but I will direct you to where in the book to find the images mentioned.
First, imagery is description using the five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. Anne Frank uses imagery early on, in the first page or so of the diary. For example, she mentions her cat rubbing against her legs in the dining room. We can visualize a cat and feel the sensation of fur against bare legs. She also uses visual imagery as she describes her birthday gifts on or near the first pages:
Then a bouquet of roses, some peonies and a potted plant. From Daddy and Mama I got a blue blouse, a game, a bottle of grape juice, which to my mind tastes a bit like wine (after all, wine is made from grapes), a puzzle, a jar of cold...
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We can visualize all these items, and note that Frank makes them vivid with added details, such as that the blouse is blue or that the grape juice tastes like wine.
Frank uses imagery again fairly early in the diary, if you can find the entry for July 8, 1942, the day her family goes into hiding. She uses images that describe the temperature and offer many details that help us visualize what Anne was wearing and how hot she felt:
Fortunately, it wasn't as hot as Sunday; a warm rain fell throughout the day. The four of us were wrapped in so many layers of clothes it looked as if we were going off to spend the night in a refrigerator, and all that just so we could take more clothes with us. No Jew in our situation would dare leave the house with a suitcase full of clothes. I was wearing two undershirts, three pairs of underpants, a dress, and over that a skirt, a jacket, a raincoat, two pairs of stockings, heavy shoes, a cap, a scarf and lots more. I was suffocating even before we left the house, but no one bothered to ask me how I felt.