Forster’s novel Howards End, which focuses on class conflicts and personal relationships in pre- World War I England. However, another way to work with connotative language is by choosing words, idioms, and metaphors that create connections to a story’s larger themes. As the book proceeds, Morrison’s use of language shows readers that as young Pecola faces her father’s abuse, she does so in the long shadow of a dominant cultural narrative that deepens her pain.īoth Plath and Morrison are using a stylistic device known as intertextuality, meaning that they’re using connotative language to allude to other stories. The collision between these two language styles highlights how the novel’s African-American characters are constantly exposed to the bland sanitized world of White myths like Dick and Jane stories that fail to capture the reality of Black lives. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not want to grow.” “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. Immediately after this introductory section, Morrison presents the more complex and tragic world of her characters with rich textured language: Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. Toni Morrison begins her novel The Bluest Eye with the simple language of a childhood reading primer: Prose writers also choose words that go beyond dictionary definitions for their evocative power. Yet Plath is also reminding readers of bitter feelings that often lurk not only in childhood experience but also in fairy tales and nursery rhymes in lines like: “Whipped them all soundly.”Ĭonnotative language isn’t only the province of poetry. On one hand, this reference to a beloved childhood rhyme draws a bright contrast with the speaker’s unpleasant memories of her father. She gave them some broth without any bread Īnd whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.” She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do. “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. In claiming to live in a shoe, and in doing so in short, simple language, the speaker of this poem calls to mind this famous bit of childhood verse from Mother Goose: One vivid example is Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy,” which begins: Poetry, with its intense focus on language, is tremendously well-suited to the manipulation of words for their connotative effects. However, as writers we can use this technique purposefully, deliberately choosing words that evoke images, cultural references, and emotions to amplify the power of our work. In the case above, while trying to denote “big moon,” the student accidentally invoked a cheesy Hollywood movie, temporarily bumping readers out of his own story. As we revise, however, it’s important to also consider the connotative uses of language, the associations that words call to mind. In first drafts, we often choose words for what Stephen Minot in his book Three Genres would call their denotative meaning, their literal dictionary definition. A few years after the release of the film Titanic, a fiction student of mine wrote a story in which he described the moon as “titanic.” Immediately, I thought of Leonardo DiCaprio howling, “I’m on top of the world!” Not to mention Celine Dion singing “My Heart Will Go On.” Though the student wasn’t intending to call those images to mind, he’d accidentally invoked them.