Question

As Scout eavesdrops on Atticus and Aunt Alexandra, she says, "I felt the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary closing in on me...." What does Scout mean by this comment? What literary term is demonstrated here?

Answer 1

In Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout uses a metaphor to describe how she feels confined and trapped by society's expectations.

Step-by-step explanation:

In Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout uses the metaphor of a 'pink cotton penitentiary' to describe how she feels confined and trapped by the strict expectations of her society. The term demonstrated here is a metaphor, which is a figure of speech that compares two things without using the words 'like' or 'as'. The metaphor emphasizes Scout's sense of being trapped, similar to a prisoner in a penitentiary with rigid and suffocating walls.