Sneaky Wells-Barnett

In Wells-Barnett’s essay Lynch Law, her use of metaphor, word choice and understatement make her exigence clear even though it isn’t directly stated until the end.  

Throughout the essay, she employs words that have strong negative connotations that give not-so-subtle hints about her position on the issue of lynching.  In the first few paragraphs alone, I counted more than twenty examples of this: “savagery”, “barbarism”, “disgrace”, “assassinated”, “victim”, “murder”, and “horrors” to name a few (Wells-Barnett, paragraphs 3-7). 

Another fascinating literary device she uses is that of metaphor.  In paragraph 3, she alludes to the idea that lynching is working its way across the country like an epidemic would a body of people:  “It next appeared in the south,” “north of the Mason Dixon line,” “spread throughout the North and the middle West” (Wells-Barnett, paragraph 3).  Relating the practice of lynching to a disease connects with the audience on a very elemental level, because who wants to get sick?  This, in turn, drives the audience to automatically take an unconscious stance against lynching. 

One last device I found worthy of mentioning is Wells-Barnett’s use of understatement to inflict horror on her audience.  Though she constantly uses the actual word “horror” and it’s variations throughout the essay, it is concretely expressed in paragraph 8.  Wells-Barnett strikes an indirect kind of fear into her audience when describing a scene in Paris, “The mayor gave the school children a holiday and the railroads ran excursion trains so that the people might see a human being burned to death.  A year before, men and boys amused themselves by cutting off strips of flesh and thrusting knives into their helpless victim” (Wells-Barnett, paragraph 8).  She uses language of amusement to describe a scene she finds deplorable.  The fact that people enjoy being “barbaric” is, again, something most all people would agree with. 

Though her exigence and position are never stated outright, Wells-Barnett clearly shows her exigence through other literary devices that leave no question as to where she stands.