Immediately following the audience’s first experience with Charity and the library, Charity goes out to enjoy the nature around her and, in a sense, free herself from being cooped up within the library. She expresses her malcontent with life both in North Dormer and with Royall. She often mentions how various members of the town have instilled in her the idea that she must be grateful to Royall for rescuing her as a young child and ought to be ashamed of her Mountain heritage. Meanwhile, she condemns the Mountain and those who dwell there, but cannot help but fixate her attention on it. According to Charity: The Mountain was a good fifteen mile away, but it rose so abruptly from the lower hills that it seemed almost to cast its shadow over North Dormer. And it was like a great magnet drawing the clouds and scattering them in storm across the valley. If ever, in the purest summer sky, there trailed a threat of vapour over North Dormer, it drifted to the Mountain as a ship drifts to a whirlpool, and was caught among the rocks, …show more content…
She feels that the Mountain overshadows North Dormer, but this appears to be symbolic of its influence of Charity’s consciousness. The simile between the Mountain and a “great magnet” also emphasizes this focus that Charity feels; like the clouds, Charity is powerless to ignore the pull of the Mountain. Charity also draws another simile to the Mountain and the devastating impacts of a whirlpool. According to Charity, the Mountain can exponentially augment the negative might of a mere “threat of vapor” into obliterating the “purest summer sky.” This ability acts as a metaphor for the Mountain’s capacity within Charity’s own thoughts. Even as she reconciles herself to thinking of North Dormer positively, as society encourages her to, the simple threat of contemplating the Mountain quickly ruins the supposedly pure thoughts she has on the