Mahogany rocking chair (The Pretext)

Another matching piece of furniture in the Ransom’s house is a “stiff mahogany rocking chair” (Lewis, 1968, p. 633) located in Mrs. Margaret Ransom’s room “beside her work table” (Lewis, 1968, p. 633). It is the chair in which she sits down and tries to collect herself after Guy Dawnish had made her morning so different from all others (Lewis, 1968, p. 633). Obviously, a rocking chair is “a chair with two curved pieces of wood under it that make it move backwards and forwards” (Hornby, 2015, p. 1343). The rocking chair in the short story is described as “stiff” (Lewis, 1968, p. 633) what might refer to the fact that the chair is simply made out of wood and has no cushions on it like the one in the picture. Mahogany is the type of wood the chair is made of which was also used to build the chair in the picture above.

Sources:

Hornby, A. S. (2015). Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lewis, R. W. B. (1968). The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.