Question

She was a small woman, short and straight-waisted like a child in her brown cotton gown. Her forehead was mild and benevolent between the smooth curves of gray hair; there were meek downward lines about her nose and mouth; but her eyes, fixed upon the old man, looked as if the meekness had been the result of her own will, never of the will of another.
In at least one hundred words, explain how this excerpt uses explicit and implicit details to describe Sarah Penn.

Answer 1

Well one this excerpt revels how Sarah Penn looks like and but also it allows you to see that something had happened to Sarah when she looked at the old man which had gotten Sarah to look older.

Answer 2

This excerpt from Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman's "The Revolt of 'Mother'" gives both explicit and implicit detalis that helps us characterize Sarah Penn. Among the explicit information we are given a physical description of the character: we know that she is a rather short woman with mild facial features, but we are also told that there were "meek downward lines about her nose and mouth"

The implicit information is up to us to retrieve from the description: the features explicitly stated characterizes Sarah Penn as childish figure, benevolent, lacking strenght or even docile. This information can be infered from words like "child", "mild", "benevolent", "smooth" or "meek". But on the other hand, her chosen meekness combined with her eyes fixed upon the old man points to a different feature of the character: her inner strenght. It supports the idea of a strong woman standing for her own believes