“The city’s great buildings and lavish homes awed her, but it's smoke and darkness and the ever-present scent of rotting garbage repulsed her” (Larson 264).
H.H. Holmes and the woman he is courting, Minnie Williams, invite Williams’ sister, Anna “Nannie” Williams, to come visit them and take a tour of Chicago, to try to ease her skepticism of Holmes’s intentions with Minnie. From Texas, Anna is not used to the skyscrapers and crowds accompanying the Windy City. Larson uses juxtaposition to describe the scenes that Anna sees, such as “lavish homes” which “[awe] her” and “rotting garbage” which “[repulses] her”. This use of juxtaposition portrays to the reader the wealth gap and inequality which coincide in Chicago between the rich and the
