What Is Verisimilitude? | Definition & Examples

Verisimilitude plays a big role in convincing your readers of the credibility of your story. Readers tend to value the idea that the story they are being told could possibly happen in real life. This means the details, atmosphere, character behavior, and character thinking are close to what would happen in real life. 

Now, there is no one way through which a writer can achieve verisimilitude. In carrying out close readings or literary analysis, your job is to figure out exactly how the author achieves this versimilitude. Different writers take different approaches to impart the semblance of reality in their fiction. In this article, we will examine what these approaches are and look at examples from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. 

1985 book cover for The Handmaid's Tale.

What is Verismilitude? 

Verisimilitude is the semblance of reality in fiction. The word originates from French and Latin, meaning “appearance of truth and reality.” The concept is applicable to all genres of fiction, even those that you may not expect such as science fiction and fantasy. 

Even if these genres have magic systems, dragons, and time travel, they must make the various elements of their writing believable within the limits of their world-building. Verisimilitude exists on several levels. It can take the form of:

• Character consistency

• Plot consistency

• Realistic depictions of the setting

• Realistic depictions of how characters think and see the world through their minds

Let’s look at an example of versimilitude from the Shakespearean play Macbeth. The two characters in question are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. The two take part in a horrendous act — namely, they murder King Duncan while he sleeps as a guest in the Macbeth household to secure the Scottish throne.

Lady Macbeth seems absolutely enthusiastic about the plan. She cannot understand why her husband even hesitates before the act and is so guilt-stricken after it and scolds him frequently for it. Here is Lady Macbeth scolding her husband, who has lost the nerve to frame the grooms with Duncan’s muder by smearing his blood over them in Act 2, Scene 2: 

Infirm of purpose!

Give me the daggers: the sleeping and the dead

Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of childhood

That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed,

I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal;

For it must seem their guilt.

Macbeth, on the other hand, is writing in agony over the murder and his sense of guilt in the same scene. Macbeth feels such a tremendous sense of guilt that he believes not even the sea can wash his bloody hands clean. As he says, No, this my hand will rather/ The multitudinous seas incarnadine / Making the green one red.” 

Later on, Macbeth becomes a hardened murderer, killing on a whim to eliminate even the slightest threat to his power after he replaces Duncan as king. Lady Macbeth grows in a different direction. She becomes more and more guilty, begins to sleep walk, and eventually commits suicide. 

In one of her sleepwalking episodes (Act 5, Scene 1), we see a strange reversal, where Lady Macbeth is the one recognizing the stain of blood on her hands and being tortured with guilt: 

Here's the smell of the blood still: all the

perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little

hand. Oh, oh, oh!

How does this lend verisimilitude to the play? It shows how human psychology actually works. Lady Macbeth was lying to herself with her enthusiasm about killing Duncan. She failed in recognizing the gravity of this crime. Macbeth was always aware of the true nature of what he was doing. He is a professional soldier who kills for a living, and he understands the gravity of death, unlike Lady Macbeth who thinks it's no big deal to kill a king while he sleeps as a guest in your home. 

Macbeth experienced the death of his moral self on the night of the murder, came to terms with it, and turned into a monster who accepted his newfound power as king as the reward for sacrificing his soul. Lady Macbeth had no idea what she was getting into when she decided to murder Duncan, and after slowly realizing the depths of depravity that she had sunken into, she slowly went insane. 

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Verisimilitude through stream of consciousness

With the example of verisimiltude from Lady Macbeth, we get a character analysis that is based on how her psychology works. She represses her inner sense of morality deep into her subconscious to justify an evil act. But she can only get away with this for so long. The guilt buried in her subconscious eventually surfaces driving her insane and unable to live with herself.

This is just one approach to using psychology to achieve verisimilitude. Another approach is stream of consciousness. This is a technique pioneered in modernist literature by writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, where we see the world filtered through the live stream of characters’ thoughts. It's a mixture of free indirect discourse and first-person narrative.

At one point in Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is speaking to herself, explaining why she herself wouldn’t kill Duncan after commenting on the unmanly weakness and hesitation of her husband in Act 2, Scene 2: “Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done’t.”  This can be described as a Freudian slip, where her moral conscience peeks through the surface, breaking through her fake bravado. 

What if this could be done without the character ever even speaking? Stream of consciousness, which Shakespeare doesn’t use, is a narrative technique that allows us to see characters unwittingly admit these types of contradictions and emotions hidden in their consciousness, even as they think in real time. Let’s take an example from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (published in 1985): 

A window, two white curtains. Under the window, a window seat with a little cushion. When the window is partly open—it only opens partly—the air can come in and make the curtains move. I can sit in the chair, or on the window seat, hands folded, and watch this. Sunlight comes in through the window too, and falls on the floor, which is made of wood, in narrow strips, highly polished. I can smell the polish. There’s a rug on the floor, oval, of braided rags. This is the kind of touch they like: folk art, archaic, made by women, in their spare time, from things that have no further use. A return to traditional values. Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

This describes the thinking of the character Offred, a woman in seclusion and isolation in prison-like conditions. We see the room through her mind as her eyes move from one corner of the room to the next.  Notice how sentence fragments are used for the first two sentences. There is a certain level of importance being placed on the “window” and “two white curtains.” 

The Handmaid's Tale is a curious example of verisimilitude, as the story is set in an alternative future. It has been described as a futuristic dystopian novel, which portrays an oppressive patriarchal society where women are subjugated, with handmaids being a class of women who are forced into sexual or reproductive servitude to ensure the human species endures. So, how do you make such a world believable?

The woman in the novel is enjoying a partial type of freedom and privilege. She’s a handmaid. In the world of the novel, this means she belongs to a class of women who are forcibly assigned to produce children for the patriarchal ruling class in the society. This is a privilege in the sense that if successful, she will be afforded special treatment; if she fails, she will suffer consequences. 

So the window being partly opened allowing air to come in suggests the limited freedom and privilege of her position. The last part of the paragraph moves from the character noticing “a rug on the floor” of “braided rags.” The rug is made of used materials, which Offred links to an old Christian conservative adage — waste not, want not.  This is then linked to a question regarding her own worth and desires as a woman: “I am not being wasted. Why do I want?” 

We saw Lady Macbeth hesitate to kill Duncan because he looks like her dad despite boasting about how easy it would be for her. Likewise, we see Offred being confronted with the incongruity of social values that claims her as valuable while making her feel like discarded material being used for something beyond her original purpose. This makes her feel the exact opposite of valued. 

The stream of consciousness in this passage is convincing and adds to verisimilitude by emphasizing the depressing sense of isolation and imprisonment that Offred feels. It does so by beginning with an accurate description of objects in the room before showing us how these objects and the reality that they capture affects Offred’s thinking. 

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Cite this EminentEdit article

Antoine, M. (2025, July 17). What Is Verisimilitude? | Definition & Examples. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/verisimilitude