You’re probably familiar with the idea of a symbol, or a thing that represents more than its literal meaning. However, there are different types of symbols that you should be familiar with. Conventional symbols are symbols that most people recognize. When I ask students what a bird may symbolize, they almost always answer “freedom.” The association between birds and freedom has become so ingrained in our collective cultural consciousness that we all recognize the association without having to think about it. Roses stand for love, spring stands for youth or renewal, and skulls symbolize death. These are associations we all recognize instantly.
Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” makes use of some conventional symbolism. When Goodman Brown meets the man in the woods, the man’s staff, shaped like a serpent, draws on biblical imagery to symbolize the evil nature of their meeting and perhaps identify the man as Satan. The story also borders on the allegorical in the naming of some of its characters. An allegory is a story in which the characters are very obviously meant to represent certain ideas or concepts to offer lessons to the reader. Pilgrim’s Progress, a very famous allegory written by John Bunyan, includes characters such as Christian, Piety, and Charity. “Young Goodman Brown” does something similar in naming Goodman Brown’s wife Faith.
It should also be noted that symbols are not relegated to objects. As the above example demonstrates, they can be characters. They can also be settings, such as the dense forest that represents the hidden nature of human evil in “Young Goodman Brown.” Characters can also perform symbolic acts. When Miss Brill returns her fur to its box at the end of the story, the act carries symbolic weight beyond her just putting her things away.
Most short stories, however, are not full of obvious conventional symbolism. Very often, symbols within the literary work are only intelligible within the work itself. The white heron in Jewett’s story, for example, could stand for freedom, but this seems unsatisfying given the context of the story. Rather, the bird seems to represent the New England wilderness itself, which Sylvia is trying to protect from the hunter. Even that answer, however, feels insufficient. She protects the heron by keeping its secret, the location of its nest. The hunter, after all, is an ornithologist whose goal is to gain knowledge about the animal, and Sylvia becomes the protector of that knowledge. Does the bird, then, represent some relationship with the natural world that will be lost if subjected to a modern science that seeks to extract its secrets through acts of violence? Or, to move in a different direction, does the natural world in the story merely stand between the man and the girl, symbolizing Sylvia’s complex feelings about his adult male presence as she moves closer to womanhood? Does her act of protecting the heron from the hunter symbolize her desire to protect her own girlhood innocence from the world of men for a while longer?
As I hope the preceding discussion illustrates, symbols perhaps work best when, rather than clearly representing one thing, they are complex and layered with meaning, and interpreting them unfolds a multiplicity of possible meanings that allow us to understand the story in new and different ways.
"Key Components of Short Stories" by Travis Rozier and Margaret Sullivan from Beyond the Pages: An Introduction to Literature Copyright © 2024 by Claire Carly-Miles, Sarah LeMire, Kathy Christie Anders, Nicole Hagstrom-Schmidt, R. Paul Cooper, and Matt McKinney is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
"What is an Allegory?": A Literary Guide for English Students and Teachers. Authored by: OSU School of Writing, Literature and Film. Located at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IOsFCieGQA. License: Other. License Terms: Standard YouTube License
"What is Symbolism?": A Literary Guide for English Teachers and Students. Authored by: OSU School of Writing, Literature and Film. Located at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR9VbSXxouM&t=1s. License: Other. License Terms: Standard YouTube License