Personal and Cultural Identity

Symbolism

Learning Target(s): Transform ideas and information to create original texts using various genres, forms, structures, and styles. Construct meaningful personal connections between self, text, and world. Recognize and understand the diversity within and across First Peoples societies as presented in texts. Recognize and understand the role of story and narrative in expressing First Peoples' perspectives, values, beliefs, and points of view.

A symbol is an object, action, or event that represents something or that creates a range of associations beyond itself.  In literary works a symbol can express an idea, clarify meaning, or enlarge literal meaning. 

Conventional Symbols  

Most of us are familiar with conventional symbols such as the Christian cross, the Nazi swastika, or the American flag.

We understand that these symbols can convey different meanings to different people and in different circumstances.

• The Christian cross symbolizes one thing when it is located on a church, and quite another when it is burning on the front lawn of someone's home.
       
• The American flag represents love of country, security, and pride when it is sewn on the coat of an American tourist, but it represents hatred and extremism when in the hands of an angry Iranian mob.

Literary Symbols

Literary symbols do not have a publicly accepted meaning; rather, they depend upon the context of a story or poem for their meaning. An example of this occurs in Lord of the Flies where the conch shell symbolizes freedom of speech and democracy. Outside the novel, a conch shell is simply something one might find on a beach.

Recognizing Symbols

According to Perrine and Arp in Story and Structure 8th Edition (1992), "The ability to interpret symbols is ... essential for a full understanding of literature." They go on to list four cautions when searching for symbolism in fiction:       

1. The story itself must furnish a clue that a detail is to be taken symbolically. Symbols nearly always signal their existence by emphasis, repetition, or position. In the absence of such signals, we should be reluctant to identify an item as a symbol.
       
2. The meaning of a literary symbol must be established and supported by the entire context of the story.
       
3. To be called a symbol, an item must suggest a meaning different from its literal meaning.
       
4. A symbol may have more than one meaning. It may suggest a cluster of meanings....This is not to say that it can mean anything we want it to: the area of possible meanings is always controlled by the text (pp. 197-8).
     

Archetypes

Carl Jung first applied the term archetype to literature. He recognized that there were universal patterns in all stories and mythologies regardless of culture or historical period and hypothesized that part of the human mind contained a collective unconscious shared by all members of the human species, a sort of universal, primal memory. Recognizing archetypal patterns in literature brings patterns we all unconsciously respond to in similar ways to a conscious level.  Source

Examples of archetypes include symbols (fire, light, circles), characters (the hero or the mother figure), settings (the garden, the island), and situations (the journey, a battle between good/evil), but there are many more.

Allegory

Another reference to symbols in literature is an allegory.  An allegory is a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one. Although an allegory uses symbols, it is different from symbolism. An allegory is a complete narrative that involves characters and events that stand for an abstract idea or event. A symbol, on the other hand, is an object that stands for another object, giving it a particular meaning. Unlike allegory, symbolism does not tell a story or encourage a moral lesson.