55 pages • 1-hour read
The Iron Heel
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Eagle
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Chapter 1 begins with Avis’s devotion to her husband, Ernest, whose strength and heroism are symbolized in the chapter’s title, “The Eagle.” As a pairing with the Epigraph, which features Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Play,” the chapter title may allude to another Tennyson poem, “The Eagle,” which describes the grand bird perched on a crag near the sun and falling like a thunderbolt into the sea. In a similar description, Avis describes Ernest as “[her] Eagle, beating with tireless wings the void, soaring toward what [i]s ever his sun, the flaming ideal of human freedom” (2). The shared imagery depicts the goals of the Revolution and its actors as linked with nature’s majestic animals and the life-giving energy of the sun. In contrast, the Oligarchy is associated with the cold, artificiality of “machinery” and the “Iron Heel” that crushes them to death (45, 3). The eagle imagery in Tennyson’s poem also alludes to Ernest’s downfall, as he falls from his height as the leader of the socialist revolution and is murdered before seeing his mission come to fruition.
Avis’s Gown
Avis’s “pretty gown” is a symbol of her bourgeois status and complicity with the capitalist exploitation of the working class. To Avis, the gown is simply one of the many luxuries that she consumes with no thought to the modes of production. Ernest points out that her wealth is predicated on the exploitation of workers and declares, “[T]he gown you wear is stained with blood. The food you eat is a bloody stew. The blood of little children and of strong men is dripping from your very roof-beams. I can close my eyes, now, and hear it drip, drop, drip, drop, all about me” (39). The graphic imagery of the blood-stained dress becomes an emblem of the capitalists’ oppression of and indifference to the working class. The image haunts Avis, and she begins to see the link between her wealth and consumerism and the violent and unethical modes of production in a capitalist system. As her class consciousness develops, Avis recognizes the invisible labor behind the garment and states, “I could see their wan white hands, from which the blood had been pressed, at work upon the cloth out of which had been made my gown” (60). Avis’s recognition sparks a wider realization that her livelihood is accountable for social injustices and that she can play a role in challenging class exploitation.
Shadows
The motif of shadows appears as both a symbol of capitalism’s reach and the means by which the revolutionists challenge the Oligarchy. Ernest does not fault Avis and his friends for their initial lack of political awareness, as he comprehends that capitalism’s power lies in its abstractions and disembodiment. He acknowledges that Mr. Wickson’s threats released a looming sense of “things vast, vague, and terrible […] nameless, formless things […] a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy” (104-05). London presents an image of capitalism as a shapeless yet ominous shadow stretching over every aspect of society, from the professor in the university to the preacher in the church. Chapter 6’s title, “Adumbrations,” has the double meaning of vague foreshadowing and the invisible reach of capitalism’s exploitations.
Shadows appear again in the title of Chapter 18, “In the Shadow of Sonoma,” to signify the Revolution’s subversions. In this chapter, “shadow” has a double meaning. Avis and her comrades hide on property that Wickson owns and are thus in his domineering and threatening shadow. At the same time, they are successful in hiding. They ride Wickson’s horses to smuggle supplies and transport accomplices and even succeed in converting Wickson’s son. Shadows come to represent the clandestine lives of the socialist revolutionists who obscure their identities, infiltrate the Iron Heel, and become part of an underground radical movement.
Hands
The motif of hands appears in the novel as a symbol of the workers’ labor, the materiality of their conditions, and the power of their resistance. During his debate with the clergymen at Dr. Cunningham’s gathering, Ernest invokes the saying “You’ve got to put it in my hand” to insist on concrete evidence of how the Church and the capitalist system have benefited humanity (16). The motif of hands returns when Ernest later tells the capitalists at the Philomath Club that the workers’ physical bodies will no longer be commodified for profit but will be used for revolution. He claims, “We want in our hands the reins of power and the destiny of mankind. Here are our hands. They are strong hands” (83). Ernest challenges the capitalists’ abstraction of the hand as wage labor by re-signifying hands as symbols of strength, power, and resistance.
Unlock the meaning behind every key symbol & motif
See how recurring imagery, objects, and ideas shape the narrative.
- Explore how the author builds meaning through symbolism
- Understand what symbols & motifs represent in the text
- Connect recurring ideas to themes, characters, and events