The Iron Heel

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.