in the witness box. Perhaps it’s all about nothing more than her own self-doubts, her own psychological
or spiritual difficulties. Perhaps it is racial in some way.
The only thing we are sure of about the cave as symbol isp. 103that it keeps its secrets. That sounds as
if I’m punting, but I’m not. What the cave symbolizes will be determined to a large extent by how the
individual reader engages the text. Every reader’s experience of every work is unique, largely because
each person will emphasize various elements to differing degrees, and those differences will cause certain
features of the text to become more or less pronounced. We bring an individual history to our reading, a
mix of previous readings, to be sure, but also a history that includes, but is not limited to, educational
attainment, gender, race, class, faith, social involvement, and philosophical inclination. These factors will
inevitably influence what we understand in our reading, and nowhere is this individuality clearer than in the
matter of symbolism.
The problem of symbolic meaning is further compounded when we look at a number of writers
emphasizing various, distinct elements for a given symbol. As an example, let’s consider three rivers.
Mark Twain gives us the Mississippi, Hart Crane the Hudson-East-Mississippi/generic-American, and T.
S. Eliot the Thames. All three are American writers, all from the Midwest (two from Missouri, no less).
Do you suppose there’s any chance of their rivers standing for the same thing? In The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1885), Twain sends Huck and the escaped slave Jim down the Mississippi on a raft.
The river is a little bit of everything in the novel. At the beginning it floods, killing livestock and people,
including Huck’s father. Jim is using the river to escape to freedom, but his “escape” is paradoxical since
it carries him deeper and deeper into slave territory. The river is both danger and safety, since the relative
isolation from land and detection is offset by the perils of river travel on a makeshift conveyance. On a
personal level, the river/raft provides the platform on which Huck, a white boy, can get to know Jim not
as a slave but as a man. And of course the river is really a road, and the raft trip a quest that results in
Huck growing to maturity and understanding. He knowsp. 104himself well enough at the end that he will
never return to childhood and Hannibal and bossy women, so he lights out for the Territories.
Now take Hart Crane’s poem sequence The Bridge (1930), which plays with rivers and bridges
throughout. He begins with the East River, spanned by the Brooklyn Bridge. From there the river grows
into the Hudson and on into the Mississippi, which for Crane metonymically represents all American
rivers. Interesting things begin happening in the poem. The bridge connects the two pieces of land cut off
from one another by the river, while it has the effect of bisecting the stream. The river meanwhile does
separate the land on a horizontal axis but connects along a vertical axis, making it possible for people at
one end to travel to the other. The Mississippi becomes of central symbolic importance for Crane
because of its immense length, bringing the northernmost and southernmost parts of the nation together
while making it virtually impossible to move from east to west without some means of traversing the river.
His meanings are quite different from those of Twain. Together the river and the bridge constitute an
image of total connection.
And Eliot? Eliot uses the River Thames prominently in The Waste Land, written in the immediate
aftermath of World War I and of a more personal breakdown. His river carries the detritus of a dying
civilization and features, among other things, a rat trailing along the bank; the river is slimy, dirty, its
famous bridge falling down (in nursery rhyme form), abandoned by its nymphs. The river is shorn of
grandeur, grace, and divinity. In the poem’s past, Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester carry on their
dalliance on the water, but their modern counterparts are merely sordid and seedy. Clearly Eliot’s river is
symbolic; equally clearly it symbolizes things having to do with the corruption of modern life and collapse
of Western civilization which do not come into play with either Twain orp. 105Crane. Of course, Eliot’s
work is heavily ironic, and as we’ll discuss later, everything changes when irony climbs aboard.
You will have noticed in these last pages that I assert meaning for these uses of caves and symbols with