Interesting Literature
Apples are a common fruit, and so it’s little surprise that apples have come to have powerful and distinctive symbolic properties in works of literature, religion, and myth over the centuries. But there are a number of misconceptions and wrong assumptions about apple-symbolism. How can we tell the bad apples from the rest? In this post, we’re going to take a closer look at the suggestive symbolism of apples in literature and myth.
As The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols (Penguin dictionaries) observes, the disparate meanings attached to the apple are, in fact, ultimately all interconnected: they are all keys to knowledge of some kind, whether carnal knowledge, self-knowledge, or some other kind of wisdom. Let’s unpick some of this complex, related symbolism of the apple …
Apple-symbolism in classical myth
The ancient Greeks believed that Dionysus, the god of wine, fertility, and the theatre among other things, created the apple. He presented it to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. In Athens, newlyweds were said to eat an apple before entering the bridal chamber, because the fruit was thought to bring about ‘fruitfulness’, i.e., fertility.
The most famous apples in classical myth are undoubtedly the Golden Apples of the Hesperides. The Garden of the Hesperides was the goddess Hera’s orchard. When Hera and Zeus were married, branches bearing golden apples were said to be among the wedding gifts. Once again, apples are linked to fertility and sexuality – perhaps because the shape of the fruit suggests women’s breasts (as Hans Biedermann notes in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Symbolism: Cultural Icons and the Meanings Behind Them (Wordsworth Reference)).
The Hesperides – nymphs of the evening (the name Hesperides is etymologically related to the word Vespers, for evensong) – tended and looked after the grove of golden apples. (Norse myth had its own variation on this: the goddess Iduna guarded apples which brought 
eternal youth to anyone who ate them.) In the myth of the Judgement of Paris, it was from the Garden of the Hesperides that Eris, the goddess of discord, plucked the Apple of Discord. This led to Paris being given permission to abduct Helen of Troy, the event which, in turn, led to the outbreak of the Trojan War.
One of our favourite lines of enquiry here at Interesting Literature is the field of study known as euhemerism, a branch of literary analysis which seeks to explain the origins of fanciful myths in more mundane or ordinary occurrences. And a theory arose that the Golden Apples of the Hesperides were not apples at all, but oranges, which were unknown to Europe and the Mediterranean until the Middle Ages. The powerful and divinely guarded ‘Golden Apples’ of Hera’s orchard may have been nothing more than oranges.
As part of his famous Twelve Labours, Heracles was tasked with stealing the Golden Apples of the Hesperides. Heracles tricked Atlas into retrieving some of the golden apples for him, while he offered to help shoulder Atlas’ burden (shouldering the heavens). When Atlas came back, he declined to take back the heavens onto his own shoulders, but Heracles was having none of this. He tricked Atlas by initially agreeing to the request, but asking that Atlas take the heavens back onto his shoulders for just a moment while Heracles adjusted his cloak. Atlas, clearly not the brightest of Titans, agreed, whereupon Heracles strolled off with the apples Atlas had retrieved for him.
Apple-symbolism in Christianity
In Christianity, apples play an important part in the story of the Fall of Man. However, curiously, the apple is never mentioned in the Bible as being the forbidden fruit: Genesis 2:16-17 simply states:
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
The idea that the forbidden fruit was an apple may have arisen, curiously enough, because of a misunderstanding of two similar words: the Latin mălum means ‘evil’ (as in malevolent, malign, and other related words), while the Latin mālum, from the Greek μῆλον, means ‘apple’.
Later literature certainly specifies an apple as the fruit of the tree of knowledge: by the time John Milton came to write his great epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), we get:
thence how I found
The new created world, which fame in Heaven
Long had foretold, a fabrick wonderful
Of absolute perfection! therein Man
Placed in a Paradise, by our exile
Made happy: Him by fraud I have seduced
From his Creator; and, the more to encrease
Your wonder, with an apple; he, thereat
Offended, worth your laughter! hath given up
Both his beloved Man, and all his world,
To Sin and Death a prey, and so to us,
Without our hazard, labour, or alarm …
Whether it came about because of a misreading of two closely related Latin nouns, or was a more deliberate choice, the naming of the forbidden fruit as an apple in the Garden of Eden story once again reinforces the link between apples and knowledge.
Elsewhere in the Old Testament, apples are related to ‘knowledge’, albeit of different kinds. In the Song of Solomon, the apple is linked to sensual desires and ideas of beauty: ‘As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.’
Apple-symbolism in literature
An early poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92), ‘The Golden Apple’, treats the Hesperides myth:
The golden apple, the golden apple, the hallowed fruit,
Guard it well, guard it warily,
Singing airily,
Standing about the charm’d root.
Round about all is mute,
As the snowfield on the mountain-peaks,
As the sandfield at the mountain-foot.
Crocodiles in briny creeks
Sleep and stir not: all is mute.
If ye sing not, if ye make false measure,
We shall lose eternal pleasure,
Worth eternal want of rest …
Another notable poem about apples is Robert Frost’s ‘After Apple-Picking’. Having picked apples all day, the speaker of this poem grows tired, and longs to sleep. But is he, in fact, slipping into what Hamlet calls ‘that sleep of death’? Meanwhile, in his poem ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, W. B. Yeats wrote of apples in terms which recall the Hesperides:
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Источник
What Does The Apple Logo Mean?
The Apple logo has Biblical roots.
Apple products are ubiquitous in our homes – and that means that the brand’s simple, elegant apple icon is a part of our daily lives. But what does it mean? Today we’ll take a look at the Apple logo meaning and the history of its loaded symbolism.
Here’s how I used to explain the Apple logo meaning when I taught an art class for teenagers.
I’d begin by asking the students, “Do any of you have an Apple computer, or an iPhone?” The answer was always yes. Then I’d ask, “What does the logo look like?”
“It’s an apple,” they’d reply.
“Is it just a plain apple? Is there anything unusual about it?”
“There’s a bite out of it.”
Here’s where the fun starts. “Have you ever heard a story where someone takes a bite out of an apple?”
A few moments of silence from the class. Then: “Snow White…”
“Right, Snow White,” I’d say. Then I’d ask a student to recall the plot: “The witch gives Snow White a poison apple that kills her.”
Early Apple advertisement
“Are there any other stories with an apple?” I’d ask, leading them another step back. This time, there were usually two moments of silence. Sometimes I’d have to nudge them with a clue (“Maybe an older story?”). Eventually, someone would shout, “The Bible!” Cue the astounded chorus of woaaahhh.
In the Bible, Adam and Eve are tempted, by Satan, to taste the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Eve, like Snow White, gives in to temptation and takes a bite of an apple. Once Adam and Eve had their first taste of knowledge, they knew that they were naked, and they were ashamed. That first bite of the apple represents the fall of man.
The apple symbol – and the Apple computers logo – symbolizes knowledge.
This symbol is one of the oldest and most potent in Western mythology. Apple’s use of the logo is extremely powerful; their name and the corresponding pictorial icon are synonymous: they both say apple. The simple logo design deftly carries the heft of centuries of meaning. Apple likes their symbol so much that they’re very protective of it, and they don’t like when other people attempt to use apples in their logos. Two examples of Apple logo trademark disputes are Apple versus New York City’s ‘GreeNYC’ logo and Apple versus Woolworths’ ‘apple-y’ logo.
Rob Janoff, the designer of the Apple logo, claims that he didn’t explicitly intend a Biblical reference in the Apple logo meaning when he created the logo in 1977. He didn’t have to. Mr. Janoff said he included the bite “for scale, so people get that it was an apple not a cherry. Also it was kind of iconic about taking a bite out of an apple.” Why is the bite iconic? Because of its use as a symbol over hundreds of years of mythology. Former Apple executive Jean Louis Gassée called the logo “the symbol of lust and knowledge.”
The Apple logo symbolizes our use of their computers to obtain knowledge and, ideally, enlighten the human race (when we’re not too busy using them to look at cat GIFs, that is).
Apple Logo Meaning: Mythological Roots
In our standard telling of the Christian creation myth, Eve is tempted to eat forbidden fruit from a tree in the Garden of Eden. However, nowhere in Genesis is the fruit specified as an apple. We are merely told that it is fruit from the “tree of knowledge of good and evil.” God tells Adam: “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
Detail, ‘The Fall of Man’ by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1537
Eve disobeys God when she is tempted by the serpent Satan: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.”
The forbidden fruit grants wisdom, just like Apple computers do. Of course, the sin of partaking in the tree of knowledge is also the original sin that accounts for the fall of man. If you’ve ever seen the Terminator movies, you know that technology will also be the fall of man! How appropriate.
So, if the Bible doesn’t specify the fruit as an apple, how did the apple become a primary symbol of this creation myth? The most likely reason comes from fine art.
Adam and Eve depicted by Albrecht Dürer, 1507
The apple has historically been used as a standard symbol in visual depictions of the Garden of Eden (as seen above), and thus accounts for its place in our common knowledge of the Biblical creation story. It’s likely that painters initially chose the apple because of its prominence in Greek mythology, where it was already being used for very similar purposes.
Detail: “The Garden of the Hesperides” by Frederic Leighton, 1892
In Greek mythology, the ‘Hesperides’ are nymphs that reside in a garden of delight where golden apples grow. These apples grant immortality when eaten. The garden was also guarded by a hundred-headed dragon named Ladon, who never sleeps. Ladies in a garden, an evil beast, and an apple tree. Sound familiar?
The similarities of these myths reveal a fundamental aspect of storytelling. It’s a natural human habit to borrow, reuse, and re-purpose familiar symbols, plot structures, and other narrative elements. For artists who had a preexisting association of apples with similar stories that had been told before the birth of Christ, it would have been natural to ascribe the same symbol into the Biblical creation tale.
Apple Logo Meaning: Mythological Potency
In short, apple symbolism is not only prominent in our most common version of the Biblical creation myth, but it predates that myth. Since the dawn of storytelling, man has used the apple to visually symbolize all manner of things, including knowledge, immortality, abundance, the fall of man, and more. It makes sense – the apple almost seems to epitomize the fundamental idea of fruit and even food itself. It’s a visually simple food – round, colorful, and almost elemental in its form. If you’re building a website, you might use an apple icon to simply represent a ‘food’ or ‘health’ category in the navigation. It’s such a primary symbol to us that we almost take the Apple logo meaning for granted.
It was extremely savvy of Apple computers to harness such a potent symbol in both their brand name and logo. In doing so, they harnessed iconography that’s been around as long as we have.
Источник
The apple in literature
The Apple Tree (1917) is a long short story written by a prominent English novelist, playwright and short story writer John Galsworthy. His most famous novels are The Man of Property, A Modern Comedy and The Forsyte Saga. In his works, he gives a truthful picture of English bourgeois society at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. The Apple Tree is called «most finely crafted, most symbolic, and most poetic tale».
The extract under analysis shows us two no-longer-students Frank Ashurst and Robert Garton who want to get to Chagford, Ashurst having an aching knee. On their way, they decide to put up for a night on some farm. They see a girl who invites them in her aunt’s farm and whom Ashurst find quite attractive. On the farm, they ask for a stream to have a bath and are told about one near an apple tree.
In the given extract, there is no conflict; it is only an exposition of the story, where we can see only the beginning of the relationship between Ashurst and Megan. In this part, the author shows us the contrast between people of different social classes.
The main characters are Frank Ashurst and Megan David. He is a representative of the upper class, a graduate from the university, he is «pale, idealistic», and he has a bent for literature. As an educated person, he loves talking about philosophical matters. The girl they meet is different. She’s wearing a «dark frieze skirt», «worn and old greyish blouse», «split shoes» and a Scottish bonnet worn usually by men, her hands are «rough and red», and her neck is «browned» because of working under the sun. She is, surely, not that educated as Ashurst is.
Two more characters reflecting this contrast are Ashurst’s friend Garton and Megan’s aunt Mrs. Narracombe. Garton is opposed to Ashurst to some extent (he is «like some primeval beast» and very communicative, while Ashurst is more meditative), but mostly for diversity of characters. He is also well-educated and intellectual and may even seem somewhat haughty. Mrs. Narracombe is hospitable, and this trait of character is more often demonstrated by representatives of the lower class.
In order to prove his point of view, the author uses stylistic devices. Firstly, there are a number of epithets in descriptions («peacock tam-o’-shanter», «crisp voice», «round-the-corner», «dewy eyes»), idioms («talking through his hat»), metaphors («haven’t met a soul for miles»), similes, trite and genuine («thin as rails», «like some primeval beast»). All these devices are used to create the atmosphere, to make the descriptions more artistic and underline the characters’ peculiarities in a more accurate way. There are also some poetic words («maiden»).
Galsworthy uses such a graphic means as graphon («I thought you were a Celt»). The reason to italicize the word «thought» is to show that Garton makes a special stress on it as if emphasizing his knowledge. There is one more graphon of different kind, which serves to create the atmosphere. The author uses dialectal forms «strame, sittin’, an'» instead of «stream, sitting, and» to show that the action takes place in Devonshire.
Besides, in order to reveal Ashurst’s feelings and meditation at the end of extract, the author uses enumeration of things which belong to different spheres: «He thought of Theocritus, and the river Cherwell, of the moon, and the maiden with dewy eyes». Here we can see also an example of polysyndeton which makes the sentence smoother and more poetic.
As for syntactic structure, there are both simple and complex sentences. The former are used in dialogues accompanied by ellipsis (which, alongside the absence of the author’s speech, makes them more vivid and natural), and the latter are used mostly in descriptions. In the description of Megan there is also anaphora («her shoes were, . her little hands, . her neck…») and some chaotic repetitions («her face was short, her upper lip short», «her brows were straight and dark, her lashes long and dark, her nose straight»). Those repetitions of simple adjectives create rhythm and, probably, make us think that Ashurst’s eyes are quickly jumping from one part of Megan’s body to another. In addition, there is an example of inversion («by the house door stood a woman») for the purpose of smoother narration.
The extract is written in a third-person narrative. The author helps us to see the action with Ashurst’s eyes and listen to his inner thoughts. Those thoughts characterize him well enough: we could do even without his direct description to understand that he is «full of absence». His thoughts change their direction quickly, e.g.: «The sky, the flowers, the songs of birds! Robert was talking through his hat.»
There is also a symbol in this story — the apple tree (the title is not occasional, of course). In Celtic culture (Megan is a Celt), the apple tree deals with love, truth, beauty, remembrance, purity. These meanings are only hinted at in this extract, but we can see them fully in the whole story.
I cannot help admiring this work. I am charmed by the style and the master use of expressive means and stylistic devices, especially syntactic ones. They make me want to read the story again and again. I am also attracted by symbolism and poetics of the story. Besides, it is necessary to say that Galsworthy managed to create a good image of people from different social classes and living in different places.
Источник
