Year of Wonders

The novel’s opening and closing chapters are titled “Apple-picking Time,” centering the story around the seasonal rhythms of the harvest and presenting apples as one of the novel’s most important symbols.

As the book begins, Anna considers the abundance of apples. Apples are a fall crop that symbolize the end of summer's richness, but the apples are decaying since no one is left to eat them. The rotting smell reminds Anna of loss and death, reflecting the devastation of the plague. Anna also associates the smell of rotting apples with the news of her husband’s death, which occurs before the novel’s action begins. Anna experiences the scent again in George Viccars’ sick room, this time from his putrefying flesh from the plague bacteria. She says, “the smell of rotten apples filled the house. That scent, once beloved, now was so married in my mind with sickrooms that it made me gag” (141). The apples thus stand for the inescapable disintegration and fragility of existence.

Apples have also become synonymous with the Biblical story of man’s Fall from grace when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit—often represented in Western art as an apple—ensuring their mortality. Since the Edenic apple came from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, apples symbolize forbidden knowledge.