Symbolism in Writing – The Chair.

Using symbols to represent abstract ideas or qualities enhances the depths of your writing. Poetry, fiction, nonfiction, film scripts, plays, they all use symbolism  because it offers a subtlety of meaning – a nuance – creating  layers in your work and giving your writing a poetic feel.  

The crucial words in the paragraph above are 'nuance' and 'subtlety'.  To be  effective, symbolism has to be implied; you can't slam your reader in the face with it. In fact, if you are hitting your reader over the head with symbolism, then you are probably using clichés. 

I've just read a couple of books that used the image of The Chair as a central symbolism, and this made me wonder – what comes into our heads when 'chair' is represented in story, and how long have writers been using it? 

In art, the chair often features, making its own point about life. Vincent van Gogh's Chair (1888) shows a  simple, unpretentious rustic chair, wooden with a cane seat. It is clearly Vincent's chair; in the background is an onion box with his name, and a pipe and a pouch of tobacco has left in waiting. 

In literature, an empty chair can signify a personal loss or absence of an important character or person. It can be the empty chair at a meal; the person dead or cold-shouldering the family. 
In literature, an empty chair can signify a personal loss or absence of an important character or person. It can be the empty chair at a meal; the person dead or cold-shouldering the family. 

The silence of the empty chair is used to amazing effect in The Little Red Chairs by Edna O'Brien.  It has wide-ranging themes, but the most clearly portrayed is that of exile; immigration and asylum. The chairs of the title were laid out in rows on the 6th of April 2012, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the start of the siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb forces. There were 11,541 along the 800 meters of the main street of Sarajevo -- one for every man, woman, and child killed during the siege of the city – many of them small,  representing the hundreds of children killed. This symbolic act is described at the beginning of this amazing novel, and then not mentioned again. You can read a review of the book here.

In medieval times, chairs were an obvious indicator of a person’s wealth or craft. There is little mention of chairs in the Bible, or in  Homer, and in some plays by Shakespeare almost no one ever sits down. But by the middle of the 19th century, it is a completely different story. Charles Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, Austin; they all have their chairs, mostly middle-class and often symbolising hearth, home and family.

But then you can imagine an extravagant chair like a throne which symbolises status. Royalty traditionally are seated on chairs embellished with gold and gems, making the symbolism of  the throne an ultimate status of superiority –

 a place to sit high above the mass of people and judge those below you in order to make decisions about your realm.  As George RR Martin writes;

‘When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die:'

Throughout his series A Song of Ice and Fire, warring houses fight and plot for their moment on the Iron Throne, which stands as a bloody and brutal symbol of power.

As with power, bondage is  unpleasantly linked to chairs. Think Casino Royal, if you can bear it. Or C S Lewis's  The Silver Chair (number six in the Narnia series), in which the children final find the missing Prince Rilian of Narnia –         

a wicked witch has been keeping him under a spell, binding him to a silver chair every night, sending him mad to prevent  him  breaking free. Chairs as prisons and the way one can become 'pinned' to them, becomes a dark symbol. 

This symbol can also represent restlessness. During the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, in Alice in Wonderland, everyone has to change seats (and change perspective), to the annoyance of Alice who finds herself sitting  where there is little to eat or drink, while in Madame Bovary, Emma sits in the chair by the window every day, to watch life pass, and also to see Leon, who never turns his head to return the gaze, even though he is familiar with the house. 

This restlessness is also used to effect by Yevgeny Petrov in his USSR era satirical novel The Twelve Chairs. Bender is an unemployed con artist who joins forces with a former nobleman who hid a cache of missing jewels in twelve chairs during the revolution. These chairs have been appropriated by the Soviet authorities, and the search  takes the nobleman and Bender from Moscow to  Georgia to the Trans-caucasus mountains. In  1970  Mel Brooks directed the film of the same name, described as 'one of the funniest film in years'.Chairs can represent laziness in a big way, especially the easy chair. With sitting being called 'the new smoking', in that a  sedentary lifestyle is known to be bad for the health, the easy chair can become a symbol for that 'drug of choice'.  In film, perhaps the iconic chair is that  of the computer whizz kid, always in the middle of a bag of crisps as he hacks (pr prevents the hack) that will change the world from his enormous black swivel chair, complete with computerisation, in which he is fully enveloped. Or if you like the idea take a look at The Couch Potato by Jory John and Pete Oswald, which is a picture book for small children.

The Couch Potato has everything he needs within reach of his sunken couch cushion. But when the electricity goes out, Couch Potato is forced to peel himself away from the comforts of his living room and venture outside. And when he does, he realises fresh air and sunshine could be just the things he needs...
So chairs are fair game as symbols, and there are just so many other ways emotions and storylines can be represented by them. It may be simply describing the chair and thus describing the seated character. Or, like O'Brien and Petrov, it may a symbol of something deeply important to society.
To read more blogposts about symbolism in literature, click here