56 pages • 1 hour read
Dandelion Wine
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Symbols & Motifs
Dandelion Wine
Each summer, Grandpa presses dandelions into wine: one bottle for each day of the season. The wine is to be sipped, now and again, during winter, while the drinker fondly recalls the events of that bottle’s date. In addition to serving as the central symbol of the story and the titular image, the making of the dandelion wine also represents a time-honored ritual that connects the Spauldings to their memories and to each other even as it grants each summer a sense of continuity despite life’s inevitable series of endings large and small. By the last pages of the tale, it becomes clear that the novel is itself a form of dandelion wine, pressed into words, for in its poetic passages, Bradbury himself has harvested the finest memories of his childhood and bottled them up to be sipped decades later in celebration of the joys, fears, frustrations, and wonders that make up the precious moments of a life.
Grandma’s Kitchen
Every day, Douglas’s grandmother uses the enchanting disarray of her kitchen to conjure up magically delicious meals for Grandpa, 10 boarders, multiple visitors, and the entire Spaulding family. Her kitchen is filled with random collections of spices, condiments, various foodstuffs, and the spoons, knives, bowls, and cutting blocks of food preparation. To the uninitiated eye, the place seems beyond messy, but Grandma knows where everything is, and her cooking is instinctive, so her culinary creations are different every evening yet are always extravagantly delicious.
In a sharp contrast to Grandma’s imprecise yet exquisite kitchen magic, Aunt Rose’s attempts to impose sterile organization upon the beautiful chaos destroys the delicate magic that governs Grandma’s dishes. Faced with the logical precision of Aunt Rose’s attempts to “improve” her life, Grandma temporarily loses her touch, and only Douglas’s act of returning the kitchen to its chaotic state allows the magic to return. With this dynamic, it becomes clear that Grandma’s kitchen represents human creativity at its messy best, for it is a place that honors inspiration, instinct, and invention just as it abhors order, reason, and linearity. Rose’s attempt to tame it is an example of how well-meaning busybodies can stifle other people’s genuinely creative efforts.
Green Town
Green Town is the fictionalized version of the author’s hometown of Waukegan, Illinois. In 1928, it’s fairly small and, in the northern precincts where Douglas lives, partly rural. Wreathed in nostalgia, it serves as an archetype for a small, friendly town in “Anywhere, U.S.A.”: a bastion of early-1900s American values and an endless source of stories about the dreamy foolishness of humans. It’s also the author’s repository of fondly nostalgic memories from his own childhood—events and feelings and friendships that have a distinctly Midwestern quality but also resonate with similar memories shared by people the world over.
Ravine
Barely two streets over from Douglas’s house is the ravine, a dark and ominous place that represents the boundary between well-ordered and fully controlled human civilization and the wilder, more dangerous elements of the unknown and the untamable. In this liminal space, Bradbury hides the story’s most vicious monsters and gut-wrenching fears. The ravine is where “nature” overrules “civilization” and strange and eerie things become infinitely possible. Several of the book’s most unsettling and terrifying events occur there. It’s used by locals as a short cut into town, but it is also rumored to shelter the dreaded murderer, the Lonely One—and it also serves as the repository for the townspeople’s darkest fears.
Spaulding Houses
The Spauldings’ two houses, like most of the others on their street, are two stories tall with a front porch and a lawn. The book locates them on St. James Street, which in real life is a residential road that is less than a mile from the beach and just a short walk from the ravine and the downtown stores and businesses. Douglas, Tom, and their parents live in one house; next door is the grandparents’ boarding house. Representing the beating heart of the Spaulding household, these two buildings serve as a safe place to nurture childhood dreams, raise families, savor life’s blessings, and grow old. In short, the houses represent The Magic of Everyday Things in a myriad of ways; everything that Douglas loves, learns, and cherishes will begin and end in these two houses.
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By Ray Bradbury
