60 pages • 2 hours read
Richard LlewellynHow Green Was My Valley
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1939A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Mountain
Huw grows up in the Valley, a small village which—as the name suggests—is located in the natural basin between two significant inclines. Towering over the village is the mountain, an unnamed local landmark that represents the natural beauty of the world. The mountain is where Huw wanders to collect his thoughts, where he watches birds and animals and where he indulges his love of nature. The mountain is so close to the family home and so easily accessible that it represents a form of idealized nature that goes hand in hand with country life. For the young Huw, the mountain symbolizes the beauty of the world. As he grows older, however, this natural beauty is infused with danger. His mother nearly dies on the mountainside during a difficult winter night, and he loses the use of his legs in the same incident. Marged dies on the mountainside. The mountain grows increasingly associated with danger and death as Huw ages. Even when he has his first romantic experiences on the mountain, he is then chased away by men from Ceinwen’s village. Huw’s changing perception of the mountain—from innocent and beautiful to dangerous and exciting—reflects his own loss of naivety as he grows from a boy to a man. His understanding of the mountain matures just as he does.
As well as natural beauty, the mountain offers the people of the valley a bounty of natural resources. The coal buried in the mountain fuels the local economy and sustains the existence of the Valley. This coal, however, is buried deep and the physical size and imposing nature of the mountain is a reminder of the difficulties involved in mining so deep underground. As much as the mountain towers over the community, the danger of mining towers over the lives of the men who go underground each day. The mountain provides for the town, but it is a danger, killing men like Ivor and Gwilym. The mountain provides natural resources, but these come at a cost, the price of which is made clear every time the residents glance up to the imposing mountainside.
From Huw’s position as a narrator, the mountain is also a symbol of time. In the past, the mountain represents beauty and resources enough to sustain a community, but it is now abandoned and buried beneath the slag heaps. Huw’s present, like the mountain, is also lonely and abandoned. By the end of the novel, the once beautiful mountain has come to symbolize the unattainable past, a place which will never be made beautiful or possible again.
The Slag Heap
If the mountain above the Valley represents the power and the beauty of nature, as well as the past, then the slag heaps which eventually cover the mountainside represent a poisonous form of modernity. The slag heaps are formed with the waste from the mines. As a foreman explains to Huw when a new slag heap is being built near the village, moving the waste costs money and the owners are not willing to cut into their profits to put the slag in a safe, faraway place. As such, the waste is deposited near the village, destroying the natural beauty and creating a precarious threat to the people who live nearby. A slag heap in Aberfan in Wales collapsed in 1966 (27 years after the publication of How Green Was My Valley ) and killed 144 people, including 116 children. Such slips were known about at the time the novel was written, providing a reminder of the dangers of coal extraction and the threat such industries posed to the small rural communities which had little power in comparison to the mining companies. The modern mining industry creates the slag heaps, destroying the natural world of the past, and creating a palpable threat for the future.
The slag heaps are poisonous. Not only do they pose a danger of collapsing on to the houses beneath them, they also destroy fertile land. Nothing can grow on the pile of waste and junk that constitutes a slag heap, further reducing the amount of natural space available for the people of the Valley. They have no say in where the slag heaps are placed, nor which part of their local ecosystem is sacrificed in the name of the mining company’s profits. In this sense, the poisonous, infertile nature of the slag heaps symbolizes the poisonous nature of the capitalist drive for profits which poisons the lives of the miners. The mining company seek out the cheapest, most cost-effective solution for dumping their poisonous material. Since the mining company is owned by English people who live far away and who have grown wealthy by extracting Welsh minerals for profit, the owners do not care and destroying Welsh communities if they stand to make a little extra money. The slag heaps represent the remorseless extraction of wealth by the English at the expense of Welsh communities, leaving behind only junk and poison after everything valuable has been taken from the local people.
At the point when Huw is narrating his story, the community in the Valley has been abandoned. Everyone is either dead or gone away, except for Huw. The slag heaps which are perched above the town are about to collapse, finally burying the houses below under the weight of decades of poisonous, costly coal extraction. The collapse of the slag heaps is a symbol of inevitability, illustrating the way in which the coal mines were built on an unsustainable system of exploitation, characteristic of modernity.
The Chapel
The chapel is the focal point for religious practice in the Valley. Reverend Gruffydd leads a service in the chapel each Sunday in cooperation with a team of deacons who are appointed from the most respected men in the community. In this way, the chapel functions as an expression of the structure of the community. Men like Gwilym are both deacons and pillars of their community, pointing to their community power and respect.
Each week, the community gathers together to express their shared belief. These services are reaffirmations of the shared ideals of the community, gatherings in which the small Welsh town shows its unity under the auspices of religion and common morality. But while the people of the chapel share a common morality informed by the Bible, this faith can have both positive and negative effects. Huw is horrified when respected men in the chapel publicly lambast a woman for having an affair. Reverend Gruffydd assures Huw that this form of community self-policing is a necessary evil, as fewer women will consider adultery in the future. As the leader of the chapel, however, Reverend Gruffydd helps to symbolize the hypocrisy of this mode of thought. Reverend Gruffydd is later driven out of the Valley due to the rumors which concern his possible extramarital affair with Angharad Morgan. He was the head of the chapel and the man most invested with religious authority in the community, but even he was not able to adhere to the morality which he preached. If the priest of the chapel cannot maintain his morality and preaches for the necessity of the same public shaming which drives him out of town, then the chapel comes to represent a form of community hypocrisy which is never addressed. Publicly, people call for one form of strict morality while hypocritically breaking their own rules behind closed doors.
Late in the novel, the departures from the chapel symbolize the divisions in the community. Gwilym, once a respected deacon, is forced out of his role so he sets up a new church with his family. This schism shows the division in the apparently unified community. The same congregation which once prayed alongside one another in chapel cannot sustain their unity and they separate from one another. They preach from the same book but in different buildings. The removal of the Morgans—and Reverend Gruffydd—from the chapel symbolizes the extent to which faith is also impacted by the time and modernity.
