Stoppard’s Arcadia, through its characters Chloe and Thomasina, considers gender’s role in the quest for knowledge and in human nature’s resistance to a fully deterministic model of the universe. Stoppard uses an apple in both the play’s past and future scenes as a symbolic tie between the two women, their thirst for new knowledge, and their theories about the ways nature and mathematics reflect or resist each other. Both women theorize predictability and chaos in nature, questioning Newtonian determinism and insisting some disorder must exist. Thomasina does so through her early discovery of mathematical iterations, theorizing a natural object’s determined shape would emerge through seemingly random plotted points on a graph. Chloe theorizes desire as the chaotic element that impedes determinism from predicting the universe’s future. The emblematic apple has connections to both the biblical Eve and to Isaac Newton, and so functions to reconcile Romantic and Enlightenment worldviews.
The apple makes an appearance in both scenes where the young women make their scientific queries toward new knowledge. Thomasina uses a leaf from the apple’s stem to illustrate her theory that within nature’s unpredictability exists a universal predictability through mathematical iterations. Chloe hypothesizes human desire as the element that prevents Newton’s laws from predicting everything to come; Valentine refers to it as “the attraction that Newton left out…All the way back to the apple in the garden.” (Act 2, Scene 7) Chloe’s conjecture in this way relates to Eve’s quest for new knowledge through consuming the forbidden fruit—a knowledge that determined all humankind’s fate thereafter. This mythical reference reinforces Chloe’s theory, as Eve purportedly entices Adam to eat the fruit with her sensuality—but the feminine thirst for new knowledge seems just as significant to that force which resists Newtonian reasoning.
Newton’s gravitational discovery also has a symbolic connection to the apple, building an association between scientific discovery and romantic myth; in both the biblical and Newtonian references, the fruit represents a pursuit for new knowledge—a portal into a new phase of human understanding. Thomasina discusses something known to the modern world as iterations: by feeding an equation’s solution back into itself, she can translate natural objects into mathematical ones. Her iterations theoretically will form the leaf’s image, but do so through plotting countless, seemingly random points on a graph. In this way, Thomasina translates the unruly natural world to a deterministic and mathematical world; as Valentine says, the leaf “wouldn’t be a leaf, it would be a mathematical object….The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.” (1.4) Chloe’s theory works in the reverse, translating the scientific Newtonian world to the chaotic world of human nature and sexuality. Both theories attempt to integrate a deterministic worldview with chaos and unpredictability.
Stoppard uses the symbolic apple in a manner that probes the intricate ways gender interacts with the pursuit for new universal insight, and the ways human nature resists a deterministic world model. Although both theories discuss the possibility of predicting the future, they seem much more engaged with bridging Thomasina’s transitioning Romantic world to Chloe’s modernity—with reconciling human chaos with mathematical patterns. Small agents of disorder, like the plotted leaf and human sexuality, give way to the larger, looming agent of disorder—entropy. As Hannah asserts, “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter;” this feminine lineage that seeks to understand the world in new ways constitutes the force that resists a fully deterministic universe, keeping the world from ending up at room temperature. (2.7)
honey gaze 