Damask Roses Symbol in Code Name Verity

The roses Maddie encounters in and around Ormaie represent hope, beauty, and innocence. This symbolism first shows up in the name of Julie’s Resistance circuit, which is known as the Damask Circuit. Like most Resistance circuits, it’s named for its oldest and most powerful member’s profession, which in this case happens to be growing roses. The Resistance is fighting to take down the Nazis, who have invaded France—an innately hopeful goal.

Both Anna Engel and the rose-grower position actual roses as symbols of innocence and beauty. In a conversation with Maddie, Engel notes that the square in Ormaie used to be filled with beautiful, blooming roses—but when the Nazis arrived, they tore all the roses out so they could park trucks and tanks in the square. To Engel, tearing out the roses in favor of tanks represents the Nazis’ immorality—they are, after all, willing to destroy innocent, beautiful things and replace them with symbols of oppression and violence. Engel and the rose-grower also liken Julie, who’s deceased at this point, to roses: Julie was beautiful, vivacious, and tortured senselessly to further the Nazi cause. So when the rose-grower buries Julie and the other deceased female prisoner in her rose garden and piles the gravesite high with damask roses, it further associates Julie with beauty and hope for a better future.

More broadly, the damask roses that the rose-grower is best known for cultivating bloom well into the winter, long past when most rose varieties have gone dormant. Her damask roses are, in this sense, a spot of beauty and hope during the darkest, coldest time of the year. They represent various characters’ hopes that the situation in Ormaie specifically, and Europe more broadly, will improve—that spring will come, the Nazis will be defeated, and life will once again be beautiful.

Damask Roses Quotes in Code Name Verity

The Code Name Verity quotes below all refer to the symbol of Damask Roses . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:

Her gardens are full of roses—sprawling, old tangled bushes, quite a few of them autumn-flowering damasks with their last flowers still nodding and drooping in the rain. […] The flowers are sodden and dying in the December rain, but the sturdy bushes are still alive, and will be beautiful someday in the spring, if the German army doesn’t mow them down like the ones in the Ormaie town square.

Related Characters: Maddie Brodatt (speaker), Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity, The Rose-Grower

Related Symbols: Damask Roses

Page Number and Citation: 292

Explanation and Analysis:

“They let us bury everyone at last,” she told me. “Most are up there by the bridge. But I was so angry about those poor girls, those two lovely young girls left lying there in the dirt for four days with the rats and the crows at them! It’s not right. It is not natural. So when we buried the others I had the men bring the girls here—”

Julie is buried in her great-aunt’s rose garden, wrapped in her grandmother’s first Communion veil, and covered in a mound of damask roses.

Related Characters: The Rose-Grower (speaker), Maddie Brodatt, Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity

Related Symbols: Damask Roses

Page Number and Citation: 319

Explanation and Analysis:

Damask Roses Symbol Timeline in Code Name Verity

The timeline below shows where the symbol Damask Roses appears in Code Name Verity. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.

...narrator and her family have been there before. It used to be beautiful—she remembers a rose garden in the Place des Hirondelles planted in honor of her grandfather, for instance—but now... (full context)

...habit of referring to Julie as Verity in this account.) Verity is part of the Damask circuit, named for the oldest member, a rose grower. (full context)

...one who can move between the town hall and the Gestapo headquarters. So, the entire Damask Circuit is on edge; they fear that Julie will betray them. It’s very likely the... (full context)

...could’ve just been the Benzedrine. The operator told Maddie she was lucky to be with Damask and said that Paul is gross, but safe—it’s best to just accept it. (full context)

...biked into town and hid the Rosalie in a garage. The garage belongs to the rose-grower whom the Damask Circuit is named after. Hopefully this woman won’t get in trouble for... (full context)

The rose-grower’s gardens are full of damask roses, which are still flowering in December. According to Mitraillette,... (full context)

...observed that the Nazis had turned Ormaie into “a real shit-hole.” They plowed down the roses in the square to park tanks. Engel led Maddie along the river and, chain-smoking as... (full context)

...the Thibauts after two nights. They had to go get the Rosalie out of the rose-grower’s garage. While they were at the villa, the old woman led Maddie through her garden... (full context)

...one more thing to write. Balliol gave her a copy of a message from the Damask Circuit, which says that Isolde’s father has been found dead. It seems like a suicide.... (full context)

...that she’s in England and can keep working, but part of her is buried under roses in France. That part of her is “unflyable, stuck in the climb.” (full context)

Code Name Verity

Elizabeth Wein

Damask Roses Symbol Analysis

Damask Roses Quotes in Code Name Verity

Damask Roses Symbol Timeline in Code Name Verity