Peas Symbol Analysis

In Woyzeck, peas represent how Woyzeck’s circumstances influence his behavior and shape the course of his life. More specifically, they symbolize how his poverty leaves him vulnerable to abuse and exploitation at the hands of higher-ranking members of his society. The play’s opening scene shows that Woyzeck’s grip on reality is tenuous at best: he makes a series of bizarre, incomprehensible statements indicating that he is hearing voices and experiencing apocalyptic visions, and these symptoms only worsen over time. It’s not long before readers learn the likely cause of Woyzeck’s odd behavior: he has agreed to participate in a doctor’s dehumanizing, harmful experiments in order to supplement the insufficient earnings he brings home as a lowly soldier. One such experiment, which has been going on for months, requires Woyzeck to subsist solely on peas so that the doctor may study the diet’s effects on Woyzeck’s urine.

Woyzeck’s dangerously insufficient diet has, it seems, taken a grave toll on his health: throughout the play, he experiences trembling, an irregular pulse, and aural and visual hallucinations. His grip on reality eventually becomes so compromised that he murders Marie—the mother of his child, and his sole source of relief and happiness in an otherwise unceasingly bleak and exhausting existence—in a fit of jealous, delusional rage. While higher-ranking members of society—like the doctor—repeatedly criticize Woyzeck for his brutishness, they all fail to acknowledge their complicity in the very system that pushes Woyzeck to the brink of madness and thus makes inevitable his erratic, unseemly behavior. Woyzeck’s diet of peas thus reinforces the play’s broader criticism of social hierarchy as a cruel and arbitrary mechanism of oppression.