The Count of Monte Cristo

Use this activity to engage all types of learners while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“The Adventures of the Red Silk Bag”

In this activity, students will demonstrate their understanding of the symbol of the red silk bag by illustrating its development throughout The Count of Monte Cristo.

The red silk bag first appears when M. Morrel uses it to leave some money with Edmond’s father—but this is far from its only appearance in the text. In this activity, you will show how the bag’s initial appearance and subsequent reappearances develop it as a symbol over the course of the novel. Your goal is to create a visual representation of its travels that conveys to your audience both where the bag shows up in the plot and why—how does each appearance further develop its value as a symbol?

Gather Your Evidence

• Review the plot of the novel and note where the red silk bag appears—what is happening, and who has possession of the bag?
• Consider diction, imagery, figurative language, and plot detail in these scenes—what messages about the characters and their actions are being suggested by their interactions with the red silk bag?

Create a Representation

• Your representation can be in any form that is

o Primarily visual (although you may add small amounts of text if you choose).

o Appropriate for the classroom and shareable with others (some suggestions: a map, a game board, an illustrated timeline, a flow chart, or a comic).

• Your representation should successfully

o Note where the red silk bag appears in the plot (what event is taking place and where the bag is physically located currently).

o Demonstrate how the symbol changes or develops with each appearance.

Share and Reflect

• When you finish your work, share your representation with at least three peers while you also review their work.
• Write a paragraph explaining which of the representations you have viewed (other than your own) does the most thorough job demonstrating both where the bag appears in the plot and how each appearance develops the bag as a symbol.

Teaching Suggestion: The intention of this activity is for students to consider how symbols can evolve and perform more than one function throughout the course of a text. Students are likely to find it relatively simple to track the bag’s movement through the story, but they may need some coaching to understand how these appearances differ and what the implications of these differences might be. You might prepare a different example in advance—Faria’s red liquid, for example—and discuss how its meaning changes as it reappears throughout the novel.

Differentiation Suggestion: Although the format of the activity’s final product is flexible, offering many types of students a way to be successful in this activity, an effective end product can only be arrived at after searching the text for evidence and coming to conclusions about that evidence’s significance. English learners, students with dyslexia, and those with attentional and executive function differences may struggle with the search for evidence, and these students may benefit from being allowed to work on this step with a partner or in a small group. Students who find abstractions challenging may benefit from assistance with drawing conclusions from the evidence they gather; for example, you might model how you yourself would make one or two deductions from evidence in one of the passages discussing the red silk bag.