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The Wheel of Fortune

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The Wheel of Fortune
Dickens’s fascination with the possibilities of fortune (both in terms of worldly wealth and the future) with human freedom and with ethics can be seen throughout his works. One way in which he could organise his ideas about the confusion of these concepts was through the Wheel of Fortune. The Wheel of Fortune was equally a literary and a visual image, used by writers and artists to build on concepts of time, money, power and morality. Because of this, a person named Marcus Stone was therefore able to exploit the inheritance of visual images of Fortune’s Wheel to hold a dialogue with Dickens’s text about its constructions of wealth, power and moral action. It was during the Middle Ages that the Wheel of Fortune was developed as a full-fledged image. It was usually four different type of human figures that were often attached to the wheel. These types were labelled, “regnabo” (I will rule, or will be in power), “regno” (I am in power), “regnavi” (I have been in power), and “sum sine regno” (I am without power). The Wheel of Fortune illustrated ones history as forceful, cyclic and tragic. The fall from power and prosperity was, to the medieval mind, unpreventable. The movement of the wheel, governed by Fortuna’s hand, would progress, without thinking towards it, regardless of what humans might try to do. Fortuna, however, was not completely unstoppable. She only had power when, by pursuing her “gifts” of worldly wealth and power, an individual submitted him/herself to the wheel. The path taken to avoid Fortuna’s power was through the pursuit of the “summum bonum” (the highest moral good). Under this status, Fortuna had no power over one’s fate. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Fortuna’s image was gradually more conflated with that of Occasio, another goddess who represented the idea of opportunity (usually the opportunity for profit). Human action now became the force behind the “dynamic passage” of time.


Bibliography: • Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. U of Texas P Slavic Series 1. 12th pbk printing. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. 624 625 • Joseph Dahmus, Dictionary of Medieval Civilization
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