Theme Of Ignorance In Year Of Wonders

Year of Wonders emphasises how ignorance dismantles the importance of knowledge and the way isolation affects the quest for knowledge. Within the quaint town of Eyam that Anna resides in, it is presumed that those in the village ‘had no occasion to travel farther than the market town seven miles distant’, leaving them in the safety of their highly rigid and restrictive, religious society. This indicates their lack of intent to acquire knowledge, promoting their sense of ignorance on ‘how things stood in the real world.’ Consequently, when the villagers were confronted with the unexplained arrival of the Plague, their first instinct was to persecute the Gowdies; intelligent and independent women, who with medical knowledge, were deemed as witches.