Allegory

An allegory is a literary device in which abstract ideas and values are represented as characters, objects, or events. It is typically a fictional story that offers a moral in order to teach and explain an abstract principle or idea, such as a fable or a parable. Allegory appears in prose, poetry, rhetoric, and visual arts.

According to some definitions, an allegory is a type of extended metaphor. Allegories exist on two planes: the literal, or what the figure does in the story, and the symbolic, or what the figure stands for. They rely heavily on the use of individual symbols to represent abstract ideas.

Background

“Allegory” comes from the Greek word allegorein, which refers to speaking figuratively. Allegorical tradition has comprised various threads throughout its history. The earliest documented instances of allegory in Western culture come from ancient Greek poetry, covering the fields of religion, philosophy, and rhetoric, among others.

The allegorical tradition continued to develop in mystical, theological, philosophical, literary, and cultural manifestations throughout the medieval era and the Renaissance. In medieval European literature, writers used a very specific allegorical method to explore the lofty sentiment of courtly love, from its inception in eleventh-century France until it fell out of fashion in the late sixteenth century. Among the major allegorical poems from this era are Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–96) and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung’s Roman de la rose (ca. 1230–80; Romance of the Rose), as well as the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Giovanni Boccaccio, John Gower, and Thomas Usk, among others.

The allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic (Politeia, 388–366 BCE; English translation, 1701) is a classic and often-cited example of allegory. Through a dialogue between his brother Glaucon and the Athenian philosopher Socrates, Plato uses a story about people living in a cave to argue that some people are ignorant and choose to remain so, while others leave the cave and gain understanding. Important literary and theoretical approaches to allegory in the modern era included reactions from writers and scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as reconceptualizations of its power in the twentieth century and beyond.

In addition to literature and art, allegory can be found in such everyday contexts as political speeches, debates, and advertising. Wherever it is used, allegory functions to add layers of meaning to a work. It can make characters and events deeper and multifaceted, standing for something deeper in meaning than what they superficially seem to represent. Allegory also allows writers to put forth their ideas and points of view without appearing too didactic. A careful analysis of an allegorical artwork or text can provide insight into the artist’s or writer’s perspective. Allegory provides the audience a window into how the creator understands or hopes the world to be.

Overview

Allegory relies on the representation of abstract ideas in figurative language or form, such as human figures, animals, fantastic beasts, inanimate objects, or elements from the natural world such as planets, fruits, or plants. Allegory often takes the shape of a sequence of metaphors and may even become a lengthy literary work, such as Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.

Writers and artists have long used allegory as a literary and visual resource in order to present complex ideas in the real world. For example, a blindfolded woman holding a scale represents the concept of justice in Western cultures. Allegorical figures are not limited to a solitary figure; they may be part of a larger process, with a whole structure of allegorical images or words, so that a whole literary work, for example, may be allegorical and invite the reader to engage in the process of thinking about ideas by way of allegorical representations. Allegory seeks to appeal to the imagination by making the connections between the image and the concept. In this sense, the perfect allegorical form, according to scholar Tsvetan Todorov, is the fable. In a fable, a cast of animals or representative human characters, such as shepherds or teachers, animates a short story with a moral lesson at the end. The stock characters are meant to illustrate certain human traits and behaviors, often in an amusing way. Examples of nonhuman figures being used to create an allegorical work include George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm (1945), the fables of the Greek sage and storyteller Aesop (ca. 620–564 BCE), and Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986–91).

Concepts related to spirituality, politics, morality, and even sexuality are often the underlying meaning or theme. Scripture, for example, is full of allegorical narratives. Allegory was also a standard way of transmitting complex ideas from ancient Greece to the Middle Ages. One of the ways in which allegory was expressed in medieval spiritual allegories was by establishing correlations between religious faith and the quest through a difficult road full of obstacles. These are the underlying themes of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684) and Dante’s Divine Comedy, among others. In many of these works, those who reach the end of the road are understood to have achieved a sense of grace or spiritual fulfillment.

Another type of allegory takes the form of stories set in the past, or protagonists commenting about the past, in order to express concern about a present situation. This is often found in situations in which freedom of speech is restricted, due perhaps to political or religious oppression.

Finally, allegory may imply a reaction or an interpretive process on the part of the audience, rather than a deliberate choice on the part of the creator. The term can refer to a certain way of reading a text or appreciating a work of art in which the figures, characters, descriptions, or imagery are interpreted by the reader or viewer as a metaphor for something else, separate from the literal story itself. Early theologians used a multilayered method of text interpretation that included literal, moral, spiritual, and prophetic meanings. Allegories are, according to many scholars, extended metaphors, but unlike a metaphor, which is usually a phrase, idiom, or figure of speech, an allegory takes narrative form.

Bibliography

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