1965
From the Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965; enlarged ed. entitled Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1974), 12–15. Selections reprinted in Topics in Literary Criticism, ed. Christopher Butler and Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), items 185 and 195. The text uses short forms, chiefly “a.” for “allegory,” which have here been expanded.
ALLEGORY (Greek allos, “other,” and agoreuein, “to speak”) is a term denoting a technique of literature which in turn gives rise to a method of criticism. As a technique of literature, allegory is a technique of fiction-writing, for there must be some kind of narrative basis for allegory. We have allegory when the events of a narrative obviously and continuously refer to another simultaneous structure of events or ideas, whether historical events, moral or philosophical ideas, or natural phenomena. The myth and the fable are forms closely related to, or frequently used for, allegory, and the works usually called allegories are genres of fiction: epic (Dante’s Divina Commedia), romance (Spenser’s Faerie Queene), prose fiction (Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress), or drama (Everyman). It is continuity that distinguishes allegory from ambiguity or simple allusion. Fiction-writing has two aspects: (1) a progression of incidents which are imitations of actions, and (2) elements of meaning or thought which represent a poetic use of ideas. Hence there are two main types of allegory: historical or political allegory, referring to characters or events beyond those purportedly described in the fiction; and moral, philosophical, religious, or scientific allegories, referring to an additional set of ideas. If the allegorical reference is continuous throughout the narrative, the fiction “is” an allegory. If it is intermittent, if allegory is picked up and dropped again at pleasure, as in many works of Ariosto, Goethe, Ibsen, and Hawthorne, we say only that the fiction shows allegorical tendencies. Allegory is thus not the name of a form or a genre, but of a structural principle in fiction.
Allegory may be simple or complex. In simple allegory the fiction is wholly subordinate to the abstract “moral,” hence it often impresses the literary critic as naive. An example is the fable, which is directed primarily at the set of ideas expressed in its moral. Simple historical allegories (simple at least as regards their literary structure) occur in some of the later prophecies of the Bible, such as the allegory of the four kingdoms in Daniel.1 More complex historical and political allegories tend to develop a strongly ironic tone, resulting from the fact that the allegorist is pretending to talk about one series of incidents when he is actually talking about another. Hence there is a close connection between historical or political allegory and satire, a connection marked in Spenser’s Mother Hubberds Tale (Prosopopoeia), which uses a beast-fable to satirize a contemporary political situation; in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, which uses an Old Testament story for the same purpose; in Swift’s Tale of a Tub, and elsewhere.
Moral allegories are apt to be deeply serious in tone. In these the fiction is supposed to provide entertainment and the allegory instruction. The basic technique of moral allegory is personification, where a character represents an abstract idea. The simpler the allegory, the more urgently the reader’s attention is directed to the allegorical meaning. Hence simple or naive moral allegory belongs primarily to educational literature: to the fables and moralities of the schoolroom, the parables and exempla of the pulpit, the murals and statuary which illustrate familiar ideas in official buildings. Often the allegorist is too interested in his additional meaning to care whether his fiction is consistent or not as a fiction. Bunyan, even Spenser, occasionally drop into naive allegory. In the first book of The Faerie Queene, the Redcross Knight is being taught by Faith, Hope, and Charity, and Hope urges him to take hold of her anchor, the traditional emblem of hope. It is possible to think of Hope as a female teacher lugging this anchor into the lecture room to make her point—such emblems are still brought into classrooms—but it is simpler to think that the literal narrative is being naively distorted by the allegorical interest.
Allegorical interpretation, as a method of criticism, begins with the fact that allegory is a structural element in narrative: it has to be there, and is not added by critical interpretation alone. In fact, all commentary, or the relating of the events of a narrative to conceptual terminology, is in one sense allegorical interpretation. To say that Hamlet is a tragedy of indecision is to start setting up beside Hamlet the kind of moral counterpart to its events that an allegory has as a part of its structure. Whole libraries of criticism may be written on the fictions of Hamlet or Macbeth, bringing out aspects of their meaning that would not occur to other readers, and all such commentary might be said, by a ready extension of the term, to allegorize the plays. But this does not, as is sometimes said, turn the plays into allegories. A glance at Hamlet is enough to show that it is not structurally an allegory to begin with. If it were, the range of commentary would be greatly limited, because the presence of allegory prescribes the direction in which commentary must go. As Hamlet is not an allegory, it has an implicit relation only to other sets of events or ideas, and hence can carry an infinite amount of commentary. Strictly defined, allegorical interpretation is the specific form of commentary that deals with fictions which are structurally allegories. This leaves considerable latitude still, for there are many fictions, notably ancient myths, where the presence or absence of allegory is disputable. In this situation the critic must content himself with offering his allegorical interpretation as one of many possible ones, or—the more traditional method—he may assume that the poet has, deliberately or unconsciously, concealed allegorical meanings in his fiction. The history of allegorical interpretation is essentially the history of typical forms of commentary applied to fictions where allegory is present, or is assumed to be so.
Of these, one of the earliest and most important is the rationalization of myth, especially Classical myth. The stories about the gods in Homer and Hesiod were felt by many early Greek philosophers to be not serious enough for religion: as Plutarch urged much later, gods who behave foolishly are no gods [Moralia, 417e–f]. A system of interpreting the gods as personifications either of moral principles or of physical or natural forces grew up, known at first not as allegory but as hyponoia.2 The practice is ridiculed by Plato in the Republic [378d] and elsewhere, but it increased with the rise of the more ethical and speculative cults, notably Stoicism. Judaism had similar difficulties, and the extensive commentaries of Philo on the Pentateuch are the most ambitious of the earliest Jewish efforts to demonstrate that philosophical and moral truths are concealed in the Old Testament stories.3
With Christianity a special problem arose, that of typology, of which allegory formed a part. To some extent the Old Testament had to be read allegorically by the Christian, according to the principle later enunciated by St. Augustine: “In the Old Testament the New Testament is concealed; in the New Testament the Old Testament is revealed.”4 Certain Messianic passages in the Old Testament were held to refer specifically to Jesus; the Jewish law was abolished as a ceremony but fulfilled as a type of the spiritual life. St. Paul in Galatians, commenting on the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, explicitly says that the story is an allegory [4:22–6], though it later became more exact to say that such stories had or contained allegorical meanings. Hence a doctrine of multiple meanings in Scripture was elaborated which could be applied to religious literature as well. Dante has given us the best-known formulation of the medieval scheme in his Tenth Epistle, to Can Grande (also at the beginning of the second part of the Convito), partly in explanation of his own practice. We begin with the “literal” meaning, which simply tells us what happened; this narrative illustrates certain principles which we can see to be true (quid credas, as a popular tag had it), and this is the allegory proper. At the same time the narrative illustrates the proper course of action (quid agas); this is its moral meaning, and is particularly the meaning aimed at in the exemplum or moral fable used in sermons and elsewhere, and which is also employed a good deal by Dante, especially in the Purgatorio. Finally there is its anagogic or universal meaning, its place within the total scheme of Christian economy, the Creation, Redemption, and Judgment of the world. These last two meanings may also be called allegorical in an extended use of the term.
The allegorization of Classical myth continued throughout the Middle Ages, though the emphasis shifted to Latin literature, through the popularity of allegorical commentaries on Virgil and Ovid which remained in vogue for well over a millennium.5 The use of allegory for educational purposes, largely popularized by Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Mercury and Philosophy (early fifth century), is still going strong in England in Stephen Hawes’s Passtyme of Pleasure (ca. 1510). In secular literature, the most popular form of allegory was the allegory of Courtly Love, which employed an elaborate system of parallels to religion, its God being Eros or Cupid, its Mother Venus, its great lovers saints and martyrs, and so on. Allegory also of course pervaded the plastic arts, and the emblem books which became popular in the sixteenth century are an example of the literary absorption of pictorial iconology.
The original motivation for allegorical systems of commentary had been the defence of the sobriety and profundity of religious myths which appeared, on the face of it, to ascribe capriciousness or indecency to the gods. Hence attacks on Homeric theology by Plato, or on early Christianity by anti-Christian apologists, normally included a rejection, usually with some ridicule, of all such face-saving interpretations. With the rise both of Protestantism and of post-Tridentine Catholicism, the same problem entered literary criticism. Puritans attacked Classical mythology as puerile fable, and scoffed at all efforts to allegorize it. In Elizabethan England Gosson’s School of Abuse was one of the most articulate of such attacks, and was replied to by Sir Philip Sidney and by Thomas Lodge. Lodge concerned himself more particularly with the question of allegory: “Why may not Juno resemble the air?” he protested; “must men write that you may know their meaning?”6 Tasso in Italy also defended his Jerusalem Delivered along allegorical lines. The conception of major poetry as concealing enormous reserves of knowledge through an allegorical technique was widely accepted in the Renaissance: the preface to Chapman’s translation of Homer expresses it eloquently, and other men of letters discovered their own philosophical interests in Classical mythology, as Francis Bacon did in his Wisdom of the Ancients.7
Gradually the Aristotelian conception of poetry became the main basis for the defence, as well as for much of the practice, of imaginative literature. In the Poetics, which influenced criticism increasingly from about 1540 on, poetry is conceived as an imitation of nature which expresses the general and the typical rather than the specific and particular, and which consequently is not to be judged by canons of truth or falsehood. This is obviously far more flexible a principle than the assumption of concealed allegorical meanings, and the latter interpretations fell out of favour. In the Romantic period a renewed interest in myth, where the myth became subjective and psychological, a part of the poet’s own creative processes, developed a new conception of allegory, expressed in Goethe, Friederich Schlegel, and Coleridge (notably in the Statesman’s Manual). In this conception allegory is thought of as essentially the translating of a nonpoetic structure, usually of abstract ideas, into poetic imagery, and is thereby contrasted with symbolism, which is thought of as starting with the poetic image, and attaching concepts to it. This contrast then becomes the basis of a value judgment, symbolism being good and allegory bad. The distinction is uncritical, because it identifies all allegory with naive allegory, but it became very popular, and helped to rationalize the growing prejudice against allegory which still exists. The good allegorists, such as Dante and Spenser, were explained away by other means: readers were taught to think of allegory as tedious or pedantic, or were encouraged to read Spenser or Bunyan for the story and let the allegory go. Such criticism reflects the Romantic conception of a direct firsthand encounter with experience as the key to great literature, in contrast to the secondhand approach to it through books. Nevertheless, the allegorical tradition survived fitfully. In criticism, it is found notably in Ruskin, whose Queen of the Air, a treatise on Classical mythology, practically defines a myth as an allegorical story,8 and classifies the canonical allegories into the moral and the cosmological. In poetry, more or less straightforward allegory is found in the second part of Goethe’s Faust; in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound; in Keats’s Endymion; in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.
The new Romantic conception of symbolism is illustrated by such fictions as Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, The Golden Bowl, To the Lighthouse, and others, where there is a central symbol, usually named in the title, with a great variety of suggestive implications, but which lacks the continuity necessary for genuine allegory. Hawthorne is frequently allegorical in his technique—some of his stories, such as “The Bosom Serpent,” might almost be called naive allegories—but the nineteenth and twentieth century are notable for fictions which carry a great deal of conceptual weight, such as War and Peace, or are mythopoeic, such as The Plumed Serpent, and yet are not strictly allegorical. The use of an archetypal model for a fiction, as Joyce uses the Odyssey in Ulysses and Faulkner the Passion in A Fable, is closer to traditional allegorical techniques. Continuous allegory, as we have it in Anatole France’s Penguin Island, usually favours the historical type, with its natural affinity for satire;9 but the recent vogue of Franz Kafka indicates that even serious moral allegory still makes a powerful appeal.
Since 1900 two new forms of allegorical interpretation have crowded out nearly all the older ones. Dreams have been from ancient times recognized as close to allegory, but it was only after the appearance of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams that there developed in criticism a technique of reading works of literature as psychological allegories, revealing the latent sexual drives and conflicts either of their authors or of their readers. There is now an extensive bibliography of such allegorical criticism in literature, most of it either Freudian or Jungian in reference. About the same time Frazer’s Golden Bough began a school of criticism which approaches literature much as Christian typology related the New Testament to the Old. Works of literature, especially of ancient literature, are regarded as myths which contain and at the same time reveal the significance of earlier rituals and ceremonies. This form of allegorical interpretation, like the other, assumes the unconscious rather than the deliberate concealment of the allegorical allusion.
There is no comprehensive work on the subject: an immense amount of scholarly research has been done on Classical and medieval allegory, much of it in areas remote from literature; critical treatments of modern literature usually deal with mythopoeia rather than allegory. The following studies are helpful: C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936); R.P. Hinks, Myth and Allegory in Ancient Art (1939); J. Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. B. Sessions (1953); E.D. Leyburn, Satiric Allegory: Mirror of Man (1956); H. Berger, Jr., The Allegorical Temper (1957); E. Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (1959); M.P. Parker, The Allegory of the Faerie Queene (1960); A.C. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in “The Faerie Queene” (1961); P.E. McLane, Spenser’s “Shepheardes Calender”: A Study in Elizabethan Allegory (1961); A. Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964).