Allegory

For allegories in category theory, see Allegory (category theory).

File:Filippino Lippi 001.jpg

Allegory of Music by Filippino Lippi. The "Allegory of Music" is a popular theme in painting; in this example, Lippi uses symbols popular during the High Renaissance, many of which refer to Greek mythology.

Allegory is a figurative mode of representation conveying meaning other than the verbal.

Overview

Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation. Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric, but an allegory does not have to be expressed in language: briefly, an allegory is a device used to present an idea, principle or meaning, which can be presented in literary form, such as a poem or novel, or in visual form, such as in painting or drawing.

As a literary device, an allegory in its most general sense is a conceit or extended metaphor. As an artistic device, an allegory is a visual symbolic representation. An example of a simple visual allegory is the image of the grim reaper. Viewers understand that the image of the grim reaper is a symbolic representation of death. Not every fiction with general application is an allegory.

Etymology

First attested in English 1382, the word allegory comes from Latin allegoria, the latinization of the Greek ἀλληγορία (allegoria), "veiled language, figurative", from ἄλλος (allos), "another, different" + ἀγορεύω (agoreuo), "to harangue, to speak in the assembly" and that from ἀγορά (agora), "assembly".

Types

Northrop Frye discussed what he termed a "continuum of allegory," ranging from what he termed the "naive allegory" of The Faerie Queene, to the more private allegories of modern paradox literature. In this perspective, the characters in a "naive" allegory are not fully three-dimensional, for each aspect of their individual personalities and the events that befall them embodies some moral quality or other abstraction; the allegory has been selected first, and the details merely flesh it out.

History

Many ancient religions are based on an astrologic allegories, that is, allegories of the movement of the Sun and the Moon as seen from the Earth. Examples include the cult of Horus and Isis.

The classical era

In classical literature two of the best-known allegories are the cave in Plato's Republic (Book VII) and the story of the stomach and its members in the speech of Menenius Agrippa (Livy ii. 32). In Late Antiquity Martianus Capella organized all the information a fifth-century upper-class male needed to know into an allegory of the wedding of Mercury and Philologia, with the seven liberal arts as guests; Capella's allegory was widely read through the Middle Ages.

Other early allegories are found in the Hebrew Bible, for instance in the extended metaphor in Psalm 80 of the Vine, which is Israel and Ezekiel 16 and 17.

The medieval era

Main article: Allegory in the Middle Ages

Medieval thinking accepted allegory as having a reality underlying any rhetorical or fictional uses. The allegory was as true as the facts of surface appearances. Thus, the bull Unam Sanctam (1302) presents themes of the unity of Christendom with the pope as its head in which the allegorical details of the metaphors are adduced as actual facts on which is based a demonstration with the vocabulary of logic: "Therefore of this one and only Church there is one body and one head—not two heads as if it were a monster... If, then, the Greeks or others say that they were not committed to the care of Peter and his successors, they necessarily confess that they are not of the sheep of Christ" (complete text).

In the late 15th century, the enigmatic Hypnerotomachia, with its elaborate woodcut illustrations, shows the influence of themed pageants and masques on contemporary allegorical representation, as humanist dialectic conveyed them.

The denial of medieval allegory as found in the 11th-century works of Hugh of St Victor and Edward Topsell's Historie of Foure-footed Beastes (London, 1607, 1653) and its replacement in the study of nature with methods of categorization and mathematics by such figures as naturalist John Ray and the astronomer Galileo is thought to mark the beginnings of early modern science.

The modern era

Since meaningful stories are nearly always applicable to larger issues, allegories may be read into many stories, sometimes distorting their author's overt meaning. For instance, many people have suggested that The Lord of the Rings is an allegory for the World Wars, in spite of J.R.R. Tolkien's emphatic statement in the introduction to the 2nd edition: "It is neither allegorical nor topical.... I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence." Many have also suggested that the movie The Dark Knight is an allegory for the Bush Administration's conduction of the War on Terror (the Dark Knight himself taking on the role of President George W. Bush).

Where some requirements of "realism", in its flexible meanings, are set aside, allegory can come more strongly to the surface, as in the work of Bertold Brecht or Franz Kafka on one hand, or on the other in science fiction and fantasy, where an element of universal application and allegorical overtones are common, as with Dune.

Examples by genre

Not every resonant work of modern fiction is an allegory. Arthur Miller's The Crucible, for instance, is character-driven historical drama with contemporary relevance, but is not an allegory in spite of its parallels with McCarthyism, linking the hunt for communists in the 1940s and 1950s to the hunt for witches in the late 17th century. L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is plot-driven fantasy narrative in an extended fable with talking animals and broadly-sketched characters. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is another example of a work seen by many as allegorical yet, as the author explained, is not - rather it is an example of what he referred to as applicability.

Art

Some elaborate and successful specimens of allegory are to be found in the following works, arranged in approximate chronological order:

• Ambrogio Lorenzetti; "Good Government in the City" and "Bad Government in the City"
• Sandro Botticelli – La Primavera (Allegory of Spring)
• Albrecht Dürer – Melencolia I
• Bronzino – Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time
• Artemisia Gentileschi – Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting; Allegory of Inclination
• The English School's "Allegory of Queen Elizabeth" painted circa 1610.
• Jan Vermeer – The Allegory of Painting

Literature

Classical

• Aesop – Fables
• Plato – The Republic ("Plato's allegory of the cave")
• Plato – Phaedrus (Chariot Allegory)
• Euripides – The Trojan Women
• Qu Yuan – Encountering Trouble
• Book of Revelation (for allegory in Christian theology, see typology (theology)
• Martianus Capella – De nuptiis philologiæ et Mercurii

Mediaeval

• Prudentius – Psychomachia
• Christine de Pizan – The Book of the City of Ladies
• William Langland – Piers Plowman
• Pearl
• Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy
• Everyman

Modern

“	No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... [In The Old Man and the Sea], I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.	”
—Ernest Hemingway in 1954

• Edmund Spenser – The Faerie Queene
• Edwin Abbott Abbott – Flatland
• Joseph Addison – Vision of Mirza
• Antoine De Saint-Exupery – The Little Prince
• Jorge Luis Borges – "The Library of Babel" and "The Babylon Lottery"
• Peter S. Beagle – The Last Unicorn
• John Bunyan – Pilgrim's Progress
• William M. Burwell – White Acre vs. Black Acre
• Albert Camus – The Plague, The Stranger
• Wu Cheng'en — The Journey to the West
• J.M. Coetzee – Waiting for the Barbarians
• Charles Dickens – A Christmas Carol
• William Faulkner – A Rose for Emily (Emily symbolizes the decline of the Old South)
• William Golding – Lord of the Flies
• Daniel Handler – A Series of Unfortunate Events
• Roger Hargreaves - Mr.Happy
• Nathaniel Hawthorne – "The Great Carbuncle", "Young Goodman Brown"
• E. T. A. Hoffmann – Princess Brambilla
• John Irving – A Prayer for Owen Meany
• C.S. Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia: generic allegorical elements of good and evil, as well as many Christian themes, expressed in a narrative with strong fantasy fiction elements and credible characters: not fully an allegory.
• David Lindsay – A Voyage to Arcturus
• Jack London- "A Piece of Steak", short story about youth vs. old age
• George MacDonald – Phantastes
• Naguib Mahfouz – Children of Gebelawi
• Bernard Malamud – The Natural
• Cormac McCarthy – The Road
• Herman Melville – The Confidence-Man
• Hualing Nieh – Mulberry and Peach
• Herman Melville – Moby Dick
• George Orwell – Animal Farm
• Edgar Allan Poe – "The Masque of the Red Death" (though Poe did not believe in allegory, this story is generally assumed to be one)
• Philip Pullman – His Dark Materials
• Jose Saramago – Blindness
• Anna Sewell – Black Beauty
• John Steinbeck – Of Mice and Men
• John Steinbeck – The Pearl
• Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels (political allegory)
• Koushun Takami – Battle Royale
• Rex Warner – The Aerodrome

Plays

• August Wilson – Fences (play) (Troy's fence is "designed" to keep the grim reaper away)

Film

• Fritz Lang's Metropolis
• Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal
• El Topo
• Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, the Cold War
• The Matrix
• Dawn of the Dead
• The Virgin Suicides
• District 9, Apartheid
• Gojira
• Cannibal Holocaust, sensationalism
• Foodland (film)
• Ana's Playground
• The Wall (film)
• Planet of the Apes (1968 film), racism, creationism, evolution, animal rights, anti-nuclear politics, McCarthyism, and socio-economic stratification.
• Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Vietnam War, torture, Catholicism, jingoism, Mutual assured destruction.
• The Dark Knight, The War on Terror

Television

• The Twilight Zone (varied themes)
• Star Trek all series, (varied themes, though frequently addressed the issues of prejudice and racism)
• Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 5, Episode 2: Darmok
• The Prisoner
• Lost

Comics

• Various X-Men comics (mutants as an allegory for various social and racial minorities)
• The manga Hanako and the Teller of Allegory calls a story given form from peoples' belief in it an allegory
• The end of every series Grant Morrison writes

See also

Template:Sister

• Allegory in the Middle Ages
• Allegory in Renaissance literature
• Allegorical sculpture
• Cultural depictions of Philip II of Spain
• Literary technique
• Plot device
• Roman à clef
• Semiotics

References

• Frye, Northrop (1957) Anatomy of Criticism.
• Foucault, Michel (1966) The Order of Things.

External links

Poems

• Allegories on Penny's Poetry Blog

About

• Brief definition of Allegory
• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Allegory in Literary history
• Electronic Antiquity, Richard Levis, "Allegory and the Eclogues" Roman definitions of allegoria and interpreting Vergil's Eclogues.