An allegory is a story in which characters represent abstract qualities, and the literal story line is less important than the symbolic truth that the story both conceals and dramatizes. An allegory is similar to both a parable, the kind of story used in the Christian Gospels to illustrate moral truths, and a fable, in which a story dramatizes a practical insight about life. An allegory, however, is more elaborate than either a parable or a fable and is developed in more detail. More complicated allegories reveal a multiplicity of meanings.
In classical literature there are many famous examples of allegory, including the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic, where Plato likens human life to the existence of cave-dwellers who can see reality only in the form of shadows cast on a wall. In addition, several of the stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses invite allegorical interpretation.
The allegory received its fullest expression in medieval and renaissance Europe. Early Christian writers such as Augustine, and medieval religious writers who followed him, extended the parable form to help convey spiritual concepts. As medieval romances grew in popularity, writers defused charges of frivolity leveled against their preoccupation with secular passions by including religious meanings. In The Divine Comedy, for example, Dante achieved a complete fusion between romance and religious poetry, and every event and conversation can be understood on several levels.
In some allegories, such as William langland’s Piers Plowman, characters bear the names of abstract qualities (Piers meets and talks with deadly sins such as Gluttony and Sloth, and virtues such as Truth and Peace). In other allegories, the characters seem to be real people with whom the reader can identify while at the same time symbolizing moral dilemmas. For example, in the 14th-century English romance sir gawainand the green knight, Sir Gawain, although a good knight and a hero, is also an ordinary, flawed human being; but the Green Knight who challenges him, the host who entertains him, and the host’s lady who tempts him all have a symbolic function that is not fully explained and that challenges the reader to search for the best interpretation.
Renaissance examples of allegory include Torquato tasso’S Gerusalemme Liberata, Ludovico ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). Jonathan swift used allegorical techniques in his A Tale of a Tub, and writers and filmmakers to this day use allegory to engage at once the reader’s emotions and intellect.
Other Works Featuring Allegory
Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2003.
Dryden, John. “Absalom and Achitophel,” in Selected Poetry and Prose of John Dryden. Edited by Earl Miner. Los Angeles: Random House, 1969.
Works about Allegory
Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Fletcher, Argus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982.
