Anyone remember high school English? It’s a safe bet that no matter where you went to school, you probably drew from a mutual stock of books. “The Great Gatsby,” “Catcher in the Rye,” “The Old Man and the Sea,” “Jane Eyre,” “Native Son,” “Beloved,” etc. Maybe you read “Animal Farm,” George Orwell’s allegory for the Russian Revolution and the rise of Josef Stalin.
You are probably well familiar with what an allegory is: a piece of art (literature or otherwise) meant to convey an idea or particular meaning. And allegories abound through the history of literature. Some people can’t seem to get enough of them. Plato had plenty of them, most famously “Allegory of the Cave.” Dante’s “Divine Comedy” was an allegory for the afterlife, and it’s not just for old art. Besides “Animal Farm,” many famous works of the 20th century can be considered allegories: “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Stranger,” “Blindness,” “The Road.”
Personally, the epitome of allegorical novels is “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. It’s all about allegorizing Objectivism, Rand’s pet philosophy. That’s all Rand is writing about—she just wraps it up in a romance/politically-charged thriller. There’s no way of avoiding it, the same way you can’t avoid it with other allegories. Now, you can call allegorical stories the very peak of literature (as some have said of “Atlas Shrugged”), Simultaneously, you can argue that allegories cannot be called literature since literature shouldn’t bog itself down with ideas, or unduly foist them upon other people.
My stance is fairly straightforward—I’m not a big fan of allegories, since they have the potential to be so polarizing (you may want to think twice before taking on a staunch Objectivist—they play to win, generally). Not to mention, they can sometimes subsume story/art—in other words, make it kind of boring. But I think it can be dangerous to dismiss them. Just because I don’t like allegories doesn’t mean I can’t recognize “Atlas Shrugged” as possessing a certain stature and reputation. It’d be a mistake.
The trick with allegories is how nebulous they are. Within reason, any piece of art can serve as an allegory for something or other.
For instance, I could make a legitimate argument that “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” is really just an allegory for America during the Great Depression: Snow White is America, since she wears red, white, and blue. Snow White wins the loyalty of the hard working dwarves (an obvious parallel). However, Snow White falls under the spell of the evil Witch, who represents FDR. And, most importantly, the Wicked FDR poisons Snow White with a red apple—the apple is obviously communism.
That’s just a personal, albeit personally ludicrous, example. But you’re more than welcome to believe it. Oh, and for any inspired Film Studies majors, I take cash or check.
Perhaps a better-grounded example is “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller, another perennial high school book. Sure, it’s a play about witch hunts, and it was written in the 1950s, when Joseph McCarthy (the beloved Wisconsin senator) was instigating witch hunts for Communists in the U.S., but an allegory functions on an audience being able to recognize the parallels between the piece and reality. The fact is “The Crucible” stands as its own work. There is, for instance, no one character in “The Crucible” who stands in for McCarthy or any of his Un-American Committee cronies.
But that’s my opinion. You could make the argument that “The Crucible” is all about allegorizing McCarthyism.
You could say: “There’s allegory all up in this bitch!” But I leave that up to your interpretation—whether allegories are worthwhile and meaningful—and you leave me mine. You (and I) have the right to decide the worth of allegories for ourselves.
Got some bitchin’ allegories Sean should give a second chance? Having trouble seeing past the mossy walls of Pluto’s cave? Tell Sean about it at sreichard@wisc.edu.
