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Teachers' Resource Web Allegory in Dante Jennifer Thompson, UCI, English 28A During both of the last two discussion sections I promised to define allegory--a rhetorical figure which I think is crucial to understanding Dante. In lecture, Martin has spoken of the moral significance of the landscape, monsters, and characters in The Divine Comedy. It might help to think of these in terms of allegory. Here's the formal definition from M.H. Abrams' Glossary of Literary Terms: An allegory is a narrative fiction in which the agents and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived to make coherent sense on the ‘literal,' or primary, level of signification, and at the same time to signify a second, correlated order of agents, concepts, and events (Abrams 4). By "'literal,' or primary, level of signification," Abrams simply means the most obvious plot level. In The Divine Comedy, that means wandering through a forest, being menaced by animals, etc. The "second, correlated order" is less obvious, but still coherent and readable: the poet is spiritually lost, and menaced by various sins or failures. He longs to ascend to God, but finds his way blocked, and is filled with fear and despair for the condition of his soul. This second level is as coherent and ordered as the first; it often shapes elements of the first (plot, landscape) entirely. To continue with Abrams: "We can distinguish two main types [of allegory]: (1) historical and political allegory, in which the characters and actions ... represent, or ‘allegorize,' historical personages and events" (Abrams 4). So, for instance, in Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Queen Elizabeth and other important political and noble figures appear disguised as characters. Spenser meant this as a compliment to Her Majesty, of course, but it's not hard to see how allegory could be insulting to royalty and dangerous to poets. In fact, it's been suggested that Shakespeare's poem "The Rape of Lucrece" is carefully tailored to demonstrate to nobility that it is not allegorical, and that he's not advocating the establishment of a republic (which the original myth does most vigorously). The second sort of allegory for Abrams is "The allegory of ideas, in which the literal characters represent abstract concepts and the plot exemplifies a doctrine or thesis" (Abrams 4). Abrams mentions The Pilgrim's Progress and a portion of Milton's Paradise Lost in which Satan sleeps with his daughter Sin and incestuously begets Death. He goes on to remark that "The central device in ... allegory of ideas ... is the personnification of abstract entities such as virtues, vices, states of mind, modes of life, and types of character" (Abrams 4). To use another example from The Faerie Queene, then, in the "Maske of Cupid," various allegorical figures parade past the heroine, Britomart: ... Reproach, Repentance, Shame; To Abrams' points, I'd like to add that allegory can be used to portray inner psychological or spiritual states like fear, hatred, sinfulness, purity, and so on. Again, think back to the opening lines of the Inferno. The dreary forest, horrifying beasts, and so on, could easily be a way of making the poet's otherwise-invisible spiritual state readable. Or, to inflict a little more Spenser, here's an allegorical account of the inner state of Amoret, who has been imprisoned and raped by a sorcerer: Her brest all naked, as of net ivory, Here, her hacked-out, transfixed and bleeding heart substitutes for her broken hymen, violated will, and psychological agony. The "deadly art," is both the wizard's penis and his conquering will.
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