By: Claire Noring
In the 18th-century, the popularity of the allegorical novel had faded. Moral plays like Everyman were out of fashion. Instead, a focus on psychological profiles and real-life descriptions rose with the help of convincing detail.
An excellent example of this is Samuel Richardson’s 1748 epistolary novel, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady. In its almost 1500-page length, it describes every facet of the novel’s protagonist, from her clothing to every minute detail of her mind as she struggles through the trials set upon her by the antagonist, Lovelace, and her own family.
In Oroonoko, Aphra Behn uses her reliability as a narrator along with an inundation of detail to convince her readers that the story she is presenting them mirrors real life. Take, for example, her statement at the very beginning of the novel:
“I do not pretend, in giving you the history of this royal slave, to entertain my reader with the adventures of a feigned hero, whose life and fortunes fancy may manage at the poet’s pleasure; nor in relating the truth, design to adorn it with any accidents but such as arrived in earnest to him” (Behn 141).
While Everyman is a clear fiction, with fictional characters that represent either concepts or all of humanity, Oroonoko blends the boundary between fact and fiction. It is clearly important to Behn to convince her reader of the verity of her tale and convey the story of a specific man in a specific location at a specific point in time. These are not the goals of the author of Everyman. In contrast with the stark moral lesson present in Everyman, Behn is careful to remain impartial in Oroonoko.
For example, when Oroonoko is captured at the beginning of the text, Behn, as the narrator, interjects: “Some have commended this act as brave in the captain; but I will spare my sense of it, and leave it to my reader to judge as he pleases” (Behn 160). This apparent comfort with writing a tale of moral ambiguity works against the form of allegory. In an allegory, there must be a metaphor, a symbol, and what it represents. A literal sense with a figurative sense intertwined with it. Instead, in both Clarissa and Oroonoko, there is just the literal. The move away from allegory is definite.
However, there are subtle ways in which components of allegory persist in 18th-century literature. For example, names in allegorical stories are signs that point to the real-world message of the texts, and names in 18th-century texts occasionally function in the same way. Lovelace is pronounced “loveless” and Clarissa means “most pure.” These names signify that Lovelace and Clarissa might be more than just fictional characters. Like allegorical characters, they could be representations of the interaction between all loveless men and pure women.
In the novel Rasselas, by Samuel Johnson, chapter titles point to the prince meeting unnamed individuals who are defined by their characteristics. For example, Chapter 7, “The Prince Finds a Man of Learning,” Chapter 17, “The Prince Associates With Young Men of Spirit and Gaiety,” and Chapter 18, “The Prince Finds a Wise and Happy Man” (743, 758, 759). These individuals are unnamed, referred to only as “young companions,” for example. Like allegorical characters, they represent a certain kind of person or a certain collection of attributes, instead of being specific people.
These allegorical elements are subtle in 18th-century texts, but it is clear that allegory didn’t “die” in the 18th-century. Instead, it is dissolved and incorporated in new ways into these new stories.