by: Chris Milton
Allegory has been implemented as a literary technique for thousands of years. We see it in biblical writings, oral tradition, and of course in Middle Age literature. The influence of allegory has permeated the history of the arts. Even today we see a plethora of fine examples of allegorical text in all sorts of different kinds of media. In this paper, I’m going to pick out a few examples of where we can see Middle Age allegorical technique being implemented in modern culture in artistic media.
One of the cornerstones of allegory is the metaphorical technique of saying one thing, the concrete, but meaning something totally different. Spenser’s The Faerie Queene does this masterfully on several occasions. Duessa spends the majority of Book 1 posing as a beautiful woman. That is, until she ends up being captured by Arthur and the others.
“Then when they had deployid her tire and call,/ Such as she was, their eyes might her behold,/ That her misshaped parts did them appall,/ A loathly, wrinckled hag, ill favoured, old,/ Whose secret filth good manners biddeth not be told” (Spenser I.viii.46).
It is here that Duessa is revealed as, in actuality, very ugly. She is old and wrinkled, not unlike a witch. But the point of the description is not to take make known how physically ugly Duessa is, but that her true ugliness lies deeper. The description given above is a manifestation of her inner, moral repulsiveness.
Since The Faerie Queene is an extremely deep allegory, it takes multiple reads to uncover all of the metaphors that Spenser plants in his text. This is excellent writing because it makes the reader go back over the pages again and again to analyze everything they may have missed. One of the best allegorical pieces in recent memory with plenty of replay value is Jordan Peele’s Get Out. The film is about an interracial couple (Chris a black male and Rose a white female). When Chris goes with Rose to meet her family, it is revealed that Rose’s family runs a business in which they kidnap black people and surgically place a white person’s mind into the black host. It’s a farfetched plot, but it is written and directed masterfully by Peele. The reason the film has so much replay value is because it has so many subtle double meanings throughout the first two acts. The character of Rose is especially fascinating because with almost everything she says, she means something different or intends something different than how it appears. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Peele says, “If you’ve only seen the movie once, you have to see it again and, like, just watch Rose because everything she does has a different meaning. Obviously.” Clearly, Middle Age allegorical text has stood the test of time if modern day directors are still using the same techniques.
Further Reading:
Shmoop Editorial Team. “Allegory in The Faerie Queene.” Shmoop, Shmoop University, 11 Nov. 2008, www.shmoop.com/faerie-queene/allegory-symbol.html.
Allegorical Elements in Everyman, www.bachelorandmaster.com/globaldrama/everyman-allegorical-elements.html#.Xb_GzS2ZN-U.
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. W.W. Norton and Company, 2018.