Allegory

The word allegory comes from the Greek allègoreïn, which literally means "to talk differently." An allegory is a transfer of meaning. Most often, it consists of an image that develops within a coherent narrative context, referring systematically—often metaphorically—to a referential universe of a different nature (e.g., abstract, philosophical, or moral). As a figure of speech, it is commonly distinguished from a metaphor or a comparison by the number of its elements. Because an allegory is characterized by the systematically maintained coexistence of a double meaning, literal and symbolic, literal and figurative, it is a complex figurative system whose interpretation is difficult. An allegory is thus always at risk of remaining enigmatic or undecipherable. However, its obscure character, its sometimes sinuous or elliptical logic, also gives it its strength and permanence: an allegory is always rich with meaning, versatile, polysemic.

LINGUISTIC CONCEPTUAL MODES

Resorting to a personifying allegory has often been a defense against this possible confusion or incomprehension. Personifying involves ascribing human traits, feelings, and behaviors to inanimate beings or abstractions. The readability of the personifying allegory thus prevents misinterpretations: virtues (e.g., Justice, Temperance, Charity), passions (e.g., Envy, Vengeance, Glory, Vanity), fortune or time (e.g., Death, Old Age as well as seasons or months), nations, the temperaments of ancient and modern medical anthropology (e.g., Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Irascible, Melancholic), the five senses, the liberal arts (e.g., Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, Music), fine arts and their Muses, and other categories are easily depicted.

All these allegories are predominantly feminine, as if this gender facilitates comprehension of the figure of speech. Several explanations can be offered for this feminization of the allegory. From antiquity, poets have personified all these beings of reason, these abstract notions, these techniques, these eminently human feelings and desires, so as to transform them into divinities of flesh and blood, animated characters, or the familiar figures of the Greek mythology best known from the writings of Homer in Iliad or the Odyssey. One of the first explanations given concerning allegory's gender is that the gender of the word, notion, or concept determined the gender of the personification: Because numerous terms were grammatically feminine in ancient (and some modern) languages, they were depicted as feminine. This philological explanation, although perhaps less than satisfying, is nonetheless heuristically sound. In her Cité des Dames, Christine de Pisan places real women by taking seriously the grammatical gender of allegorical figures of political, philosophical, scientific, or artistic authority. Through direct usage of allegorical personification, she reduced the figurative to the literal, the symbolic to the domestic. She thus transcribed her feminine characters into reality. She gave them a historical and proclamatory density, as shown by the positions she took in her Querelle de la Rose (Quilligan 1991). Women are not authority, women have authority. However, in doing so, Christine de Pisan purely and simply sacrificed allegory.

Angus Fletcher defines allegory as a technique to encode a text: Allegory says one thing and means another (Fletcher 1982). The feminine gender of personifications and other allegorical figures thus necessarily refers to something else: it appears to show itself, to unveil itself, but it always has to fade away to serve a coded, hidden meaning. The gendered incarnation of allegory may be defined as a "power transfer game": The feminine body of the allegorical figure serves a world that is in fact dominated by men. One then better understands why, during the seventeenth century—the century of the allegory—Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) chose the cartographical allegory to represent relationships between the sexes. This kind of cartographical allegory had been present since ancient times and was commonly used by Christian thinkers. It allowed the representation of complex relationships as well as the visualization of metaphysical, moral, social, and political values as they related to one another; by definition, a map has coordinates and is thus symbolically hierarchical, whereas benefiting from a panoptical and thus immediately inclusive acquisition mode. The seventeenth century saw the development of what is called "gallant geography," first in the Parisian salons, then in England. La Carte du Tendre (Map of Tenderness), conceived by Madeleine de Scudéry and expanded by François Chauveau (1613–1676) in his engravings illustrating Scudéry's poetry, certainly is the most famous of these productions (Reitinger 1999). In this representation of the meanderings of the heart, feelings are likened to so many rivers, mountains, lakes, seas, forests, boroughs, or towns. This de-gendering of allegory allowed courtesans to reinvent the norms of gallant friendship. Given that love's passions and virtues were no longer fixed allegorically in female or male characters, they could be truly incarnated by women and men meeting freely: thus testifying to the strength of the societal trend that was critical of inequality between the sexes, which developed during the classical age.

SHIFTING HISTORICAL SENSES OF A TROPE

At the end of the eighteenth century, allegory became one of the favorite forms of expression of political power. In Europe, as in America, a profusion of female allegorical characters arose in the texts of neoclassicism and, later on, romanticism. Just when new nations were born and old nations called for their own "regeneration," allegory contributed to the great fabric of founding narratives. Allegory then becomes "a kind of physiognomy of history" (De Baecque 1994, p. 112). During the nineteenth century, for example, the painter Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) gave France a human face with his La Liberté Conduisant le Peuple (Freedom Leading the People). The allegorical female characters of modern nations almost systematically contradict dominant norms of femininity. The characters Marianne, Britannia, and Germania are inspired by the warrior goddess Athena: These secularized guardian divinities; these female armed authorities (the bayonet of the French republic, the trident of Britannia, and the sword of Germania) appeared just when the separation between the public sphere and the private sphere—to which most women were assigned—was confirmed. But more fundamentally, just when the modern, exclusively male citizen thought of himself as a free Subject, liberated from any material and social determination, masculinity could no longer be an efficient signifier, because it was confounded with the neutral, the undetermined, and the universal. The allegorical character could consequently be only female, because its gender is by definition a matter of determination and concrete characterization. Only the feminine can thus signify the most abstract notions, embody a concept, and give it meaning and reality (e.g., Freedom, Independence).

However, as soon as nations were transformed into colonial empires, the allegory not only served to represent national values, it also became a real discursive and political matrix (Dorlin 2006). The allegorical femininity of the nation was entirely confounded with motherhood: she simultaneously generated and represented her people. The metaphor thus acquired a performative dimension: The nation was represented as an agricultural divinity. Marianne was, for example, represented as the maternal, nurturing, and white goddess Ceres, whereas the colonies and other overseas possessions were represented as both hyper-eroticized and grotesque bodies. The indigenous, hyper-eroticized, almost systematically naked bodies represented a wildness to be civilized, an eternal childhood of peoples allegedly devoid of history, as well as the erotic object par excellence, on which the colonizers' desire could licitly focus. Just when European nationalisms arose at the end of the nineteenth century and allegorical female characters repeatedly represented an excessive and virilized motherhood, those colonized incarnated all sexual fantasies. This allegory was made of all sexual desires: The exoticism of the colonies was the signifier of sexuality. These colonized bodies became grotesque as they were outrageously racialized through the animalization of gender: Men represented an animal-like virility far from the predominant civilized masculinity. Allegory is crafty, however, because this racialization—in the literal sense of the word—of colonized nations expressed the racialization of the colonizing nations; "the continent," in the words of Césaire (1955), "proceeds to savagery."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Césaire, Aimé. 2001 (1955). Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

De Baecque, Antoine. 1994. "The Allegorical Image of France, 1750–1800: A Political Crisis of Representation." Representations. 47: 111-143.

Dorlin, Elsa. 2006. La Matrice de la Race: Généalogie Sexuelle et Coloniale de la Nation Française [The Racial Matrix: Sexual and Colonial Genealogy of the French Nation]. Paris: La Découverte.

Fletcher, Angus. 1982 (1967). Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Quilligan, Maureen. 1991. The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan's Cité des Dames [The Ladies' City]. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Reitinger, Franz. 1999. "Mapping Relationships: Allegory, Gender and the Cartographical Image in Eighteenth Century France and England." Imago Mundi 51: 106-130.

                                                  Elsa Dorlin