Symbolism and Allegory

Intuition [Beginner]

A symbol is something that stands for something else -- but not by simple substitution. A red octagonal sign means "stop" through pure convention. That is a sign, not a symbol in the literary sense. A literary symbol participates in both its literal and its figurative meaning simultaneously. When the white whale in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick appears on the page, it is literally a whale -- an enormous animal swimming in the ocean. But it also accumulates meanings (nature's indifference, the inscrutability of the universe, Captain Ahab's obsession) that go far beyond the literal. The whale is not just a stand-in for some idea; it is a whale that also carries meaning.

Symbols come in two broad types. Conventional symbols are widely recognized within a culture: a dove means peace, a skull means danger or death, a flag means a nation. Literary symbols are built within a particular work: the conch shell in William Golding's Lord of the Flies comes to mean civilization and democratic order, but only a reader of that novel would make that association. Literary symbols gain their meaning through repetition, emphasis, and context within the work.

Allegory takes symbolism a step further. In an allegory, the entire narrative operates on two levels simultaneously. Every major character, event, and setting corresponds to something outside the story. George Orwell's Animal Farm is about farm animals who overthrow their farmer and establish self-rule -- and it is simultaneously about the Russian Revolution and the rise of Soviet totalitarianism. The pigs are literally pigs and figuratively Bolshevik leaders. The farm is literally a farm and figuratively Russia. The allegory is sustained from beginning to end: there is no moment when the story operates on only one level.

Allegory is related to but distinct from fable (a short story, often with animal characters, that teaches a moral lesson, like Aesop's "The Tortoise and the Hare") and parable (a short narrative that illustrates a religious or ethical principle, like the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan). All three forms carry a "second meaning," but allegory is typically longer, more detailed, and more systematic in its symbolic correspondences.

Visual [Beginner]

SYMBOLISM vs ALLEGORY: SCALE OF SYMBOLIC STRUCTURE

SINGLE SYMBOL:         One element carries extra meaning
  e.g., the green light in The Great Gatsby

RECURRING MOTIF:       A symbol repeated for emphasis
  e.g., blood in Macbeth

ALLEGORY:              The ENTIRE narrative is a symbol
  e.g., every character in Animal Farm = a historical figure

ALLEGORY MAPPING (Animal Farm):
+------------------------+----------------------------+
| Literal Level          | Symbolic Level             |
+------------------------+----------------------------+
| Old Major (pig)        | Karl Marx / Lenin          |
| Napoleon (pig)         | Stalin                     |
| Snowball (pig)         | Trotsky                    |
| The windmill           | Five-Year Plans            |
| Animalism              | Communism                  |
| Mr. Jones (farmer)     | Tsar Nicholas II           |
| The dogs               | Secret police (NKVD)       |
| "All animals equal..." | Soviet egalitarian ideals  |
| "...but some more equal| corruption of ideals       |
|  than others"          |                            |
+------------------------+----------------------------+

Worked Example [Beginner]

Consider the conch shell in William Golding's Lord of the Flies.

Step 1: Identify the literal object. The conch is a large sea shell that Ralph and Piggy find on the beach early in the novel. When blown, it produces a loud sound. The boys agree that whoever holds the conch has the right to speak at assemblies.

Step 2: Track how the symbol develops. In the early chapters, the conch is associated with order, democracy, and rational discussion. The boys respect it. As the novel progresses, the conch's authority is challenged -- Jack speaks without holding it, the boys ignore it, and the assemblies break down. In the final chapters, the conch is shattered when Roger drops a boulder on it, and immediately afterward, Piggy (the voice of reason) is killed.

Step 3: Interpret the symbolic meaning. The conch symbolizes civilization, democratic process, and the rule of law. Its gradual loss of authority mirrors the boys' descent into savagery. Its destruction marks the point of no return -- civilization has been completely abandoned. Golding does not need to state "democracy has failed" because the symbol does that work.

Step 4: Notice what makes it a literary symbol. The conch is not a conventional symbol -- a reader unfamiliar with the novel would not know what a conch shell "means." Its symbolic meaning is built entirely through how the novel uses it: the care with which it is treated, the rules established around it, and the violence of its destruction.

Check Your Understanding [Beginner]

Formal Definition [Intermediate+]

A symbol is a person, place, object, or action that, in addition to its literal meaning within a narrative, suggests or evokes a further range of meanings. Unlike a metaphor (which asserts a specific comparison), a symbol is more open-ended: it does not specify exactly what it stands for, and it may accumulate multiple, even contradictory, meanings over the course of a work.

An allegory is a narrative (or part of a narrative) in which characters, events, and settings represent abstract ideas or moral qualities, and in which the author intends the reader to interpret the story on both its literal and its symbolic levels simultaneously. The word derives from Greek allos (other) and agoreuein (to speak publicly): allegory is "speaking otherwise."

Types of Symbol

• Conventional / cultural symbols: Symbols whose meanings are widely recognized within a culture (the cross in Christianity, the bald eagle in American iconography).
• Literary / contextual symbols: Symbols whose meanings are established within a specific work through repetition, emphasis, and narrative context.
• Universal / archetypal symbols: Symbols that, according to Jungian theory, draw on the collective unconscious and appear across cultures (the journey, the mother, the shadow, the wise old man).

Types of Allegory

• Historical / political allegory: Characters and events correspond to specific historical figures and events (Animal Farm, Arthur Miller's The Crucible as allegory for McCarthyism).
• Religious / theological allegory: The narrative represents spiritual truths (Dante's Divine Comedy, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress).
• Moral / philosophical allegory: Characters embody virtues, vices, or abstract qualities (the medieval morality play Everyman).
• Psychological allegory: Characters and events represent aspects of the human psyche (readings of Lord of the Flies as an allegory of id, ego, and superego).

Related Forms

• Fable: A brief narrative, often featuring anthropomorphized animals, that illustrates a moral lesson. Associated with Aesop.
• Parable: A short, realistic narrative that teaches a religious or ethical truth through comparison. Associated with the teachings of Jesus.
• Myth: A traditional story that explains natural phenomena, cultural practices, or existential questions through symbolic narrative.

Key Concepts [Intermediate+]

Exercise 1. Distinguish between allegory and symbolism in the following works. For each, explain whether the narrative operates as a sustained allegory or uses isolated symbols within a non-allegorical framework.

• (a) Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" from The Republic
• (b) The green light in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
• (c) Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene

Exercise 2. T.S. Eliot argued that the "objective correlative" -- a set of objects, a situation, or a chain of events -- can evoke a particular emotion more effectively than direct statement. Explain how the concept of the objective correlative relates to symbolism. How does a symbol "correlate" with an abstract idea without naming it?

Critical Theory [Master]

Formalist / New Critical approaches. The New Critics treated the literary symbol as the highest form of figurative language because of its capacity for ambiguity and complexity. Unlike allegory, which the New Critics often dismissed as mechanical (because it assigns fixed meanings to its figures), the symbol was valued for its openness and resistance to paraphrase. This preference was explicitly articulated by Coleridge, who distinguished between allegory (a translation of abstract notions into picture-language) and symbol (which "partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible").

Structuralist approaches. Structuralists analyze symbols and allegory as elements within a semiotic system. A symbol is a sign in which the relationship between signifier and signified is motivated (not arbitrary) -- the dove's gentleness "fits" its association with peace. Allegory is analyzed as a system of double coding: the text functions as a signifier at the first level (the literal narrative) and as a signified at the second level (the allegorical meaning). Greimas's actantial model has been applied to analyze the narrative structures that allegories share across cultures.

Post-structuralist approaches. Post-structuralist critics resist the reduction of symbols to fixed meanings. Barthes's concept of the "writerly text" celebrates symbols that generate multiple, unfixable meanings. Deconstructive readings of allegory reveal that the relationship between the literal and allegorical levels is never stable -- the allegory always produces meanings that exceed or contradict the author's intended correspondence.

Marxist approaches. Marxist critics read allegory as a form that can either reveal or mystify social relations. Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, argues that all narrative operates as a form of allegory: texts allegorize the historical contradictions they cannot represent directly. Walter Benjamin's reading of Baudelaire's allegory in The Origin of German Tragic Drama treats allegory as a mode of historical cognition that reveals the fragmentary, ruined character of experience under capitalism.

Feminist approaches. Feminist critics have examined how allegorical traditions encode gender. The figure of "Nature" as a female body, or "Liberty" as a female form, has been analyzed as both empowering (giving women symbolic presence) and objectifying (reducing women to abstractions). Feminist rewritings of allegory, like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, expose how patriarchal systems use allegorical structures to naturalize gender roles.

Postcolonial approaches. Postcolonial critics have analyzed how colonial discourse uses allegory to construct the colonized subject and how postcolonial writers use counter-allegory to resist. Homi Bhabha's concept of "mimicry" reads the colonial subject as an allegorical figure who both mirrors and destabilizes colonial authority. Postcolonial allegories, such as Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, create hybrid narrative structures that resist the binary logic of colonial allegory.

Reader-response approaches. Reader-response critics emphasize that the meaning of a symbol is not fixed in the text but is actualized through the act of reading. Wolfgang Iser argues that symbols create "gaps" that the reader must fill, and different readers will fill them differently. The allegorical text, with its double level of meaning, requires the reader to hold two frameworks simultaneously -- a demand that shapes the reading experience itself.

Historical Context [Master]

Allegory is one of the oldest literary techniques in the Western tradition. Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" (c. 380 BCE) uses the image of prisoners watching shadows on a wall to represent the human condition in relation to knowledge and reality. This allegory has shaped Western philosophy for over two millennia.

In the medieval period, allegory became the dominant literary mode. The fourfold system of biblical interpretation (literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical) meant that every text was read as operating on multiple symbolic levels. Dante's Divine Comedy (c. 1320) is the supreme achievement of medieval allegory, with its journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise functioning simultaneously as a literal narrative, a spiritual allegory, a moral guide, and a prophetic vision.

The Renaissance saw a split. Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590-96) continued the medieval allegorical tradition, but Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists moved toward symbolism rather than systematic allegory. Ben Jonson's "allegory" objection to Shakespeare -- that he lacked "art" in the classical sense -- reflects a tension between the older allegorical mode and the newer symbolic mode.

The Romantic poets rejected allegory in favor of symbol. Coleridge's distinction in The Statesman's Manual (1816) between allegory (a mechanical translation of abstractions) and symbol (an organic participation in the reality it represents) was enormously influential. Symbolism was elevated; allegory was demoted.

The late nineteenth-century Symbolist movement in France (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme) pushed the symbol to the center of poetic practice, seeking to evoke rather than state, to suggest rather than explain. This movement influenced modernist poets like T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.

In the twentieth century, allegory was rehabilitated. Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) recovered the Baroque allegorical tradition. Postmodernism embraced allegory as a mode appropriate to a world of signs, simulations, and appropriated meanings. Fredric Jameson's argument that all narrative is ultimately allegorical restored the technique to critical respectability.

Bibliography [Master]

• Abrams, M.H. and Harpham, G.G. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 11th ed. Cengage, 2015.
• Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. Hill and Wang, 1974.
• Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. Verso, 1998.
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Statesman's Manual. 1816.
• Cuddon, J.A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 5th ed. Wiley, 2013.
• Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Cornell UP, 1964.
• Honig, Edwin. Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory. Northwestern UP, 1959.
• Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Cornell UP, 1981.
• Quilligan, Maureen. The Language of Allegory. Cornell UP, 1979.
• Todorov, Tzvetan. Theories of the Symbol. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cornell UP, 1982.
• Whitman, Jon. Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique. Oxford UP, 1987.