Definition
A type of narrative in which the surface story reflects at least one other meaning. Traditional allegory frequently employs personification, the use of human characters to represent abstract ideas. Medieval morality plays were allegories in which abstractions such as Mankind, Good Deeds, Penance, and Death appeared as characters.
Another type of allegory uses the surface story to refer to historical or political events and persons. Jonathan Swift's Tale of a Tub (1704), for example, provides a satirical allegory of the Reformation. In his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye distinguishes between a continuous allegory, such as The Faerie Queene (1590–96), which maintains the allegorical meaning throughout the narrative, and intermittent allegory, such as in The Scarlet Letter (1850), where it "may be picked up and dropped at pleasure."By the 19th century, allegorical technique had begun to fall from favor. Symbolism, another method of representing an alternative meaning, became the preferred form. Symbolism and allegory sometimes overlap, but there is an important distinction between the two. A symbol bears a natural relation to the events of the story: the whale in Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851) is both a whale and a mysterious force. In allegory, the surface story is often an arbitrary excuse for the secondary meaning.As a result, in the age of modernism symbolism came to be preferred to the seemingly antiquated technique of allegory. More recently allegory has made a comeback, in theory if not in practice: deconstruction argues that the arbitrary quality of allegory is an accurate reflection of the character of language itself. That is, deconstructionists see the idea of a "natural" relation between a word and the object to which it refers as a comforting illusion. For them, the reality is closer to that depicted in allegory.An additional use of the term is as the second of the four levels of meaning in medieval exegeses of biblical and literary texts.
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