Allegory in Enlightenment Britain: Literary Abominations [1st ed. 2022] 3031190351, 9783031190353

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Allegory in Enlightenment Britain Literary Abominations

Jason J. Gulya

Allegory in Enlightenment Britain “Jason Gulya’s Literary Abominations makes a fresh and insightful contribution to the ongoing scholarly retrieval of allegory in the long eighteenth century. Surveying a wide range of both literary and critical writings of the period, Gulya argues thoughtfully and persuasively that the critiques of allegory in the British Enlightenment paradoxically led to the reinvention and revitalization of allegory through the dissection of allegory into component parts that could be blended with other genres. This book will become a key study of a vital moment in the story of how allegory has survived and thrived into the present day as an effective mode of representing hidden realities.” – David Parry, Lecturer of English at University of Exeter “Jason Gulya’s Allegory in Enlightenment Britain: Literary Abominations provides a fresh and intelligent intervention into the received history of allegory. The book argues persuasively that, rather than destroying the allegory, British Enlightenment writers transformed the form into one that is linked meaningfully to its history and also adaptable to a constantly changing present and future.” – Kirsten T. Saxton, Professor of English at Mills College at Northeastern University “Offering a fresh, nuanced reading, Jason Gulya argues that the death of allegory during the Enlightenment has been greatly exaggerated. He illustrates how writers adapted allegory, a genre he sees as supple enough to accommodate the new and experimental ways of understanding the world that characterizes Enlightenment thinking and writing.” – Sharon Harrow, Professor of English at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania. “Allegory in Enlightenment Britain takes yet another step forward in the advancing recovery of allegory’s long-disavowed modern history. In a deft account of literary allegory’s progressive and decisive transformation by British Enlightenment writers, it offers not only a compelling reminder that allegory survived its presumed Enlightenment demise, but also a close, yet broadly-illuminating account of precisely how literary allegory changed and adapted during this crucial period of generic attack. More than simply providing scholars of the period and context with a valuable resource,  Allegory in Enlightenment Britain  offers a significant contribution to our understanding of how modern allegory evolved.” – Matthew S. Buckley, Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University

Jason J. Gulya

Allegory in Enlightenment Britain Literary Abominations

Jason J. Gulya English Department Berkeley College Woodland Park, NJ, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-19035-3    ISBN 978-3-031-19036-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19036-0 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Book Summary

Allegory in Enlightenment Britain: Literary Abominations revises the history of allegory as we know it. Accepted wisdom says that the Enlightenment ruined allegory by making readers and writers more empirical, more secular, than ever before. This wisdom oversimplifies not only allegory but also the effects of empiricism and secularization. This book takes a different approach. It argues that British Enlightenment writers attempted to save allegory by dissecting it in two senses of the word. The first form of dissection was properly scientific and passive: they analyzed earlier allegories with the rigor of a scientist examining a specimen under a microscope, confident that doing so would tell them how to revitalize the form for their increasingly empirical readership. The second form was more active and sometimes bordered on being downright Frankensteinian: writers broke up allegory into parts and combined them with other genres. This dissection ran the risk of producing literary abominations, composites of disparate elements that appeared to violate agreed-­ upon rules for what types of literary forms writers could combine and why. These abominations could turn away and even horrify readers. Using a broad range of examples, this book argues that British Enlightenment writers attempted to save the literary genre by unmooring components of allegory from their original genre, modifying and mode-ifying allegory in a way that made it conducive to innovation and experimentation. In so doing, they transformed allegory into a form that early modern writers could hardly have imagined. Allegory in Enlightenment Britain challenges long-held assumptions about what allegory is capable of by tracking the period’s use of allegory v

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as both a distinct genre and a mode that writers could combine with other modes. The march toward literary modernity lies not in rejecting the forms of the past but in retooling those forms for ever-changing audiences.

Acknowledgments

This book took almost ten years to write. When I began researching the project, I was a 26-year-old graduate student. By the time I finished the book, I had graduated, completed a postdoctoral fellowship, gotten married, secured a professorship, bought a house, become a parent, and lost a parent. Suffice it to say, throughout the course of writing this book, I became practically a different person. Along the way, I became indebted to so many individuals. Listing all of the people who somehow shaped me or this book would be a fool’s errand. Doing so would produce another book in and of itself. But I will attempt to mention those individuals whose roles in the final creation of the book were the most salient. If you find your name missing below, please do not take it as a slight. Take it as a result of my own insufficiencies. As a graduate student, I had some of the best models I could hope for. Michael McKeon’s guidance and intellect are sprinkled everywhere. I will never be able to thank him enough or pay him back for everything he did for me. His mentorship and friendship changed my life. Lynn Festa is one of the most supportive, constructive intellects I have ever worked with. Whenever I showed her a version of a chapter or talked about the project more generally, I came away with new ideas. Ann Baynes Coiro also helped every step along the way, offering sage advice about how to move forward and, sometimes, how to approach the project differently. I also want to pause and mention someone I have never met in person but who played a major role in the final version and, on a somewhat smaller level, was a star of my dissertation defense. Upon receiving the final vii

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version of my dissertation, Jayne Elizabeth Lewis wrote up a six-page evaluation of the project, its scope, and how I could revise it into a book. She provided my dissertation committee and me with a document we could refer to throughout the defense. And more importantly, she helped spark the ideas that would eventually become this book. While at Rutgers, I became deeply indebted to many professors, administrators, staff members, and graduate students. I want to make special mention of Colin Jager, Carolyn Williams, John Kucich, Ann Jurecic, Abigail Zitin, Matthew Buckley, Richard Miller, Stéphane Robolin, Thomas Fulton, William Galperin, Martin Gliserman, Christopher Iannini, Gregory Jackson, Stacy Klein, Meredith McGill, Evie Shockley, Kurt Spellmeyer, Henry Turner, and Rebecca Walkowitz. And those are just the professors! I would also like to mention a few graduate students who helped shape my thinking and life as a graduate student: Torleif Persson, Isaac Cowell, Nathan Peterson, Randalle Hughes, Brian Pietras, and Tyler Bradway. But honestly, listing all of the graduate students who helped shape me as a person would take up at least 20 pages. I would be remiss if I did not mention Cheryl Robinson and Courtney Borack, two of the most hard-working and passionate people I have ever met. Their dedication was truly remarkable, and is one of the reasons I made it through graduate school. I currently teach at Berkeley College and am honored to work with many inspiring faculty members and staff. I am particularly grateful for the friendship and support of Pattie Cowan, Richard Schultz, Julie Porter, Gregory Hotchkiss, Hui-Wen Tu, Donald Kieffer, Ronald Boswell, James Pacello, Jennifer Moschella, Laura Harste, and Kirk Johnson. I am also incredibly thankful for the anonymous readers at Palgrave Macmillan, who provided detailed, constructive feedback on the original manuscript. You undoubtedly improved the book. I want to thank everyone in my family who put up with me as I completed this decade-long project. My three brothers and parents are a constant source of joy and support. And Cecilia, I wish the world had given you more time. Lastly, I am forever grateful for my wife and son. Debra is my rock. Theo is my inspiration. She is my how. He is my why.

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Sections of Chap. 5, on Johnson’s analysis of Milton’s Paradise Lost, were originally published in Literary Imagination (Oxford University Press) as “Johnson on Milton’s Allegorical Persons: Understanding Eighteenth-Century Attitudes Toward Allegory.” I am thankful for Oxford University Press’s permission to reprint sections of that article here.

Contents

1 Introduction:  How the British Enlightenment Transformed Allegory 1 2 How  Bunyan’s Anxieties about Allegory Sparked a Culture of Experimentation15 3 How  Dryden Created an Abomination that Would Haunt the Next Century35 4 How Prose Experiments Dissected Allegory53 5 How Critics Retrofitted Rules for Allegory75 Some Concluding Remarks95 Index97

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: How the British Enlightenment Transformed Allegory

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict. – Saul Alinsky (1971, 21).

Scholars have long understood the Enlightenment as anti- or post-­ allegorical. In Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory, Edwin Honig argues that Enlightenment empiricism led allegory into a “literary dead end” (1957/1982, 39). Michael Murrin agrees. He contends that allegory died around 1660 (1969, 199–212; 1980, 173–96). Moreover, in The Ruins of Allegory (1998), Catherine Gimelli Martin writes that John Milton’s Paradise Lost is the meta-allegory to end all allegories, ultimately showing that allegory is on the verge of becoming a nonviable literary form. According to this line of thought, allegory was dead by the 1670s, and later examples of allegory are last-ditch efforts to revive a form that was just about to flatline. The scholar Marilyn Francus, for instance, contends that the “abandonment of allegory…began in the seventeenth century with the rise of empiricism” (2012, 41). Only relatively recently have scholars begun to recover from the myth of allegory’s demise. In Reinventing Allegory (1997), Theresa Kelley focuses on how Romantic writers reformulated allegory for a new readership. In The Persistence of Allegory (2007), Jane K.  Brown looks at the continuing relevance of allegorical personifications on the stage up until © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Gulya, Allegory in Enlightenment Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19036-0_1

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Richard Wagner. In The Vitality of Allegory, Gary Johnson points out that “critics have never quite managed to retire allegory” and that the form remains relevant today (2012, 2). This work has freed us from the notion that allegory stopped being important or aesthetically valuable shortly after the early modern period. These books encapsulate the evolution of scholars’ position on allegory during the eighteenth century. Scholars have shifted from characterizing the Enlightenment as anti-allegorical to leaving it out of allegory’s story altogether. Even if this work counteracts the idea that empiricism killed allegory, it advances the myth that the literary form simply survived the period from 1660 to 1770. The assumption is that writers might not have “managed to retire allegory,” but this was despite their best efforts. This assumption has created a blind spot. Little has been written about just how pivotal allegory is to the Enlightenment and how pivotal the Enlightenment is to the history of allegory. Scholars typically skip over what Brown has called “the most difficult and significant period in the history of allegory, the period in which allegory is believed to have disappeared but underwent a profound transformation” (2001, 643). For this reason, Kevin Cope calls allegory “the phantom of the opera of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholarship. It won’t go away, but neither will it come forward for inspection” (1993, xiii). The resulting gap is what Allegory in Enlightenment Britain is designed to fill. The book analyzes how allegory adapted to the cultural changes accompanying the Enlightenment, including the increasing dominance of the empirical worldview, the process of secularization, and the rise of the modern aesthetic. Limiting the discussion to the supposed death of allegory means missing the complexities of the Enlightenment’s engagement with one of the most pervasive and influential literary forms of earlier periods. It also means holding onto a notion of allegory as a rigid form that is ultimately irreconcilable with empiricism and secularism. Allegory is, in fact, far from rigid. Writers experimented with the form throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is more versatile than scholars often recognize.

The British Enlightenment Project: Breaking from the Past? Enlightenment thinkers saw themselves as freeing individuals from the bondage of received wisdom and authority (see Gottlieb, 2016, 238). In their minds, intellectual darkness dominated the past. The only way

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forward was to cast the light of knowledge onto the world, paving the way for a future that was more material, more socially conscious, more democratic, more human-centered, more secular, and more progress-driven. During the Enlightenment, cautious optimism was the default. Thinkers, writers, and individuals alike believed there were actionable ways to improve the here and now for everyone. No one embodied this spirit as much as Immanuel Kant, who wrote that: Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’—that is the motto of the enlightenment. (1784/1995, 1)

For Kant, enlightenment means liberating oneself from the direction of others—whether that direction is political, social, or religious—to rely on their self-directed reason. The individual courageously casts off the joint tyrannies of tradition, social pressure, religious authority, and political absolutism to usher themselves into a new age of maturity and knowledge. Kant gives voice to Enlightenment principles that had been circulating (and, in fact, dominant) for over 100 years. John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) boiled down to the idea that humans needed to think for themselves rather than relying on the authority of others or the traditions of the past. As C.S. Pierce put it in 1890, “Locke’s grand work was substantially this: Men must think for themselves” (254–5). Thinking for ourselves was a surefire way to push against the tyranny of the past. Since Locke and Kant, many scholars have complicated our ideas about the Enlightenment. In Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno home in on the dark side of Enlightenment thinking (1947/2007, xvii). Horkheimer and Adorno contend that Enlightenment individuals use reason and logic to dominate not only others but nature itself. The Enlightenment differed in its techniques and methodology. Still, the tendency to dominate by excluding specific lines of thought (anything deemed irrational) makes Enlightenment thought closer to mythology than previously recognized. Furthermore, Jonathan Israel argues that the Enlightenment is a multi-national battleground for radical and moderate versions of Enlightenment: these two models pushed and pulled

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against one another, fighting for dominance as the world became more secular and modern (2002, 7–8; 2009, 4; 2013, 1–4). Moreover, several scholars question the validity of “the Enlightenment” as a cohesive movement. J.G.A. Pocock contends that there were multiple enlightenments, each with its national character. In Volume 1 of Barbarism and Religion, Pocock writes that the Enlightenment “occurred in too many forms to be comprised within a single definition and history, and that we do better to think of a family of Enlightenments, displaying both family resemblances and family quarrels (some of them bitter and even bloody” (Pocock, 1999, 9). The Enlightenment is a constellation of concurrent movements that converge, diverge, and merge at various historical moments. Not only were there national iterations of the Enlightenment project, but each iteration comprised various models of Enlightenment and counter-enlightenment that vied for dominance. These iterations were local manifestations of a multi-national move toward modernity. Roy Porter has demonstrated that the British iteration of the Enlightenment project merits close attention. Despite the tendency of scholars to prioritize French and German models of enlightenment (such as Ernest Cassirer’s Francocentric analysis in The Philosophy of the Enlightenment), Britain played a leading role in producing and disseminating Enlightenment thought (Porter, 2001, 4; see Cassirer, 1932/2009). The British Enlightenment was well under way by the Glorious Revolution in 1688, a political manifestation of the questions abounding in philosophy and writing for decades. Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and others had already applied the materialism of the physical sciences to both scientific and non-scientific concerns. In doing so, they had established reason and experience as the arbiters of knowledge. The British Enlightenment had several key characteristics. For one, its resistance to received knowledge gravitated toward modern-day individualism. Individuals often assumed they were on their own to make sense of the world. They had become increasingly skeptical of knowledge they could not verify with empirical data, personal experience, or reasoning. Additionally, British Enlightenment writers prized semantic transparency. Bringing light to the world required being understood. Locke, for example, argued that everyone (philosophers included) must choose their words carefully to make their thoughts meaningful. Otherwise, “men’s language will be like that of Babel; and every man’s words being intelligible only to himself” (1689/1979, 456.) Semantic transparency was

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pivotal to the community-building at the heart of language itself (see Porter, 2001, 54). Violating that transparency would not only render the communicator ineffective but would isolate them from society. Enlightenment thinkers believed they could create a more inclusive, progressive intellectual community through transparent and open discourse. However, the idea of progress far outperformed its actual practice. Enlightenment thinkers aimed to create what Jürgen Habermas would later term “the public sphere,” which ostensibly functioned by bracketing personal identities in the interest of honest, open conversation (Habermas, 1989, 42). In truth, the bracketing was itself an expression of privilege. Those admitted into Enlightenment discourse were predominantly white, male, land-owning, and aristocratic. Moreover, anyone who desired to enter Enlightenment discourses needed to follow the criteria of Western empirical thought. Enlightenment “progress” was a tool for exclusion as much as it was for inclusion. For this reason, Frederic Jameson calls Enlightenment progress “the most pernicious pre-Marxist illusion” (Jameson, 2019, 213). Still, Enlightenment writers and thinkers were fully committed to the idea of progress. They believed breaking with the past was the only way to create a prosperous future (see Porter, 2001, 48; see also McKeon, 1987/2002, 21). Enlightenment writers doth protest too much. Despite their focus on novelty and the importance of breaking with received knowledge and tradition, they never achieved true liberation from the past. Instead, they incorporated that past into their everyday rituals and thought patterns, hiding and obscuring that past but never eliminating it (see Himmelfarb, 2004, 18–19, 38, 50–1). Secularization is a case in point. Many scholars point out that the secularization process, and the march toward modernity of which it is a part, was never inherently anti-religious. José Casanova proposes thinking about secularization as an ongoing process of differentiation: society gradually perceives “this world” (Earth) as fundamentally different from “that world” (Heaven). This world is then divided into religious and secular components (Casanova, 1994, 211–34). In this light, secularization was never about pushing against religious hermeneutics. It was about decentering it, opening up the possibility for other discourses that were not inherently religious. However, this process never rendered religion obsolete. Many aspects of political and social life pattern themselves after religious discourse. This is the core idea behind Carl Schmitt’s famous assertion that “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state

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are secularized theological concepts” (Schmitt, 1922/1985, 36). Modernity hides the past, taking it as patterns to adapt to new contexts and an ever-evolving worldview. I want to close this section with a quick clarification of this book’s terminology. One of the chief obstacles in writing about the Enlightenments is that they converge and diverge at various points. The British, French, and American Enlightenments (to name a few) stem from a multi-national movement, but they also differ in how they iterate that multi-national movement. Throughout this book, I will avoid slipping between the British Enlightenment (our primary concern) and the Enlightenment unwittingly. I will use the term “the Enlightenment” when I believe that a particular trend or action resulted from a larger, multi-national epistemological shift. I will use “the British Enlightenment” when I connect the trend or action to national developments. Sometimes, I will use the latter term because I am unsure and do not want to generalize about a multi-­ national phenomenon based on insufficient evidence.

Adapt or Die Much ink has been spilled on defining allegory. Rather than outlining the entire debate (which would take a book in and of itself), I will begin this section by laying out some of the most common, agreed-upon definitions of allegory and then placing them within the context of the British Enlightenment. Allegory is a form for speaking otherwise. Allegorical writers initially hide the meaning behind the text, encouraging readers to uncover that meaning for themselves. As Angus Fletcher writes, “allegory says one thing and means another. It destroys the normal expectation we have about language, that our words ‘mean what they say.’ When we predicate quality x of person Y, Y really is what our predication says he is (or we assume so); but allegory would turn Y into something other (allos) than what the open and direct statement tells the reader” (Fletcher 2). Honig makes a similar point when he describes allegory as a form of “dark conceit” or “dark rhetoric” (Honig, 1957/1982). Allegorical writers instruct their readers by keeping them in the dark, at least temporarily. What use could the Age of Enlightenment—whose central figures often branded themselves as bringers of intellectual light, truth-seekers and truth-speakers who prided themselves on their semantic transparency, and iconoclasts taking aim at tradition—have for allegory? Not only had the

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literary form been used for hundreds of years, but its central characteristic was hiding true meaning through dark rhetoric. At first glance, allegory seemed wholly incompatible with the spirit of enlightenment. It’s no surprise that scholars often assume that the Enlightenment killed allegory, or at least put it on life support. Enlightenment writers did indeed approach allegory as flawed by design. Some thought its reliance on rhetorical darkness made it incongruous with the age’s praise for semantic transparency. Others thought it simply outmoded. As Chap. 2 demonstrates, even a premier allegorist like John Bunyan had reservations about whether the form would resonate with Enlightenment readers as it did with Langland’s or Spenser’s. Add to these reservations the period’s search for new literary forms, such as the novel, and it would appear that the writing was on the wall for allegory. But that was far from true. Even a cursory search through eighteenth-­ century publications reveals that allegory never dies. Many texts could confidently be placed in the allegorical genre. Many examples—such as William Congreve’s Quadrille: An Allegory (1729) and Herbert Lawrence’s The life and adventures of Common sense: An historical allegory (1769)—have received little attention, even from scholars of the period. Others demonstrated a commitment to using allegory to reach diverse and sometimes still-emerging target audiences. For example, in The Adventures of the Six Princesses of Babylon; in their travels to the temple of virtue: an allegory (1785), Lucy Peacock attempted to use allegory to reach young readers and, in the process, created an early example of children’s literature. Alongside these lesser known allegories, the period also saw the publication of Alexander Pope’s adaptation of The Temple of Fame (1715), Samuel Johnson’s A Vision of Theodore (1748), James Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence (1748), and many romans à clef (a form that was itself an offshoot of political allegories). These texts hardly give a sense that post-seventeenth-century allegory had no future. That is counting only generic allegories. Expanding the search to modal allegory swells the number considerably. Even early examples of the novel—a form long understood as the bedrock of literal narrative—frequently used allegorical personifications. In The Adventures of David Simple (1744), Sarah Fielding delineates the parentage and moral characters of David and Daniel Simple. She spends the first few pages associating simplicity with moral purity. She then splits up the two brothers, making David’s simplicity into naivete and characterizing Daniel as “in reality one of those Wretches, whose only Happiness centers in themselves; and

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[whose] Conversation with his Companions had never any other View, but in some shape or other to promote his own Interest” (Fielding, 1744/1988, 8). Fielding transforms Daniel into the embodiment of non-­ simplicity, which amounts to unabashed self-interestedness. She sets up Daniel and David as personifications of simplicity but then disjoins them. In the process, she investigates the results of simplicity. It makes one character naive. It makes another character self-interested. We will look at the use of allegorical names in Enlightenment novels in more detail in Chap. 4. For now, it is sufficient to recognize that the abstractions of allegory were alive and well, even in the literary form noted for its verisimiliarity. Allegory in Enlightenment Britain reconciles two developments that appear to be mutually exclusive: the almost unanimous belief in allegory’s problematic nature and the continued use of allegory. The book argues that allegory’s death was a possibility that sparked experimentation with the form, not a reality. Enlightenment writers attempted to save allegory by dissecting it in two senses of the word. The first form was relatively passive: writers and critics analyzed earlier allegories with the rigor of a scientist examining a specimen under a microscope, confident that doing so would tell them how to revitalize the form for their increasingly empirical readership. This form of dissection further solidified allegory as a distinct genre with a unique modus operandi. The second form of dissection was more active. Writers broke that now distinct genre of allegory into its parts and experimented with combining those parts with those of other genres. Writers incorporated elements of allegory into their works, regardless of what genre they were working within. They helped popularize modal allegory (see Gulya, 2022, 149–55). This observation departs from most scholarship on allegory by suggesting that it can function as a genre, a mode, or something in between. Fletcher argues that allegory is fundamentally a mode that cuts across genres (1979, 3). Maureen Quilligan, on the other hand, contends that it is a genre because it has a “pure strain” (1992, 27). Rather than defining allegory as one or the other, it is far more helpful to approach it as a flexible form with modal and generic iterations. As Northrop Frye points out, allegory functions on a continuum, ranging from the generic allegories of Dante, Spenser, Tasso, and Bunyan to a “freistimmige style in which allegory may be picked up and dropped again at pleasure” (1990, 90–1). Alistair Fowler similarly identifies allegory as a mode and genre (2002, 191–5). The British Enlightenment’s legacy was to push allegory toward the modal (or the freistimmige style, if we prefer Frye’s phrasing) side of the continuum.

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To be fair, modal allegory was nothing new. There were examples during the medieval and early modern periods of what Pamela Gradon calls “pseudoallegories” or what Mindele Treip calls “episodic allegory” (Gradon, 1971, 374; Treip, 1993, 4–6, 41). These texts use allegorical conventions without themselves being classifiable as allegories. Moreover, as Kenneth Borris points out, medieval and early modern allegories sometimes indiscriminately mixed literal and allegorical modes (2000, 77–8). What changed during the Enlightenment was that modal allegory became both the dominant use of the form and a source of potential disruption. If Gordon Teskey is correct that “The critical discussion of allegory as a distinct genre, rather than as a rhetorical figure, began in the Enlightenment,” then the development had a corresponding effect on modal allegory (1997, 98). Thanks to the further solidification of generic allegory and the Enlightenment’s drive toward the concrete and empirical, modal allegory now generated a pull that writers needed to reconcile with the pull of the larger narrative. Unlike in the medieval and early modern periods, Enlightenment writers operated under the assumption that mismanaging modal allegory could produce literary abominations, composites of disparate parts that appeared to violate agreed-upon rules for what kinds of literary forms could be combined and why. Modal allegory could not lead to abominations in the medieval and early modern periods precisely because it was not until the Enlightenment that the rules for allegory became explicit. Before there could be the threat of creating literary abominations out of literal and allegorical modes, there needed to be expectations for what allegory was supposed to be. Dr Frankenstein’s monster is an abomination because it is composed of the body parts of the deceased. Likewise, Bunyan’s Apollyon is “hideous to behold” because it is part fish, part dragon, part bear, and part lion. Enlightenment writers wrestled with a literary equivalent in their experiments with modal allegory. Modal allegory now produced seams that writers needed to hide from readers. Otherwise, the mix of literal and allegorical modes ran the risk of making the overall combination of disparate parts at the expense of the narrative’s consistency and subjecting the text to derision. The literary stakes could not have been higher. Because of this risk, writers used their problem-solving skills to develop creative workarounds. The solutions Enlightenment writers created are testaments to human ingenuity. Some writers fully encased miniature allegories in dream visions, thus separating those allegories from the narrative’s literal level. Others relegated personified abstractions to the

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non-material world, permitting them to serve as tableaux but not interact with literal characters. Still others allowed abstractions to have material existences so long as they were limited to minor narrative arcs. The techniques were diverse and often surprising. Modal allegory is more than proto-Romantic symbolism. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), Walter Benjamin contends that the Romantic period established symbolism over allegory as the preferred figurative form. Below is how Bainard Cowan parses out Benjamin’s distinction between allegory and Romantic symbolism: Furthermore, the symbol’s claim is made in bad faith, because it is born out of the very consciousness that—for the first time as a widespread cultural phenomenon—experienced the pervasiveness of that gap [between abstract ideas and concrete phenomena]. Benjamin’s exposition implies that the Romantic symbol is an artificial isolation of the nostalgic impulse within allegory, a desire for being that grew out of the consciousness of this ontological gap was awakened. The symbol, with its hallmark of unity, arose from the mentality that could not tolerate the self-combating tension, the Zweideutigkeit within allegory—the tension, however, characterizing human life. (1981, 111–2)

Early modern allegory rested on the convergence of the abstract and the concrete. The Enlightenment then forced individuals to recognize the “ontological gap” between the two, unsettling one of the primary assumptions behind allegory. It swapped out the unity of a cosmological worldview that finds the abstract in the concrete for a more empirical, chaotic worldview where the abstract and concrete are distinct levels of experience. Romantic symbolism attempts to recapture the now lost promise of converging the abstract and concrete, harkening back to a pre-­ Enlightenment mindset. Romantic symbolism promised to return something that the Enlightenment’s secularization process took away. Though this promise proved to be a lie, what matters for Benjamin is the effort of commingling the abstract and the concrete within a single, internally consistent narrative. For this reason, Benjamin argues that symbolism attempts to recapture the “nostalgic impulse within allegory,” an impulse that the Enlightenment exposed as problematic and even naïve. Modal allegory offered no such lie. Instead of suggesting that we could momentarily return to an earlier mindset, it brought attention to how pervasive the “ontological gap” was between the abstract and the concrete. Whereas the

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Romantic symbol complements the text’s single unified narrative, the Enlightenment’s modal allegory reserved the right to disrupt the text because it retained traces of its natural genre. Modal allegory’s virtue, paradoxically, lay in its post-Enlightenment artificiality. Readers, like writers, had begun to feel distanced from non-empirical writing. This was a significant change. The Enlightenment made modal allegory dominant over generic allegory. Well into the early modern period, generic allegory brought a degree of reverence. But now, as a mode, allegory could be used as a source of humor, a tool for satire, a shortcut for character development, or for any other purpose the writer could imagine. The literary form had fallen from up high, making it more conducive to adoption by future writers. Modal allegory came into close contact with existing and emerging practices associated with particular genres. Those genres had their own constantly evolving ways of structuring temporality, space, and agency. The main questions facing Enlightenment writers concerned not how to push against or reject allegory in favor of more literal modes but how to manage the different modes within individual texts. Should writers separate the literal and allegorical modes from one another and, if so, how should they do so? How could writers use components of allegory to further their purposes even if those purposes differed from those of medieval and early allegorists? These questions aligned with what was happening during the Enlightenment. Adapting traditional forms for the eighteenth century often entailed separating what medieval and early persons conceived as wholes into their components (see McKeon, 1987/2005, xxiv-v, 4, 15). For literature, one of the effects of the British Enlightenment was that it broke traditional genres—previously conceived as wholes—into parts so that writers could consider those parts separate from their original overarching structure. Writers then recombined the resulting parts with parts of other genres, creating innovative literary mixtures. The ongoing fragmentation and recombination of previously whole genres is a widespread process that transformed traditional literary forms such as pastoral, romance, and satire during the eighteenth century. Michael McKeon argues for the continuity of pastoral during the eighteenth century and brings our attention to how writers transvalued the form for their readers rather than abandoning it (1998, 267–89). Romance, similarly, did not die despite savage critiques of the form by seventeenth- and eighteenth-­ century writers. Writers frequently treated these ostensibly outmoded forms as modes that could be used intermittently for artistic effect.

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The same can be said about allegory during the British Enlightenment. As Britain moved further from what David Rosen and Aaron Santesso call “allegorical culture,” writers approached allegory not as an obsolete genre but as a literary form that could be modified and combined with other literary forms in surprising and creative ways (2008, 11–24). The result was a form of allegory that medieval and early modern writers could hardly have imagined.

References Alinski, Saul. 1971. Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. New York: Vintage Press. Borris, Kenneth. 2000. Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Jane K. 2007. The Persistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Brown, Jane K. 2001. “Reinventing Allegory by Theresa Kelley: Review.” Modern Philology 98: 640-5. Casanova, José. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Cassirer, Ernest. 2009. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published in 1932) Cope, Kevin. 1993. Enlightening Allegory: Theory, Practice and Contexts of Allegory in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. New York, NY: AMS Press. Cowan, Bainard. 1981. “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory,” New German Critique 22 (1981): 109-22. Fielding, Sarah. 1988. The Adventures of David Simple. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press. Fletcher, Angus. 1979. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Fowler, Alistair. 2002. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Francus, Marilyn. 2012. Monstrous Motherhood. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Frye, Northrop. 1990. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gottlieb, Anthony. 2016. The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation. Gradon, Pamela. 1971. Form and Style in Early English Literature. London, Methuen, Inc.

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Gulya, Jason. 2022. “[C]onsigned to a Florida for tropes’: Theorizing Enlightenment Allegory.” Allegory Studies: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. Vladimir Brljak. New York, NY: Routledge. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Himmelfarb, Gertrude. 2004. The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments. New York, NY; Alfred A. Knopf. Honig, Edwin. 1982. Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory. Brown University Press. (Original work published 1957) Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. 2007. Stanford University Press. (Original work published in 1947) Israel, Jonathan. 2002. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Israel, Jonathan. 2009. Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670-1752. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Israel, Jonathan. 2013. Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750-1790. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Jameson, Frederic. 2019. Allegory and Ideology. Brooklyn, NY: Vintage Books. Johnson, Gary. 2012. The Vitality of Allegory. University of Ohio Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1995. “What is Enlightenment?” The Portable Enlightenment Reader. New York, NY: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1784) Kelley, Theresa M. 1997. Reinventing Allegory: New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. Locke, John. 1979. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter Nidditch. New  York, NY: Oxford University Press. (Original Work publishing in 1689) Martin, Catherine Gimelli. 1998. The Ruins of Allegory: “Paradise Lost” and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McKeon, Michael. 2005. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. McKeon, Michael. 1998. “The Pastoral Revolution.” Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution. Ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N.  Zwicker. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Murrin, Michael. 1969. The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes Toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance. University of Chicago Press. Murrin, Michael. 1980. The Allegorical Epic: Essays in its Rise and Decline. Pierce, C.S. 1890. Nation 51: 254-55. Pocock, J.G.A. 1999. Barbarism and Religion Volume One: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764. Cambridge University Press. Porter, Roy. 2001. The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. Quilligan, Maureen. 1992. The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Rosen, David and Aaron Santesso. 2008. “Swiftian Satire and the Afterlife of Allegory.” Swift’s Travels: Eighteenth-Century British Satire and Its Legacy. Ed. Nicholas Hudson and Aaron Santesso. New  York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political Theology: Four Concepts on the Concept of Sovereignty. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1922) Teskey, Gordon. 1997. Allegory and Violence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Treip, Mindele Anne. 1993. Allegorical Poetics: The Renaissance Tradition to “Paradise Lost.” Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

CHAPTER 2

How Bunyan’s Anxieties about Allegory Sparked a Culture of Experimentation

John Bunyan published his allegories between 1678 and 1684, securing his place in literary history not long before his death in 1688. During these six years, he published The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), The Holy War (1682), and The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Second Part (1684). To date, Bunyan remains one of the most famous purveyors of the form. The Pilgrim’s Progress is still one of the most widely read stories globally, and writers continue to adapt it for various mediums. In 2011, Scott Cawthon released a videogame based on the text. As recently as 2019, Robert Fernandez directed another Pilgrim’s Progress film. Because of the sheer fame of Bunyan’s allegories, scholars often lost touch with how anxious he was about the literary form. Taken as a whole, his body of work paints the image not of a person confident that allegory would speak to his readers, but of someone who felt that allegory was a flawed form he needed to save for a new generation. In other words, one of the most famous purveyors of allegory was an apologist. Bunyan’s stance as an apologist is a direct response to the pressures the British Enlightenment was putting on allegory. His belief in allegory’s problematic nature sparked innovation rather than abandonment. He remained confident that the Christian allegorical tradition could be reinvented for a readership expecting more and more empirical detail.

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The first section of this chapter covers Bunyan’s anxieties about allegory, as they work themselves out in his paratexts and the allegories themselves. The second section covers how those anxieties drove him to experiment with the form. Concerned that allegory was on its way to becoming a relic of the past, Bunyan kicked off a culture of innovation around the form. Allegory needed to adapt or die.

Bunyan the Apologist The paratextual materials included in the two parts of The Pilgrim’s Progress are remarkable windows into the thoughts of the period’s premier allegorist. To the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress Bunyan adds “The Author’s Apologist for His Book,” along with the concluding poem that further clarifies his use of allegory. Then, to the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress he appends “The Author’s Way of Sending Forth His Second Part of the Pilgrim.” Together, these paratextual materials constitute what William Tindall has called Bunyan’s “miniature essays” on allegory and what U. Milo Kaufmann has called an “aesthetic brief” (see Tindall 1934, 43; Kaufmann 1966, 8). In this section, I will argue that Bunyan situates himself as an apologist in the modern sense of the word. He clarifies his use of allegory by drawing attention to its positive and negative attributes: he uses it despite its glaring problems. He embraced the lie about allegory’s impending demise at the same time that he used it. Bunyan begins his apology to The Pilgrim’s Progress by casting himself as an unwitting allegorist who gets caught up in his writing process while working on another project. On the verge of finishing The Heavenly Foot-­ man (1698, published posthumously), he feels compelled to write an allegory. Scholars often dismiss the apology as disingenuous. To be fair, Bunyan merely mimics the self-deprecation typical of medieval and early modern writers who credit divine inspiration (whether through God or the muses) for their literary works. Dismissing it too quickly, however, takes attention away from the extraordinary complexity of Bunyan’s self-­ description as a writer who ultimately decides to complete a tangential book project to protect his current one: When at first I took my Pen in hand,Thus for to write; I did not understand That I at all should make a little Book In such a mode; Nay, I had undertook

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To make another, which when almost done, Before I was aware, I this begun. And thus it was: I writing of the Way And Race of Saints in this our Gospel-Day, Fell suddenly into an Allegory About their Journey, and the way to Glory, In more than twenty things, which I set down; This done, I twenty more had in my Crown, And they again began to multiply, Like sparks that from the coals of Fire do flie. Nay then, thought I, if that you breed so fast, I’ll put you by your selves, lest you at last Should prove ad infinitum, and eat out The Book that I already am about. (1678/2008, 3)

It is easy to see why scholars read the apology as a harbinger of allegory’s decline. Bunyan presents The Pilgrim’s Progress as a tangential writing project threatening to take over his primary one. The allegory, once begun, practically writes itself. Bunyan’s ideas about how to put “the Way/And Race of Saints” into allegorical form soon “multiply,/Like sparks that from the coals of Fire do flie,” as if they get away from the writer. At this point, Bunyan apologizes for his chosen writing mode by depersonalizing it. Brenda Machosky begins an essay on The Pilgrim’s Progress by suggesting that we read the word “fell” from this passage “quite literally.” “The fall into allegory,” she writes, “is analogous to the fall from the realm of heaven and true light into the dark and profane world in which we live, implying that the fallen world is always already allegorical” (2007, 179). Her analogy is helpful. It links Bunyan’s statements about allegory to his cosmological worldview, presenting the practice of reading allegorically as looking beyond the material and literal. It also suggests that The Pilgrim’s Progress’s fallen nature is what qualifies it as a vehicle for spiritual meaning in a fallen world. Unlike printed sermons like The Heavenly Foot-man, the text will appeal to humans who have lost the ability to understand spiritual truth directly. Like humans, allegory is flawed.

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Later in the apology, Bunyan defends allegory against the common anxieties about teaching religion through fictional narratives by extending biblical hermeneutics to his text. He does so by staging a conversation between two speakers, the first of which embodies the contemporary anxieties toward allegory and the second of which defends allegory against those anxieties. But they [metaphors] want solidness: Speak man thy mind: They drown’d the weak; Metaphors make us blind. Solidity, indeed becomes the Pen Of him that writest things Divine to men: But must I needs want solidness, because By Metaphors I speak; was not Gods Laws, His Gospel-laws in older time held forth By Types, Shadows, and Metaphors? Yet loth Will any sober man be to find fault With them, lest he be found for to assault The highest Wisdom. No, he rather stoops, And seeks to find out what by pins and loops And Calves, and Sheep; by Heifers, and by Rams; By Birds and Herbs, and by the blood of Lambs; God speaketh to him: And happy is he That finds the light, and grace that in them be. (1678/2008, 5-6)

The bone of contention between the two opposing sides is the relationship between representation and content. For the first speaker, who prefers plain writing over figurative discourse, representing spiritual truths through a fictional narrative amounts to a lie. For the second, what matters is that the narrative is consistent with Scripture. The Pilgrim’s Progress has “solidity” as long as its meaning is in line with the word of God. This second argument, which wins out throughout the apology, hinges on the point that Scripture uses figurative tropes, including allegory. It vindicates allegory as a representational mode so long as it uses the similarities between its signifiers and signifieds to reinforce and emphasize the laws of Scripture. This section of the apology paints Bunyan not as a self-assured allegorist but as someone who felt like he needed to justify his use of allegory all along the way. The first speaker’s concerns are also his own. Bunyan worried intensely about whether allegory would even work for his audience because readers tended to approach it as mere fiction or, perhaps

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even more anxiety-producing, to misunderstand it. He responds to these worries by dovetailing his writing mode with the methodology of biblical hermeneutics, which relies on the infallibility of God’s word to encourage what Bunyan calls “stoop[ing].” Stooping involves a particular readerly temperament whereby readers suspend their criticism—because finding fault with the Bible would amount to “[assaulting]/The highest Wisdom”—and takes for granted that nothing is superfluous: all details, no matter how unnecessary they may seem, have a hidden meaning. It is a mode of clue-hunting that results from investing spiritual narratives with authority resembling the Bible. Readers are to look closely at how the details of Bunyan’s narratives figure forth spiritual concepts just as they look closely at the pins, loops, calves, sheep, heifers, rams, birds, herbs, and lambs of the Old Testament. Such a clue-hunting mindset is characteristic of traditional allegoresis, in which readers take humble positions on the text and understand mysteries resulting from humans’ limited capacity. According to Bunyan, part of the problem with allegories is that they rely heavily on their readers. He understood that allegories were compelling only if they convinced readers to perform their own interpretations. Readers must feel the desire “To study what those Saying should contain,/ That speak to us in such a Cloudy strain.” They need to take it upon themselves to search for meaning as diggers do for gold in the dirt or as people do for pearls in toads’ heads and oyster shells. In his various metaphors for how allegories function, Bunyan consistently puts the onus of interpretation on the readers rather than the writer. We saw this already in the logic of stooping, where readers treat the text’s details as clues to a hidden spiritual meaning. Allegories, if they are to “make truth to spangle, and its rayes to shine,” rely on rhetorical darkness to send readers on this interpretive journey (Bunyan, 1678/2008, 5). Allegory ideally puts readers in humble positions, convincing them to look through “things that promise nothing, [which] contain/What better is then Gold” (5). To produce spiritual light from rhetorical darkness, allegorists must lead their readers along—hinting at hidden meaning but not presenting it outright. This practice of hinting at meaning rather than stating it made allegories especially prone to misinterpretation. Bunyan ends The Pilgrim’s Progress with a poem that warns his readers to “take heed/Or Mis-­ interpreting: for that, instead/Of doing good, will but thy self abuse;/By mis-interpreting evil insues” (1678/2008, 155). For Bunyan, readers misinterpret allegorical texts when they “[play] with the out-side” of the story, failing to look inside it for the intended spiritual meaning (155).

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Here, Bunyan picks up on Spenser’s description of allegory as a “dark conceit” which, because of the covertness of its commentary, can be easily misunderstood (Spenser, 1590/2007, 714). This issue, which played out so conspicuously in the paratexts of The Pilgrim’s Progress, drives Bunyan’s literature even on the level of the page. Bunyan’s allegories include marginal glosses that impose certain kinds of interpretation on the readers. As such, they ward off misinterpretation by making connections for readers and aligning their interpretations with the writer’s intended meaning. Like the guides in The Pilgrim’s Progress that keep Christians from straying from God’s path, the glosses help prevent readers from “los[ing] their way” by guiding them toward correct interpretations. Bunyan describes the importance of his marginalia in The Holy War: Nor do thou go to work without my key, (In mysteries men soon do lose their way;) And also turn it right, if thou wouldst know My riddle, and wouldst with my heifer plough. The margent. It lies there in the window. Fare thee well, My next may be to ring thy passing-bell. (Bunyan 1682/1967, 6)

Here Bunyan works through one of the primary problems with allegory, which emerges from the imitative logic expressed in his apology to The Pilgrim’s Progress. Because allegories imitate the biblical practice of illuminating spiritual truth through the darkness of early similitudes, it is difficult to control their meanings. With these sidenotes, Bunyan borrows the spatial layout of the Geneva Bible and early modern devotional and allegorical texts to circumscribe the meanings of his allegories, demonstrating the kinds of connections readers should make without infringing on the narratives’ integrity. As Slights points out, since the medieval period, “The margins were conceived of as a space in which readers’ responses to a text could be influenced” (2001, 11). For Bunyan, in particular, sidenotes demonstrate how an allegoresis of his texts should proceed. Within a single passage, it was not uncommon for Bunyan to include a variety of different sidenotes: some drew attention to one-to-one correspondences; some generalized about the Christian experience; some simply summarized the plot; some uncovered references to the Bible; and so on.

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Bunyan took advantage of the sidenotes to address the problem with allegory’s darkness. He did not trust his readers to interpret according to his intended meaning, whether because they would willfully misinterpret the text or because he miscommunicated some concept. The vagueness central to allegory was its virtue and vice: it allowed the story to be delightful while instructive, but it also allowed readers to misunderstand it willfully. The form had problems, but it was far too valuable to eliminate from the writers’ toolbox. Soon after Bunyan died in 1688, printing marginalia to guide interpretation went out of style (see Slights, 2001, 250–1; Tribble, 1993, 131). Eighteenth-century editors prefer footnotes to glosses, perhaps because moving the notes from the side to the bottom of the page makes the distinction between the text and notations even more emphatic. Thanks to an emerging eighteenth-century aesthetic that privileges narrative consistency and imaginative transport, and an emerging focus on original genius, glosses are soon understood as unnecessary or harmful. Perhaps the most glaring example is when Penguin and Houghton Mifflin publish editions of The Pilgrim’s Progress without the glosses in the 1960s. Thorpe, the editor of the Mifflin edition, writes that they deleted the glosses to make the text “more readable” (Thorpe, 1969, xxiv). Kaufmann makes a similar point when he argues that The Pilgrim’s Progress presents a problem to “many modern readers…[who are] troubled by suspicions about the originality and wholeness of a work that so persistently points beyond itself” (1966, 25). In other words, Bunyan’s use of sidenotes to address one of allegory’s shortcomings was temporary and would not survive the eighteenth century. But it was not the only method that Bunyan used to save the form from itself. The following section will focus on his more lasting and innovative mark on allegory.

Bunyan the Innovator A close look at Bunyan’s paratexts and marginal glosses has proven that he consistently encourages his readers to look beyond the narratives’ literal levels to uncover their undergirding meaning. This process entails connecting the stories to moments in Scripture or generalizing about spiritual enlightenment. However, despite Bunyan’s claim in the conclusion of The Pilgrim’s Progress that readers should “throw away [the dross,] but yet preserve the Gold” throughout his writing, Bunyan demonstrates a profound

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investment in allegory’s literal level (1678/2008, 155). This much is clear from the abundance of scholarship on The Pilgrim’s Progress’s influence on the emerging novelistic form. As early as 1818, for instance, Coleridge writes that we read the allegory “with the same illusion as we read any tale known to be fictitious, as a novel, [and] we go on with his characters as real persons, who his neighbors had nicknamed” (1818/1936, 31). In 1927, Gwilym Griffith declared Bunyan “the first of our modern novelists” based on his use of concrete, verisimilar detail (228). Finally, in the most advanced study of the prehistory of the British novel, McKeon presents The Pilgrim’s Progress as an unusually literal allegory that anticipates many strategies of later novelists (1987/2002, 295–314; see also Frei, 1974, 51). If any lesson can be taken from this scholarship, it is that setting up allegories as mediators of spiritual truths (as Bunyan does) does not necessarily entail devaluing the narrative’s literal meaning. The enduring popularity of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which went through 160 editions by 1792 and continues to be read and taught in various contexts, is due to the concrete detail of its literal narrative (see Harrison, 1941, 73; Hofmeyr, 2003, 11–44). The concreteness of The Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the main differences between it and its medieval and early modern predecessors. It is why The Pilgrim’s Progress has remained such a powerful model for interactive, homiletic literature that draws readers into the protagonist’s situation (see Jackson, 2012, 235–7; 2013, 451–85). Less appreciated is that these comments could easily apply to Mr. Badman or The Holy War. In each of these narratives, Bunyan seeks to balance a concrete, literal diegesis with an allegorical purpose to gesture toward a pretext that validates the narrative. His use of marginal glosses is one way of achieving this balance: the citations from Scripture stand apart, reminding readers of the pretext while also allowing for the imaginative engagement which has caused numerous scholars to associate Bunyan’s allegories with the rise of the British novel. In The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Holy War, Bunyan draws his readers in by describing the events in rich, sensory detail and by depicting his characters more as individualized beings than as personified abstractions merely performing what Fletcher calls “fated actions,” which accord with the abstractions’ names (1979, 49). And Mr. Badman reads less like an anti-progress narrative, with a degenerate journeying toward Hell just as Christian journeys toward the Celestial City, than a composite of negative examples. Despite the implication of “fatedness” built into their names, Christian and Mr Badman exhibit an extraordinary degree of agency. As Christopher Hill observes,

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“One of the significant paradoxes of The Pilgrim’s Progress is that nevertheless one feels that the Pilgrim is making free choices all the time, deciding for himself” (1988, 209). This issue relates not only to Bunyan’s predestinarianism but also to his use of personifications. The Pilgrim’s Progress and Mr. Badman maintain the feeling of suspense and the possibility for spiritual growth by focusing on figures whose governing concepts are too broad, too all-encompassing, to provide readers with accurate barometers for what those abstractions will do next. Bunyan’s literary project is to intermingle the literal and the allegorical, drawing readers into his texts through engrossing, verisimilar detail, but ultimately showing the insufficiency of the literal (and the material) for depicting spiritual enlightenment. He resists the secularization of British culture, which had begun during the early modern period and which extended well into the nineteenth century. He delineates spiritual truths in material terms, subordinating the literal to the allegorical and demonstrating the need for the literal for spiritual instruction. The goal was to use allegory as a persuasive tool (see Parry, 2022, 161–200). In his allegories, Bunyan seeks to use the literal level without becoming overly invested in it. His project resembles St Augustine’s discussion in On Christian Doctrine (ca. 397–426) of how to “use” the physical world without losing sight of the spiritual one: To enjoy something is to cling to it with love for its own sake. To use something, however, is to employ it in obtaining that which you love....Suppose we were wanderers who could not live in blessedness except in home, miserable in our wandering and desiring to end it and return to our native country. We would need vehicles for land and sea which could be used to help us to reach our homeland, which is to be enjoyed. But if the amenities of the journey and the motion of the vehicles itself delighted us, and we were led to enjoy those things which we should use, we should not wish to end our journey quickly, and, entangled in a perverse sweetness, we should be alienated from our country, whose sweetness would make us blessed. (397/1958, I.iv.9-10)

Augustine and Bunyan seek to instrumentalize the material and literal without making them the central focus. For Augustine, there is great danger in treating the vehicles or travel itself as the desired destination. Doing so would cause travelers to wander without their original sense of purpose,

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“entangled in a perverse sweetness” because they have mistaken the vehicle for the tenor. Augustine’s discussion of using the material world for accessing the divine is an analogy for understanding what Bunyan is doing with his allegories. Bunyan continually asks readers to look beyond the literal levels of his narratives without discounting them. Like Augustine’s vessels that are necessary but not sufficient for the traveler to reach his homeland, the literal level of Bunyan’s stories appeals to the imaginations of seventeenth-­ century Christians, but to obtain spiritual enlightenment readers must understand the stories as dark texts with ulterior meanings. As demonstrated by Bunyan’s apology and concluding poem to The Pilgrim’s Progress, the danger is that readers will lose touch with the allegorical meaning and, by so doing, enjoy rather than use the literal level. Still, for Bunyan, using the literal level as a vehicle for spiritual meaning demands a real investment in that level. The Pilgrim’s Progress, in particular, is filled with scenes in which Bunyan draws readers into the literal narrative rather than consistently pointing them to the undergirding spiritual meaning. Perhaps the most famous scene, in this respect, is the fight between Christian and Apollyon. The American writer Royall Tyler satirizes the engaging nature of this scene when he has his protagonist, Updike Underhill, poke out Apollyon’s eyes with a penknife “to help Christian beat him” (1816, 26). Tyler’s satirical detail is consistent with what Bunyan is doing. Bunyan, that is to say, encourages the very imaginative transport and personal engagement that Underhill participates in so conspicuously. Rather than beating his readers over the head with heavy-­ handed didacticism, Bunyan consistently cultivates an intimacy between his readers and the literal text. Part of the point of Bunyan’s allegories lies in this intimate relationship: Bunyan enlivens and reinforces doctrine, using imaginary creatures and personified abstractions to explain and clarify various moments in Scripture. Behind Bunyan’s verisimilar allegories is a theological point. Individuals should perform an Augustinian utilization of their material world just as they should the surface-level details of Bunyan’s allegories. This worldview demands a calculated investment in the material components of the world without understanding those components as the be-all and end-all of our existence. The investment in the material is the crucial mechanism for spiritual teaching. This quasi-­material worldview emphasizes that all things, even the base ones used to usher in the divine, are mediums for spiritual truth.

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Such a utilization puts the material world and the literal level of an allegorical narrative in an analogous relationship. Bunyan seeks to convince his readers to look beyond the literal level of his stories just as they should look beyond their material surroundings to their spiritual significance. As Barbara A. Johnson writes, “The Pilgrim’s Progress is allegorical as a means of being mimetic, since its subject is a special kind of experience: the process of moving from one reality to another and therefore simultaneously the discovery of that other reality and a rediscovery of this one” (1989, 137). The Pilgrim’s Progress is mimetic in that it portrays the experience of encountering the material world as a medium for the spiritual. Like The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan’s other allegories encourage readers to simultaneously become engaged in and look beyond the narrative’s literal level, thereby imitating the doubleness central to the Augustinian utilization of the material world and getting his readers to question and rediscover their sense of reality. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, he suggests that readers should “read thy self” in the narrative, applying the story to their situations. Analyzing the scenes at the House of the Interpreter shows how this utilization works. Here, as James F. Forrest notes, Bunyan constructs an “allegory within an allegory,” where “the emblems are themselves allegories in miniature” (1989, 111). He follows Spenser’s practice of using houses—places where travelers learn about themselves—to illuminate the allegory’s meaning and self-consciously bring attention to the significance of allegorical figures (see Spenser, 1590/2007, I.x. and II.l.x). In The Pilgrim’s Progress, the central theme of Bunyan’s “houses” is interpretation itself. He describes seven emblems designed to teach Christian (and the reader) how to interpret allegory: a picture of Christ, holding the Bible and looking up at the Heavens; a dusty Parlor that represents the heart of man; a scene involving two personified abstractions, Passion and Patience, waiting for their rewards; a fire burning against a wall, with two persons (representing, respectively, the Devil and Christ) sprinkling water and oil upon it; a beautiful palace into which Christian gains admittance by fighting the guards; a man of despair, who tells his story to Christian while locked in an iron cage; and a man who constantly trembles because he has dreamt of Judgment Day and God’s wrath. For most of the emblems, Christian prompts the Interpreter to immediately assign meaning to the scene by asking the question “What means this?” or telling the Interpreter to “Expound this matter more fully to me” (1678/2008, 29–35). The question-and-answer structure keeps the Interpreter in control of his meaning; Christian rarely offers his interpretations, nor do the

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emblems stand on their own for long before having their hidden meaning revealed. In his first five explanations, the Interpreter proceeds by painstakingly laying out one-to-one correspondences between the emblems’ details and their intended meanings. Consider his explication of the parlor emblem: This Parlor, is the heart of a Man that was never sanctified by the sweet Grace of the Gospel: The dust, is his Original Sin, and inward Corruptions that have defiled the whole Man. He that began to sweep at first, is the Law; but She that brought water, and did sprinkle it, is the Gospel: Now, whereas thou sawest that so soon as the first began to sweep, the dust did so fly about, that the Room by him could not be cleansed, but that thou wast almost choaked therewith, this is to shew thee, that the Law, instead of cleansing the heart (by it working) from sin, doth revive, put strength into, and increase it in the *Rom. 7.6 soul, even as it doth discover and forbid it, for it doth not *I Cor. 15.56 give power to subdue. (1678/2008, 30-1) *Rom. 5.20

After being prompted by Christian, the Interpreter substitutes for the details of the image their spiritual equivalents: the Parlor is the heart of man; dust is original sin; the sweeper is the law; the woman sprinkling water is the Gospel. His function is similar to Bunyan’s sidenotes that match the stories’ details with their spiritual signifieds. His presence is evidence of Bunyan’s profound investment in directing allegorical interpretation while also leaving interpretation up to his readers. As an analogy for allegorical reading, the parlor emblem serves as a model. It demonstrates how a reader can invest themselves in a contrived situation to the extent that the person’s emotional and physical response becomes a signifier in and of itself. The Interpreter incorporates Christian’s physical reaction to the dust—above all, a material substance—into his explanation, understanding it as a signifier of the law’s inability to exonerate man from sin. To follow the Interpreter’s explicatory method, that is to say, Christian would have identified himself as a major actor in the allegory, ultimately decreasing the distance between himself and the miniature allegory which characterizes some of the other emblems (like the painting of Christ, the beautiful palace, and the allegorical figures who explain their own significance). This reading suggests that Bunyan is far from antagonistic toward the personally engaging nature of his allegories.

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On the contrary, he wants his readers to turn a critical eye on their own emotions and, by so doing, understand their physical and emotional reactions to the text as fundamental to its usefulness as a didactic tool. At the end of the parlor emblem, Bunyan cites Romans 7.6, 1 Corinthians 15.56, and Romans 5.20—all biblical passages that somehow concern the insufficiency of law for saving individuals from sin. A few lines later, after turning from law to spiritual purification, he cites John 15.3, Ephesians 5.26, Acts 15.9, and Romans 16.25 and 26. Bunyan’s scriptural glosses thematically link the narrative to the Bible, bringing attention to the spiritual lessons underlying the story’s logic. In John 15.3, for instance, Jesus tells his followers that they “are clean through the word I have spoken unto you.” Ephesians 5.26 discusses God’s ability to “sanctify and cleanse it [the soul] with the washing of water by the word.” The same process repeats throughout the scene at the Interpreter’s house: the Interpreter applies morals to his various scenarios while Bunyan shores up these moralizations with a sophisticated marginal apparatus. After taking Christian from the parlor, the Interpreter takes him to see Passion and Patience. Patience receives a bag of treasure but soon spends all his money and becomes destitute with only rags for clothing. Patience waits until the afterlife to receive his treasure, making him wealthy forever, for “he therefore that hath his Portion first, must needs have a time to spend it; but he that has his Portion last, must have it lastingly” (1678/2008, 32). In the margins, Bunyan associates the Interpreter’s language with that of Luke 16, which covers the economic reversal of Dives and Lazarus. Like the parlor emblem, the scene with Patience and Passion is a conspicuously contrived situation that reinforces and intensifies lessons from Scripture. The House of the Interpreter scenes highlight one of the paradoxes of late seventeenth-century allegory, which Bunyan runs up against repeatedly. Though Bunyan patterns his miniature allegories on the dark speech of Scripture, his emblems are effective means of instruction because the Interpreter is present at the scene to make the intended meanings known and prevent Christian from applying his interpretations without guidance. The Interpreter’s emblems, like The Pilgrim’s Progress as a whole and Bunyan’s allegories in general, simultaneously withhold meaning and make it apparent. They are instances of “dark” speech that the Interpreter immediately decodes as the presiding authority. Even in the final two emblems where the Interpreter forbears from explaining their meaning, Bunyan allows the man of despair and the dreamer to describe the causes of their misery. Whether from the personified abstractions themselves or a

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presiding interpreter, these explanations are analogous to Bunyan’s sidenotes, as they work through the meanings of different allegorical moments. Bunyan’s allegories are about the necessity, but inherent insufficiency, of mediums for representing the divine, whether they be the material world or the literal level of a fictional narrative. They require a double vision whereby readers simultaneously pay close attention to superficial details and look beyond them to an ulterior spiritual meaning. Consider, again, Bunyan’s discussion of “stooping,” a form of close reading that looks beyond the literal level but also highly values the figures themselves. The Bible’s dark figures are inherently insufficient for imparting God’s meaning, not because of rhetorical missteps but because of the audience’s incapacity to understand God directly. The same logic obtains in Bunyan’s allegories, especially The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the narrative framework is a useful but insufficient means of describing the Christian experience. For this reason, Fish takes The Pilgrim’s Progress as the self-consuming artifact par excellence, a text that eats away at its foundational premise. “The illusory nature of the pilgrim’s progress,” he writes, “is a large part of Bunyan’s point, and the reader’s awareness of the problematics of the narrative is essential to his intention, which is nothing less than the disqualification of his work as a vehicle of the insight he pretends to convey” (1972, 224–5). Fish identifies Bunyan’s ambivalence toward his central conceit, which matches physical travel with stages in Christian’s spiritual development. In his paratext and sidenotes, Bunyan himself discusses the “problematics of the narrative” that Fish explains at length. To Fish’s account we can add those moments when Bunyan self-consciously disrupts the seeming equivalence between travel in the narrative and the acquisition of spiritual insight. Shortly after leaving the Interpreter, Christian encounters Formalist and Hypocrisie after they scale the wall to get to the path rather than entering through the Wicket Gate. Formalist and Hypocrisie respond, in unison, that “besides...so we get into the way, what’s matter which way we get in? if we are in, we are in: thou art but in the way, who, as we perceive, came in at the Gate; and we are also in the way that came tumbling over the wall: Wherein now is thy condition better than ours?” (1678/2008, 40). Christian responds by saying that he adheres to God’s rules while they “walk by the rude working of …[their] fancies” (40). The scene decouples Formalist and Hypocrisie’s, and potentially the reader’s, impulses to

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understand spatial progress within the narrative as synonymous with spiritual progress. Bunyan makes similar moves elsewhere in the poem, condemning pilgrims who follow the same path as Christian. To cite one more instance, toward the end of the narrative, Ignorance is cast down to Hell just as he arrives at the Gates of Heaven. The narrator observes, “Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the Gates of Heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction” (154). Pilgrims are always on the verge of damnation, no matter how far they have traveled. Bunyan muddies the typically closed, unchanging conditions of generic allegory by representing names as changing and negotiable. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian’s name used to be Graceless (47). And Mr By-ends rejects his name (without giving an alternative): “That is not my name, but indeed it is a Nick-name that is given me by some that cannot abide me, and I must be content to bear it as a reproach, as other good men have born theirs before me” (98). By making names somewhat changeable, Bunyan gives his personified abstractions the possibility for development and growth. Such a move is characteristic of Bunyan’s allegories. Perhaps his most profound reflection on the seemingly direct epistemological status of allegorical names—which appear to identify persons, places, and things exactly as they are—is in The Holy War. The allegory features a series of trials in which the clerk tries to discern whether individuals have sided with Diabolus or Emmanuel. The Diabolonians, who “love to counterfeit their names,” argue that they are virtues instead of vices (1682/1967, 148). Thus, Mr False-peace contends that his name is Mr Cheer-up; Mr Covetousness, Mr Good-Husbandry; Mr Pride, Mr Neat, or Mr Handsome. Consider Mr False-peace’s defense: Then said Mr. False-peace, ‘Gentlemen, and you now appointed to be my judges, I acknowledge that my name is Mr. Peace, but that my name is False-peace, I utterly deny. If your Honours shall please to send for any that do intimately know me, or for the midwife that laid my mother of me, or for the gossips that was at my christening, they will, any or all of them, prove that my name is not False-peace, but Peace. Wherefore I cannot plead to this indictment, for as much as my name is not inserted therein; and as is my true name, so also are my conditions. I was always a man that loved to live at quiet, and what I loved myself, that I thought others might love also. Wherefore, when I saw any of my neighbors to labour under a disquieted mind, I endeavoured to help them what I could, and instances of this good temper of mine, many I could give.’ (1682/1967, 143)

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As is usually the case with these trials in The Holy War, the defendant betrays himself throughout his speech. It becomes clear that Mr False-­ peace deserves his name for lulling others into a false sense of peacefulness and certainty despite the ongoing struggle between Diabolus and Emmanuel. But more important than this conclusion is that Bunyan explores the possibility that vices can masquerade as virtues—that the allegorical names of conceptual abstractions can be deceiving. Such a notion inverts the direct epistemology typically associated with allegorical names. In The Holy War, Bunyan puts the clerk and readers in the position of discerning the individuals’ names by listening to their speeches. He presents allegorical names as epistemological problems while embracing the underlying logic of allegorical names. The trial scenes ultimately reinforce the idea that conceptual abstractions can only perform “fated actions” or what we might call fated speech (which agrees with the figure’s name) but keep the clerk and the readers temporarily in the dark about the individuals’ actual names (Fletcher, 1979, 49). They waffle between two sides of a similar concept, highlighting the frequency with which individuals misidentify vices as virtues in the real world. The Pilgrim’s Progress provides a more subtle but more radical revision of fated actions. Christian’s actions are difficult to foresee. His governing concept is too big, too encompassing, to provide readers with an accurate barometer for what he will do next. Within a predestinarian framework, his actions are only coincidental to his salvation. Bunyan, then, presents Christian as a conceptual abstraction but not of the sort that merely performs predetermined actions and speech. He hardly seems like Fletcher’s obsessed persona or Steven Knapp’s self-absorbed agent, who only perform actions that explicitly align them with their governing concept to such an extent that they cancel out their agency. In Hill’s words, Christian demonstrates his ability to “[make] free choices all the time, deciding for himself,” a description that dovetails his complex status as an allegorical figure with his place within a predestinarian framework (1988, 209). Bunyan’s tweaks to allegory—the use of broad or vague abstractions and the self-reflexive critique of allegories’ central conceits—maintain a sense of suspense for readers, encouraging them to become invested in the literal narratives and the allegorical subtext (see Berger, 1998, 28–35). The point is not simply that allegory appeals to unenlightened readers who, like the young Bunyan described in A Few Sighs From Hell and Grace Abounding, are more interested in romances and chapbooks than theological treatises. The point is that Bunyan’s process of looking beyond

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allegories’ concrete, verisimilar detail resembles his proposed method for instrumentalizing the material world without idolizing that world as an end in and of itself. He wants to teach readers to avoid the over-­investment in materialism shared by Obstinate, Mr Worldly-Wiseman, and the attendants at Vanity Fair in The Pilgrim’s Progress. The strangeness of Bunyan’s narratives results from his commitment to poking at allegory. In various moments throughout The Pilgrim’s Progress, Mr. Badman, and The Holy War, Bunyan pushes against some of the most conventional assumptions of allegorical compositions to point to the insufficiency of his text. We might now return to Fish’s comment on The Pilgrim’s Progress with greater clarity. Fish, the reader will remember, argues that “the reader’s awareness of the problematics of the narrative is essential to his [Bunyan’s] intention, which is nothing less than the disqualification of his work as a vehicle of the insight he pretends to convey.” Fish is right insofar as Bunyan in no way suggests that The Pilgrim’s Progress, or any of his other allegories, neatly contains a roadmap for acquiring spiritual enlightenment. It is not the case, however, that Bunyan disqualifies his texts as instructive vehicles. Bunyan, on the contrary, suggests that allegory is the only way to reach readers. What Fish calls these texts’ “disqualification[s]” are, in truth, what Bunyan understood as their qualifications. Allegory’s distinct didactic advantage over sermons, that is to say, derives directly from its relationship to humans’ own fallen state. As fallen creatures, humans cannot understand God directly. God and his disciples must speak through similitudes, representing spiritual truth using material embodiments. The bone of contention between Fish and my chapter is whether the problematics of Bunyan’s allegories disqualify them as instructive vehicles, or whether the fallen nature of his allegories makes them particularly useful as means for reaching not only the saved but also the reprobate. In A Few Sighs From Hell, like in Grace Abounding, Bunyan uses his past reprobate nature to coax his listeners out of their sinful state. He recounts his encounter with Scripture as a young man: “[G]ive me a Ballad, a Newsbook, George on Horseback, or Bevis of Southampton, give me some book that teaches curious arts, that tells of old fables; but for the holy Scriptures I cared not” (Bunyan, 1672/1980, 333). There is ultimately little evidence that the problematics of Bunyan’s allegories—which he not only recognizes but actively draws attention to—make them any less useful as a pedagogical tool for enlightening his readers. Bunyan borrows conventions from early modern allegories and chapbooks, which had

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become so popular for middle-class readers, to appeal to a broad array of individuals. For Bunyan, allegories and romances are not necessarily a tool of Satan—though, as evidenced by some of his sidenotes, they certainly can be. For instance, in The Holy War, Bunyan writes that Mr Filth has an “odious nasty, lascivious piece of beastliness to be drawn up in writing.” He clarifies in the footnotes that, by this, he means “Odious atheistical pamphlets and filthy ballads and romances full of baldry” (1682/1967, 35). The trick is to use what is helpful about these pamphlets, which are noteworthy because of their popularity, and to retool it for spiritual purposes. The Enlightenment separated wholes into component parts. As emphasized by the work of Casanova, Sommerville, and Taylor, the secularizing process is one major component of this overall process. Modern modes of knowledge arise from the subjection of medieval and early modern modes of knowledge to vigorous analysis. This lengthy historical process is perhaps one of the most critical influences on the form that allegory eventually took by the eighteenth century. But Bunyan’s allegories are curious because they so actively push against this differentiation process by intermingling the literal and the allegorical, the secular and the spiritual, the mimetic and the imaginary. We should have trouble classifying texts like The Pilgrim’s Progress, Mr. Badman, and The Holy War because Bunyan exerts a great deal of energy, bringing what had been differentiated from one another back into conjunction. Perhaps the most influential aspect of Bunyan’s project is encouraging readers and writers to use whatever sources—even if they are material or imaginary—to further the advancement of God’s Truth. Bunyan wanted to appeal to a wide variety of readers, whether they were Christian or reprobate, and did not see any reason why writers should not use any artistic means necessary to teach truths represented in Scripture. In Bunyan’s hands, the rise of empiricism is not the death knell for allegory. It was a chance to innovate. Convinced that refusing to adapt allegory would mean its end, Bunyan adapted it by aligning it more closely with the period’s ever-increasing focus on the material as crucial to the spiritual signified. He saw allegory as a genre that could be both disrupted and disrupting. Writers could push the genre forward by questioning and revising its central assumptions. At the same time, writers could use allegories as counter-cultural instruments. Bunyan participates in the materializing direction of British culture to disrupt the secularization of that same culture. He opens up a future in which British persons invest themselves in the material. This investment did not need to be secular.

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Innovation calls long-held assumptions into question, disrupting traditional ways of thinking. Bunyan’s allegories are no different. They challenged some of the foundational principles of the literary genre, seeking a balance of empirical detail and theological abstraction. In doing so, they opened the floodgates. Others would follow suit, though their experiments would be wildly different. Enlightenment experiments with allegory would, indeed, become strange and sometimes even off-putting. In fact, just nine years after the publication of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Dryden would publish an allegorical poem so innovative, so disrupting, that writers and critics would lambaste it categorically. Innovation almost always produces resistance.

References Augustine. 1958. On Christian Doctrine. Trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. (Original work published 397) Berger, Benjamin Lyle. 1998. “Calvinism and the Problem of Suspense in The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Bunyan Studies: John Bunyan and His Times 8: 28-35. Bunyan, John. 2008. The Pilgrim’s Progress. New  York, NY: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1678) Bunyan, John. 1980. “A Few Sighs from Hell.” The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan. Ed. T.L. Underwood. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. (Original work published 1672) Bunyan, John. 1967. The Holy War. Ed. James F.  Forrest. New  York, NY: New York University Press. Bunyan, John. 1680. The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. London. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1936. “Lectures of 1818.” Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism. Ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fish, Stanley. 1972. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-­ Century Literature. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fletcher, Angus. 1979. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Forrest, James. F. 1989. “Allegory as Sacred Sport: Manipulation of the Reader in Spenser and Bunyan.” Bunyan in Our Time. Ed. Robert G.  Collmer. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press. Frei, Hans. 1974. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Griffith, Gwilym O. 1927. John Bunyan. London, UK: Hodder and Stoughton. Harrison, Frank Mott. 1941. “Editions of Pilgrim’s Progress.” Library 4th ser., XXII: 73-81.

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Hill, Christopher. 1988. A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church, 1628-1688. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hofmeyr, Isobel. 2003. The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jackson, Gregory. 2013. “The Game Theory of Evangelical Fiction.” Critical Inquiry 39: 451-85. Jackson, Gregory. 2012. “The Novel as Board Game: Homiletic Identification and Forms of Interactive Narrative.” The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Johnson, Barbara A. 1989. “Falling into Allegory: The ‘Apology’ to The Pilgrim’s Progress and Bunyan’s Scriptural Methodology.” Bunyan in Our Time. Ed. Robert G. Collmer. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press. Kaufmann, U.  Milo. 1966. The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Machosky, Brenda. 2007. “Trope and Truth in The Pilgrim’s Progress.” SEL 47: 179- 98. McKeon, Michael. 2002. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1987) Parry, David. 2022. The Rhetoric of Conversion in English Puritan Writing from Perkins to Milton. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. Slights, William. 2001. Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Spenser, Edmund. 2007. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A.C. Hamilton. New York, NY: Pearson Education Limited. (Original work published 1590) Thorpe, James Ernest. 1969. The Pilgrim’s Progress. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Tindall, William York. 1934. John Bunyan: Mechanick Preacher. New York, NY; Columbia University Press. Tribble, Evelyn B. 1993. Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Tyler, Royall. 1816. The Algerine Captive. Hartford, CT: Peter B. Gleason.

CHAPTER 3

How Dryden Created an Abomination that Would Haunt the Next Century

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. – Steve Jobs (1997)

John Dryden’s experiments with allegory were more political than religious. His Absalom and Achitophel (1681) was an ambitious political allegory paralleling the Exclusion Crisis in England with an episode from the Bible. Over the next ten years, Dryden would write a series of allegories paralleling contemporary political events with moments in history. Dryden co-wrote the dramas The Duke of Guise (1683) and King Arthur (1691), demonstrating an investment in paralleling contemporary with past events (see Wallace, 1969, 265; Pinnock, 2010, 55–81). Throughout the last twenty years of his life, Dryden demonstrated a penchant for producing allegories that justified his political interests. During this period of experimenting with allegory, Dryden wrote The Hind and the Panther (1687), a poem that was as bewildering for Dryden’s contemporaries as it has been for subsequent scholars. The poem generated acerbic criticism almost immediately. Charles Montagu and Matthew Prior point to the design of the poem as flawed, as it “[confounds] the Moral and the Fable together” (1687, Preface). About eighty years later, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Gulya, Allegory in Enlightenment Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19036-0_3

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Samuel Johnson would pick up on the same line of thought, objecting to the “original incongruity” of the poem, “for what can be more absurd than one best should counsel another to rest her faith upon a pope and council?” (Johnson, 1779/2010, vol. 21, 473). The Hind and the Panther was far from Bunyan’s internally consistent worlds. Instead of keeping the moral and fable separate—and, in the process, keeping the narrative’s explication an ulterior, unmentioned signified—Dryden worked that moral explicitly into the story. For Johnson, this produced an incongruity that marked the text as a massive literary failure. The difference between an allegory like The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Hind and the Panther is so stark that C.S. Lewis—who was such an admirer of Bunyan’s allegory that he would update it for his own The Pilgrim’s Regress (1939)—had this to write about Dryden’s poem: The Hind and the Panther...is full of ‘good things,’ but...what are we to say if not that the very design of conducting in verse a theological controversy allegorized as a beast fable suggests in the author a state of mind bordering on aesthetic insanity? The Hind and the Panther does not exist...It is not a poem: it is simply a name [for]...a number of pieces of good description, vigorous satire, and ‘popular’ controversy, which have all been yoked together by external violence. (1939, 8–9)

For Lewis, The Hind and the Panther is barely a poem since he defines a “poem” as an internally consistent, self-contained literary text. If this is a sin for literature in general, then it is doubly so for allegory. Allegories’ instructional capacity hinges entirely on their ability to initially draw readers into a literary universe and then reveal that universe’s subtext. Several scholars have taken a more positive approach to The Hind and the Panther. W.D. Christie calls the poem “the triumph of Dryden’s art” (1926, lx). In a more recent analysis of the poem, Margaret Doody writes that the poem is “the great, the undeniable sui generis poem of the Restoration era,” which “is its own kind of poem…[that] cannot be repeated (and no one has repeated it)” (1985, 80). Like Montagu, Prior, Johnson, and Lewis, Doody identifies the poem’s inconsistency as its main characteristic. But unlike previous writers, recognizing this inconsistency was an observation rather than an adverse judgment. This chapter takes these points about the narrative inconsistency of The Hind and the Panther seriously but places them within the context of British Enlightenment experiments with allegory. Even if the poem is the

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sui generis of the Restoration, it is also a product of its age. As I will argue, the poem is the closest the Restoration period ever came to producing a literary abomination out of mixing literal and allegorical modes. For most of the Enlightenment, the threat of creating an abomination was abstract. This poem showed writers and critics that it was a real possibility. The Hind and the Panther, a text frequently maligned and rarely studied, would haunt the rest of the Enlightenment.

Dryden the Political Allegorist To understand how Dryden would later produce the chief literary abomination of the period, we must look at his experiments with allegory up until that point. The most influential and innovative of these was Absalom and Achitophel. In this poem, Dryden follows many of his contemporaries in using allegory to parallel contemporary and past historical events. But he adds another layer. He encourages readers to identify the connections between the political situation in 1680s England and an event recounted in the Old Testament, and to place the two events in a typological relationship. In so doing, Dryden justifies his political theology by taking advantage of an interpretive pattern already endemic to bible studies. Dryden makes the political referents of Absalom and Achitophel apparent from the outset. He attaches a letter to the poem’s earliest printings, pointing out the historical parallels lest they escape the reader’s attention. He writes: Tis not my intention to make an Apology for my Poem: Some will think it needs no Excuse; and others will receive none. The Design, I am sure, is honest: but he who draws his Pen for one Party, must expect to make Enemies of the other. For, Wit and Fool, are Consequents of Whig and Tory: And every man is a Knave or an Ass to the contrary side. There’s a Treasury of Merits in the Phanatick Church, as well as in the Papist; and a Pennyworth to be had of Saintship, Honesty, and Poetry, for the Leud, the Factious, and the Blockheads: But the longest Chapter in Deuteronomy, has not Curses enow for an Anti-­ Bromingham. My Comfort is, their manifest Prejudice to my Cause, will render their Judgment of less Authority against me. (1681/1972, 3)

Dryden does not open Absalom and Achitophel by claiming that the poem rises above political controversy or depicts some universal truth. Instead, he positions it within the ongoing political strife over the English throne between the Whigs and Tories, during which time readers need to take the

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political name-calling needs with a grain of salt. The compliments and insults—“Wit,” “Fool,” “Knave,” and “Ass”—are politically motivated since they are “Consequents of Whig and Tory.” Dryden draws attention to the poem as a political argument, suggesting that he brings both praises and insults upon himself because he has “[drawn] his Pen for one Party.” Members of the opposing party, the Whigs, will oppose it not because of any lack of literary merit but because of its suggestions about the Exclusion Crisis and the politicians involved. With these lines, Dryden primes his readers to look for those suggestions. Toward the end of the letter to the reader, Dryden includes a not-so-­ hidden reference to how the relationship between David and Absalom in the poem represents a relationship between two real-life individuals. He writes, “Were I the Inventour, who am only the Historian, I shoud certainly conclude the Piece, with the Reconcilement of Absalom to David. And, who knows but this may come to pass?” (4). It is because of the hope of a reconciliation between David, Absalom, and Achitophel that “he [Achitophel] is neither brought to set his House in order, nor to dispose of his Person afterwards, as he in Wisedom shall think fit” (5). Dryden connects the open ending of his poem, in which David is restored to the throne after a lengthy speech, to his hope that the events in 1680s England will not continue to follow the pattern of the biblical narrative. After all, in Scripture Absalom is killed by David’s soldiers and Achitophel commits suicide after the failure of Absalom’s rebellion (see The Bible, 2008, Samuel 17.23). Dryden, like that passage earlier in the letter, points to the poem’s implicit signifieds, though, unlike that passage, he focuses specifically on how he has changed the ending of the biblical narrative to allow for the reconciliation that the Bible does not. From the outset, Dryden makes it difficult for his readers to miss the connections between his depiction of Absalom’s rebellion against David and those readers’ own historical and political moment. In the poem, Dryden supplements the biblical narratives revolving around David, Absalom, and Achitophel with narrative details that draw attention to the poem’s political context. Sometimes, he does this by including in Absalom and Achitophel linguistic echoes of specific phrases and words circulating in 1680s England. Early on in the poem, for instance, the speaker describes the gradual growth of factions in Israel, with some Israelites calling for the ascension of Absalom to the throne while others call for peace:

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The sober part of Israel, free from stain, Well knew the value of a peacefull raign: And, looking backward with a wise affright, Saw Seames of wounds, dishonest to the sight; In contemplation of whose ugly Scars, They Curst the memory of Civil Wars. The moderate sort of Men, thus qualifi’d, Inclin’d the Ballance to the better side: And David’s mildness manag’d it so well, The Bad found no occasion to Rebell. But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans, The careful Devil is still at hand with means; And providently Pimps for ill desires: The Good old Cause reviv’d, a Plot requires. Plots, true or false, are necessary things, To raise up Common-wealths, and ruin Kings. (II. 69–84).

These lines contain coded references to England’s political and historical situation, suspending the idea that Absalom and Achitophel is about biblical Israel. The sober, peaceful Israelites curse the Civil Wars for irreparably damaging the authority of monarchical government. During the 1680s, political rebels used the phrase “The Good old Cause” to connect their actions to the Puritan rebellion of the 1640s (see Dryden, 1681/1972, n.82). Furthermore, the word “Plot” draws attention to the language of the “Popish Plot” regularly used in the 1680s. Although the poem is ostensibly about biblical Israel, the speaker uses terms that gesture toward the political signifieds of contemporary England. The passage encapsulates how Dryden uses language to encourage readers to look for hidden political meaning. In addition to linguistic cues, Dryden also fleshes out the biblical narrative with details that draw attention to well-known events and rumors revolving around the Exclusion Crisis. In the poem, the speaker mentions the Triple Alliance (“Triple Bond”) formed by England, the Netherlands, and Sweden in 1668 to defend against an increasingly ambitious France (Dryden, 1681/1972, I.175). He refers to the rumor about a black box ostensibly containing the marriage certificate for Charles II and Monmouth’s mother (II. 467–74). Furthermore, he refers to the well-known and contentious fact that Charles II had recently asked for money from France (II. 709–10). Dryden adds myriad details to the biblical narrative to make it clear to his readers

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that they are to connect the events, thoughts, and persons in Absalom and Achitophel to contemporary political figures. Dryden points to the biblical narrative as a vehicle for talking about recent events. Absalom and Achitophel is a political allegory that uses one set of persons taken from sacred history to represent another from secular history. Dryden superimposes 1680s England onto biblical Israel, specifically using various sections of the Bible relating to David and Absalom as a framework for depicting and commenting on the events of the Exclusion Crisis and the Popish Plot. Through this superimposition, Dryden keeps in play two subjects—the one explicit (ancient Israelites) and the other implicit (modern Whigs and Tories). The poem functions by substituting persons from Scripture for contemporary political actors: Charles II is King David, the Duke of Monmouth is Absalom, the Earl of Shaftesbury is Achitophel, Titus Oates is Corah, the Duke of Buckingham is Zimri, and so on. Later editions would typically append a key that informed readers exactly which political figures to attach to which biblical persons. For example, Christopher Ness put together A Key (with the whip) to open the mystery & iniquity of the poem called, Absalom and Achitophel shewing its scurrilous reflections upon both king and kingdom (London, 1680) and the eighteenth edition of Absalom and Achitophel (London, 1708). Perhaps the most extensive of these keys was Absalom and Achitophel. A poem to which is added an explanatory key neve[r] printed before (London, 1727). Behind these keys was anxiety that failing to pinpoint the coded references would eventually enshroud Dryden’s point in darkness and mystery. For Dryden, as it was for Bunyan, allegory was a source of anxiety. The keys were deceptively simple. They suggested that readers need only swap out biblical signifiers with political signifieds as if they neatly mapped onto one another. This process would require little cognitive work. But when approached within the context of the narrative itself, the mapping is more complex. Unlike earlier examples of political allegory like Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia (1593) and Spenser’s Book V of The Faerie Queene, Dryden culls his signifiers from sacred history instead of his imagination (see Anderson, 1970, 65–77; Stump, 1988, 81–105). This detail sets Absalom and Achitophel apart from Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684, 1687), which represents the events leading up to and immediately following the Monmouth Rebellion by using fictional characters to compare the uprising to a secret romance.

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In choosing a biblical narrative as a pretext, Dryden draws attention to the similarities, differences, and tension between his signifiers (from that sacred pretext) and signifieds (from the surrounding political context). He thus creates what contemporaries called “parallels” between two historical situations. As John M. Wallace demonstrates, “The construction of parallels was the most popular game of the century, always played most earnestly when times were bad and another great crisis had occurred” (1969, 279). These parallels forge connections between seemingly disparate historical events and persons, participating in (to borrow a phrase from Alan Roper) a widespread “game of identifications” that hinges on the identification of similarities and differences between two historical moments (2002, 268–94). The game of identifications in Absalom and Achitophel goes beyond the signified-hunting of the keys because the poem is only part allegory. It is also a typology (see McKeon, 1987, 25–9; Korshin, 1982, 51, 71). Traditionally, typology refers to a method of biblical interpretation that approaches the persons and events of the Old Testament (types) as prefiguring those of the New Testament (antitypes). It emphasizes that the two testaments are part of a single holy text and encourages readers to move back and forth between the two testaments. Moses, for example, was understood to prefigure Christ—with the latter fulfilling and spiritually completing the former. Built into the typological pairings between Old Testament types and New Testament antitypes was the implicit notion of non-equivalency: type and antitype were part of a single unit, but they were also their own stand-alone historical events. By the seventeenth century, typology had not only become a method of writing as well as an interpretive method but had also become much more flexible. The period saw the formation of what Paul Korshin calls “abstracted typology,” a form of typology that uses the form and removes itself from traditional theological concerns (1982, 101–3). The century helped normalize secular typology, as writers extended the traditionally religious interpretive technique to secular, modern history (see Lewalski, 1979, 111). Writers regularly used typology to discuss how to properly understand the Old and New Testaments in connection to one another and to make arguments about contemporary politics. Writers used typology to give secular argument the form of spiritual authority. It was particularly fruitful for polemic writers, who set up what Ira Clark calls “neotypes,” secular antitypes that purportedly fulfill biblical types (1982, 18–22, 85–6).

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Erich Auerbach’s essay “Figura” (1938) is the most famous discussion of the relationship between typology and allegory. Auerbach argues that typology, or figurism, and allegory are entirely separate from one another: “Most of the allegories we find in literature or art represent a virtue (e.g. wisdom), or a passion (jealousy), an institution (justice), or at most a general synthesis of historical phenomena (peace, the fatherland)—never a definite event in its full historicity” (1938/1984, 54). Auerbach aligns typology with historicity because it connects distinct historical events into a pairing of type and antitype. Correspondingly, he associates allegory with fictiveness because allegory is inextricable from entirely fictional personified abstractions like Wisdom, Jealousy, Justice, Peace, and the Fatherland. Auerbach’s discussion does not account for political allegories that use topical allusions to discuss historical events. However, even if typology were antithetical to allegories that use personifications, it need not be antithetical to political allegories. Absalom and Achitophel demonstrates how difficult it is to separate typology from allegory, especially as Dryden and his contemporaries approach these as flexible forms rather than rigid structures (See also Parker, 2017, 58–83). Dryden uses political allegory to cast contemporary politicians as persons from sacred history, creating a parallel between two historical situations that (in a moment of true political theology) vindicates his royalism. But Dryden also uses allegory to set up a typological pairing where 1680s England is the antitype and biblical history is the type. This pairing allows Dryden to highlight differences as well as similarities, since (as Ira Clarke argues) “while types foreshadow similarities, they also manifest disparities” (1982, 18). Pure political allegory, on the contrary, focuses primarily on similarities. Dryden innovates with allegory by dovetailing it with typology, pushing against the tendency to regard them as distinct genres (a trend that existed far beyond Dryden’s time and heavily influenced Auerbach). Frustrated with traditional allegory’s limits, Dryden mixes genres, confident that doing so would give him greater latitude for making his points. This genre-mixing is why Samuel Johnson would later write that the “original structure of the poem was defective: allegories drawn to great length will always break; Charles could not run continually parallel with David” (1779/2010, 463). This comment highlights something important about the poem’s structure and misses the mark. The inconsistencies are not evidence of the poem’s flaws. Instead, they are evidence of Dryden’s desire to go beyond merely pointing out similarities.

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Pairing political allegory and typology allows Dryden to draw attention to similarities and differences between two historical situations within a single, internally consistent narrative. For this reason, Absalom and Achitophel sets the foundation for later experiments with allegory while also primarily following the precedents set by Langland, Spenser, and others. A few years later, Dryden would come close to shattering those precedents with The Hind and the Panther. With this poem, Dryden departed from generic allegory altogether. Compared to The Hind and the Panther, Absalom and Achitophel was downright tame.

Dryden the Mad Allegorist Reading Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther is quite the experience. Approached negatively, it reads like a disjointed mess, as if the poet could not decide which approach to take. Approached positively, it reads like a post-modern classic hundreds of years before the post-modern existed. The poem is part allegorical beast fable, part political allegory, part direct theological discourse, part poetic ode, and part first-person allegoresis of the beast fable itself. Dryden never allows his reader to place the poem in one genre. It feels almost as if The Hind and the Panther were different poems cobbled together since Dryden virtually dispels the narrative consistency he relied on so heavily in Absalom and Achitophel. Dryden begins by introducing a series of animals and then establishing those animals as signifiers for specific religions. At the center of the poem is the hind, a stand-in for the Catholic Church: A milk white Hind, immortal and unchanged, Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged; Without unspotted, innocent within, Yet she had oft been chased with horns and hounds And Scythian shafts, and many winged wounds Aimed at her heart; was often forced to fly And doomed to death, though fated not to dy. (1687/1969, I. 1–8)

Dryden establishes the hind as a non-arbitrary signifier. He uses the figure of the hind to represent the Catholic Church as prey: its members are “doomed to death” precisely because other churches have victimized them. At the same time, the hind is “fated not to die” because it represents the Catholic Church. Dryden modifies the corporate notion of the “Kings

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Two Bodies,” the belief (extending back to the medieval period) that kings have natural and political bodies, the first of which is mortal and the second of which exists far beyond the life of the king himself (see Kantorowicz, 1957/1997, 3–6, 42–86). Dryden uses the hind to represent the similar concept that Catholics are mortal but also part of the immortal church. Dryden establishes a menagerie of animals, each of which signifies a particular religious institution. The “bloody Bear” represents Independents; the hare represents Quakers; the “Buffoon Ape” represents atheists; the boar represents Baptists; the Panther represents the Anglican Church. Dryden creates a visual tableau for each religious faith, casting the faiths as either prey or predator depending on their role in recent history. As Earl Miner argues convincingly, Dryden demonstrates an acute awareness of early modern and Restoration zoology and natural science (1969, vol. 3, 343, 347–8). Perhaps the most important of Dryden’s sources is Wolfgang Franzius’s Historia Animalium Sacra (1612, 1670). This sacred zoology pairs descriptions of animals with passages from Scripture and empirical observation. Franzius describes the bear, for instance, as “a very large Creature, and very strong; mischievous, perfidious, and deformed” and as being “very fierce and cruel when she hath young; therefore Solomon saith, that is it better to meet a Bear robbed of her Whelp than a fool in his folly, Pro. 17.12. thus we find God speaking, Hos. 13.8, I will meet them as a Bear that is bereaved of her Welps, and will rend the caul of their hearts; so 2 Sam.17.8. we find that Davids counsellours were compared to Bears” (1672, 56). Dryden uses descriptions of certain animals by Franzius and others to flesh out his political commentary, casting particular churches as animals in a way that supports his own political beliefs and interests. The Hind and the Panther is in close contact with the tradition of political allegory— which includes the medieval poem Reynard the Fox—that uses characteristics of beasts to support its political commentary, but also with the discipline of zoology as it was developing in the seventeenth century. The beginning of Dryden’s poem is predicated on connecting the physical characteristics of certain animals, according to sacred and secular zoologies and common conceptions, to the behaviors and assumptions of particular churches’ members. Dryden chooses certain animals because of how their physical and behavioral characteristics resemble the actions of certain churches’ members toward Catholics, just as he had chosen, for example, Absalom as an appropriate type for giving a “Picture to the Wast”

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of Monmouth. The Congregational church shares the bear’s cruelty and ferocity; the Quakers share the hare’s temerity and self-interested neutrality; atheists share the ape’s ability to imitate; Baptists share the boar’s frenetic nature; Socinians share the fox’s craftiness; and so on. The resemblances between animals and churches relate to the public and political manifestations of religious beliefs rather than directly to the beliefs themselves. Even in a poem that centers on questions about religion, the ultimate focus is on earthly conduct rather than spiritual belief. Here and in other poems such as Religio Laici (1682), Dryden’s chief concern with religion focuses on its social and political implications rather than its theological doctrines (see Fujimura, 1961, 205–17). The non-arbitrariness of Dryden’s signifiers makes it jarring when Dryden quickly dispenses with the beast fable to pen a miniature poetic ode: What weight of ancient witness can prevail If private reason hold the public scale? But, gracious God, how well dost thou provide For erring judgements an unerring guide! Thy throne is darkness in th’ abyss of light, A blaze of glory that forbids the sight; O teach me to believe thee thus concealed And search no farther than thyself revealed, But her along for my director take Whom thou has promised never to forsake! (1687/1969, I.62–71)

Dryden leaves the reader to fend for themselves. What was the relationship between this speaker, who is trying to figure out how to understand the world as a signifier of God’s grace, and the beast fable already laid out? The seams are visible. Dryden moves from a detailed allegorical tableau to a first-person poetic ode, forcing his readers to come to terms with the gap between the two. Throughout the poem’s first part, Dryden drops and then picks up the allegorical beast fable with virtually no transitioning. He even includes both signifier and signified within the same couple of lines. For example, he writes, “The Wretched Panther cried aloud for aid/ To church and councils, whom she first betrayed” (i. 468–9). This is the kind of line that would offend C.S. Lewis hundreds of years later because it mixes a signifier (the “Wretched Panther” of the allegorical beast fable) with signifieds (“church and council”). Bunyan, most likely, would have maintained narrative consistency by inventing a signifier to stand in for the

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church and council and then using a sidenote to guide readers’ interpretations of that signifier. Dryden does no such thing. On the contrary, he mixes allegorical and literal modes indiscriminately throughout much of the poem, picking up on the signifiers only when it supports his political theology. As the poem progresses, the churches’ signifiers—which initially had specific purposes—become increasingly arbitrary. During the theological dialogue of Part II, for example, the fact that a hind represents the Catholic Church and a panther represents the Church of England is irrelevant to the narrative. The signifiers fade into the background so that the allegorical nature of the beast fable is lost altogether. The gradual non-significance of the signifiers amounts to a particular argument: the two churches have more similarities than differences in how other churches have treated them in recent history. They have a shared history. Part III ratchets up the poem’s self-referentiality. After pushing the two animals’ signifiers closer to arbitrariness, Dryden casts those same animals as two warring allegorists. The panther tells the fable of the swallows (representing English Catholics) that argue over whether to migrate further south in search of a warmer climate or stay on the “steeples heigh” on which they had just landed (III. 445). The panther rewrites one of Aesop’s fables for this tale to advance a drastically different moral. Contemporaries often understood Aesop’s fable to be a warning against civil wars. As John Ogilby writes in his translation, “When Civil War hath brought great Nations low,/Destruction comes, oft with a Forrain Foe” (1651, II. 40.50). Dryden’s panther has a different plan. He revises the original tale into a violent allegory about English Catholics’ impending doom. In the panther’s version, the martin (who represents Edward Petre, an antagonistic Jesuit and privy council to James II) advises the swallows to stay where they are, supporting his advice with a “boding dream,/Or rising waters, and a troubl’d stream,/Sure signs of anguish, dangers, and distress” (III. 480–2). In the context of Dryden’s poem, the advice amounts to Catholics focusing on their present safety in having a Catholic king and paying little heed to English anti-Catholicism. The swallows follow the martin’s advice and are met with a brief season of security and prosperity as “New blossoms flourish, and new flow’rs arise” not only in the immediate surroundings but also abroad (III. 553). However, this season is followed by a stormy night in which the swallows are pelted by “ratling hail-stones mix’d with stone and rain” (III. 553). Those who survive the

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storm are killed off by other birds immediately afterward or beaten to death by a club. The story features a series of gruesome endings. The panther’s allegory is malicious. Whereas (according to Ogilby) the original fable cautions against becoming embroiled in civil wars, this fable foreshadows the end of peace for English Catholics. Eventually, the panther suggests, the tide will change, and Catholics will be subject to persecution and death. The hind counters the panther’s malicious fable with the story of the pigeons and the chickens, meant to demonstrate how “concord there cou’d be/Betwixt two kinds whose Natures disagree” (III. 900–1). Her fable focuses on peace and reconciliation rather than hostility and violence. She recasts extremist Anglicans as pigeons, William of Orange and the Whig Gilbert Burnet (in a double representation) as a buzzard, and the Catholic clergy as domestic poultry—all cared for and overseen by a personage known alternatively as the “Plain good Man,” “Master of the Farm,” or even the “Imperial Owner” (III. 906, 1058, 1228). This good man, a stand-in for James II, extends alms and tolerance to all of his animals, making little distinction between members of the dominant and minority groups, just as James made little distinction between members of the Catholic and Protestant faiths. The pigeons, jealous of what little the chickens have, call for the persecution of all chickens and a renewed commitment to the laws banishing them from the farm. The banishment of chickens from the farm represents, quite transparently, the official English policy toward Catholic clergy members after the Test Acts of 1563 and 1673. The pigeons elect the Buzzard as their leader, and he wins over the public through his charisma and good looks, just as Absalom does in Absalom and Achitophel and Guise in The Duke of Guise. The good man, dismayed by how the pigeons have taken advantage of his leniency and “turn’d his Grace to villany” (III. 1229), strives “a temper for th’ extreams to find,/So to be just, as he might still be kind” (III. 1231–2). The result of his desire to balance justness with kindness is a “Gracious Edict” formally extending tolerance to all birds: He therefore makes all Birds of ev’ry Sect Free of his Farm, with promise to respect Their sev’ral Kinds alike, and equally protect. His Gracious Edict the same Franchise yields To all the wild Encrease of Woods and Fields, And who in Rocks aloof, and who in Steeples builds: To Crows the like Impartial Grace affords,

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And Choughs and Daws, and such Republick Birds: Secur’d with ample Priviledge to feed, Each has his District, and his Bounds decreed: Combin’d in common Int’rest with his own, But not to pass the Pigeons Rubicon. (1687/1969, III. 1244-55)

The edict extends tolerance to kinds of birds not given allegorical significance. Dryden has not aligned the crows, choughs, and daws with specific religious sects either in the hind’s fable or in The Hind and the Panther. Their lack of allegorical identity is part of the point since the good man is performing a political act that regards questions of creed and religiosity as fundamentally irrelevant. The second point is that tolerance, here as elsewhere in the poem, is closer to restrained belligerence than acceptance. The hind suggests that religious belief should not enter into public policy and that Catholics should be allowed their own “District” or “Bounds” as long as they do not infringe on the rights of Protestants. As it turns out in the fable, the extension of tolerance to all religious sects is the perfect remedy for political and religious extremism: in the absence of a shared object of hatred, the buzzard’s followers turn on one another, “Rent in Schism” or “by themselves opprest” (III. 1285, 1287). The hind argues that the best policy for dealing with fanatics is to leave them alone until, under moderate circumstances, they lose their zeal or, under more extreme ones, turn on one another in their competition for power. In the 1660s and 1670s, dissenters often advanced a similar argument against penal laws that would only unify them against the state (see McKeon, 2015, 168–9). The Hind and the Panther is a literary abomination—a rare reification of the phantom threat beginning to dominate Enlightenment experiments with allegory—punctuated by internally consistent allegories that emphasize the overall poem’s rhapsodic nature. What future writers would go out of their way to avoid Dryden does with full force. He mixes different types of discourse without transition, producing (in the words of Lewis) a collection of parts that “have been yoked together by external violence,” as if putting them together amounted to an affront to nature. But despite Lewis’s characteristic insight, he misses how that external violence is purposeful. In this poem, Dryden brings generic allegory down to Earth. In a stark departure from the dynamics behind traditional allegories—which assume the trustworthiness of the narrative—Dryden makes the generic allegories the tools of argumentative rhetoric and the modal, broken

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allegory as a trustworthy source of theological discourse. The rhetorical darkness of the panther’s allegory allows him to push for his agenda, and only the savviness of the hind undoes it. In The Hind and the Panther, generic allegory is a far cry from the one practiced by Langland, Spenser, or even Bunyan. It is a form for heated discussions about the earthly realm, while traditional generic allegory at least purported to transcend worldly concerns to deal with spiritual ones. Dryden paints the immersion of traditional allegories as deserving skepticism. The abomination of the first two parts, despite its unpopularity with contemporaries and later writers, has the advantage of keeping the signified always in view. It consistently disrupts the reader’s engagement with the narrative’s vehicle in hopes of training readers to be skeptical of generic allegories’ ability to instruct covertly. Dryden’s modal allegory is politically motivated. He uses the apparent transparency of the literary abomination as a rhetorical strategy. The poem never aspires to rise above the political fray. On the contrary, it seeks to even the playing field between generic and modal allegory. Allegory had fallen, but in a very different way than it had for Bunyan. In his paratexts, Bunyan points out that allegory is a fallen art form because it could never achieve the same degree of reverence reserved for the Bible alone. Allegories were fallen because fallible humans created them. Dryden shares the belief in allegory’s fallenness but focuses less on inherent human infallibility and more on the form’s rhetorical nature. The only difference between an internally consistent, generic allegory like Absalom and Achitophel and broken, modal allegory like that found in The Hind and the Panther is that the first partially hides its referents. In contrast, the second gives readers the courtesy of putting referents in open view. The Hind and the Panther was the exception that proved the rule. Dryden recognized the disruptive nature of modal allegory and used it to make a point about dark rhetoric. As a genre wielded by the likes of Spenser and Bunyan, allegory was a tool for instructing through misdirection. But as Dryden showed, generic allegory was not always trustworthy. Its central characteristic—the hiddenness of its meaning—should make readers skeptical because it gives the writer a convenient way to hide their ulterior motives and political leanings. Dryden wanted to be more aware of the lessons and meanings writers might be slipping by them with allegory. In falling from a genre to a mode, allegory lost its inherent reverence. Writers could use it for a variety of moods and functions. Allegory was ripe

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for the taking. The next chapter will cover just how ripe it was, and how Enlightenment satirists and early novelists took the literary form in new directions.

References Anderson, Judith H. 1970. “‘Nor Man It is’: The Knight of Justice in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.” PMLA 85: 65-77. Auerbach, Erich. 1984. “Figura.” Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1938) Bible, The. 2008. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Christie, W.D. 1926. Dryden: Select Poems. Ed. C.H. Firth. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clark, Ira. 1982. Christ Revealed: The History of the Neotypological Lyric in the English Renaissance. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press. Doody, Margaret Anne. 1985. The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Dryden, John. 1972. The Works of John Dryden: Poems 1681-1684. Ed. H.T. Swedenberg, Jr. Vol. 2. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Dryden, John. 1969. The Works of John Dryden: Poems 1685-1692. Ed. Earl Miner. Vol III. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Franzius, Wolfgang. 1672. The History of Brutes; Or, a Description of Living Creatures. London. Fujimura, Thomas. 1961. “Dryden’s Religio Laici: An Anglican Poem.” PMLA 76: 205- 17. Johnson, Samuel. 2010. The Lives of the Poets. Ed. John H.  Middendorf. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Kantorowicz, Ernest H. 1997. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1957) Korshin, Paul J. 1982. Typologies in England, 1650-1820. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lewalski, Barbara. 1979. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century English Lyric. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lewis, C.S. 1939. “Shelley, Dryden, and Mr. Eliot.” Rehabilitations and Other Essays. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. McKeon, Michael. 1987. “Historicizing Absalom and Achitophel.” The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, edited by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown. New York, NY: Methuen, Inc. McKeon, Michael. 2015. “Civil and Religious Liberty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Case Study in Secularization.” Representation, Heterodoxy, and

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Aesthetics: Essays in Honor of Ronald Paulson. Ed. Ashley Marshall. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. Montagu, Charles and Matthew Prior. 1687. The hind and the panther transvers’d to the story of The country-mouse and the city-mouse. London. Ness, Christopher. 1680. A Key (with the whip) to open the mystery & iniquity of the poem called, Absalom & Achitophel shewing its scurrilous reflections upon both king and kingdom. London. Ogilby, John. 1651. The Fables of Æsop, Paraphras’d in Verse, and adorn’d with Sculpture. London. Parker, Brent E. 2017. “Typology and Allegory: Is There a Distinction? A Brief Examination of Figural Reading,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 21.1: 58-83. Pinnock, Andrew. 2010. “A Double Vision of Albion: Allegorical Re-Alignments in the Dryden-Purcell Semi-Opera King Arthur.” Restoration 34: 55-81. Roper, Alan. 2002. “Absalom’s Issue: Parallel Poems in the Restoration.” Studies in Philology 99: 268-94. Stump, Donald V. 1988. “The Two Deaths of Mary Stuart: Historical Allegory in Spenser’s Book of Justice.” Spenser Studies 9: 81-105. Wallace, John M. 1969. “Dryden and History: A Problem in Allegorical Reading.” ELH 36: 265-90.

CHAPTER 4

How Prose Experiments Dissected Allegory

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them.’ – Jim Jarmusch (2004)

The search for ostensibly “new” ways of understanding the world dominated the British Enlightenment. The “New Science” took aim at past scientific knowledge, preferring to work inductively from concrete particular to general principles rather than deductively. Correspondingly, philosophers like Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and others approached the world through an increasingly material, increasingly individualistic lens (see Porter, 2000, 262, 278, 293). These philosophers positioned themselves as iconoclasts. Breaking with the past, so argued empirical scientists and philosophers, was the first step to building a more promising future. Progress required disruption. This search for the new extended to writers. During this period, for example, writers constantly argued over the status of past literary forms and whether it was better to use them, revise them, or move on to find © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Gulya, Allegory in Enlightenment Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19036-0_4

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new ones. This was the argument at the center of the “battle of the books,” a phrase that Jonathan Swift gave to the wide-ranging and long-lasting debate over whether ancient or modern writers had the advantage. In truth, British Enlightenment writers created literary forms not by rejecting those of the past but by revising, breaking apart, and recombining those forms for new contexts. This is why seemingly outmoded forms like the pastoral and romance continued to find prevalence throughout the Enlightenment (see McKeon, 1998, 267–89; McKeon, 1987/2002, xxiv-v, 4, 15). The previous chapters of this book have highlighted how Bunyan and Dryden set the stage for innovative approaches to allegory. This chapter will flesh out this development by analyzing several literary experiments of the British Enlightenment. The central claim of this chapter is that Enlightenment writers frequently adapted allegory by dissecting it in the double sense of the term mentioned in the Introduction. They examined allegory with the same vigor and spirit of inquiry that Robert Hooke brought to his organisms in Micrographia (1665) or that Isaac Newton brought to natural philosophy in Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), confident that this level of examination would provide clues about how to revamp the literary form for modern audiences. These writers also—and this is the second meaning of “dissection”—broke allegory into its components and experimented with how those components could combine with other modes. These literary experimenters approached allegory with a combination of self-reflexivity, aesthetic distance, and skepticism. This combination began in earnest with Bunyan’s allegories, although it would take several more decades before Jonathan Swift, Eliza Haywood, and others would push it to the extreme. Bunyan may have approached allegory with a sense of aesthetic distance, but his work left no doubt that he supported the use of allegory in both theory and practice. The same cannot be said about many examples covered in this chapter.

Simulated Allegory in Swift Satire is, in the words of Leon Guilhamet, a “borrower of forms” (1987, 13, 165; see also Paulson, 1967, 4). It frequently appropriates other literary forms such as the pastoral and the epic, reformulating them as instruments of critique and correction. “Among the genres of traditional literary theory,” writes Guilhamet, “satire is most like this form of art [the

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bricolage]. Both employ fragments of an earlier contemporary pattern or system of signs” (165). During the British Enlightenment, allegory was one of the primary systems of signs that carried over from earlier periods. For satirists interested in using allegory, questions abounded. How could they use allegorical conventions for their purposes? What kind of work could allegory still do? These questions animate many of Jonathan Swift’s works. After all, he used allegory frequently. A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions Between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome (1701), one of his earliest political tracts, is a historical parallel resembling Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel. Swift conjoins the tense political situation involving the recent impeachments of Lords Orford, Somers, Halifax, and Portland in 1701 with examples from classical history. Frank H. Ellis points out in his edition of Contests and Dissensions that Swift proceeds by “way of Allegory,” suggesting that the text displays “Swift’s ingenuity in finding classical analogues” for contemporary political events (Ellis, 1967, 157, 169; see also Downie, 1987, 25–32). As Dryden did in Absalom and Achitophel, Swift used allegory to create analogs, or parallels, between contemporary and ancient persons. But it is Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704) that is a bellwether text for how later writers could use allegory. Close attention to it provides valuable insight into how an Enlightenment writer could adapt allegory for their purposes. A Tale of a Tub sets the standard for post-dissection allegory, foreshadowing how writers could implement the form as genre and mode even after it had lost its reverence. A Tale of a Tub is about allegory. It focuses on the conditions and conventions undergirding the literary form, thus sharing the self-reflexivity so apparent in texts like The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Hind and the Panther. In this text, Swift alternates between an allegory about three brothers and narrative digressions. The allegory retells the events leading up to, causing, and following the Protestant Reformation and the digressions satirizing moderns’ pedantic and self-serving reading practices. The digressions feature a speaker who is a satirical embodiment of the moderns, used by Swift to debunk many of their assumptions about literature and criticism. When discussing the role of A Tale of a Tub in the history of allegory, scholars typically follow one of two approaches. The first is to categorize the entirety of A Tale of a Tub as an allegory, a member of the same genre as The Faerie Queene, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and Absalom and Achitophel (see Leyburn, 1950, 323; Starkman, 1950, 64–86; Levine, 1966, 1999).

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The second is to focus solely on the allegory of the coats as a fascinating version of the Protestant Reformation, effectively excising the allegory from the text. Neither of these approaches is satisfactory because each glosses over the digressions that disrupt and often overwhelm the allegory. A complete understanding of the text will consider both the content of the allegory itself and how A Tale of a Tub asks its readers to move between that allegory and non-allegorical digressions regularly. Swift dissects his allegory, breaking it into sections he can pick up and drop at will. He oscillates between sections of the allegory and unrelated or semi-related digressions. The results of this oscillation are two-fold. For one, he regularly disrupts the reader’s investment in the allegory. Swift follows Dryden’s lead in treating allegory as a literary form that—paradoxically—can be disrupted productively. Like Dryden in The Hind and the Panther, the constant disruption of allegory is part of the point. Secondly, by oscillating between allegory and digression, Swift holds allegorical conventions at bay. He uses allegory’s system of signs but also distances himself from the underlying assumptions. A Tale of a Tub is simulated allegory at its finest. This subgenre of British Enlightenment allegory—which also included texts like Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad (1728–1743) and Henry Fielding’s A Journey from this World to the Next (1749)—used allegorical conventions self-­ consciously and with a healthy dose of skepticism. Simulated allegory participates in the tradition of allegory but always at a remove, treating participation in the tradition as worthy of comment in and of itself. Unlike a text like The Pilgrim’s Progress (which certainly has its fair share of selfconsciousness and reflexivity), a simulated allegory like A Tale of a Tub borders on criticizing, or even downright subverting, the literary form it uses. This idea is built into the structure of A Tale of a Tub. The book includes various paratexts before moving on to the tale and digressions: a letter “To the Right Honourable, John Lord Sommers,” a letter from “The Bookseller to the Reader,” an “Epistle Dedicatory, to His Royal Highness Prince Posterity,” and a preface. These paratexts set the stage for a particularly observant text about contemporary writing and editing practices— criticizing, for example, writers’ tendencies to go on for too long and the practice of appending lengthy dedications and apologies to texts. Then, thirty-three pages in, readers are introduced to the narrative itself and are finally provided with the first section of the “Tale” on page

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fifty-­four. This section is labeled as part of the “Tale” not by a heading, as later sections will be, but by the phrase “A Tale” at the top of the page. This phrase signals to readers that they have entered into a new narrative, which is at least partially separate from the prefatory materials they have hitherto read. After this first section, the book alternates loosely between sections of the tale and digressions, using section headings to indicate to readers when they are in a certain kind of section. Even on the level of the page, A Tale of a Tub draws attention to the readers’ movements between two partially distinct modes of writing. The digressions feature a speaker who embodies the madness of modern critics, arguing for what Swift understood to be poor printing and writing practices. The tale is an allegory of three brothers (eventually identified as Peter, Jack, and Martin) that attacks many of the actions and beliefs of the Catholic and Protestant dissenting churches. But precisely what evidence is there that the tale of the three brothers is an allegory? First of all, starting with the 1710 edition, Swift himself refers to it as such. In this edition, he appends an apology to the original version of the text, in which he writes that “The abuses in Religion he [the author] proposed to set forth in the Allegory of the Coats and the three Brothers, which was to make up the body of the discourse” (1704/2008, 2). Also, starting with the 1710 edition, Swift incorporates many of the notes written by William Wotton and others into his text—in many instances, accurately revealing the allegorical signifieds of the narrative. For example, Swift opens up the tale with “Once upon a time there was a man who had three sons by one wife,* and all at birth, neither could the midwife tell certainly which was the eldest” and follows this sentence up with an annotation to the asterisk, reading “By these three sons, Peter, Martin, and Jack; Popery, the Church of England, and our Protestant dissenters, are designated” (1704/2008, 14). Swift’s footnote is from Wotton’s A Defense of the Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (see Wotton, 1705, 49). Though Swift savagely attacks Wotton’s criticism elsewhere in A Tale of a Tub, he uses Wotton’s note as an accurate gloss of the narrative’s coded references. Swift balances the negative critique of overly allegorical reading with the more positive use of allegory to criticize the actions of the Catholic and Protestant dissenting churches. He satirizes the self-serving process of interpreting literal texts allegorically. For instance, in the introduction, the speaker argues that many critics do not like the “writings of our society

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[the moderns]” because they are part of the “superficial vein among many readers” who refuse to read allegorically (1704/2008, 30). He then draws attention to the types and fables used by ancient writers to convey divine truths: But the greatest maim given to that general reception which the writings of our society [the Moderns] have formerly received (next to the transitory state of all sublunary things) hath been a superficial vein among many readers of the present age, who will by no means be persuaded to inspect beyond the surface and the rind of things. Whereas, Wisdom is a fox who after long hunting will at last cost you the pains to dig out. ‘Tis a cheese which, by how much the richer, has the thicker, the homelier, and the coarser coat, and whereof, to a judicious palate, the maggots are the best. ‘Tis a sack-posset, wherein the deeper you go you will find it the sweeter. Wisdom is a hen whose cackling we must value and consider because it is attended with an egg. But then lastly ‘tis a nut which unless you choose with judgment may cost you a tooth, and pay you with nothing but a worm. In consequence of these momentous truths, the Grubæn Sages have always chosen to convey their precepts and their arts shut up within the vehicles of types and fables; which having been perhaps more careful and curious in adorning than was altogether necessary, it has fared with these vehicles after the usual fate of coaches over-finely painted and gilt, that the transitory gazers have so dazzled their eyes and filled their imaginations with the outward lustre, as neither to regard nor consider the person or the parts of the owner within. A misfortune we undergo with somewhat less reluctancy because it has been common to us with Pythagoras, Æsop, Socrates, and other of our predecessors. (1704/2008, 31)

Swift is characteristically tongue-in-cheek about the speaker’s literary and interpretive standards. The speaker piles one metaphor on top of another. In the span of a few sentences, he compares the wisdom gained through allegorical reading to a fox that a hunter needs to dig out at the end of a hunt, a chest that has a richer taste when the coat is thicker, a “sack-posset” (a medicinal drink made from hot milk curdled with ale) that is sweeter the more one drinks, a hen that produces eggs, and a nut that would yield a worm without any sustenance unless chosen carefully. This series of comparisons disorients readers rather than clarifying the speaker’s point. Swift uses the word “‘tis” to create an anaphoric structure that, by shining a light on the speaker’s series of meaningless comparisons, gives the passage a mocking tone. Additionally, he uses the phrase “the Grubæn Sages” to associate ancient allegorists with the hack writers of contemporary Grub Street.

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By having his speaker go through a prolonged series of meaningless comparisons and showing this speaker’s favorable opinion of the hack writers of Grub Street, here Swift teaches his readers to read against the speaker. The speaker’s lament for the “transitory gazers” who have become so dazzled by the outward luster of coaches and other objects that they no longer look beyond that luster reads like a corrupted version of Augustine’s and Bunyan’s anxieties about individuals overly investing in the material and literal at the expense of the spiritual (discussed in Chap. 2). Whereas Augustine implores his readers to look for hidden meaning in the world and Bunyan warns his readers to not “[play] with the out-side of [his] Dream,” Swift shines a light on how the speaker of A Tale of a Tub uses the excuse of hidden meaning to justify his poor interpretations of texts. Swift is similarly critical of allegorical reading that openly serves readers’ interests elsewhere in A Tale of a Tub. Later in the text, for instance, the speaker praises “the republic of dark authors,” taking up the association between allegory and rhetorical darkness that we have already seen in Spenser, Bunyan, and others. “For, night being the universal mother of things,” says Swift’s speaker, “wise philosophers hold all writings to be fruitful, in the proportion they are dark” (1704/2008, 90). The darkest of authors “have met with such numberless commentators, whose scholiastic midwifery hath delivered them of meanings that the authors themselves perhaps never conceived, and yet may very justly be allowed the lawful parents of them” (90). Dark writing amounts to a situation in which readers can use “scholiastic midwifery,” a kind of self-serving pedantry, to get whatever interpretations they want out of a specific text (regardless of that text’s literal meaning) and then blame the writer for whatever meanings they find. In the apology first published in the 1710 edition of A Tale of a Tub, Swift connects this attack on self-interested interpretation to commentators on his text. He addresses the ambiguity inherent in language and places his texts within a print sphere where critics often misinterpret their objects of study. In the interim between the book’s original publication in 1704 and the fifth edition in 1710, several critics wrote commentaries on A Tale of a Tub. William King wrote Some Remarks on the Tale of a Tub in 1704. And in 1705, William Wotton, one of the modern critics satirized as a pedant in Swift’s The Battle of the Books, wrote a more meticulous, scene-by-scene explication of several moments in A Tale of a Tub (Wotton, 1705; See Swift, 2008, 4). Swift responds to these commentators as “prejudiced and ignorant readers [who] have drawn by great force to hint at ill

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meanings, as if they glanced at some tenets in religion. In answer to all which, the author solemnly protests he is entirely innocent; and never had it once in his thoughts that anything he said would in the least be capable of such interpretations, which he will engage to deduce full as fairly from the most innocent book in the world.” He goes on to argue that “it will be obvious to every reader that this was not any part of his scheme or design” (4). Swift extends his critique of self-interested reading to the comments about the text between its original 1704 printing and its 1710 reprinting. He also appeals to readers in general, arguing that “it will be obvious” that these commentators have participated in kinds of interpretation that are not encouraged by the text itself. Swift does not disparage allegorical reading and writing in general. The brunt of his satire falls on allegorical interpretation not licensed by the text. This interpretation gives readers far too much control over the text’s meaning. Swift satirizes what Rosemond Tuve calls “imposed allegory,” a kind of allegorical interpretation that readers can practice on any text to benefit their thoughts or interests (Tuve, 1966, 219–20). Such reading, Swift suggests, is nefarious because it does not follow naturally from the text. He makes a similar suggestion in the allegory when he has the speaker praise those “whose converting imaginations dispose them to reduce all things into types; who can make shadows, no thanks to the sun, and then mould them into substances, no thanks to philosophy; whose peculiar talent lies in fixing tropes and allegories to the letter, and refining what is literal into figure and mystery” (1704/2008, 92). The argument is less about allegories in general and more about self-­ interested allegorical interpretation. Swift’s negative portrayal of a republic of dark readers and writers does not preclude him from the more positive use of allegory we find in the tale of the three brothers. Swift uses the allegory of the three brothers to recount the events leading up to, causing, and following the Protestant Reformation. He casts the story of the eventual split between Anglican, Catholic, and dissenting Protestant sects as a domestic drama. In the first section, three unnamed brothers are given their coats by their dying father. The father tells his sons that these coats “have two virtues contained in them: one is, that with good wearing they will last you fresh and sound as long as you live: the other is that they will grow in the same proportion with your bodies, lengthening and widening of themselves so as to be always fit” (1704/2008, 34).

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The sons are to keep these coats free of embellishment, resisting the ever-changing fashions and maintaining their coats’ purity. After the father dies and leaves them to interpret his will, these sons realize that their drab, inornate coats disqualify them from wooing any women, especially the Duchess d’Argent (representing covetousness), Madame de Grands Titres (representing ambition), and the Countess d’Orgueil (representing pride)—three negative personifications (35). Faced with this predicament, the brothers engage in what might be called a series of interpretive games, which Swift uses to represent how self-interest had led biblical hermeneutics into implausible and self-serving readings of God’s word. The brothers collectively warp the content of the will to justify their decisions to follow the latest fashions—adding shoulder-knots, gold lace, flame-­colored satin, silver fringe, embroidery with Indian figures, and points to their coats. Each of these new fashions represents a new interpretive obstacle for the brothers, testing their collective ability to willfully misconstrue the meaning of their father’s will to serve their interests. Rather than presenting an image of allegorical reading in which a Christian, assisted by an interpretive guide, learns how to interpret a series of scenes in accordance with Scripture as Bunyan does in the House of the Interpreter scene, Swift demonstrates how readers can use interpretive license to twist the meaning of a text (see Saccamano, 1993, 306). Here, allegoresis is especially sinister because the Bible is the text being twisted. Swift uses the learned brother’s manipulation of a legal, secular text through his knowledge of “criticisms” and specious reasoning to signify the kind of interpretive foul play that allows skilled casuists to reason their way out of sin. Swift’s criticism here is very similar to his satire, in one of his digressions, of the “scholiastic midwifery” that allows readers to extrapolate almost any meaning from a text. As Jay Levine has demonstrated, Swift’s focus throughout these early scenes in A Tale of a Tub is satirizing “critica sacra, the interpretation and (in its most specialized sense) the textual study of Scripture” (1966, 198–227). The critical reading of the Bible became popular during the seventeenth century thanks to publications such as Edward Leigh’s Critica Sacra (1642), Matthew Poole’s Synopsis Criticorum Bibliocorum (1664–1676), and Richard Simon’s Critical History of the New Testament (1689) (see Levine, 1966, 200). Swift attacks the methods of reading the Bible taught in these texts as pedantic and self-serving. In oscillating between a positive use of allegory and digressions that frequently portray allegorical reading in a negative light, Swift asks his readers

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to find a middle ground between unlicensed allegorical reading that serves their self-interests and superficial reading that misses a text’s ulterior meaning. He uses modal allegory to encourage in his readers an interpretive method loyal to a text’s content: reading the tale as an allegory is warranted, but the speaker’s reading of literal texts as if they were allegories is not. A reader’s interpretive method must be appropriate for the text at hand. Swift approaches allegory at an aesthetic distance, recognizing its capacity for satire while remaining heavily critical of its open interpretations often encouraged. This approach is very much in keeping with the rise of aesthetic judgment and taste during the Enlightenment. Enlightenment empiricism brought renewed attention to how and why art produced specific effects on its audience. The rise of the aesthetic and the concurrent focus on the coherence of the art object’s parts made an abomination like The Hind and the Panther possible. Yet, in A Tale of a Tub, Swift responds to the rise of the aesthetic by doing what Dryden refuses to do. He keeps the allegory and digressions separate, ultimately reinforcing the tale of the tub as a coherent generic allegory à la Spenser or Dryden. In other words, Swift encases a generic allegory within a multi-generic text. A Tale of a Tub represents a conservative approach to allegory. Swift leaves the allegory at the center of the tale alone. This approach allows him to toggle between criticism with and criticism of allegory. Sometimes, he uses allegory as a powerful satirical tool; at other times, he highlights its absurdity. In his satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726/2002), Swift switches up his strategy. He opts for a more free-floating form of allegory, working it into his narrative more organically. In Book III, for example, he uses the city of Laputa as a political allegory about the Royal Society of London (see Fitzgerald, 1968, 657–76; Firth, 1977, 260–7; Hammond, 1987, 65–7; Ehrenpreis, 1989, 13–28; Philmus, 1992, 157–79). The scientists at the Academy of Lagado perform experiments like “extracting SunBeams out of Cucumbers,” turning human excrement back into food, and building a house from the roof down. Swift satirizes charlatan scientists who get too carried away with the Enlightenment’s increasing focus on the empirical and the concrete. He uses political allegory to criticize science run amok. Later in the novel, Swift shifts gears to use the Yahoo as a loose allegorical representation of the man-of-mode (See Traugott, 1963, 1–18). He uses a similar satirical method but with a different target. For us, Gulliver’s Travels is significant because of how it actively refuses to set its allegorical components. Here, Swift participates in the great mode-ification of allegory, a natural offshoot of literary experiments that mixed modes as a general rule. This offshoot pushed allegory toward the

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freistimmige side of Frye’s spectrum: instead of treating allegory as a form for consistently linking literal signifiers to allegorical signifieds, experimenters treated it as a form that could be picked up and dropped at will (Frye 1990, 90–1). This development set the stage for Eliza Haywood’s literary experiments, as we will see in the next section.

Haywood’s Creation: The Case of Eovaai Eliza Haywood was one of the Enlightenment’s most prolific, experimental writers. Her literary creations challenged readers to question their assumptions not only about the texts they consumed but about everyday life. In Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1725), Haywood would do this with a proto-feminist spin. She portrays a female protagonist who, against the topoi of amatory fiction, easily manipulates and outwits her male counterpart. This plot development invites readers to question their ideas about gender roles and characteristics. It is no surprise that, about fifteen years later, Haywood would go on to write Anti-Pamela; or Feign’d Innocence Detected (1741). In this book, she uses Syrena Tricksy to subvert the characterization of women in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). She highlights how Richardson’s narrative doubles down on often inaccurate stereotypes about female agency. As a writer, Haywood was remarkable for her self-awareness. In Fantomina and Anti-Pamela, she displayed a keen ability to unearth others’ assumptions about her mental acuity, behavior, and worth as a woman in Enlightenment Britain. This self-awareness extended to her creation of cross-genre literary experiments like The Adventures of Eovaai (1736). As Earla Wilputte describes the text in her Broadview edition, Eovaai “presents an unstable mixture of generic forms” (1736/1999, 9). Kathryn R.  King similarly describes the narrative as “a satirical-allegorical-­ Bolingbrokean-­romantical oriental tale” (2012, 73; see also Russo, 2018, 980). The unstable mixture of genres in The Adventures of Eovaai makes it perfect for this chapter. Though Eovaai appears to be an outlier, it is representative of the British Enlightenment’s experimental tendencies. Moreover, Haywood’s generic innovation was central to her point. As Megan Cole points out, Haywood uses fantasy to engage with proto-­ feminist texts like those of Mary Astell (2022, 287–306). She takes advantage of fantasy’s ability to, in the words of feminist philosopher Rosemary Jackson, reveal “reason and reality to be arbitrary, shifting constructs, and thereby [scrutinize] the category of the ‘real’” (Jackson, 1981/2009, 12;

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See Cole, 2022, 290). Pushing against reason pushes against male dominance. But what does this mean for Haywood’s allegory, which was much looser than Swift’s use in either A Tale of a Tub or Gulliver’s Travels? What does she get out of modal allegory? These questions will animate this chapter. Haywood’s first move is to set up Eovaai at a temporal and spatial distance from her current political moment. The text is a “Pre-Adamitical History” and a translation of an ancient Chinese text (See Hargrave, 2015, 31–50). By setting up Eovaai this way, Haywood frees herself up to launch a biting satire of the Walpole administration. Tellingly, Haywood’s central character is not allegorical. Haywood imbibes her with the same sense of interiority and will that would characterize Richardson’s Pamela several years later. However, throughout the narrative, Eovaii encounters a series of political stand-ins for political figures. Ochihatou, a sorcerer and master manipulator, represents Robert Walpole. Alhazuza, who comes to Eovaai’s aid and actively resists Ochihatou’s attempts to overtax and take advantage of the citizens of Hypotosa, represents Henry St John. And so on. Eovaii’s interiority is central to the narrative. It emphasizes the emotional and personal effects of Walpole’s political machinations. Here is an example. In the story, Ochihatou uses magic to hide his deformity from Eovaai. After Ochihatou and Eovaai sleep together, the genie Halafamai arrives and reveals Ochihatou’s true form: Take this, said Halafamai, presenting a small Perspective to the Princess, and behold your Lover as he really is: all Delusions of the Ypres vanish before this sacred Telescope, nor can even they themselves, invisible as they are to human Sight, escape detection by the Eye that looks through this: Nay, it has moreover this wondrous and peculiar Property, that, tho’ envelop’d with the Shades of Night, the visual Ray becomes so strengthned by it, that you see all as clearly as at Noon-day. Eovaai, who had not yet assum’d Courage enough to open her Lips, obeyed in silence; but that reverential Awe, which had hitherto obstructed the Passage of her Words, now subsided at the more poignant and instantaneous Emotions of Horror and Surprize. She not only saw Ochihatou as she had seen him in Ijaveo, crooked, deformed, distorted in ever Limb and Feature, but also encompassed with a thousand hideous Forms, which sat upon his Shoulders, clung round his Hands, his Legs, and seem’d to dictate all his Words and Gestures. (1999, 94)

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The play on agency is a standard component of allegory, though here (as Alexander Pope had also done with the sylphs in The Rape of the Lock) Haywood complicates agency further with fantastical creatures. Eovaai was in control of her actions when she decided to cast off her moral upbringing to sleep with Ochihatou, though the sorcerer’s deception played a deciding role in that decision. Ochihatou, on the contrary, is a puppet for invisible forces. He is physically deformed, immoral, and devoid of agency. This scene epitomizes Haywood’s ability to mix political allegory and fantasy to make a point about Robert Walpole’s ultimate insignificance. In Haywood’s hands, allegory here is scathing. But even though she uses it from time to time in The Adventures of Eovaai, she does not commit to a consistent allegory. We can confidently say that Haywood uses allegorical conventions alongside non-allegorical ones, but we cannot classify the entire narrative as an allegory in and of itself. There is good reason for this. Haywood uses political allegory to level a series of scathing criticisms of Walpole’s deceit of the British public, his work promoting tax laws that benefited the rich and kept the poor poor, and his use of political office for his gain. At the same time, her Adventures of Eovaai suggests the limits of political allegory itself. Haywood aimed at Walpole, but she also used the narrative to investigate corruption and deception. Walpole, like Ochihatou, was a symptom. He was evidence of a larger pattern. To put this slightly differently, Haywood combines political allegory and fantasy to make a point about specific individuals while also looking beyond those individuals. She conducted a root cause analysis into corruption and ambition. In the process, she launched what is perhaps the most biting insult Walpole could receive: he was ultimately powerless, a slave to invisible forces.

Giving a Facelift to Allegory in the Early Novel Scholarship on the rise of the novel has played a pivotal role in the myth of allegory’s demise. In The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt argues that early novelists actively resisted giving their characters allegorical names, opting for more realistic pairings of first names and surnames. Watt writes, “Logically, the problem of individual identity is closely related to the epistemological status of proper names; for, in the words of Hobbes, ‘Proper names bring to mind one thing only; universals recall any of many’” (1957, 18). For Watt, the emerging preference for proper names coincides with

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the rise of individualism, the rise of the novel, and the fall of allegory. Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding opted for the concrete spaces and temporally specific markers often associated with epistolary writing over the abstract and temporally vague storytelling typically aligned with allegory. In his monumental revision of Watt’s narrative, Michael McKeon begins his The Origins of the English Novel with an analysis of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1987/2002, 1–4). Bunyan sets a precedent for using concrete, empirical detail within the allegorical genre. Later novelists then borrow these techniques while working within a new form. These seminal studies of the early novel place allegory at the starting point for a more empirical, concrete, and temporally specific type of narrative. However, as we have seen, allegory is not inherently anti-empirical. The idea that the early novel is anti- or non-allegorical, which pervades Watt’s book, is inaccurate. Writers such as Swift, Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding incorporate elements of allegory into their narratives. This section of the chapter will examine how and why early novelists experimented with allegory, even during an age that had purportedly moved onto more verisimilar genres. British Enlightenment writers approached the novel with the same fervor and experimental mindset with which a modern individual might approach a new technology: they pushed it to the absolute limits, testing out what it could do. Their use of allegory was very much a part of this process. As has often been the case throughout this book, these writers’ approaches were opportunistic. They aimed to get as much out of allegory as possible. However, their experiments with allegory took place within a specific context. Using allegorical conventions brought with it a set of assumptions and expectations. Sometimes, early novelists sought to dissect allegory, breaking it apart so that they could implement it intermittently as Swift had done in A Tale of a Tub or Pope had done in The Dunciad. At other times, these writers incorporate allegory into their novels while knowing that the form’s potency was only a fragment of what it had been during the medieval and early modern periods. Allegory had already been dissected and broken apart. Early novelists’ experiments with allegory were diverse and surprising. In Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe cordons off an allegory about Crusoe’s spiritual enlightenment in a single dream vision. For a good portion of the novel, Crusoe focuses on his survival. Then, he has a “terrible Dream”:

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I thought, that I was sitting on the Ground on the Out-side of my Wall, where I sat when the Storm blew after the Earthquake, and that I saw a Man descend from a great black Cloud, in a bright Flame of Fire, and light upon the Ground: He was all over as bright as a Flame, so that I could but just bear to look towards him; his Countenance was most inexpressibly dreadful, impossible for Words to describe; when he stepp’d upon the Ground with his Feet, I thought the Earth trembl’d, just as it had done before in the Earthquake, and all the Air look’d, to my Apprehension, as it had been filled with Flashes of Fire. (1719/2007, 75)

This dream is decidedly Bunyan-like. Crusoe faces the threat of his damnation, since his tragedies over the past eight years had (as Crusoe phrases it later) caused him to have “no divine Knowledge” (76). Like Christian at the House of the Interpreter in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Crusoe requires the possibility of eternal damnation to alter his behavior patterns. But to what extent is this scene allegorical? The answer is telling. Defoe amplifies the structure we see in The Pilgrim’s Progress, using a dreamscape to externalize Crusoe’s internal insecurities about his spiritual plight. Confronted with the threat of his damnation, Crusoe shifts his mindset overnight. Before the dream, he conceptualizes his experiences and surroundings as literal signifiers: they are important insofar as they relate to his literal survival. After the dream, Crusoe views his experiences and surroundings as allegorical signifiers. In other words, he learns to connect them to his spiritual, allegorical survival rather than his literal survival. He learns to read like Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress. However, Defoe falls short of writing a generic allegory where literal signifiers match allegorical signifieds within a single unified narrative. Scholars often miss that Defoe’s spiritual allegory in Robinson Crusoe is far removed from the pairing of literal signifiers with allegorical signifieds that pervades Piers Plowman or The Pilgrim’s Progress. For one, Defoe contains the spiritual allegory within a much larger, primarily mimetic narrative. Secondly, even within that modest scope, the allegory is intermittent and fragmented. This fragmented, modal allegory wins out throughout the Enlightenment. In Robinson Crusoe, it takes the form of a single moment that—though essential as a turning point in Crusoe’s life—is contained so as not to infect the rest of the novel. The narrative experiment is quite different in other noteworthy examples such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David

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Simple (1744/1988). Richardson’s and Fielding’s protagonists border on what Angus Fletcher, working within allegory studies, calls “obsessed” actors (Fletcher, 1979, 287; see also Knapp, 1985, 4). But unlike Bunyan’s Christian or even Defoe’s post-dream Crusoe, who are both obsessed with questions about spiritual enlightenment, Richardson’s Pamela and Fielding’s David Simple are obsessed with the partially secularized values of virtue and simplicity. Richardson’s Pamela and Sarah Fielding’s David Simple provide us with two models for what happens when a character who is part mimetic and part personification encounters a predominantly mimetic world. These novelists set their main characters apart from their world. In Pamela, Richardson writes from within the mind of a person obsessed with virtue in all of its forms. He gives his readers a front-row seat to a character trying desperately to hold onto her obsession, despite a world that will frequently punish and deride her for doing so. By shining a light on Pamela’s thought process through a series of epistles, Richardson finds a workaround for creating a Dryden-like abomination. Though Richardson’s protagonist is concept-obsessed to the point that she seems wholly out of place, this fact rarely hits the reader because he focalizes the entire narrative from her perspective. Several years later, with Clarissa (1748), Richardson would perform a similar literary experiment. But this time, his concept-obsessed protagonist would meet with tragedy. Sarah Fielding’s David Simple shows what happens when an Enlightenment novel portrays a concept-obsessed character from the third-person perspective. Like Richardson’s Pamela, Fielding’s David Simple is out of place. Those around him consistently manipulate him because of his naïve simplicity. However, Fielding does not focalize the narrative through Simple’s perspective, so her novel is closer to a farce than a heart-wrenching tale. Whereas Richardson’s novels are noteworthy for their characters’ rich interiority, Fielding’s David Simple takes advantage of the distance between reader and protagonist for the sake of humor. Richardson’s novels land on the protagonists’ side in the battle between concept-obsessed protagonists and the often cruel worlds they inhabit. Novels like David Simple land on the side of the world. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Sarah Fielding’s brother also saw the possibility of using modal allegory for humor. In A Journey from This World to the Next, Henry Fielding picks up on many of the allegorical

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tropes used in texts like The Faerie Queene and The Pilgrim’s Progress, which utilize movement through the landscape to represent the search for spiritual enlightenment. Fielding makes several changes to the template offered by allegorical travel narratives. Instead of linking literal signifiers with allegorical signifieds, he creates an entirely literal travel narrative about a single individual who is denied admittance to Heaven again and again before finally gaining entrance. Instead of treating admittance to Heaven as proof of a character’s spiritual well-being, Fielding treats it as a chance for characters to game the system. Julian takes advantage of reincarnation. He converts it into an opportunity to practice trial and error. As Julian narrates his experiences throughout A Journey from This World to the Next, the whole enterprise of traveling through the landscape to gain spiritual knowledge and ultimately enter the Celestial City becomes increasingly absurd. This absurdity is possible only because allegory had already fallen from on high. As a form, as we saw in the section on satire, allegory no longer carried the same level of respect it enjoyed during the early modern period. The sixty-four years between The Pilgrim’s Progress and A Journey from This World to the Next had fundamentally changed the form. It had created a sense of aesthetic distance from the literary tools of the past. This distance opened up the form in a way never before seen, so writers could use it to create a variety of moods. In David Simple and A Journey from This World to the Next, its use was satirical. Even within the intersections of satire and the Enlightenment novel, there was much variation. David Simple engages with modal allegory primarily through the use of a semi-personification. A Journey from This World to the Next engages with the premise of spiritual allegories that dovetailed movement through space with spiritual progression. But in an example like Henry Fielding’s The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild (1743), we see how an Enlightenment novelist could leverage political allegory for satirical purposes. Fielding takes full advantage of the story of Jonathan Wild, creating a set of pairings between that story and the rise of Walpole as Britain’s first Prime Minister. He, like Haywood, criticizes Walpole as a corrupt, self-interested politician. As is often the case with Enlightenment novels that are part political allegory, in Jonathan Wild the pairings of literal signifiers with allegorical signifieds are surface-level. Fielding designs the narrative in a way that encourages readers to link Wild and Walpole. But even here, the novel falls

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far short of the generic allegories common in early modern Britain. Modal allegory continues to win the day over generic allegory. In other novels, the allegorical mode is a shorthand for character development. Such is the case when Richardson names one of his characters Robert Lovelace in Clarissa or when Fielding names one of his characters Squire Allworthy in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749). These names align novelistic characters with concepts without violating the narrative’s mimeticism. Within the context of a novel, these names function like nicknames. They may refer to the character’s dominant concept but fall short of portraying that character as concept-obsessed. Rather than being set apart from their surrounding contexts (as Pamela, Clarissa, and David Simple are), Lovelace and Allworthy actively participate in their contexts. Using names as shorthand for character development is not limited to novels. Examples are plentiful in Enlightenment drama. For instance, in The Beggar’s Opera (1728), John Gay uses names to align characters with occupations or characteristics. The jail keeper is named “Lockit”; the thieves have names like “Nimming Ned” (with “nimming” being a euphemism for stealing); women in town have names like “Mrs Coaxer” and “Dolly Trull.” Gay, like many other contemporary dramatists, understood the storytelling power of a name that automatically aligns character (typically a minor one) with concepts. Surveying these literary experiments demonstrates that Enlightenment writers were far from abandoning allegory. Most of the writers covered in this chapter acknowledged allegory as fundamentally flawed. But they also recognized that, despite or maybe even because of allegory’s flaws, the literary form could be adapted and retooled for a new audience.  In a recent analysis of the novels of Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, and Jane Collier, Ros Ballaster argues that allegory “has an unacknowledged afterlife in the mid-century novel” (2015, 630). The word “afterlife” implies that allegory had outlived its usefulness and somehow existed beyond death. As we have seen in this chapter, that was far from true. Novelistic adaptations of allegory were far-reaching, innovative, and diverse. Allegory was not simply lingering. It was thriving.  This process presented a problem for Enlightenment literary critics. Many of those critics witnessed the widespread use of modal allegory and—whether explicitly or implicitly—recognized the potential for

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creating a Drydenesque abomination. How Enlightenment critics responded to that potential will be the topic of the next chapter.

References Ballaster, Ros. 2015. “Satire and Embodiment: Allegorical Romance on Stage and Page in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27: 631-660. Cole, Megan. 2022. “Fantasy and Education in Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 34: 287-306. Defoe, Daniel. 2007. Robinson Crusoe. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1719) Downie, J.A. 1987. “Swift’s Discourse: Allegorical Satire or Parallel History?” Swift Studies 2: 25-32. Ehrenpreis, Irvin. 1989. “The Allegory of Gulliver’s Travels.” Swift Studies 4: 13-28 Ellis, Frank H. 1967. A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions Between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome: With the Consequences they had upon both those States. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Fielding, Sarah. 1988. The Adventures of David Simple. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press. (Original work published 1744) Firth, Charles Harding. 1977. The Political Significance of “Gulliver’s Travels. Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions. Fitzgerald, Robert P. 1968. “The Allegory of Luggnagg and the Struldbruggs in Gulliver’s Travels.” Studies in Philology 65: 657-76. Fletcher, Angus. 1979. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Frye, Northrop. 1990. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Guilhamet, Leon. 1987. Satire and the Transformation of Genre. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hammond, Brean. 1987. “Allegory in Swift’s ‘Voyage to Laputa.’” KM: A Birthday Album for Kenneth Muir Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press. Hargrave, Jennifer. 2015. “To the Glory of the Chinese’: Sinocentric Political Reform in Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49: 31-50. Haywood, Eliza. 1999. The Adventures of Eovaai. Ed. Earla Wilputte. New York, NY: Broadview Books. Jackson, Rosemary. 2009. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York, NY: Routledge. (Original work published by Methuen & Co. Ltd. 1981) Jarmusch, Jim. 2004. “Things I’ve Learned.” MovieMaker Magazine 53.

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King, Kathryn R. 2012. A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood. London: Pickering and Chatto. King, William. 1704. Some Remarks on the Tale of a Tub. London. Knapp, Steven. 1985. Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levine, Jay Arnold. 1966. “The Design of A Tale of a Tub (with a Digression on a Mad Modern Critic).” ELH 33: 198-227. Leyburn, Ellen Douglass. 1950. “Certain Problems of Allegorical Satire in Gulliver’s Travels.” Huntington Library Quarterly 13: 161-89. McKeon, Michael.“The Pastoral Revolution.” 1998.  Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution. Ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N.  Zwicker. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. McKeon, Michael. 2002. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1987) Paulson, Ronald. 1967. The Fictions of Satire. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Philmus, Robert M. 1992. “Swift and the Question of Allegory: The Case of Gulliver’s Travels.” English Studies in Canada 18: 157-79. Porter, Roy. 2000. The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. Russo, Stephanie. 2018. “Strange Ghosts Handing Out Jewels Is No Basis for a System of Government: Politics and the Redemption of Eve in Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai.” English Studies 100: 980-996. Saccamano, Neil. 1993. “Knowledge, Power, Allegory: Swift’s Tale and Neoclassical Literary Criticism,” in Enlightening Allegory: Theory, Practice, and Contexts of Allegory in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. New York, NY: AMS Press. Starkman, Miriam. 1950. Swift’s Satire on Learning in “A Tale of a Tub.” Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Swift, Jonathan. 2002. Gulliver’s Travels. Ed. Albert J.  Rivero. New  York, NY: W.W Norton & Company, Inc. (Original work published 2008) Swift, Jonathan. 2008. ‘A Tale of a Tub’ and Other Works. Ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1704) Traugott, John. 1963. “Swift’s Allegory: The Yahoo and the Man-of-Mode.” University of Toronto Quarterly 33: 1-18.

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Tuve, Rosemond. 1966. Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wotton, William. 1705. A Defense of the Reflections Upon Ancient and Modern Learning, in Answer to the Objections of Sir W.  Temple, and Others. With Observations upon The Tale of a Tub. London.

CHAPTER 5

How Critics Retrofitted Rules for Allegory

Periodicals were a quintessential Enlightenment form of writing. In publications such as The Rambler, The Tatler, and The Spectator, writers engaged in conversation about the future of society, the role of philosophy and literature, the morality of urban spaces, and seemingly everything else (see Squibbs, 2014, 1). The resulting textual conversations encapsulated the spirit of the “public sphere” during this period, in Britain and elsewhere (see Habermas, 1989, 42). They advanced the idea that people could bracket their identities to engage in honest, open discourse about various social topics. This bracketing operated by way of a lie. It ostensibly opened up discourse to a broader public while simultaneously applying its own criteria for inclusion and exclusion. Those included were primarily white, mostly male, mostly land-owning, and mostly upper class, with some exceptions. The ability to bracket identities was an expression of privilege. As was frequently the case with British Enlightenment endeavors (as emphasized in the introduction to this book), proponents of periodicals exaggerated how much their endeavor broke with the past. Still, the lie that periodicals featured open discourse that anyone could enter was, in and of itself, a way to further progress. It created an inclusive ideal that, although reality fell far short of that ideal, would help usher in a break from the past. The dream of Enlightenment discourse far outpaced reality. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Gulya, Allegory in Enlightenment Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19036-0_5

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On the level of form, as Manushag Powell has noted, periodicals were characterized by a “variety of content, including advertisements, essays, images, letters, fiction, and reportage” (2011, 441). This variety allowed writers to experiment in spurts, testing out what a specific form could look like without necessarily taking on a more extended project. It also afforded writers a platform for writing about writing, a practice that helped popularize literary criticism (see Gavin, 2015, 8–9) and furthered the emergence of an Enlightenment aesthetic based on decorum and a distance from the literary object. This chapter analyzes how literary criticism—including, but not limited to, that found in British periodicals—approached allegory. Collectively horrified by some experiments (e.g., Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther) that departed from literary tradition, literary critics sought to right the ship. They looked at past precedents, trying to figure out if they could extrapolate rules for allegory. Enlightenment critics attempted to save allegory by making contemporary writers toe the line. This process was retroactive as well as tendentious. In reading through past examples such as Everyman, Piers Plowman, and The Faerie Queene, these literary critics generated rules that were over-generalizations about how a complex literary form should look. They saw what they wanted to see. It would be difficult to overestimate how influential the rules generated by Enlightenment critics have been, both for contemporary writers and for allegory today. These critics were bent on preventing another abomination like The Hind and the Panther. They tried to identify how past examples of the form worked and retrofit guidelines for how present and future writers could manage the form. In the process, they projected their focus on decorum, propriety, and consistency onto texts that did not share that focus. In these writers’ hands, dissecting allegory moved from a descriptive to a prescriptive exercise. They spent a great deal of time and ink on how writers could use allegory without producing literary abominations that would turn readers away. For them, it was time to rein in allegory. Some of the most prominent literary critics of their time—including Thomas Parnell, John Hughes, Joseph Addison, and Samuel Johnson— responded to their age’s experiments with allegory by retroactively creating guidelines for its use. These critics were optimistic that the key to saving allegory lay in returning to its past. They combined an intense focus on readers’ developing tastes (which increasingly preferred the empirical and concrete) with an aesthetic distance that was only emerging during

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this period. Whereas Bunyan’s Christian was unable to analyze the allegory of the dusty parlor from a distance—with the dust infecting his lungs and his choking becoming a subject of interpretation in and of itself— these critics latch onto aesthetic distance to save allegory from becoming a relic of the past.

Making Rules for Generic Allegory In Spectator No. 501, the critic Thomas Parnell had this to say about allegory: As some of the finest Compositions among the Ancients are in Allegory, I have endeavoured, in several of my Papers, to revive that way of Writing, and hope I have not been altogether unsuccessful in it; for I find there is always a great Demand for those particular Papers, and cannot but observe that several Authors have endeavoured of late to excel in Works of this Nature. (1712/1987)

Parnell invested in the usefulness of allegory as a tool for teaching moral and social values. He believed that allegory deserved to be saved for his modern readers. For him, saving allegory meant examining it closely, as if that would tell writers how they might change the original form for their ever-changing readership. Parnell’s words encapsulate what is happening in eighteenth-century criticism more generally. Like Bunyan several decades before, these critics believed allegory was just too powerful a literary tool to abandon. They combed through various examples to figure out how to revamp it for an audience that no longer seemed interested in full-fledged allegories. The range of texts used by these critics is staggering. We find many usual suspects: Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” in The Republic, Homer’s epics, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. But we also find texts that might surprise us: Persius’s satires, the Arabian Nights, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and even historical texts such as Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s The General History of China (1735). This range of texts prompted Thomas Vogler to write, “By the end of the eighteenth century ‘allegory’ had become one of the most important words in the European aesthetic vocabulary. It had also become almost meaningless” (Vogler, 1993, 75). Vogler’s point is well taken, but patterns emerge when we examine how writers and critics conceptualized allegory as a literary form. Why did

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many critics think the form was worthwhile? How did those writers theorize allegory, moving from specific texts to support their more general ideas about managing allegory? Critics understood allegory as, at its best, a powerful method for delightful instruction. They approached the literary form in a way strikingly similar to Philip Sidney’s theory of poesy in “The Defence of Poesy” (1595). Sidney argues that poesy can “teach and delight” its readers and encourage them “to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger, and teach to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved” (1595/2004, 11). For Sidney, literature can make goodness seem engaging and delightful. In the eighteenth century, critics approached allegory with similar terms in mind. They identified allegory as an exemplar of literature’s ability to delightfully instruct readers. In Tatler No. 147, for instance, Addison and Steele compare learning about virtue through reading allegories to improving one’s health through the pleasing exercise involved in hunting: Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. As by the one, health is preserved, strengthened and invigorated; by the other, virtue (which is the health of the mind) is kept alive, cherished and confirmed. But as exercise becomes tedious and painful when we make use of it only as the means of health, so reading is apt to grow uneasy and burdensome, when we apply ourselves to it only for our improvement in virtue. For this reason, the virtue which we gather from a fable, or an allegory, is like the health we get by hunting; as we are engaged in an agreeable pursuit that draws us on with pleasure, and makes us insensible of the fatigues that accompany it. (Tatler 1709/1987, 331).

Allegory exemplifies the standard of delightful instruction that Addison and Steele borrow from medieval and early modern writers. It “draws us on with pleasure,” teaching us about virtue and morality while keeping us engaged with its literal level. Allegory is a powerful literary form because it teaches moral, social, and religious values without becoming “uneasy and burdensome” over time, as do texts that explicitly teach their readers about virtue. Addison and Steele suggest that overtly moral narratives can be tiresome for readers and that, therefore, the art of speaking otherwise is pivotal to creating exciting and instructive stories. Elsewhere, Addison invests in the idea that allegory is a promising literary form because it pleases readers’ imaginations. In Spectator No. 339,

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Addison writes, “Poetry delights in cloathing abstracted Ideas in Allegories and sensible Images” (1712/1987, 258). He suggests that the personified abstractions found so often in allegories are sources of delight because they give corporeal forms to abstract concepts that might otherwise elude description and discussion. Furthermore, in Spectator No. 357, Addison writes that allegories should “convey particular Circumstances to the Reader after an unusual and entertaining Manner” (1712/1987, 258). He suggests that the differences between allegory and the texture of real-­ life, material experience might even be a source of entertainment: the “unusual” way allegorists approach the world is a welcome and delightful break from literal, direct speech. As a rhetorical method, allegory is one way to make otherwise unremarkable ideas seem new, unusual, and entertaining. Johnson would express a similar sentiment later, calling allegory “perhaps one of the most pleasing vehicles for instruction,” repeating the notion already presented by Addison and the anonymous poet (1751/1969, 284). These comments draw attention to how allegorists can simultaneously use hidden meaning to please and instruct their readers. These examples demonstrate that many of the eighteenth century’s most prominent critics were far from regarding allegory as obsolete or irreconcilable with eighteenth-century tastes. Addison, Steele, and Johnson understood allegory as a promising didactic tool for instructing readers without hitting them over the head with the story’s meaning. They assumed that directly telling readers how to interpret a narrative shuts down those readers’ imaginative engagements with the story. In the formulation of Addison and Steele, writing only for the “improvement of [the reader’s] virtue” would make the text “uneasy and burdensome” (1709/1987, 331). It is preferable to keep the meaning at least partially hidden. Doing so allows readers to find pleasure and delight in the story while learning about moral, political, and religious truths. Such discussions frequently associate the level of the signifier with pleasure and that of the signified with instruction (see Bernard, 1627). They value allegory as a method for encouraging readers to become invested in the literal narrative while, almost unbeknownst to the readers themselves, also learning and internalizing social and moral lessons. The comments linking allegory to delightful instruction presuppose that readers are much more receptive to ideas when taught through narrative. According to Addison, Steele, and others, eighteenth-century readers delight in a well-­ chosen pairing between vehicle and tenor, making allegory a powerful pedagogical tool.

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At the same time, these critics regarded allegory as challenging to manage. They shared the belief that saving allegory meant formulating guidelines to circumscribe its use. For instance, here Addison moves from noting allegory’s usefulness to listing some criteria for compelling allegory: Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many Tracks of Light in a Discourse, that make every thing about them clear and beautiful. A noble Metaphor, when it is placed to an Advantage, casts a kind of Glory round it, and darts a Lustre through a whole Sentence: These different Kinds of Allusion are but so many different Manners of Similitude, and, that they may please the Imagination, the Likeness ought to be very exact, or very agreeable, as we love to see a Picture where the Resemblance is just, or the Posture and Air graceful. (1712/1987, 578)

Addison commingles his thoughts on how allegories can delight the imagination with his more prescriptive views on how contemporary writers should manage them to produce the desired effects. The phrases “when well chosen” and “when it is placed to an Advantage” function as restrictive clauses, distinguishing between the effects of what Addison deems successful and unsuccessful allegories. Addison suggests that allegories are of great value, but only if their use satisfies specific criteria—including a close resemblance between signifiers and signifieds and the agreeability and grace of the writer’s comparison of them. His discussion hinges on identifying good allegory’s effects on its readers: good allegory causes everything around it to shine with greater brilliance because of the striking resemblance between its signifiers and signifieds. Bad allegory, in contrast, makes unconvincing comparisons and thus lacks grace and justness of representation. In The Connoisseur No. 67 (1755), an anonymous poet echoes Addison’s warnings about mismanaging allegory: Others, who aim at fancy, chuse To woo the gentle Spenser’s muse. This poet fixes for his theme. On allegory, or a dream; Fiction and truth together joins Thro’ a long waste of flimzy lines, Fondly believes his fancy glows, And image upon image grows. Thinks his strong muse takes wond’rous flights

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When’e’er she sings of PEERLESS WIGHTS, Of DENS, of PALFREYS, SPELLS, and KNIGHTS. Till allegory, Spenser’s veil, T’instruct and please in moral tale, With him’s no veil the truth to shroud, But one impenetrable cloud.

The poem critiques eighteenth-century writers’ tendency to imitate Spenser’s allegories rather than follow their imaginations and create genuinely original literary texts. It suggests that imitations of Spenserian allegory had moved away from a method of veiled discourse—in which a writer commented on an implicit signified—and toward the “one impenetrable” cloud that characterizes utter meaninglessness. In this line of thought, modern imitators mistake the use of wights, dens, palfreys, spells, and knights for substance. These imitators erroneously think that their muse “takes wond’rous flights” at the sheer mention of these conventions, missing that, for Spenser and other allegorists, the conventions were didactic tools used to shroud rather than obfuscate meaning. Embedded within this anonymous poet’s critique of what had become of Spenserian allegory is a set of judgments about good and bad allegory: good allegory is veiled discourse that instructs and delights its readers; bad allegory simply uses the trappings of good allegory, using them as matters of course rather than to engage or teach. How could current writers be sure they were using allegorical conventions correctly? Addison addresses this exact question in Guardian No. 152. Here, he provides guidelines for how allegories should be written: “in the first place, the Fable of it ought to be perfect, and if possible, to be filled with surprising Turns and Incidents. In the next there ought to be useful Morals and Reflections couched under it, which still receive a greater Value from their being new and uncommon; as also from their appearing difficult to have been thrown into emblematical Types and Shadows” (1713/1982, 497). The initial hiddenness of the morals and reflections makes them shine brighter once readers receive enough information to identify the allegorical signifieds and, second, recognize the surprising and uncommon resemblances between the writer’s signifiers and signifieds. In this formulation, allegory’s instructional technique closely resembles the “Aha moment” of modern pedagogy. The allegorists’ goal is to introduce a perplexing story, to allow readers to ponder the story’s meaning, and then to introduce a key that somehow smooths over the confusion and, in the process, rewards the reader for their efforts.

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Creating aesthetic principles for how to use the literary form properly was far from limited to Addison. In “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry” (1715), John Hughes argues that literary rules “are useful to help our Observations in distinguishing the Beauties and Blemishes, in such Works as have already been produc’d” (xlvi–xlvii). In other words, the rules help readers and writers know what to look for when judging a text’s qualities. Later in the same essay, Hughes uses The Faerie Queene to extrapolate four criteria for successful allegory: (1) the narrative must be “lively, and surprising”; (2) there must be “Elegance, or a beautiful Propriety, and Aptness in the Fable to the Subject on which it is employ’d; (3) “the Fable [must] be every where consistent with itself; and (4) the “Allegory must be clear and intelligible,” meaning that the writer must give the reader enough evidence to discern the moral of the story. Hughes’s last two principles echo throughout eighteenth-century criticism on allegory. The call for allegory to be internally consistent is on par with the rise of the aesthetic during the period. As M.H.  Abrams points out, the eighteenth century saw an increasing emphasis on judging literary works from a distance so that writers and critics could accurately judge those works’ emotional and ethical value (1953, 271–84; 1985, 8-33). This process often involved a powerful drive toward narrative consistency, which maintained what scholars would later call “internal probability” (see Patey, 1984, 142–5). Even if readers understood a narrative to be fictional, the consistency of its various parts drew readers into the story. It made them feel as if they were participating in a literary world with its own rules and conventions. Hughes brings this expectation of narrative consistency to bear on his aesthetic principles for allegory, contending that successful allegories commit fully to their conceit. This process ran an ancient literary form through expectations that only solidified during the eighteenth century. Writers such as Hughes scan a wide range of allegorical and pseudo-allegorical texts, using their chosen examples to support their thoughts on how allegories should function. As we would expect, these Enlightenment writers fall into the trap of confirmation bias. In creating rules for allegory, they choose examples that best serve their purposes and leave out those that would contradict their thoughts on what allegories should do.

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Reining in Modal Allegory The process of creating rules for generic allegories was relatively easy. There was a consensus that the most successful allegories created an internally consistent narrative that pointed toward ulterior signifieds. But what about writers who used allegory as a mode rather than a genre? How could those writers use allegorical elements while prioritizing the narrative consistency of the text overall? These questions drove Enlightenment critics to be inventive since no one had laid down rules for modal allegory. It would force them to take their creative problem-solving skills up a notch. This book has leaned so heavily on the distinction between generic and modal allegory because it arose out of eighteenth-century criticism. Hughes’s essay on allegorical poetry is, again, instructive. Hughes argues that writers must distinguish between “Epick and Dramatick Poems” that momentarily use elements of allegory and allegories “the very Frame and Model of which is design’d to be Allegorical; in which therefore, as I said before, such unsubstantial and Symbolical Actors may be very properly admitted” and even made central to the narrative (Hughes, 1715, vliii). He thus distinguishes between modal and generic usages of allegory and uses that distinction to dictate whether writers need to set off personified abstractions from literal characters (for comparison, see Dubos, 1748, vol. 1, 161–4). Hughes, for example, points out that Virgil’s description of personified abstractions in Hell in the Aeneid—which Hughes classifies as an epic—is improper because “Persons of this imaginary Life are to be excluded from any share of Action in Epic Poems” (1715, xliii). For Hughes, Virgil needed to separate his personifications from the more probable characters in the Aeneid because the text is, generically speaking, an epic instead of an allegory. Other critics follow Hughes’s project of figuring out how writers combine allegorical figures and literal characters while maintaining decorum. These critics, collectively, seem bent on preventing the aesthetic insanity that characterized Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther toward the end of the seventeenth century. Samuel Johnson even writes about “the original incongruity” of The Hind and the Panther, asking “for what can be more absurd that one beast should counsel another to rest her faith upon a pope and council?” (1779/2010, vol. 21, 473). This incongruity is central to literary abominations. Even if John Steadman is correct in arguing that the “mixture of literal and allegorical modes is an early modern epic convention,”

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eighteenth-­century critics were not convinced that the technique was viable for their readers (Steadman, 1974, 96). They treated such an indiscriminate mixture as an abomination to be avoided and, as a result, searched for different and creative ways to separate the modes even if they were used in the same text. In their search for evidence supporting their ideas about separating literal and allegorical modes, these critics naturally gravitated toward specific texts. When it came to the conversation about whether writers could mix allegorical and literal modes, Milton’s Paradise Lost proved to be a lightning rod. Johnson focuses on what he calls Milton’s “allegorical persons,” personified abstractions that co-exist with literal characters in the same text. For Johnson, they are to be represented materially, but with strict limits to avoid the impression that they are real: After the operation of immaterial agents which cannot be explained may be considered that of allegorical persons, which have no real existence. To exalt causes into agents, to invest abstract ideas with form, and animate them with activity has always been the right of poetry. But such airy beings are for the most part suffered only to do their natural office, and retire. Thus Fame tells a tale and Victory hovers over a general or perches on a standard; but Fame and Victory can do no more. To give them any real employment or ascribe to them any material agency is to make them allegorical no longer, but to shock the mind by ascribing effects to non-entity. In the Prometheus of Æschylus we see Violence and Strength, and in the Alcestis of Euripides we see Death, brought upon the stage, all as active persons of the drama; but no precedents can justify absurdity. (Lives 1779/2010, vol. 21, 198)

Poets, Johnson argues, are welcome to “invest abstract ideas with form,” but only if they do not mix them freely with actual entities. Allegorical persons are not to behave as “active persons” because doing so would produce representational inconsistencies, as it would put the literal and the allegorical on the same plane of significance. To maintain consistency, writers must distinguish between the literal and the allegorical modes of representation. This criticism is not a slight against allegory. On the contrary, it is an argument about how literature functions according to Johnson and why an indiscriminate mixture of literal and allegorical representational modes (where both include material beings that can interact with one another) is undesirable. Here, Johnson further distinguishes between two sorts of figurative representation, one used for real but immaterial beings that “cannot be explained” to humans unless changed

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to material terms and the other used for unreal concepts that “have no real existence” but that are, for Johnson, unquestionably valuable for literary texts. According to Johnson, allegorical persons are “suffered only to do their natural office, and retire” precisely because they personify preexisting concepts. Fame and Victory can only perform actions that further establish their relationships to the concepts they embody. Introducing Violence and Strength (as Æschylus does in Prometheus) or Death (as Euripides does in Alcestis) as “active persons” who exert their own will violates their roles as allegorical embodiments. Allegorical persons can only perform fated actions, which agree with the meaning of the figure’s particular concept. As Johnson writes within the context of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714), allegorical persons “may produce effects, but cannot conduct actions,” meaning that they cannot function independently of the concepts they embody (Lives 1779/2010, vol. 23, 1205–6). They, therefore, do not possess agency because concepts act through them. Their actions and speech are always already conditioned by their governing concepts. For Johnson, personification is a valid literary technique because it gives form to abstract concepts, treating them as embodied agents instead of disembodied causes. It unites the specific and the general, making it possible for the writer to home in on a single, identifiable person representing a purely mental concept. Johnson often uses personifications in many of his Rambler allegories, employing these to discuss virtues and vices and teach lessons about social conduct and morality. Moreover, Johnson’s The Vision of Theodore, a generic allegory, has many powerful scenes in which personified abstractions fight over the fates of those living on the Mountain of Existence. In one such instance, Reason and Religion attempt to save captives from the clutches of Habit, with varying degrees of success: Some however there always were, who, when they found Habit prevailing over them, called upon Reason or Religion for assistance; each of them willingly came to the succour of her suppliant, but neither with the same strength, nor the same success. Habit, insolent with her power, would often presume to parley with Reason, and offer to loose some of her chains if the rest might remain. To this Reason, who was never certain of victory, frequently consented, but always found her concession destructive, and saw the captive led away by Habit to his former slavery. Religion never submit-

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ted to treaty, but held out her hand with certainty of conquest; and if the captive to whom she gave it did not quit his hold, always led him away in triumph, and placed him in the direct path to the Temple of Happiness, where Reason never failed to congratulate his deliverance, and encourage his adherence to that power to whose timely succour he was indebted for it. (Johnson, 1748/1990, vol. 16, 207-8)

Here, as throughout The Vision of Theodore, the abstractions are strikingly human-like. Reason and Religion try different strategies to free the captives from Habit, the former often parleying with Habit with little success and the latter simply leading the prisoners away to the Temple of Happiness. But if Johnson treats his abstractions almost as persons, what prevents him from running into the same problem that Milton does in Paradise Lost? The answer is that Johnson manages The Vision of Theodore so that the only character described as literal, Theodore himself, observes from a distance as the personifications interact. He avoids attributing material agency to his personifications, refraining from giving them the ability to interact with literal characters physically or to manipulate the surrounding environment. In other words, Johnson spends most of The Vision of Theodore describing the actions performed by allegorical persons. Still, he consistently maintains the distinction between the allegorical and the literal. The only interactions between Theodore and the allegorical persons are, appropriately, through conversation. Theodore and the personified abstractions can talk to one another but ultimately inhabit two different planes of existence. Johnson does not object to abstractions acting as persons per se. Indeed, in his Rambler allegories and The Vision of Theodore, he shows how to use abstractions to describe and discuss concepts that do not exist in the world. Johnson’s problem with Milton’s use of personified abstractions arises when Milton mixes allegorical persons with literal characters, with little separation. In Life of Milton, Johnson uses Sin and Death as examples of allegorical persons that act like real agents, arguing that Milton erred when he portrayed them interacting with a literal character like Satan. Unlike Edmund Burke, who praises Milton’s description of Death as a demonstration of the sublime’s obscurity and uncertainty (see Burke, 1757, II.III.43–44;), Johnson criticizes Milton for breaking the allegory by ascribing material agency to Sin and Death. By having them pave a road between Hell and Earth, Milton disrupts their allegorical significance—following the ancient precedent of Æschylus and Euripides

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rather than looking to what contemporary readers would find absurd. He treats them like real persons who can exert influence on Satan’s physical surroundings and, therefore, as capable of more than personifying abstract concepts: Milton’s allegory of Sin and Death is undoubtedly faulty. Sin is indeed the mother of Death, and may be allowed to be the portress of hell; but when they stop the journey of Satan, a journey described as real, and when Death offers him battle, the allegory is broken. That Sin and Death should have shown the way to hell, might have been allowed; but they cannot facilitate the passage by building a bridge, because the difficulty of Satan’s passage is described as real and sensible, and the bridge ought to be only figurative. The hell assigned to the rebellious spirits is described as not less local than the residence of man. (Johnson, 1779/2010, vol. 21, 198)

Johnson’s tone is striking. He focuses on what actions literal and allegorical persons should be allowed to perform, with these conditioned by their ontological statuses as actual or virtual. The bridge built by Sin and Death “ought to be only figurative” because, as conceptual abstractions, Sin and Death should not be allowed to produce “real and sensible” changes to the environment. Unlike Satan’s journey from Hell to Eden, which Johnson insists should be literal, the bridge can have no real, material existence (see Gallagher, 1976, 317; Quilligan, 1983, 126; Fallon, 2008, 329–50). Johnson calls for Milton to separate Sin and Death from Satan because Paradise Lost is not a self-contained allegory like Johnson’s The Vision of Theodore or his Rambler allegories but a predominantly literal poem that selectively incorporates modal allegory. Although The Vision of Theodore does include one character described as literal, the vast majority of the text describes a consistently allegorical scene on the Mountain of Existence, with ontologically similar beings interacting only with one another. The division between Theodore and the personified abstractions is stark, with the former studying and asking about the latter’s actions. Furthermore, Johnson’s Rambler allegories are internally consistent to the point of isolating its personifications from the literal discourse of surrounding papers. No. 22, for instance, depicts the rivalry between Wit and Learning, two personified abstractions that regularly compete with each other in debates. The personifications “Both had prejudices, which in some degree hindered their progress towards perfection, and left them open to attacks”

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(1750/1969, 123). Wit and Learning marry and become “the favourites of all the powers of heaven,” demonstrating that people should aim to balance these two concepts in their everyday lives (1750/1969, 125). Because literal characters are absent from the allegory, Johnson does not run the risk (as Milton does) of failing to distinguish between different levels of meaning. The danger of mixing literal and allegorical modes of representation is not that readers will mistake allegorical persons for literal characters but that writers will create absurdities by not correctly separating these personified abstractions that exist only in figurative terms. To put this in another way, it is not that writers will dupe readers into believing the conceptual abstractions to be literal characters, but that conspicuous falsities will disrupt the reader’s engagement with the narrative. As Lord Kames, a figure of the Scottish Enlightenment as well as Johnson’s contemporary, points out, “in writing the allegory can easily be distinguished from the historical part: no person, for example, mistakes Virgil’s Fame for a real being” (1762, vol. III, 130). Whatever differences exist between how Kames and Johnson discuss allegorical persons, these critics share confidence in the reader’s ability to distinguish between literal characters and personified abstractions in literary texts. (Kames contends that doing so is much harder for paintings and images.) Johnson implies such confidence when writing about how allegorical persons can shock readers with their absurdity if not separated from literal characters. The pursuit of literary decorum drives Johnson’s analysis, if we understand decorum not in the strict, overbearing sense sometimes attributed to the eighteenth century but as denoting a general focus on reception and plausibility and the congruity of a text’s various components. For instance, in his discussion of Sin and Death, he writes about what actions should be “allowed” for conceptual abstractions given their relationship to literal characters. What is the relationship between allegorical persons and literal characters? What kinds of actions should allegorical persons be allowed to perform? When does the writer’s use of them become absurd or unnatural? How can writers use allegorical persons without suggesting that these figures are literal? Johnson does not answer these questions exhaustively. However, the questions’ increasing relevance to discussions of allegorical figures indicates a shift from the early modern to the eighteenth century. These questions would have been all but unintelligible within the context of medieval or early modern literature since, as Knapp points out, it was only during the eighteenth century that the combination of the literal and

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the allegorical became a problem to be solved. In his discussions of allegorical persons in Paradise Lost, Johnson addresses not so much the viability of allegories as an artistic form traditionally relying on an overarching system of meaning, but questions about how to use bits and pieces of that art form within genres lacking that system of meaning. He creates rules for managing the kinds of bricolage covered in Chap. 3. Johnson’s comments are far from anomalous. The Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos, whose Re′flexions critiques sur la poe’sie et sur la peinture (1719) became widely influential in England after the 1748 translation, makes the same distinction between generic and modal allegory (vol. 1, 161–4). For modal allegory, according to Dubos, authors must not allow allegorical persons to function as “principal actors” but instead as minor characters that can only exert limited influence over the plot (1719, vol. 1, 178). And Kames writes that “allegorical beings should be confined within their own sphere; and never be admitted to mix in the principal action, nor to cooperate in retarding or advancing the catastrophe” (1719, vol. 3, 248). These critics tie allegorical persons’ limited agency more explicitly than Johnson does to narrative structure, making the primary plotline the litmus test for distinguishing allegorical from literal characters. However, in the end, it is essential to understand these critics as participating in the same historical process as Johnson, as they all seek to evaluate how writers can successfully incorporate allegorical persons into predominantly literal texts (for similar examples, see Spence, 1747, 312; Ogilvie, 1762, lxiii; Duff, 1768, 172–6). However, the most important precedent for Johnson’s argument is Joseph Addison’s Spectator papers on Paradise Lost. I propose turning to Addison’s treatment of Sin and Death to sharpen our sense of what Johnson means in his Life of Milton and refine our understanding of his argument’s context. Addison wrote at least seventeen Spectator papers on the poem and—thanks partially to their continued publication as Notes Upon the Twelve Books of ‘Paradise Lost’ after Addison’s death—these papers had a potent influence on how later critics like Johnson would read the poem. Addison approaches Paradise Lost as, above all, an epic poem that needs to maintain probability. It is unsurprising that he takes issue with Milton’s decision to interweave “in the Texture of his Fable some Particulars which do not seem to have Probability enough for an Epic Poem, particularly in the Actions which he ascribes to Sin and Death” (1712/1987, 60). And in another Spectator paper, Addison argues that although the scene with Sin and Death is “a very beautiful and

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well-­invented Allegory,” he “cannot think that Persons of such a chimerical Existence are proper Actors in an Epic Poem; because there is not that Measure of Probability annexed to them, which is requisite in Writings of this Kind” (1712/1987, No. 273, 563). In No. 357, Addison brings together many of his points about Sin and Death in Paradise Lost, using them as examples of “such Shadowy and Imaginary Persons as may be introduced into Heroic Poems.” For Addison, writers should relegate “Allegorical Persons” to descriptive digressions, setting them off from literal persons by minimizing their ability to affect the primary storyline. Allegorical persons are effective means for “convey[ing] particular Circumstances to the Reader after an unusual and entertaining Manner,” but become improper when they influence a narrative involving literal characters: “when such Persons are introduced as principal Actors, and engaged in a Series of Adventures, they take too much upon them, and are by no means proper for an Heroick Poem, which ought to appear credible in its principal Parts. I cannot forbear therefore thinking that Sin and Death are as improper Agents in a Work of this nature” (Addison 1712/1987, No. 357, 338). Addison, like Dubos and Kames, believes that the most effective way to contain the actions of allegorical persons within predominantly literal texts is to make them minor characters with little direct influence over the plot. Addison, it is important to note, is one of the major architects behind the positive reevaluation of the imagination at the beginning of the eighteenth century. For Addison, the problem in Paradise Lost is not the unreality of concepts like Sin and Death but the strictures involved with working within the epic genre (see Rees, 2010, 109–10, 121–47). Poets can include allegorical persons in their epics, but only if they contain the actions of those persons and prevent them from taking “too much upon them.” We are now positioned to spot some significant differences between critics making similar arguments. Johnson borrows the phrase “allegorical persons” from Addison’s Spectator papers, but uses a different logic to identify acceptable actions for those persons. Even from a relatively small sample of Addison’s comments on Paradise Lost, it is clear that his argument relies heavily on the poem’s genre. The expectation that Paradise Lost needs to be a consistently literal narrative—in which only literal persons are “principal Actors”—comes from its close relationship to the epics of Homer and Virgil rather than to the fantastical allegories of Spenser and Ariosto (see Spectator 1712/1987, No. 297). The question of genre, so

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pivotal to Addison’s understanding of how Milton should have used the allegorical persons Sin and Death, is almost completely absent from Johnson’s discussion of the scene. For Johnson, the expectation of literality comes from the text itself rather than the genre of which Paradise Lost is a part: Milton himself presents Satan as a material and therefore real character that can change (and be changed by) his surroundings. Johnson and Addison believe personified concepts like Sin and Death are fundamentally unreal, but use different rationales to justify their understanding of Paradise Lost as a mimetic text. Another difference between Johnson’s discussion of Sin and Death and Addison’s is that Johnson ties the real– unreal distinction to materiality, whereas Addison ties it to the plot. What does the comparison between Johnson and Addison mean for reevaluating what happened to allegory during the eighteenth century? Despite the differences between their arguments, the comparison demonstrates the centrality of the questions driving Johnson’s discussion of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost—questions that revolve around literary decorum and how to properly distinguish between different modes of representation. Johnson, Addison, Dubos, and Kames all discuss the possibility of encasing allegorical narratives within literal ones, so that an author can maintain probability while also taking advantage of the many uses of allegory. In their discussions of allegorical persons, these authors conceptualize components of allegory (here, personified abstractions) apart from their original genre. In so doing, they depart strikingly from earlier writers. As Kenneth Borris and Kelley point out, medieval and early modern writers regularly mix literal and allegorical modes of representation without the fear of shocking readers (Borris, 2000, 31; Kelley, 1997, 75). Unlike their medieval and early modern forebears, eighteenth-century writers need to contend with the idea that using the incorrect allegorical mode could produce a literary abomination. The focus on decorum is not to be understood as entailing the a priori application of literary rules to allegorical and quasi-allegorical texts, but as a closer, more empirically analytical attention to literary form. The critics cited in this chapter demonstrate how eighteenth-century writers typically prioritize formal over theological considerations. In his discussion of angels and allegorical persons in Paradise Lost, Johnson is not particularly interested in getting writers to follow the purported rules of literature or even in the true immateriality of spirits. On the contrary, he makes case-­ by-­case judgments about how readers would react to specific moments in the text and how writers might change or manage those reactions. He

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focuses on how artistic choices might, to use Johnson’s word again, “shock” readers and thereby take their attention away from the narrative. His argument for representational consistency is, thus, fundamentally reader-oriented rather than rule-oriented. In his assertion that “no precedent can justify absurdity,” Johnson pithily suggests that it is not enough for eighteenth-century authors to follow earlier uses of allegorical persons by, for instance, Æschylus and Euripides. Writers must balance classic authors’ authority with their readers’ ever-changing responses. Johnson uses this focus on readers to support his argument that authors must distinguish not only between literal and figurative representation, but between different sorts of figurative representation (that of spirits and that of allegorical persons). Medieval and early modern writers rarely made this second distinction (see Borris, 2000, 212, 250). Johnson conceives of Paradise Lost as a literary text that, as such, Milton should have kept internally consistent even if doing so would not have been wholly consistent with his religious beliefs. Milton should have maintained the distinction between allegorical persons like Sin and Death and literal persons interacting with the material world. However, it would be a mistake to understand this analytical separation as evidence of Johnson’s, or his age’s, animus against allegory. On the contrary, Johnson’s discussion of allegorical persons is a powerful call for authors to distinguish between different modes of representation bolstered by an unwavering commitment to representational consistency. Johnson uses readers’ expected responses to texts to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate representation methods. In the process, he helped carve a space for allegory within the modern aesthetic. Addison, Johnson, and others tried to avoid what they saw as failed innovations with allegory. They were not against literary experiments, nor were they suggesting that modern writers should merely follow ancient precedents. On the contrary, they worked under the assumption that experiments with allegory were pervasive and far-reaching enough that writers could take a step back and extrapolate what worked and what failed. They attempted to help Enlightenment writers achieve an acceptable degree of departure from literary tradition. Achieving this would allow writers to innovate without losing the advantages of allegory. It would save allegory for a new audience.

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References Abrams, M.H. 1985. “Art-as-Such: The Sociology of Modern Aesthetics.” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 38: 8-33. Abrams, M.H. 1953. The Mirror and the Lamp. New  York, NY: Oxford University Press. Bernard, Richard. 1627. The Isle of Man: Or, the Legall Proceeding in Man-shire against Sinne. London. Borris, Kenneth. 2000. Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Burke, Edmund. 1757. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London. Connoisseur, The. 1755. London. Dubos, Jean-Baptiste. 1748. Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music. Trans. Thomas Nugent. London. Duff, William. 1768. An Essay on Original Genius. London, 1768. Fallon, Stephen. 2008. “Milton’s Sin and Death: The Ontology of Allegory in Paradise Lost.” English Literary Renaissance 17: 329-350. Gallagher, Phillip J. 1976. “‘Real or Allegoric’: The Ontology of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost.” English Literary Renaissance 6: 317-35. Gavin, Michael. 2015. The Invention of English Criticism, 1650-1760. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Guardian, The. 1982. Ed. John Calhoun Stephens. Lexington, KY: The University of Kentucky Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hughes, John. 1715. “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry.” The Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser. In Six Volumes. With a Glossary Explaining the Old and Obscure Works, edited by John Hughes. London. Johnson, Samuel. 2010. The Lives of the Poets. Ed. John H.  Middendorf. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Original work published 1779) Johnson, Samuel. 1969. The Rambler. Ed. W.J.  Bate. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Johnson, Samuel. 1990. Rasselas and Other Tales. Ed. Gwin J. Kolb. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Original work published 1759) Kames, Lord. 1762. Elements of Criticism. Edinburgh. Kelley, Theresa M. 1997. Reinventing Allegory. New  York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Ogilvie, John. 1762. Poems on Several Subjects. London. Patey, Douglas. 1984. Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age. New  York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

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Powell, Manushag N. 2011. “Afterword: We Other Periodicals, or, Why Periodical Studies?” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 30: 441-50. Quilligan, Maureen. 1983. Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rees, Christine. 2010. Johnson’s Milton. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Spectator, The. 1987. Ed. Donald F.  Bond. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987. Spence, Joseph. 1747. Polymetis: or, an enquiry concerning the agreement between the works of the Roman poets, and the remains of the antient artists. London. Squibbs, Richard. 2014. Urban Enlightenment and the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan Press. Steadman, John. 1974. The Lamb and the Elephant: Ideal Imitation and the Context of Renaissance Allegory. San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library. Tatler, The. 1987. Ed. Donald F.  Bond. New  York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987. Vogler, Thomas. 1993. “The Allegory of Allegory: Unlockeing Blake’s ‘Crystal Cabinet.’” Enlightening Allegory: Theory, Practice, and Contexts of Allegory in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. New York, NY: AMS Press.



Some Concluding Remarks

A Note on Ideological Shifts Allegory is always with us, in politics, in narratology, in daily life, and in “common sense.” – Frederic Jameson (2019, 207)

In Allegory and Ideology (2019), Frederic Jameson analyzed the ideological underpinnings of allegory and, more specifically, attempted to revive the fourfold allegorical method of Dante and others from a Marxist perspective. He points out that allegory goes far beyond a mistrust of empirical thinking, though that mistrust certainly plays a role. Allegory is about “the dilemmas of representation itself” (34). It highlights the impossibility of representing noumena with language since any representation involves sense-perception (34–5). In other words, as Jameson points out, the crux of allegory is the representability (in Freud’s sense of the term) of the world. One of the reasons the British Enlightenment is such a pivotal period for allegory, despite much scholarly silence on the topic, is that philosophers and writers thought quite seriously about the representability of experience. The seventeenth century saw a disillusionment with what McKeon calls “romance idealism” (1987/2002, 21), which had hinged on accepted wisdom and tradition. In its stead, Enlightenment individuals hung their hats on “naïve empiricism,” a belief that the trick to representing lived experience now lay in sticking to empirically observable data (21). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Gulya, Allegory in Enlightenment Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19036-0

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The reliance on empiricism produces its own counter-critique, “extreme skepticism” (21). Throughout the British Enlightenment, empiricism went through the wringer: it dismissed many of the mental frameworks of the past, only to become the object of skepticism. The British Enlightenment was an unsettled time. It is tempting to understand it as a linear progression from an allegorical worldview to a scientific, empirical one. But this is far from true. The movement toward modernity was non-linear, full of counter-movements and repurposings of older mental frameworks. The British Enlightenment’s attempts to “clear away the rubbish” of the past (Porter’s phrase) were complex and paradoxical (2001, 48–71). They involved a major ideological shift. But they did not mean getting rid of religion, fantasy, or wonder. They also did not mean getting rid of allegory. Allegory is yet another sign that literary forms will find a way to adapt and change. The British Enlightenment, and the multi-national Enlightenment more broadly, put pressure on the ideological underpinnings of the form (as analyzed by Jameson and others). That pressure, in turn, helped crystallize allegory into its modern form. As we’ve seen again and again, pressure breeds innovation.

References Jameson, Frederic. 2019. Allegory and Ideology. Brooklyn, NY: Vintage Books. McKeon, Michael. 2002. The Origins of the English Novel. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1987) Porter, Roy. 2001. The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.

Index

A Abomination desire to prevent, 76 Hind and the Panther as an abomination, 35–37, 43, 44, 48, 49, 76 Addison, Joseph, 76, 78–82, 89–92 Aesop’s fables, 46 Aesthetic aesthetic insanity, 36, 83 aesthetic principles, 82 rise of modern, 2 Allegoresis critique of, 30 positive portrayal of, 61 Allegory as genre, v, 7–9, 12, 32, 49, 66 as mode, 8, 9, 11, 46, 49, 83, 84, 88, 91 political allegory, 7, 35, 40, 42–44, 62, 65, 69 its supposed death, 2 vs. symbolism, 10 vs. typology, 42, 43 Augustine, 23, 24, 59

B Benjamin, Walter, 10 allegory vs. symbolism, 10 Bunyan, John, 7–9, 15–33, 36, 40, 45, 49, 54, 59, 61, 66, 68, 77 Pilgrim’s Progress; and the novel, 15–25, 27–33, 36, 55, 56, 66, 67, 69, 77; sidenotes, 20 C Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 22 on Bunyan, 21 D Defoe, Daniel, 66–68 Robinson Crusoe, 66, 67 Dryden, John, 33, 35–50, 54–56, 62, 76, 83 Absalom and Achitophel, 35, 37–43, 47, 49, 55 Hind and the Panther, The, 35–37, 43, 44, 48, 49, 55, 56, 62, 76, 83 Religio Laici, 45

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Gulya, Allegory in Enlightenment Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19036-0

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E Empiricism naïve empiricism (see McKeon, Michael) Enlightenment British Enlightenment, v, 1–12, 15, 36, 53–56, 63, 66, 75, 95, 96 as a multi-national movement, 6 F Fielding, Henry, 56, 66, 68–70 Jonathan Wild, 69 Journey from this World to the Next, 56, 68, 69 and novelistic detail, 70 and skepticism, 56 Fielding, Sarah, 7, 8, 67, 68 Adventures of David Simple, 7, 67–68 Fletcher, Angus, 6, 8, 22, 30, 68 allegory as mode, 8 definition of allegory, 8 fated actions, 22, 30 H Habermas, Jürgen, 5, 75 rise of the public sphere, 5, 75 Haywood, Eliza, 54, 63–65, 69 Adventures of Eovaai, 63, 65 experimentation with narrative, v, 63, 65 Hughes, John, 76, 82, 83 “Essay on Allegorical Poetry,” 82, 83 J Jameson, Frederic, 5, 95, 96 Allegory and Ideology, 95 Johnson, Samuel, 7, 36, 38, 42, 76, 79, 83

criticism of Dryden, 35, 76 Rambler, 7, 75, 85–87 Vision of Theodore, 85–87 K Kant, Immanuel, 3 definition of enlightenment, 3 L Lewis, C.S., 36, 45, 48 on Hind and the Panther, 36, 37, 48, 49 Literary Criticism, 75, 76 relationship to periodicals, 75, 76 Locke, John, 3, 4 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 3 semiotic transparency, 4–7 M McKeon, Michael, vii, 11, 66 extreme skepticism, 96 naïve empiricism, 95 on Pilgrim’s Progress, 22, 66 Milton, John, ix, 1, 77, 84, 86–89, 91, 92 Paradise Lost, 77, 84, 86, 87, 89–92 P Periodicals, 75, 76 relationship to literary criticism (see Literary Criticism) Personification, 1, 7, 8, 23, 42, 61, 68, 76, 83, 85–87 Porter, Roy, 4, 5, 53, 96 description of British Enlightenment, 4, 96

 INDEX 

Q Quilligan, Maureen, 8, 87 allegory as genre, 8, 87 S Secularization Bunyan’s resistance to, 23, 33 definition of, 5, 10 its effect on symbolism, v, 10 Sidney, Philip, 78 “Defence of Poesy,” 78 Spenser, Edmund, 7, 8, 20, 25, 40, 43, 49, 59, 62, 77, 81, 90

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Faerie Queene, 40, 55, 69, 76, 77, 82 Swift, Jonathan, 54–64, 66 Battle of the Books, 54, 59 Gulliver’s Travels, 62 Tale of a Tub, 55–57, 59, 61, 62, 64, 66 Symbolism, see Allegory, vs. symbolism T Typology relationship to allegory (see Allegory) use in Absalom and Achitophel, 41–43