| Contrary to the bias against allegory throughout most of this century, I claim in this study that Charlotte Bronte's novels are allegorical, that the realism we have assumed to be their primary purpose and through which we have interpreted their narratives is but the surface of the texts. And as allegory is a more malleable and inclusive form than its "mechanic" structure suggests, Bronte utilizes and transforms traditional allegorical kinds for her own secular purposes, recreating the battle form between God and the devil (Prudentius), factual and verbal allegory (Bede), and the religious and moral quest for salvation (Bunyan), with the intention of addressing the religious, moral, philosophical, political and social issues of her time. More immediately, I argue that Bronte's novels are informed by Edward Bulwer Lytton's declaration in Caxtoniana that the form "characteristic" of his century was designed in its literal narrative to satisfy "popular interest in character and incident," while carrying a "moral allegory" in its "interior symbolical signification." By "moral," Bulwer does not mean that narrow category concerned with right and wrong alone, but rather that conceptual realm Victorians called the ideal, referring not only to the idea of perfection but, in a Platonic and Kantean manner, to any conceptual frame that could give shape to empirical data. Important also to my reading are Angus Fletcher's study of the grammar of allegory, including in its purview "a variety of literary [and figurative] kinds," Paul de Mans embrace of allegorical duality as a reflection of the temporality and discontinuity of human existence, and Felicia Bonaparte's claim that the idiom of Victorian fiction is poetic, not mimetic. Fletcher's examination of satire, irony, surrealism, battle, ritual, projection, and obsession as elements of allegory, de Man's claim for its "existential authenticity," and Bonaparte's mythopoeic study of the Victorian novel have influenced my claim that Bronte uses allegorical means to examine the past, test the present, and recreate the future. To that end she deconstructs the self, personifies and interrogates its fragmented elements, and ultimately creates a coherent identity in the form of a written text. |
