How Allegories Mean in the Novel

218 Pages·2015·1.03 MB·English

How Allegories Mean in the Novel:
From Personification to Impersonation
in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction

Janet Min Lee

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2015
© 2015
Janet Min Lee
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT

How Allegories Mean in the Novel:
From Personification to Impersonation
in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction

Janet Min Lee

This dissertation analyzes the legacy of Protestant allegory in eighteenth-century
fictions. In doing so, the dissertation shows that personifications and allegorically
inflected characters became increasingly opaque and vulnerable to charges of
impersonation as the novel developed in the early and middle eighteenth century. I
attribute the distortion of allegorical representation to the conflicting yet intermeshed
interpretive frameworks that allegory and the novel demand of their readers. For
evidence, I primarily analyze John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim Progress, Jonathan Swift’s
A Tale of a Tub, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................... ii
DEDICATION ................................................................................................................. iii
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................... 1
“ALL THINGS IN PARABLES DESPISE NOT WE”: JOHN BUNYAN’S DISSEMBLING
ALLEGORY .................................................................................................................... 26
“FALL[ING] INTO MATTER”: JONATHAN SWIFT’S MATERIALIST ALLEGORY ................ 64
“INDEED I AM PAMELA, HER OWN SELF!”: SAMUEL RICHARDSON’S INSISTENT
ALLEGORY .................................................................................................................. 103
“OH! DEAR SIR, SEEM A LITTLE MORE AFFECTED, I BESEECH YOU”: HENRY FIELDING’S
FARCICAL ALLEGORY ................................................................................................. 144
CONCLUSION: “I DO NOT LOVE REASONING IN ALLEGORIES” ...................................... 183
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 202

i
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Having concluded this dissertation, I have become keenly aware that the writing of
idealized figures took the real, physical efforts of mentors, colleagues, family, and
friends.

First and foremost, I am grateful for the breadth of intellectual possibilities that my
advisers – Jenny Davidson, Nicholas Dames, and Nicole Horejsi – have offered me.
This dissertation is as much a product of my and your work, intellectual interests, and
imaginative thinking. You have taught me to be an adventurous thinker, a clearer
writer, and a more generous teacher – and, of equal importance to me, you have
allowed me to discover pleasure in all three capacities.

I would also like to thank colleagues who have helped me with my dissertation – in
various states of disarray, in forums formal and informal. Special thanks to Rashmi
Sahni, my remarkable friend and constant interlocutor; to my eighteenth-century peers
who have offered useful advice, Joshua Swidzinski, Katie Gemmill, Michael Paulson,
and Candace Cunard; and from the placement seminar I would like to thank Audrey
Walton and Lucy Sheehan for their thoughtful edits on my writing; Olivia Moy for
answering my many questions by text and phone. Academic poets I met young in
their and my undergraduate flowering, Owen Boynton and Gillian Osborne – thank
you for reading and thinking with me.

I would be grossly remiss not to thank teachers who have shaped me intellectually,
Erik Gray, Joanna Stalnaker, Patricia Dailey – the traces of your teachings are
everywhere present here. I am grateful to Julie Crawford, who taught me in my
freshman year of college and my last year of graduate school, and from whom I
learned much about reading and teaching. And, because least and last known to me, I
am grateful to Jim Adams for commenting on the full draft of the dissertation – your
remarks were of immense use to me.

I could not have written this without the support of close friends, Carolyn Bancroft,
Jesse Chanin, Sage Cole, and Maria Galeano. And last, but not least, a big thanks to
my family: the Lees, the Changs, and the Kiels, who have always been ready to lend
much needed hands; Vivian and Hedde, for your bibliographical efforts and for your
constant love from across the waters; Paul for being my best friend, best editor, and
loving partner; Sebby, for gleefully taking my mind off work when I needed it the
most; and my mother and my father, for their committed love and devotion that
continue to amaze and inspire me.
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DEDICATION

To my parents

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INTRODUCTION

The early novelists, however, made an extremely
significant break with tradition, and named their
characters in such a way as to suggest that they were
to be regarded as particular individuals in the
contemporary social environment. Defoe’s use of
proper names is casual and sometimes contradictory;
but he very rarely gives names that are conventional
or fanciful.
-Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel

Personality is…rigorously structured in the realistic
novel….Indeed, in a literary form remarkable for its
variety and its concreteness, it’s perhaps even more
remarkable to find that tendency to allegorize the
self…The richly detailed textures of characterization
in realistic fiction seldom subvert the coherent
wholeness of personality…Psychological complexity
is tolerated as long as it doesn’t threaten an ideology
of the self as a fundamentally intelligible structure
unaffected by a history of fragmented, discontinuous
desires.
- Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax

The normative account of the novel is a story of how authors came to provide
increasingly realistic descriptions of people and their environment. As characters in
novels became psychologically defined and individualized, they also began to shed
names that indicate their social, moral, or satirical type. Characters like Virtue and
Una gave way to Henry Fielding’s Amelia Booth. Romance types such as Valencourt
became more clearly defined (in social and economic status, in religious affiliation, in
individualistic and complex relation to bourgeois morality) and transformed into
characters like Samuel Richardson’s Robert Lovelace. In the beginning of the
eighteenth century, allegorical characters abounded; by the end of the same century,
they were nowhere to be found. Ian Watt’s account of the realist novel and its formal
1
techniques remains persuasive in many respects. After all, characters in our twenty-
first century novels (be they realist, literary, or genre fictions) for the most part still
make use of names of “particular individuals” rather than general types – and the use
of individualized names signals that the reader is in store for a story of real people.
Leo Bersani’s reading of allegory as the primary mode of nineteenth-century
realist characterization is, therefore, deeply polemical. Bersani argues that realism
does not increasingly delineate psychological complexity in its characters, but that the
realist novel rather enforces the “coherent wholeness of personality” that Bersani
thinks of as allegorical.1 Contrary to the story of the novel I told above, Bersani
claims that the techniques of formal realism (its naming, the description of
psychological complexities) do not abolish allegory from the novel but rather sustain
it. Allegory is a useful tool for producing characters that retain a coherent shape and
therefore legibility. Even in the works that we consider as the origin of formal realism
(Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones), we find the shape and specter of allegorical
representation. Within their pages, we find Robinson Crusoe as the allegory of a
pilgrim turning to God; Pamela described as the embodiment of Virtue (that is, of
course, Richardson’s own moralistic take on his rather protean protagonist); and good
nature, though not omniscience, crystallized into Allworthy and religious and
philosophical radicalism and hypocrisy present in the shape of Square and Thwakum.
Venturing outward from these canonical examples, we see other authors wrestling
with allegorical representation well into the 1740s and beyond, such as Sarah Fielding
in The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and Eliza Haywood in Miss Betsy
Thoughtless (1751).

1 Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1984), 55-6.
2
Following Bersani, my dissertation imagines that novelistic characters retain
allegorical shapes; but it takes issue with his description of allegory as the shorthand
for coherence. This dissertation redefines and reevaluates allegory in eighteenth-
century fiction. Allegory, while a complicated figure with a rich literary history, was
beloved in the eighteenth century for its ability to present didactic tableaux or literary
embellishment, which we can find, for example, in Alexander Pope’s “Ode for
Musick, on St. Cecilia’s Day” (written 1708, published 1713):
If in the Breast tumultuous Joys arise,
Musick her soft, assuasive Voice applies;
Or when the Soul is press’d with Cares
Exalts her in enlivening Airs.
Warriors she fires with animated Sounds;
Pours Balm into the bleeding Lover’s Wounds:
Melancholy lifts her Head;
Morpheus rowses from his Bed;
Sloth unfolds her Arms and wakes;
List’ning Envy drops her Snakes;
Intestine War no more our Passions wage,
And giddy Factions hear away their Rage.2
Melancholy, Morpheus, Sloth, and Envy appear to punctuate Pope’s point about
music as the soul’s soothing balm: They appear as lively embodied abstractions,
efficiently contained, and used as both ornament and demonstration. Such didactic
allegories were widely available in Joseph Addison’s essays in the popular periodicals

2 Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope: A one-volume edition of the Twickenham
Text with selected annotations, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 139-
140.
3
The Tatler (1709-1711) and The Spectator (1711-1712). In rewriting Prodicus’ “The
Choice of Hercules” for The Tatler in 1709, for example, Addison describes Virtue,
who “had a very noble Air, and graceful deportment; her Beauty was natural and
easy, her Person clean and unspotted, her Eyes cast towards the Ground with an
agreeable Reserve.”3 If Addison can use allegory to show readers the ease with which
they can choose a life of Virtue over Vice, it is because the shorthand description of
these abstractions was so very readily understood. Addison deploys the cultural and
literary markers of a virtuous woman to conjure up the embodiment of Virtue itself –
a translation that believes in and relies on the legibility of embodiment.
This dissertation attempts to understand why it is that, on the contrary,
allegories assume an opaque, unreadable shape in eighteenth-century fiction. In it, we
do not find these clear, didactic figures; rather, we find a healthy variety of allegorical
representation that is also only variously legible. Early and mid eighteenth-century
fictions are replete with personifications (Mr. Orgueil), allegorical characters (Betsy
Thoughtless), political allegories (biting political satires in Delarivière Manley) – a
wide spectrum of allegorical representation that is a testament to its plasticity in the
period. The different grades of allegorical representation even in one work, for
example, in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones are impressive: Allworthy and Tom Jones
have both been read as allegorical, but they are allegorical to different degrees. If
Tom Jones is impermeable to experience and, therefore, can be called allegorical,
Allworthy’s paternal generosity frames the novel as a rewriting of the parable of the
prodigal son.4 The dissertation tries to make space for the strange middle ground

3 Joseph Addison, The Tatler, ed. Donald Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 2:100.

4 For an illuminating analysis of Tom Jones as a character impervious to experience, see
Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, trans.
Albert Sbragia (London: Verso, 2000), 182; and for the allegorical nature of the plot of Tom
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