Victorian Allegory

Abstract

Although the Victorian period’s association with the realist novel means its literature is not associated with allegory, its civic and everyday discourse was infused with allegorical modes. This chapter takes as its prompt Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and its depiction of the Roman Allegory painted on the lawyer Tulkinghorn’s ceiling. This figure, his pointing fingers, and other indexical gestures in the novel, provoke reflection on the uses and abuses of allegory in Victorian culture more generally. The novel exposes the allegorical mode of ‘telling otherwise’ that pervaded everyday life that includes the use of allegory as moral lesson, utilizing its claims to truth and transcendence (as identified by Walter Benjamin), the dangers of allegory’s instability and inherent openness to endless interpretation, and its use as a didactic mode for social regulation, including its function to perpetuate prejudice by associating persons with concepts, as in the depiction of the fallen woman and illegitimate child.