Download allegory (AL-eh-GOR-ee): a narrative that serves as an

allegory (AL-eh-GOR-ee): a narrative that serves as an extended metaphor.
Allegories are written in the form of fables, parables, poems, stories, and
almost any other style or genre. The main purpose of an allegory is to tell a
story that has characters, a setting, as well as other types of symbols, that
have both literal and figurative meanings. The difference between an
allegory and a symbol is that an allegory is a complete narrative that conveys
abstract ideas to get a point across, while a symbol is a representation of an
idea or concept that can have a different meaning throughout a literary work
(A Handbook to Literature). One well-known example of an allegory is
Dante’s The Divine Comedy. In Inferno, Dante is on a pilgrimage to try to
understand his own life, but his character also represents every man who is
in search of his purpose in the world (Merriam Webster Encyclopedia of
Literature). Although Virgil literally guides Dante on his journey through
the mystical inferno, he can also be seen as the reason and human wisdom
that Dante has been looking for in his life. See A Handbook to Literature,
Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature.
Life
The play is an allegory of life structured over three days. Wilder begins the play at the crack of
dawn, when the town is waking up, and concludes the play with the dead in the cemetery. The
repetition of the sun’s cycle parallels the life cycle, with one important distinction. The human
lifespan is not as long as the sun’s. And unlike a sun, when a person dies, he does not rise again.
There is hope, however, in the human life cycle: reproduction. Significantly, Emily dies while
giving birth to her second child. Although it is unclear whether her baby lived, we do know she
has at least one child to survive her and continue the circle of life.
Archetype (also called prototype) - the original model or pattern from which
copies are made or from which something develops. It is also a symbol,
theme, setting, or character that is thought to have some universal meaning
and recurs in different times and places in myth, literature, folklore, dreams,
and rituals.
The term is from the Greek archetupon, meaning “pattern” or “model.”
The psychologist Carl Jung identified the archetype in the collective
unconscious of mankind: the ideas or modes of thought derived from the
experiences of a race—such as birth, death, love, family life, struggles—
inherited in the subconscious of an individual from ancestors and expressed
in myths, dreams, and literature.
Plato was the first philosopher to use archetypes, especially those of beauty,
truth, and goodness. Sophocles used the archetypes of blindness, patricide,
incest, and fratricide. Hawthorne and Melville focused on the archetypes of
sin, retribution, and death in their works (The Scarlet Letter and Billy Budd,
respectively). The Greek Myth of Pandora introduces the archetype of the
mischievous woman, exemplified by Madame Merle in James’s Portrait of a
Lady (1881).
Answer the five following questions:
1. Identify an archetypal literary figure, either from the list above, or another with
which you are familiar. Do not use the examples covered in class.
2. Name an example of this archetype, either among characters in our readings for
this course, or in a text you think most of the class is probably familiar with.
3. Make a brief point form list, identifying four to six key character traits that you
think are typical of your character's archetype.
4. Name a few of the character traits, if any, that break away from the mold of your
character's archetype.
5. Now that you've done an archetypal analysis for one character, reflect on the
other characters in the text you've selected. Do some or many of them also invoke
literary archetypes? A yes/no answer will suffice.