Laura Miller by The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia Page A

restraints standing against his advances.” Lewis felt that this sort of all-too-common, slapdash interpretation of allegorical figures — describing them as merely “standing for” something else — missed the point. If, while reading
The Romance of the Rose,
we see Shame and Fear as no more than broad abstractions (much like the statue symbolizing Justice mounted over many a courtroom), we miss the richness of a medieval allegory, and its intimacy. What we must first remember, Lewis argued, is that the friendly and hostile figures the lover meets are contained
within
the lady he loves. “Her character,” he wrote, “is distributed among personifications.”
    What made allegory powerful, and in Lewis’s eyes “realistic,” is that it was a sophisticated way of representing the inner lives of human beings at the time the great allegories like
The Romance of the Rose
were written. Though we now take for granted the notion of psychologically conflicted characters (who are “torn” or “divided” by forces contained within their own hearts and minds), the medievals didn’t have an artistic and conceptual toolbox quite like our own. Instead of imagining each person as possessing a complex interior mental space full of warring impulses, their picture of character was more external. So for them, the natural way to portray what we would regard as a debate
within
a person’s psyche would be to write a passage in which a figure labeled (for example) Reason stands in a garden quarreling with a figure called Passion. (One of the few pop culture remnants of this kind of representation are the little angel and devil who are sometimes drawn sitting on opposite shoulders of a cartoon character, each arguing for a different course of action. They are depicted outside of the character’s body, but they represent elements of his personality.)
    The Romance of the Rose
features a garden within a garden, where most of the action (such as it is) takes place; the inner garden is the mind and heart of the lady the lover woos. In a true allegory, where aspects of a woman’s personality are made to walk about and otherwise behave like independent people, the woman herself — the territory on which the conflict is being played out — becomes a physical space, a plot of land. The medieval self is, in this sense, geographical.
    It’s helpful to keep this in mind when thinking about the difference between, say, a modern novel of psychological realism and some varieties of fantastic fiction, what Lewis called “fairy tales.” While some of the characters in the Chronicles — especially the children from our world — behave more or less like real contemporary people, others — the witches, giants, and many of the beasts, to name but a few — are at least partially a different kind of figure. They are liminal, that is, charged beings inhabiting the slippery territory between day thoughts and dreams, and in that sense they’re not really “people” at all, but forces within the human soul. The places where the action transpires are dirt and grass and stone, and at the same time the interior of the self.
    Allegory often strikes modern readers as abstract, but Lewis argued on behalf of its distinctive sensuality. The lady in
The Romance of the Rose
guards the rose, her love, well; it is surrounded by a thorny hedge. The lover hero engages in a series of protracted negotiations with assorted parties, some well disposed to him, others not, in the hope of gaining access to the inner garden so that he can kiss the rose. Lewis argued that in a successful allegory, the emblems, symbols, and personifications are more than just crude substitutions for something else. Allegorical figures are not a puzzle to be decoded and then, once you have cracked it and figured out the “real” message, tossed in the wastebasket. Allegory is a form in which images behave like ideas, without losing their essential identity as images. When the lover