One of the allegories Lewis most admired was The Romance of the Rose, a thirteenth-century French poem begun but not finished by Guillaume de Lorris and completed (to Lewis’s mind in an inferior fashion) by Jean de Meun. The story concerns a young courtier engaged in the delicate process of winning a lady’s love (symbolized by the rose of the title) in accordance with the elaborate protocols of chivalry. His opponents in this quest include figures named Shame and Fear; his chief ally is called Bialacoil, a term, Lewis explains, that is not quite the same as the chivalric principle of courtesy, but fairly similar.
If you check the entry for The Romance of the Rose in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, you will be told that the lover’s personified enemies stand for the “personal and social 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 in The Romance of the Rose stares into the garden’s clear, sparkling fountain, we are meant to understand that we are reading about the first time he gazes into his lady’s eyes. But Lewis reminds us that we should hold both pictures — fountain and eyes — in our heads at the same time; each one enriches the other, and the reader is ravished by two beauties at once.
To grasp a literary image fully and deeply and yet to understand that it has another, different, layer of meaning — or even more layers — operating within, beneath, and beside it is to read medievally. Lewis did not see allegory as equivalent to myth, but he believed that it fed from the deeper, more powerful imaginative stratum where myth lives, much as a tree draws nurturance from the soil. Lewis’s own fiction drew from both. He is a fundamentally imagistic writer and even as a child I felt almost physically intoxicated by the potency of the pictures he made with words. The garden in The Magician’s Nephew is one of those pictures. It is at once a real, leafy, shady garden, vividly present in Lewis’s description, and also an externalized image of the self, a place so “obviously private” that any decent person, any true friend like Polly, knows better than to enter it unbidden.
Jadis, the invader, tries to manipulate Digory’s fear not just of losing his mother, but of being culpable for that loss. “What would your mother think if she knew that you could have taken her pain away and given her back her life and saved your Father’s heart from being broken, and that you wouldn’t?” she taunts. She knows exactly which is the sorest spot to press because she has trespassed on territory where no one but Digory (besides Aslan) has the right to tread. Climbing the walls and eating the apples turns her skin “deadly white, white as salt,” an indication that she has lost whatever humanity had remained in her and has become something else, a voice in Digory’s head, his own worst impulses, the eternal Tempter. She is now allegorical. While the garden in The Magician’s Nephew bears a certain resemblance to the biblical Eden, it is even more evocative as an emblem of the self.
This moment, the moment of Digory’s choice, is the most emotionally naked depiction Lewis ever wrote of his feelings about Flora Lewis’s death. In Surprised by Joy, he describes the loss with a faded sorrow, as the moment when “all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life…. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.” He also recalls trying to will himself into a belief that prayer could either cure or, finally, resurrect her. Surprised by Joy, a memoir intended to explain the circumstances of Lewis’s conversion, handles this early spiritual disappointment cursorily. Lewis claims, unconvincingly, that the futility of his boyhood prayers (and the unspoken likelihood that he blamed their failure on his own insufficient faith) had “no religious importance.” A few years later, however, the teenage Lewis would come to regard himself as an unbeliever.