Political allegory is a hidden political meaning in a story or painting, using symbols to represent real-life events. It can be found in fiction, theatre, painting, music and cinema. Examples include Animal Farm and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings have also been linked to political allegory.
A political allegory is a story or painting that, on the surface, tells a story, but has a hidden political meaning underneath. It is an extended metaphor that often uses a simple substitution of one element or symbol for another. Political allegories can be extended to fiction, theatre, painting, music and cinema.
Allegory derives from the Latin and Greek word “allegory”, which means “veiled language” or “figurative”. This means that the meaning is not literal, but is implied. Examples of allegory include Virgil’s “Eclogues” and Jan Vermeer’s “The Allegory of Painting”. Marco Fabio Quintilliano divided the allegory into two main types: the personal/historical one and the witty/sarcastic one. He also believed that if an allegory was too enigmatic, it was a stain on the art.
Political allegory can cover any time and space and need not be limited to the native politics and time of the creator. An allegory becomes political if it covers a political event or situation by producing a subtle commentary on it using other symbols. The term political allegory can also be applied to the use of fictional characters as direct stand-ins for real politicians.
George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a good example of a political allegory. Orwell had no qualms about denying that it was anything other than what it was; a political allegory for the Russian Revolution of 1917. He even began to denounce British self-censorship in his original foreword to the book. The preface was scrapped for its original 1945 print run and was only added in the 1970s.
“Animal Farm” directly replaces characters from the Russian Revolution, including the Tsar and the peasants, with a farmer and his animals. The farmer is deposed and the animals, in theory, can enjoy a utopia of equality. The book then demonstrates the failings of Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union by showing how utopia can be destroyed by short-sightedness, greed, lack of care and bad deeds.
Some works of political allegory are intended and some are not. Leonard Nimoy’s story ideas in “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” are pure allegory. He wanted to have a story about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War told in space. In this allegory, instead of the Soviets and the West, the film has Klingons and humans.
While L. Frank Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz” was first written in 1900, it wasn’t until 1964 that it was considered a political allegory of the 1890s. Henry Littlefield believed the yellow brick road was a direct replacement of the gold standard and that the cowardly lion was actually William Jennings Bryan. Similar false claims have linked JRR Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” to World War II and the atomic bomb. This opens up the idea that political allegory can be found in many works that draw on or are similar to events in the period in which they were written.
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