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I assume that the "hidden meaning" was supposed to be a moral for the edification of the children (Think of the children! <sob>). The idea that all stories mus
by winestock 14y ago
I assume that the "hidden meaning" was supposed to be a moral for the edification of the children (Think of the children! <sob>).
The idea that all stories must have a moral in order to be legitimate is modern. Conventional wisdom gets in a self-righteous huff over how the different Inquisitions censored books. It would surprise modern people to see what books those old-time moral guardians did not censor.
Daphnis and Chloë, by Longus, has a frank scene where a married woman teaches a teenaged boy how to have sex. It was first translated into a modern vernacular by a Catholic bishop and was considered a perfectly good book for teenaged girls.
The Metamorphoses of Apuleius—better known as The Golden Ass—is the oldest extant novel. It contains explicit scenes of adultery and pagan worship. St. Augustine of Hippo, the greatest of the Western Fathers of the Church, cited that novel as a partial inspiration for his own work, The City of God. None of his contemporaries faulted him for this.
I'm going by memory, so I don't have citations for some of the above claims. I have a few ideas about the origin of the modern mentality of "every story must have a moral." Those ideas center around the rise of Calvinism on the Protestant side and the rise of Jansenism on the Catholic side of Europe.
- bentlegen 14y agoMy 11th grade English teacher tried to explain what every colour in a story meant. "Red is clearly used here to mean ..."
- bane 14y agoThat happened to me as well, and after a particularly extended dive into Robert Frost over a week, I went off to the library information system (this was pre-internet, so lots of swapping disks) and hunted down some interviews with Frost near the end of his life where he stated with some frustration his dislike of the practice of finding hidden symbols or political statements in his poetry. The Mending Wall, for example, is often used in classrooms as a symbolic reference of the Berlin wall, this was not Frost's intentions at all, but was something imagined up when he happened to have read it during a visit to Moscow during the Cold War. Proof in point, modern takes on the same poem no longer conjure up images of an impending Cold War nuclear doom.
- scott_s 14y agoWhen someone says "hidden meaning," I don't think "moral." I think of symbolism; "The jacket the protagonist wore symbolizes this, them getting in the car symbolizes that, their mother symbolizes..." It's quite possible for stories to have morals without any symbolism.
- derleth 14y ago> the oldest extant novel The Tale of Genji is now generally considered to hold that title. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Genji http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Genji http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/11480.aspx http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/11480.aspx
- winestock 14y agoI hope that this thread doesn't get derailed into nit-picking. The Tale of Genji was written in the eleventh century. The Golden Ass is a prose work which Apuleius wrote in the second century. Different authorities will have different definitions of the word "novel," so let's just agree to disagree.
- olavk 14y agoThe Golden Ass very clearly have a moral or educational purpose. It also have plenty of hidden meaning in the sense that it is an allegory. But morals have changed over time, and being a pagan work, the moral is very different than in christian or modern works.