Turn from allegory

Stephen D. Moore (in an essay on “The Song of Songs in the History of Sexuality”) notes that the shift from allegorical to literal/sexual interpretations of the Song is connected to shifts in understanding of male love.  Patristic and medieval commentators on the Song easily took the feminine voice of the Song as the voice of their own usually male souls, with results that often leave modern reader queasy.  Moore puts it in a typically provocative form, but the point stands: The allegorical interpretation thrusts into plain view a relationship ordinarily closeted.  It ‘outs’ the male believer.”

Nineteenth and twentieth-century commentators, working from the sharply defined sexual roles of the Victorian era, recoil against the confusions of the allegorical method, and turn the Song into a celebration of heterosexual love.  Moore nicely shows, however, that this quickly turns into a new allegorism of its own, as each metaphor is unpacked as a euphemism: “these ‘new’ allegorists give a sexual reading even to details that are ostensibly nonsexual.”