In an article for Writer’s Digest, Susan Speranza says allegorical writing helped her write her novel, Ice Out. “When I read the fairytales of my youth, I knew there was more going on than what the words represented, and I learned to look beneath the surface for the other meaning—the real meaning, the hidden message that the author sought to convey,” she writes.
When Speranza started writing as an adult, she avoided straight memoir for fiction. “But even realistic fiction was too restrictive for me. And too revealing,” she says. “The closer I got to exposing my true inner self, the more tedious and surprisingly, inauthentic the work became. I had to find another way of writing where I could hide myself, yet at the same time reveal myself—a seemingly impossible task.”
That method was allegory, a literary device in which symbols are used to convey a complex subject or idea. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible all use allegory to discuss serious ideas or current events.
In her novel, Speranza uses her heroine to tell a similar story from her own life, when she suffered a serious physical injury and her long-term relationship ended soon after. “When I decided to write this story, I knew I didn’t want to specifically tell about my ordeal,” she says. “It was too personal and, in some ways, too mundane. However, I wanted to infuse whatever story I told with the profound emotions my own life had churned up while maintaining a protective barrier between me and them, so that revealing and reliving them wouldn’t bring me down again. By setting this story up as an allegory, I was able to achieve this paradox.”
