The Reformation of the Subject

A labyrinth

It will be the business of this chapter to argue that, just as the parable of Malbecco functions as an explicating countertype to the subject construction proposed in Spenser's tale of Britomart, so the parable of Satan, Sin, and Death functions as an explicating countertype to the subject construction proposed, however problematically, in Milton's tale of Eve and Adam. Framed thus, the parallel is scarcely surprising. Unsurprising also will be the fact that I intend to focus upon the mechanisms of Satanic rhetoric, a topic common in the secondary literature on Paradise Lost. My interest, however, is not so much in the rhetoric practiced by the character of Satan in Milton's poem – his manipulative strategies, his puns, his specious logic are all familiar by now – as in the rhetoric embodied by that character and by the anomalous allegorical “family” he produces at the very heart of epic narrative. In Satan, Milton does not merely exemplify false rhetoric; he professes to have traced its etiology.