Milton's Allegory of Sin

Shalmi Barman

PG I, Roll: 76

Jadavpur University Department of English

Paul Gustave Doré - Satan talks to Sin and Death (1866)

In Book II of Paradise Lost, the recognition scene in which Satan is reunited with his hideous progeny, Sin and Death, at the gates of Hell recapitulates an episode that occurs, as it were, offstage to the epic narrative. We learn, through Sin’s recounting of the event of her birth, that she was spontaneously born, fully formed, from the side of her sire, Satan, ‘at the assembly, and in sight/ Of all the Seraphim’[i]. She is therefore of his substance and of his likeness, her fortunes sympathetically linked to his. This essay will be a general discussion on the doubled doubling of Sin, with respect to her genealogy (which link her to Satan) and to her role as progenitor (which is an ironic foreshadowing of the role of the First Mother, Eve).

“… woman to the waist, and fair… a serpent armed/ With mortal sting.”

The figuration of Sin as the Portress at Hell-gate is a recurrence of the mythic and literary trope of a monstrous guardian, often possessing the attributes of a serpent, protecting a sacred or accursed spot. The Aeneid, for example, mentions the Gorgons residing at the entrance to Hades. John Milton’s poetic exemplar Edmund Spenser described Error in very similar terms in The Faerie Queene[ii]. Sybaris, Lamia, Lilith, Scylla (the last mentioned in close conjunction to Sin) are other characters occupying the archetype of ‘snaky Sorceress’, a seductive female monster whose beauty is a kind of perverse unnaturalness. Sin’s birth marks her as unnatural since before the narrative of Paradise Lost began:

‘All on a sudden miserable pain

Surprised thee, dim thine eyes, and dizzy swum

In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast

Threw forth, till on the left side opening wide,

Likest to thee in shape and countenance bright,

Then shining heavenly forth, a goddess armed,

Out of thy head I sprung.’[iii]

These symptoms are nothing if not the childbed pangs promised to the fallen Eve, manifest first in the disobedient angel Lucifer. Sin is not fashioned by an intelligent Maker in His likeness as Adam was; nor is she, like Eve, extrapolated from a piece of living tissue. She is the substance of Satan, emerging fully formed as Athena did from the forehead of Zeus. As his semblance, she shares both his attribute of resplendence (which was likewise recalled nostalgically by Satan in Book I[iv]) and the mutation of substance that occurs post the fall from Heaven. Father and daughter are both fixed in the imagery of serpents, one snake regurgitating another which is its own self, like the self-perpetuating Ouroboros. If Satan breaches taboo by birthing his offspring, the nether regions of Sin that ‘ended foul in many a scaly fold’[v] correspondingly suggest diseased or unnatural genitalia with the ‘mortal sting’ adding a phallic undertone. The ‘fairness’ of the woman conceals a specifically sexual obscenity.

Whether Sin is beautiful and how consistent is the nature of her beauty is a question worth exploring in the light of the moral point Milton is making through this allegorical episode. In his first address to her, Satan calls her ‘double-formed’[vi] and insists ‘I know thee not, nor ever saw till now/ Sight more detestable than him (meaning Death) and thee.’[vii] However, in Book X the epic narrator, using Satan’s perspective, describes the now-familiar figure as ‘his fair/ Enchanting daughter’[viii]. In her own account of her time in Heaven, Sin narrates how the Seraphim host ‘recoiled afraid/ At first, and called me Sin’[ix] before she ‘with attractive graces won/ The most averse’[x]. The loathsomeness of Sin is the underbelly to a beautiful, indeed a literally enchanting, superficiality; the sum total renders her appearance changeable depending on the perspective being employed. This double vision is made visible to readers through a transparent use of allegory, but it is a critical reiteration of Milton’s ethical standpoint on the question of beauty, which is that it inevitably presents the threat of seduction. The ambiguous attractiveness of Sin does not exercise a duplicitous effect on readers because the mediation of the epic narrator makes it clear that she represents an absolute moral negative. But her recounting of how she won over presumably one-third of the angelic population to treason against God also indicates that the fallible subject must choose whether or not to be seduced. A similar principle was delineated in Comus which concedes that temptation has access to the fallen subject but also grants the subject the freedom of will to reject temptation. In guiding us to an appropriate response to the doubleness of Sin, Milton is perhaps arming readers with the necessary skepticism with which to tackle Satan’s rhetorical attractiveness. It would be useful to recall that in Book X Adam repels Eve thus in a moment of bitterness:

‘Out of my sight, thou serpent; that name best

Befits thee with him leagued, thyself as false

And hateful: nothing wants, but that thy shape

Like his, and colour serpentine, may show

Thy inward fraud, to warn all creatures from thee

Henceforth, lest that too heavenly form, pretended

To hellish falsehood, snare them.’[xi]

The imagery of the snake as one who deceives with ‘heavenly form’ is applied thus to the only other female presence in the poem. Satan, Sin, and Eve are connected not only in terms of the influence they exercise on others but as aspects of the same primal crime. Sin is the action of a woman, and also embodied by a woman; Sin is brought into existence by Satan and induced by him in the mother of mankind. The fatal attractiveness of Sin and Eve, however, is sexual in nature; correspondingly, the punishment for the same is meted out in terms of gendered violence.

‘… but long I sat not, till my womb,/ … Prodigious motion felt and rueful throes.’

As Satan approaches the far reaches of Hell in Book II, the landscape reveals a chthonic universe that Milton describes to us in terms of Classical similes and geography borrowed from the Hadesian underworld. The imagery of aborted birth and the generation of a multiplicity of horrors is emphasized in the narrator’s speculations just prior to Satan’s meeting with Sin and Death:

‘A universe of death, which God by curse

Created evil, for evil only good;

Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,

Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,

Abominable, unutterable, and worse

Than fables yet have feigned or fears conceived...’[xii]

Language strains to accommodate two representational impossibilities—magnitude that defies numerical imagination, and paradox. How can a good God create evil? How can Death live, or indeed be born? To some extent these knotty questions are sidestepped by Milton with the help of allegory, which is where the history of Sin (mentioned in the abstract in James i, 15[xiii] but animated into a family drama by Milton) becomes important. Sin was generated by Satan out of himself, and coupling with this unholy double brought Death into the world. Death, it must be noted, could not exist in Heaven; only after the fall of the rebellious angels did Sin find herself alone and suffer the throes of childbirth. The question of whether an allegorical personification can suffer in the same way a human (or humanised) subject can becomes moot in the face of the sheer violence that, by her own account, is Sin’s perpetual lot:

‘At last this odious offspring whom thou seest,

Thine own begotten, breaking violent way,

Tore through my entrails, that, with fear and pain

Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew

Transformed

[…]

I fled; but he pursued (though more, it seems,

Inflamed with lust than rage), and, swifter far,

Me overtook, his mother, all dismayed,

And, in embraces forcible and foul

Engendering with me, of that rape begot

These yelling monsters, that with ceaseless cry

Surround me, as thou saw’st, hourly conceived

And hourly born, with sorrow infinite

To me, for, when they list, into the womb

That bred them they return, and howl, and gnaw

My bowels, their repast, then, bursting forth

Afresh, with conscious terrors vex me round,

That rest or intermission none I find.’[xiv]

The act of generation ravages the female body. If this principle is outlined in terms of vivid hideousness in the allegory of Sin (because allegory and myth can bear the burden of poetic extremes), it will be realised within the sphere of human activity as per the divine curse levelled upon Eve:

‘Thy sorrow I will greatly multiply

In thy conception; children thou shalt bring

In sorrow forth, and to thy husband’s will

Thine shall submit; he over thee shall rule.’[xv]

Multiplication, sorrow, subjection to the will of the patriarchal figure—the narrative fates of Sin and Eve are structurally similar, differing in degree and modes of representation. While Sin’s suffering is of a Promethean nature, neverending, cyclical, existing outside time and throughout all time, Eve’s childbed pain is textually foretold as an experience that will be visited on all womankind, passed in linear fashion down the fallen generations. Both female characters, nevertheless, symbolically and literally bear at once life and death. The fruit tasted by Eve ‘brought death into the world and all our woe’[xvi]; Sin at Hell-gate holds ‘the fatal key,/ Sad instrument of all our woe’[xvii]. The significance of the two icons overlap linguistically and functionally. Eve’s tasting of the fruit of the forbidden tree brought knowledge of good and evil and subsequently death into Eden; Sin’s using the key to unlock ‘the infernal doors’ of Hell (‘Which, but herself, not all the Stygian Powers/ Could once have moved…’[xviii]) literally allows Death to escape into the human realm. The first instance of genital reproduction in Milton’s epic produces a poetic paradox—Death is born. The first child born to Adam and Eve after the expulsion from Paradise, in effect the first human to be biologically born, is Cain, the first Biblical murderer.

These repetitions lead us to draw some tentative logical conclusions out of Milton’s text concerning childbirth. Firstly, reproductive generation through the female sexual organs, which is the only kind of childbirth postlapsarian humankind knows, only occurs after a Fall, be it from Heaven or from Paradise. It is inherently an experience of the fallen subject and cannot be unaccompanied by sin. Secondly, biological generation of life also means generation of death, at least until Death himself is destroyed at the Last Judgement. This metaphysical position is concretised in the birth of Death from Sin and confirmed through repetition in the judgement upon Adam and Eve which couples generation with mortality. Finally, childbirth contains a double curse for womankind—the promise of childbed ‘sorrow’ and the paradox of bringing forth life that must die.

The feminine in Milton’s Christian mythology is defined by sexual functions. Her beauty is the dangerous seductive force that causes calamity for mankind, be he Adam or Samson. She is also literally the vessel for both life and death and therefore culpable in both the human and seraphic realms. The childbed suffering of Eve and her daughters, one might hazard, is a component of Christian purposive history since it will eventually be justified by the birth of the Messiah who will redeem life from death. But the eternal rape of Sin is an excess in the text, even if we grant that the inclusion of the Sin and Death episode serves a narrative need. How are we to read such strongly gendered punishment except as a moral message in a work like Paradise Lost? In God’s universe everything is in its place. Sin suffers, if she does at all, proportionate to her crime of violating the incest taboo. Transgressive female desire results in a cycle of incestuous rape, childbirth, and violence visited upon her in which her body is repeatedly abused by her monstrous progeny and also serves as their source of sustenance. Milton’s Sin is not, of course, a representative example of womankind but a liminal portraiture out of Classical and epic tropical practice. However, she serves as an uncanny double to Eve insofar as the transgression of the latter too (which is again an instance of desire rupturing the patriarchal law) is punished by a curse upon her feminine function. If originary myths serve to explain inexplicable natural phenomena or dominant cultural beliefs, Milton’s allegorisation of Sin is a reinforcement of the Puritan view that men—and particularly women—receive only the fruits appropriate to their inevitably sinful being.

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[i] John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Edward Le Comte (New York: Signet, 1962), ii, 749-750

[ii] See Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I, i, 14

[iii] PL, ii, 752-758

[iv] See PL, i, 84-87

[v] PL, ii, 651

[vi] PL, ii, 741

[vii] PL, ii, 744-745, parenthesis mine

[viii] PL, x, 352-353

[ix] PL, ii, 759-760

[x] PL, ii, 762-763

[xi] PL, x, 867-873

[xii] PL, ii, 622-627

[xiii] “Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.”

[xiv] PL, ii, 781-802

[xv] PL, x, 193-196

[xvi] PL, i, 3

[xvii] PL, ii, 872-873

[xviii] PL, ii, 875-876