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Allegorical Agency and the Sins of Angels

This essay reevaluates the relationship between personification and agency—taking Milton’s Paradise Lost as a primary example—and in the process offer some insights into our conventional ideas about the agency of “literal” characters in narrative. Personifications exercise a volition radically divided between causality and freedom, I argue, whereas literal characters produce the impression of free agency not so much by resembling real people as by accepting a compromise with narrative determinism. This essay explores these issues first by examining a decidedly non-allegorical figure, Milton’s Satan, who in heaven makes the most perplexing choice in the history of literature, and then by looking at the appearance of the most peculiar character in the poem, Milton’s Sin.