ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern

Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature

Andrew Escobedo

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780268101695
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Modern readers and writers find it natural to contrast the agency of realistic fictional characters to the constrained range of action typical of literary personifications. Yet no commentator before the eighteenth century suggests that prosopopoeia signals a form of reduced agency. Andrew Escobedo argues that premodern writers, including Spenser, Marlowe, and Milton, understood personification as a literary expression of will, an essentially energetic figure that depicted passion or concept transforming into action. As the will emerged as an isolatable faculty in the Christian Middle Ages, it was seen not only as the instrument of human agency but also as perversely independent of other human capacities, for example, intellect and moral character. Renaissance accounts of the will conceived of volition both as the means to self-creation and the faculty by which we lose control of ourselves. After offering a brief history of the will that isolates the distinctive features of the faculty in medieval and Renaissance thought, Escobedo makes his case through an examination of several personified figures in Renaissance literature: Conscience in the Tudor interludes, Despair in Doctor Faustus and book I of The Faerie Queen, Love in books III and IV of The Faerie Queen, and Sin in Paradise Lost. These examples demonstrate that literary personification did not amount to a dim reflection of "realistic" fictional character, but rather that it provided a literary means to explore the numerous conundrums posed by the premodern notion of the human will. This book will be of great interest to faculty and graduate students interested in medieval studies and Renaissance literature.

Chapter One

PERSONIFICATION, ENERGY, AND ALLEGORY

Literary personification nearly always produces a transition from the order of being to the order of doing. Now, it does this in a way that potentially produces a reverse movement, whereby doing lapses into states of being. This is the movement on which modern criticism about personification most often dwells, but for the moment let us stay with the transition into action. Literary personification marshals inanimate things, such as passions, abstract ideas, and rivers, and makes them perform actions in the landscape of the narrative. Conscience chides the sinner, Resistance repels the lover, and Rome reproaches Caesar as he crosses the Rubicon. In such cases, states of being and feeling—the aversion of the beloved or the outrage of Roman citizens—metamorphose into active agency. These personifications indicate, not simply desires, but desires tending toward action. Personification is an expression of will.

PROSOPOPOEIA AND ENERGY

Premodern writers offer scant theorizing about personification, and most of that pertains to the rhetorical function of prosopopoeia in oration.¹ But the orators and rhetoricians, almost without exception, characterize the trope as a kind of energy. The third-century BC treatise On Style, usually attributed to Demetrius of Phaleron, introduces prosōpopoiia as a figure “which may be used to produce force,” and it offers as an example Plato’s invocation of the future offspring of Athenian citizens in the Manexenus. “The prosōpon makes the passage much more lively and forceful, or rather it really turns into a drama,” the author of On Style concludes.²

Quintilian’s first-century Institutio oratoria distinguishes prosopopoeia from the general category of figures that intensify emotion, such as exclamatio, by indicating that the former is “bolder” and needs “stronger lungs.”³ By means of personification, a lawyer can make a judge think that he is directly hearing “the voice of the afflicted,” thereby enhancing the power of the case, “just as the same voice and delivery of the stage actor produces a greater emotional impact because he speaks behind a mask.”⁴ Like all classical commentators, Quintilian understands prosopopoeia as a tool a speaker might use in a speech, but he also associates it with personified abstractions in poetry, such as Rumor, Pleasure, Virtue, Death, and Life. He further indicates that prosopopoeia can appear in narratives, as when Livy describes cities maturing and doing things as if they were human agents.⁵

The idea of personification as a kind of emotional intensification persists into Renaissance rhetorical theory. But an important development occurs, since Renaissance commentators now often explicitly see prosopopoeia as one of the building blocks of literary fiction. Abraham Fraunce, for example, calls it “an excellent figure, much used of Poets.”⁶ There is thus a merging of poetic and rhetorical theory, although an incomplete one, since commentators “are still not sure if they are writing treatises on oratory with literary examples or treatises about how to read and write literature,” as Gavin Alexander has suggested.⁷ Nonetheless, in these Renaissance accounts any given discussion about the rhetorical value of prosopopoeia potentially implies the figure’s literary value. The energy that ancient theory mostly confined to rhetorical address begins to seep into an implicit theory of fictional character.

Erasmus, in his influential De copia (1512–34), locates prosopopoeia under the scheme of enargeia, a visualizing device used for “the sake of amplifying, adorning, or pleasing,” although he prefers to place personified figures such as Rumor, Mischief, and Malice under the heading of prosopographia.⁸ English writers likewise emphasize the act of animation, the vitalization of nonliving or non-reasoning things with living attributes and personhood. George Puttenham writes in the Arte of English Poesie (1589) that poets use prosopopoeia when they “attribute any human quality, as reason or speech, to dumb creatures or insensible things, and do study (as one may say) to give them a human person.”⁹ Henry Peacham in The Garden of Eloquence (1593) likewise describes the trope as “when to a thing senseless and dumb we fain a fit person,” attributing to it “speech, reason, and affection.” By means of prosopopoeia, Peacham explains, the poet temporarily reverses the effects of mortality: “Sometime[s] he raiseth again as it were the dead to life, and bringeth them forth complaining or witnessing what they knew.”¹⁰ Indeed, he insists prosopopoeia is the last, best defense of a besieged orator, “not unlike to a champion, having broken his weapons in the force of his conflict, calleth for new of his friends … or to an army having their number diminished, or their strength enfeebled, do crave and call for new supply.”¹¹ John Hoskyns concurs, distinguishing apostrophe, which adds “life and luster” to a speech, from prosopopoeia proper, which he credits with the capacity to “animate and give life.”¹²

Renaissance writers also affirm the intensifying power of personification outside of formal discussions about rhetorical taxonomy. Martin Luther’s commentary on Galatians uses the term to explain Paul’s opposition between Christ and the law: “And to make the matter more delectable and more apparent, he is wont to set forth the law by a figure called prosopopoeia, as a certain mighty person which had condemned and killed Christ.”¹³ Commenting on the rousing effect of Paul’s questions, “O Death, where is thy sting, O grave, where is thy victory?” in 1 Corinthians, Anthony Tuckney instructs his readers, “As to the strength and elegancy of the expression, take notice of … his rhetorical prosopopoeia.”¹⁴ Philip Sidney confirms the force of personification when he argues for the poetic dimension of the Bible by adducing David’s “notable prosopopoeias,” which “maketh you, as it were, see God coming in His majesty.”¹⁵

When premodern commentators talk about personification, then, their talk nearly always has to do with amplification, intensification, and energy. Literary personification—that is, personified figures who perform actions as characters in a narrative—partakes of this rhetorical dynamism. In leaping into the landscape as agents who do things, seeking to influence the other characters of the fiction, personifications resemble the ancient figure of the daemon. The connection between personification and daemons has been well documented, but I would like to review this material in the hope of isolating distinctive elements that have not been prominent in previous critical discussions.

PREMODERN DAEMONISM

Daemons, as Plato’s Diotima explains in the Symposium, are spirits intermediate between gods and men, immortal though susceptible to passions, “the envoys and interpreters that ply between heaven and earth, flying upward with our worship and our prayers, and descending with the heavenly answers and commandments.”¹⁶ The Greek concept of the daemon was often confused with and sometimes merged into the Roman figure of Genius, which substantially expanded its range of significance beginning in late antiquity.¹⁷ The discourse about daemons, who often have names such as Health, Love, and Discord, stretches from Hesiod to Renaissance Platonism, and it conceives of them in a variety of ways. Some writers, such as Plutarch, Bernardus Silvestris, and Ficino, emphasize the mediatory function that Diotima described; they imagine daemons linking together the various levels of the cosmos and, sometimes, the levels of the self.¹⁸ Other writers, such as Plato (in his story of Er), Apuleius, and Plotinus, describe guardian daemons or genii allotted to us by fate, guiding our actions but also expressing our character.¹⁹ (This is probably what Heraclitus means when he says that a man’s character [ēthos] is his fate [daimōn].) Still others, such as Euripides, Porphyry, and Leone Hebreo, imagine daemons as the conduit whereby the energies of the landscape transact with the energies of the self.²⁰ Daemons invade your soul from the outside, but you don’t simply absorb them: they always retain a degree of externality.

In all these characterizations, two themes stand out. First, daemons channel energy: they prompt, possess, attack, protect, and intercede. Second, daemons provide the means by which our interior lives communicate with the outside world. In a daemonic dispensation, the self is not sealed off from the environment but instead maintains a transaction with the elements of the external landscape. We are not the helpless playthings of these inhabiting spirits—our agency partly comes from them—but neither can we make ourselves invulnerable to them. Daemonism involves a mixture of passivity and activity. (In the Iliad, Achilles is certainly susceptible to the influence of Ate, but think how curious it would be to claim that Achilles is the passive victim of Ate.) Daemonism, then, posits a fundamental way in which human beings exert their will in the world.

Certainly, there were skeptics in the premodern period. Cicero’s Cotta ridicules the tendency of the Stoics to ascribe daemonic agency to every little movement of the environment. If the sun is a daemon, what about the rainbow? And the clouds? And the seasons and storms? “Either this process will go on indefinitely, or we shall admit none of these,” Cotta concludes.²¹ Likewise, Christian theologians could not accept the daemon as the ancients conceived of it. Augustine reserves his sharpest vitriol for Apuleius’s popular description of these guardian spirits, which he takes to be devils in disguise.²² Renaissance writers were also perfectly willing to make fun of pagan superstition. Sir John Harington wonders mischievously—If a daemon is assigned to every human function, then which daemon has charge over using the privy?²³

There is no denying the presence of these philosophical and theological doubts; indeed, the volitional energy of literary personification partly depends, as we will see, on an ambiguity between real and fictional, or (to put it in slightly different terms) between literal and figurative. For the moment, however, let us note that the transactional relationship between self and cosmos posited by the Greco-Roman daemon is the relationship that obtains generally throughout the pre- and early modern Christian world. The advent of Christianity did not lead to the modern, freestanding ego any more than Paul’s demotic claim that we are all one in Christ led to modern democracy. A strong continuity persists between the ancient and the premodern Christian notion of the self, which exerts its agency in constant interaction with the external energies of the world. This claim about premodern selfhood does, without a doubt, take so broad a view that it lets slip many fine differences and distinctions. But for my purposes there is no getting away from the broad view: literary personification flourished for over a millennium.

In any case, a range of studies over the last several decades from classicists, philosophers, intellectual and cultural historians, and literary critics has been approaching a rough consensus on certain aspects of premodern selfhood. Ruth Padel has discussed Athenian tragedy as a paradigmatic Greek view of a self constantly susceptible to daemonic forces, a view that fundamentally blurs the distinction between inside and outside.²⁴ Charles Taylor has recently distinguished between the modern ego, isolated from its environment, and the premodern “porous self” that both was vulnerable to and drew energy from nonhuman forces in the external landscape.²⁵ Timothy Reiss describes this porousness with the concept of “passibility,” whereby the agency of the entangled self does not rely on a firm line between active and passive; instead, the agent takes action in the midst of “concentric circles” of social, sacred, and natural forces surrounding the self.²⁶ Similarly, Gail Kern Paster and others have used a Galenic model of self and body to describe human interaction with, and management of, the surrounding environment.²⁷

Some of these accounts tend to underestimate the executive role of the will in the early modern world (bear in mind that the “executive” does not imply isolation from the deliberative or affective), and chapter 2 will take up this issue in more detail. Nonetheless, all of these accounts imply a relation between self and landscape that I am calling transactional. Why transactional rather than another term? For one thing, this term has the word action in it, and my study is anxious to analyze the relation between a certain sense of selfhood and expressions of will. I am interested in the self in action. Furthermore, transactional connotes at least a minimal degree of assent between the agent and the forces impinging on the agent: transactions are more willed than compulsive. The term’s implication of activeness, in fact, suits the purposes of this study more than Taylor’s nomenclature of “porousness,” suggestive though that nomenclature is. Finally, the term’s prefix underscores the extent to which acts of will, in the premodern imagination, take place across the boundary (a comparatively fuzzy one) between self and nonself.

DAEMONIC PERSONIFICATION

Medieval and Renaissance personification is the literary translation of the conception of action implied by daemonism. Like the daemon, personification signals our intuition of the primitive energies inside us by which we exert our wills over against the external landscape and by which we remain susceptible to that landscape’s influences. As a character in its own right, a personification has been possessed by a daemon, whose power it now channels. As an influencer of other characters, a personification is the daemon who possesses other agents and imbues them with intensified purpose. For the premodern era, one could scarcely imagine a more apt trope for figuring the self’s agentive relation to the world. Personification offers a concentrated, even exaggerated image of transactional selfhood. A literary character can sometimes own its choices to the degree that these choices appear to come from the inside and not only the outside; yet a personification’s inside already seems as if it came from the outside. A personification has an agency, but one that does not quite appear fully to belong to it.²⁸

Personification’s extreme transactionalism, its internal commitment to external forces, constitutes the figure’s most fundamental energy. It showcases personification’s close relation to the dynamic agency of the daemon, which in Greek and Roman literature often magically possessed human beings, foisting upon them a driving sense of purpose, either good or bad. Having an inside so clearly impelled by the outside, manifesting the interior passions of the mind on the external landscape, personifications enjoy a peculiar independence from the constraining effects of the narrative in which they appear. Famously, personifications refuse to function according to scale or probability: they do not modulate their behavior in response to surrounding narrative circumstance, acting out their being in an untrammeled manner.

This is not to deny that narrative circumstances can influence the reader’s understanding of a personification’s significance, or that a writer using prosopopoeia may be “concerned with context and shades of meaning,” as David Aers has suggested.²⁹ Indeed, the daemonic basis of literary personification complicates the figure’s general momentum from stasis to animation. Personification crosses a figurative threshold whereby an inanimate thing becomes, as it were, a living agent, but in a daemonic dispensation nothing is purely inanimate. Animae of all sorts literally circulate through the natural landscape and the human psyche. Prosopopoetic energy thus works on a sliding scale from daemon to figure: it poetically imbues a lifeless thing with liveliness, but that thing itself is already potentially inhabited by a daemonic spark.

This means that the metaphorical scenario that personification features can also be understood as magic or enchantment. For example, when Spenser’s Sir Guyon sets out to attack Furor with his sword, the Palmer tells him, “He is not, ah, he is not such a foe, / As steele can wound, or strength can overthroe.”³⁰ Furor defies the ordinary protocols of the story, according to which knights fight villains with weapons. Sword blows can’t stop Furor. Why not? We might understand Furor to enjoy magical protection from mortal weapons—that is, understand him as daemonic. Or, we might understand Furor as the idea of rage cast figuratively into agentive form: he performs as a character in the fiction but retains a dimension of idea-ness that remains at a remove from the fiction. This distance does not simply drag the story into abstraction: it energizes the story by making it temporarily rearrange its usual rules.

As daemon or personification—or, in the terms I argue for, as daemonic personification—Furor enjoys a freedom from narrative rules and circumstances that operate elsewhere in the poem. He is rage untrammeled, the absolute distillation of a passion into an act of will. But Furor doesn’t appear to possess “free will” as we understand this concept in modern debates about freedom. Furor doesn’t, for example, deliberate about what to do out of a range of equally possible actions. This limitation is a consequence of the kind of agency that Furor enjoys. Personifications are so radically free to do what they are that, viewed from another angle, they appear gripped by a narrow fixation.

We might put the matter in this way: Furor has “no choice” but to act out his wrath—his inner daemon drives him to it—but, by the same token, nothing can stop Furor from raging—not soothing music, not pleading, not even adverse narra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Personification, Energy, and Allegory
• Chapter Two: The Prosopopoetic Will: Ours, though Not We
• Chapter Three: Conscience in the Tudor Interludes
• Chapter Four: Despair in Marlowe and Spenser
• Chapter Five: Love and Spenser’s Cupid
• Chapter Six: Sin and Milton’s Angel
• Epilogue: Premodern Personification and Posthumanism?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index