The Use of Similes in Language

When Satan encounters his daughter, Sin, for the first time while trying to escape the gates of hell, he describes each half of her loathsome figure in a simile. The more interesting, however, is that which describes Sin from the waist down. In this simile, Part A presents the image of a pack of Hell-hounds, which is compared to the mythic proportions of vexed Scylla in part B, which are tainted by a comparison to night hags in part C. The movement of the simile from a pack of rabid animals in which evil is a natural occurrence, to another angry, mythical creature in which evil is a natural product of her situation, to a human-form to whom evil seems more of a choice, suggests that Milton is implying that, whether one is born with a predisposition to evil or not, one still always has a choice as to whether or not to act upon that evil.

There are three parts that make up this particular simile. The earlier two parts compare similar meanings, but the last part suggest an entirely different meaning of the simile altogether. In part A, the first lines of the simile, “About her middle round/ A cry of Hell-hounds never-ceasing barked/ with wide Cerberean mouth full loud, and rung/ A hideous peal, yet when they list, would creep, / and kennel there, yet there still barked and howled/ within unseen.” My interpretation of this passage is this: around the area where Sin’s stomach should be are a swarming pack of rabid black dogs, only found in Hell. They barked and barked, crying out their misery like so many others sharing their habitat. “Cerberean” refers to a chain of acid volcanoes in the north, so by “Cerberean mouth[s],” I think Milton means to compare the dogs’ wailing to the unmerciful sputtering and spewing of a volcanic eruption. The “hideous peal” sounds like a word that might describe a bell-tone- perhaps Hell’s signal of time to its captives? When the dogs were disturbed for some reason, they crept into their mother’s womb to hide and continued their howling there. This is a very childlike action for beasts so vicious; perhaps Milton is comparing them to their father, Satan himself, who certainly causes a lot of ruckus until God, his commander still, exercises his power over him. The fact that the animals succumb so much to natural instincts like fear suggests that they are also naturally evil creatures, and do not choose their behavior.

The passage continues into part B of the simile: “Far less abhorred than these/ vexed Scylla, bathing in the sea that parts/ Calabria from the hoarse Trinacrian shore.” Here, Milton renders the hell-hounds more horrible than the agitated six-headed sea monster Scylla, who is rumored to live off the rough, southern-most shores of Sicily. According to Greek mythology, Scylla’s rival enchantress, Circe, cast an ugly spell upon Scylla’s beloved ocean, causing the oceans to turn into monsters that rooted Scylla to the ocean floor. Now, Scylla unleashes her fury at passing mariners. The word “Trinacrian” is related to a type of witch religion known as “Wicca” which is still practiced in parts of the world. The Wiccan religion acknowledges God as both a mother-figure and a father-figure, which correlates with the Greek conception of Gods and Goddesses. Like Scylla, Sin has many monstrous creatures attached to her who cannot escape, and who feed her misery daily. Since Scylla did not choose her miserable fate and is tormented daily by the monsters which keep her rooted to the ground, it seems as though she did not choose to be evil either, but is destined to be instinctively so.

In part C of the simile, which reads, “Nor uglier follow the night-hag, when called’ /in secret, riding through the air she comes, / lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance / with Lapland witches, while the laboring moon/ eclipses at their charms,” Milton projects the hell-hounds to be even uglier than the “night-hag.” The night-hag is a folkloric troll who appears nocturnally to feast on the blood of infants, rather like a modern-day vampire. In paintings I have viewed, the night-hag is portrayed as an extremely unappealing, wrinkly, crotchety old woman with electrified hair the color of straw and a tiny, breakable body. To be uglier than she would be a challenge for sure. The Lapland witches are from the northern part of Scandinavia, famous for producing Santa Claus, reindeer, and unusual witchcraft, who can apparently charm the moon into an eclipse, according to Milton. These night-hags and witches, unlike the preceding creatures in parts A and B of this passage, seem to have full control over their evil; they seem to be capable of choosing their victims and dispensing evil at random. Therefore, this casts a new shadow onto parts A and B of this simile: does Milton intend for us to believe that Sin’s skirt of hell-hounds are merely her punishment for procreating with her father, Satan, or that the hell-hounds are part of Satan’s evil plot of misery and in control of the pain they inflict on their mother/grandmother?

Milton frequently pursues the issue of choice in his work, and I believe it is a significant theme of the simile presented here. While parts A and B of the simile appear to imply that Hell’s evil is manifest and uncontrollable, part C alters that entire perspective and suggests that all of Hell’s creatures have a choice and control the degree to which they act upon their evil impulses.