Always Falling: Memory, Collectivity, and Intimacy in Post-9/11 Literature

In novelistic narratives that center around the September 11 th attacks on New York, Richard Drew’s iconic photograph, “The Falling Man,” and others like it, seem to push themselves always to the forefront. These photographs represent an ultimate suspension between life and death—something both powerful and damning. The falling people live on through the photographs, frozen in their frames, yet explorations of these people in literature seem to indicate that they are constantly moving, that a photographic frame cannot capture them in one moment—still—in their fall, but instead dooms them to continue falling forever.

For the characters in the four novels I explore in this study, these images they have seen propagated throughout the news become conflated with their own memories, distorting their ability to reflect accurately upon what has really occurred. These characters are falling away from any intimacy they may experience with their own memories of that tragic day, and yet somehow those very memories seem to be the only things on which they can focus. They are suspended—like “The Falling Man”—between two impossible realities: any collectivized memory of those present in the communal space of the World Trade Center on 9/11, and intimate, personal memories; neither of which they can access in the wake of a tragedy as colossal as 9/11. In order to cope with the trauma they have experienced, they must reformulate and reimagine what has happened to them—and authors must present them as full of gaps, as mere semblances of healthy human beings with complete and structured consciousnesses. Just as the falling people are doomed always to fall, these characters are doomed always to be victims, trapped inside their trauma, a warped sense of reality being their only hope for escape.

Archiving the Ghosts in the Closet: the Comics Project of Alison Bechdel:

Why do people have archives? To serve as a foundation? To keep records of where we were? What happens if trauma has been laced within that foundation? Theorist Ann Cvetkovich argues that, “Trauma puts pressure on conventional forms of documentation....it thus demands an unusual archive.” Cartoonist Alison Bechdel knows a thing or two about the unusual. While growing up in a small Pennsylvania town, her father restored an old mansion that the family lived in, and simultaneously ran a funeral home. Shortly after she came out to her parents as a lesbian, her pedophilic gay closeted father committed suicide. After his death, Bechdel began the work of unearthing her family’s secrets, and the trauma that came along with them. Her most well known works, Dykes To Watch Out For, Fun Home, and Are You My Mother? grapple with archiving this tension, most of which is derived from the ghost of her father’s closeted sexuality. I will explore Bechdel’s use of “archival” materials (personal journal entries, newspaper headlines, family photographs) in these three texts as the creation of an alternative archive that seeks to give public cultural legitimacy to queer trauma.

In the first chapter of this thesis, I will look at how Bechdel uses Dykes to Watch Out For to merge the possibility of exploring sexuality through others and through literature. Bechdel creates a space that does not yet exist for the lesbian community: she makes them legible by associating them with real, concrete, physical texts.

In the second chapter, I will explain how the events of Fun Home are a catalyst for Bechdel; her father’s death enabled her to openly explore her sexuality in conjunction with his. In telling the story of her and father’s complex and distinct relationships to homosexuality, Bechdel identifies and creates a queer family archive.

Ultimately, I will explore how once Bechdel re-establishes her family archive as one framed by queer trauma, she will take a closer look at where the trauma manifests in her family archive through a photo sequence of her and her mother in Are You My Mother? This examination of her family archive, I argue, enables Bechdel to collaborate and connect with her father in a way that was impossible when he was alive.

Rewriting Histories: Memory, Allegory, and Imagining Postcolonial Futurities in The Sympathizer and State of War

Postcolonial anglophone Southeast Asian/American literatures often address histories and memories in ways that contest conventionally and mainstream accepted narratives of war and conquest. In his essay collection, Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Thanh Nguyen emphasizes that memories—collective, personal, alternative—have the ability to contest these traditional perceptions of history by positing alternative and community-driven narratives through storytelling. With an emphasis on the postcolonial contestations between postcolonial diasporic writers and their countries’ histories of colonization by the West, this essay examines the functionality of memory and erasure in Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War in efforts to imagine futurities of decolonial and anti-colonial identity determination. For Nguyen, the pervasiveness of recollection and memory formation is forefronted in his novel, and this essay reckons with the resulting insurrectional methods of resistance through remembrance and identity formation as a point of intervention into the postcolonial diaspora—at the same time, Nguyen complicates the idea of a national identity formation for Vietnam by presenting us with a narrator who participates in so many contradictory and oppositional communities. For Rosca, the narrative of rebellion during the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship also places strong significance on the power of naming—or the lack of naming—oppressive powers, as well as how the aftereffects of the process of colonialism have shaped national identity in the Philippines. This essay will engage with the imaginings of new visions of postcolonial countries and ask the following questions: What do decolonial practices look like for these postcolonial Southeast Asian writers? How do they engage with the histories of their countries that have been dictated for them since the period of colonization? And, ultimately, in what ways can we imagine futurities of solidarity and postcolonial identity for colonized subjects?

The Female Construction of a National Subject(lessness) in the Autobiographical Works Dicteé by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée share startling similarities in how they explore their multifaceted identities through multiple narratives not their own. Both texts can be categorized as autobiographical, yet surprisingly do not assert the idea of individual subjectivity and have been recognized instead as poetry or fiction in the past. In this way, the two texts reconsider the genre of the American autobiography, which historically served as a political tool by negotiating the relationship of the individual to the nation to explore what it means to be a citizen. Despite their unorthodox form, the texts still claim this genre and use it as a force of resistance or revolution as well as a method of identity formation—it’s only that they re-conceptualize what identity really means, by deviating from liberal models of individualism to show the power of collective histories and storytelling in understanding the self.

Following the traditional function of the autobiography, the authors grapple with the idea of nationhood, but suggest that the nation as a construct is one that can be rewritten and that the particularities of the Asian American experience make it difficult to recreate the expectations of a model citizen seen in other canonical American autobiographies. Undermining liberal feminist ideals that champion the individual, the authors spend less time on the details of their own lives and instead show strength in a sense of collectivity often criticized as antithetical to individual liberation. I apply Kandice Chuh’s idea of subjectlessness as a way of using the lack of coherence or essentialized subject to acknowledge the heterogeneity within a categorization of identity. Cha and Kingston combine their interests in their own personal female experience, which like the Asian American experience face generalized stereotypes of silence and submissiveness, with a broader interest in nationhood by introducing the narratives of various national heroines. By simultaneously examining un-American heroines and applying them to their own lives as American citizens, both Kingston and Cha also champion a transnational feminist perspective.

Of particular importance to this construction of a national subject and exploration of the female experience is the mother-daughter relationship that I propose is central to these processes in Asian American female autobiographies. The mother’s role is to share with their daughters their collective history, exposing them to the past rather than necessarily dictating their futures and therefore still leaving room for the daughters to construct their own sense of self. The importance of history and cyclicality in these works challenge more masculine notions of linear progression and nationalism. This mother-daughter relationship as the center of identity formation rather than an aggressive individualism highlights sense of shared identity and collectivity without erasing the concept of a distinct self as typically captured by the genre of the autobiography. While not necessarily about individual experience, this reformulated form of autobiography examines the collective and transnational effort that helps construct an individual or national identity, and celebrates their multiplicity.

Sharing an Authorial Presence: The Spectrality of Meaning-Making in The Turn of the Screw

Many readers have a complicated thing with Henry James, and especially with his interpretatively elusive novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), which includes an unstable narrator, a haunted mansion, and the unexplained death of a child. This readerly frustration is a product of James’s horror-writing technique: “make [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications” (“Preface” to Turn 42 emphasis mine). In this mobilization of abstraction, I locate an authorial presence that could be mistaken for the real author’s voice, Henry James himself. I use the narrative theories of Gerard Genette, Wayne Booth, and Wolfgang Iser to reject this possibility, which opens up a way of understanding a reader’s interaction with a text as a spatial, or, spectral phenomenon. My thesis examines the way this presence manifests within Turn’s narrative, and outside of it. I extract one formidable abstraction – the word “thing” – and, to use Shoshana Felman’s phrase, follow its “flight of meaning” through James’s long and short fiction (The Spoils of Poynton (1897) and “The Figure in the Carpet” (1895)), his notebooks and letters, and critical New York Edition “Prefaces.” My pivot on the word “thing” is enabled by Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory,” which calls attention to the dual nature of things and invites readers to explore the internal presences rendered detectable by a “particular subject-object relation.” The detection of the spectral presence within that very lively object – the text – is a process that reflects a reader’s subjective meaning-making experience. Authorship is, then, a function of readership. The child’s death at the end of the novella, which has mystified critics since the text’s publication, is inscrutable until the reader understands her personal role in it.

Dorian Gray and Maurice: Recovering Homoeroticism & Modern Same-Sex Love

This thesis aims to examine the various conceptualizations of homosexuality and same-sex love at the turn of the century. The fame of Oscar Wilde’s gross indecency trial is seen as a pivotal moment during the early Queer rights movement and it had a reciprocal impact on gay literature. The understanding that Wilde had of homosexuality became the dominant understanding, but in the Post-Wilde years, closeted writers, such as E.M. Forster have made ulterior conceptualizations. This essay will look at two novels by these writers: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, and Maurice by E.M. Forster. Both of these bildungsroman can be seen to present the differing understandings of Forster and Wilde. Specifically the idea of a pedagogical relationship between lover and beloved, derived from Ancient Greek pederasty and philosophy, is dealt with differently in both Decadent and Edwardian homosexuality. The separation of an “ideal” and a “base” form of homosexuality, which was important for Wilde at his trial, is somewhat tarnished in Maurice. The reemergence of the body, in Forster’s novel, devoid of shame, is homosexuality at its most revolutionary point. Additionally this thesis will examine the difficulty of “recovering” what is lost. Since Forster’s text was published around 60 years after it was written, and Wilde’s text was heavily censured from the manuscript, “recovering” their original form will be prized. Similarly, the act of “recovery” that both Wilde and Forster undergo will also be analyzed. Each writer, dealing with the harsh realities of their own times, attempts to understand homosexuality on their own terms, in what are perhaps the first modern queer novels.

The Post-Colonial Ecology of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and A World of Love

Elizabeth Bowen was a prolific Irish writer who composed countless novels, essays, articles, speeches, and reviews on an array of subjects throughout her lifetime. Yet for decades she was primarily defined by her Anglo-Irish Big House novels, whether she was being labeled a ghost- story writer or a women’s novelist. While the literary canon of Irish studies is beginning to appreciate the multi-faceted nature of Bowen as a writer, the initially intimate association of her with one of her favorite settings, the big house, is telling of her preoccupation with the importance of place in literature. In this thesis, I evaluate the treatment of the big house and its environs in the two of her novels that are set exclusively in Ireland, The Last September and A World of Love. Incorporating both early and recent criticism of her work, as well as Bowen’s own sentiments on ecology from her critical essays like “Ireland Makes Irish” and “The Big House,” I examine how Bowen’s
representation of the big house transcends capturing just the features of her setting or its psychogeography.

Instead, she encapsulates the greater ecology of her uniquely post-colonial environment through her inventive combination of gothic tropes, surreal imagery, and a modernist preoccupation with psychological processes. The big house landscape is imbued with an uncomfortable history of colonial oppression, and echoes with ghosts, stunting the growth and development of its inhabitants. She captures the factors, namely colonialism and then post-colonialism, that have shaped the
landscape originally. She also conveys the influences that continue to shape one’s experience in that landscape, including atmospheric conditions, the presence of certain people and the absence of others. She also chronicles the way an individual projects personal or collective memory back onto certain environments, forever coloring their experience and even sensations within that place. This study of the techniques Bowen uses to capture a particular ecology argues for a wider scope in future ecocritical scholarship, one that acknowledges not just how a writer shapes their fictional environments, but how they depict the inner relationships of that environment and its current, past, and future inhabitants.

Uncovering a Hidden Tradition: Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Anniad” and Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette as Feminist Epics

My thesis investigates the patriarchal nature of the epic genre and posits that modern and contemporary epics written by women and engaged with various feminist goals cannot be labelled “feminine” or “female” due to the essentialist and vague nature of these modifiers. Instead, we should employ the the term “feminist” to navigate the ways in which epics authored by women undermine the patriarchal tradition of the form. Despite the fact that, throughout history, women poets have employed the epic genre, many scholars see “women’s epic” or “feminine epic” as a kind of hidden or obscured subgenre, which suggests a further need for scholarship that brings feminist epics to the forefront and defines them in more helpful ways. I suggest “feminist epic” as a term and description, and not a classification, for epics authored by women that further feminist goals, and resist the notion that feminist epic constitutes a subgenre or constitutes a separate “female” canon.

Feminist epic describes a heterogeneous grouping of works that produce various political agendas and formal innovations. I posit two postmodern texts, Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Anniad” and Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette, as representative examples of how feminist epic extends, and adds meaning to, the epic genre at large. Moreover, both works engage with very different feminisms and political issues, thus complicating and adding nuance to the qualifier “feminist.” Upon delineating what makes these poems “epic” and remarking their individual considerations of the form, I parse the differences between Brooks’ intersectional feminism, and the second-wave feminist underpinnings of Notley’s long poem, to establish that while these pieces might share a genre, their politics are
very different.

Brooks’ “The Anniad” reflects an early intersectional feminist investment. Written from the perspective of a young black woman in Chicago, Brooks’ “The Anniad” elevates protagonist Annie’s interiority to the level of epic importance. “The Anniad” highlights Brooks’ formal mastery and innovative manipulation of both epic and mock-epic strategies to represent the contemporary, war-time environment in which Annie is situated. Notley’s Descent of Alette, on the other hand, employs the epic trope of katabasis to make a more second-wave feminist claim about American cultural hegemony and patriarchal domination. She employs a radically dialogic form to reveal the impossibility of a singular, epic male hero in her contemporaneous, Reagan-era political moment. Instead, Descent’s hero is a collective of oppressed people, spearheaded by the female hero Alette. While “The Anniad” engages the specifics of identity in order to make a feminist claim about the importance of individual black women’s experiences, Descent obscures identity coordinates in order to engage with epic archetypes, such as the divine, feminine Mother figure versus the patriarchal Tyrant.

The differing feminisms and generic innovations apparent in these works provide preliminary indications of the range of texts we might describe as feminist epics. Engaging the term “feminist epic” as a description, while also taking into account how these works add meaning to the term itself, begins to uncover the hidden tradition of feminist epic.

Never a Ghost: Rape and the Reclaiming of Self in Contemporary South Asian Literature by Women

The purpose of this work is to examine rape and revenge in female- authored South Asian literature through the lens of Sharon Marcus’s concept of the rape script. By acknowledging rape as part of a societal script forged through an enormous accumulation of individual choices, the reclaiming of the self after rape by marginalized women can be seen as crucial to both the poetics of narrative and the feminist imagination of a world without rape. The primary texts discussed are Mahasweta Devi’s Breast Stories (translated from Bengali by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), Ananda Devi’s Eve Out of her Ruins (translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman), and Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife. These works, which span across South Asia and the diaspora, were chosen due to the way they portray the struggling forces of societally scripted rape and female autonomy, and while they each portray and acknowledge the rape script in detail, they also each contain a critical moment or moments of dismantling. This project will examine not only the inner workings of the rape script, but also analyze various female protagonists as they attempt and succeed in dismantling this script, focusing particularly on the negation of equivalency between rape and death, as well as the role of female subjectivity in the aftermath of a rape. In addition, it will explore how the rape script creates an intricate system of values in order to suffocate female autonomy, and how the protagonists in these works of fiction must destroy the positive value codes in order to also destroy the negative. Ultimately, this thesis will argue that individuals in the South Asian context, no matter how limited in their choices due to issues of gender, class, and caste, can disrupt and even destroy the rape script through their fully autonomous choices. It will show that there is no situation that the rape script can create that cannot be destabilized through the choices of an individual woman, and examine how these three authors – Ananda Devi, Mahasweta Devi, and Meena Kandasamy – imagine the power of choice into being.

Women and the Novel: The Powers of Narrative Anonymity

Focusing on four select novels, all of which were initially published anonymously, this thesis explores the varied dimensions of anonymity in women’s narratives. Through a discourse with feminist narratology, this paper analyzes the varying narrative modes in Frances Burney’s Evelina, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charlotte Brontё’s Villette, and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, and how they lend to the different positive and negative effects of anonymity on the female voice, such as independence, power, and control, or the lack thereof. Centering on these modes, and their varying boundaries between character, narrator, and speaker, this paper offers a new look at the narrative of a suppressed identity, while uncovering the spaces of feminine authority within both the public and private spheres.

Ultimately, this study shows how the promises of anonymity can be both upheld or fail through a discussion of both feminism and narratological features. In the first chapter, this paper shows how the passivity of anonymity works in female narrative space that manages to both reject and uphold a patriarchal presence. Through the epistolary form, Burney both grants the suppressed Evelina, a sense of power, while also forcing her passivity through the male occupation of her written world. The second chapter illustrates the impersonality of anonymity and how it allows the power and manifestation of Fanny Price’s observations. It also discusses Austen’s use of free indirect discourse and how that furthers the ultimate personification of Fanny’s observations and their representation through the narrative voice. Finally, the third chapter explores what I’ve termed as a “floating character” and how first-person narration can epitomize the control that anonymity offers through the disembodiment of Lucy Snowe as a character/narrator.

In conclusion, I’ve specifically found that first-person narration can offer the greatest amount of narrative control for a female voice, but this control depends upon the engagement of the character-narrator with the text and the reader. Along with this, this paper also concludes that anonymity and feminine authority, internally and externally, share a powerful relationship that is still very active in present literature. Showcased greatly by Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and her exploration of its fantasy, the promises of anonymity continue to engage with women’s narratives, today. As its presence proves its importance, it’s minimal discussion, by scholars, proves its need for further exploration.

High Time, High Tide: Finding Time and the Temporal in Black Literatures in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina

There is to African-American literatures—the filmic, the visual, the literary, and the musical—as well as Black literatures generally a tradition of artistic undertaking in response to—even engendered by—ecological disaster. This lineage of creative outpouring in the wake of cataclysmic onslaught extends as far back as some of the earliest African-American writings, whose modern counterparts are my focus. Indeed more recently, in light of current discussion of and situation within the Anthropocene, this writing has become more urgent, a development which runs in parallel to the ever more frequent occurrence of extreme weather and climate events worldwide. Within the history of African-American art specifically, Hurricane Katrina and its aftereffects mark a major twenty-first century preoccupation, appearing as it does in text, film, music, and visual art in manners as often overt as oblique. Consideration of even mere selections of these media—writings (Trethewey’s Beyond Katrina), song and its sequela (Beyoncé’s “Lemonade”), and silhouetting (Kara Walker’s “After the Deluge”)—produces certain generative questions vis-à-vis ecology’s relationship to temporality as experienced by black actors.

The Cross-Examination of Humbert Humbert: An Analysis of Law, Narrative and Ethics in Nabokov’s Lolita

In Lolita, Nabokov provides his protagonist Humbert Humbert with an astonishing gift of storytelling. Despite Humbert’s descriptions of his enacted pedophilia, child molestation, and murder, Nabokov’s criminal narrator nevertheless leaves his audience in the state of a hung jury. While a subset of readers actively convict Humbert as a violator of the moral standards that compose the codes of statutory rape and murder in American law, a significant number sympathetically defend his tale as a “convincing love story” (Vanity Fair). How exactly does a guilty party like the infamous Humbert Humbert manage to romanticize an abhorrent crime, plead his way from pedophile to “pitiable,” and leave readers clinging to their rose-colored glasses for the decades that follow?

Beyond the common tip of the hat at Nabokov’s shrewd way with words, this thesis uses critical techniques drawn from the study of Law and Literature to explore exactly how Humbert’s tactical narrative shifts between romance and legality assist his manipulation of legal and ethical norms as he creates a compelling argument and deceptive tale to sway his jury of readers. Whether Humbert presents the opening statement of an attorney, delivers the testimony of an expert, or inhabits his own personal narrative, I argue the persuasive, “fancy prose” of our infamous murderer finds its roots first and foremost in an overarching legal narrative structure that parallels a knight’s move in chess. This thesis centers on my establishment of a narrative theory called “the knight’s legal move” – a pattern of shifts in form and content that finds its roots of inspiration in Nabokov’s famous Russian novel, The Gift. Through the development of this new framework of narrative technique, I perform a literary cross-examination of Humbert’s deceptive lines of argumentation to deconstruct his romantic and legal ‘turns’ in theme and thought. This examination opens the door for a subsequent investigation as to how this blur of sharp turns compels readers of Lolita to question and revise their traditional notions of morals, ethics, and the law; how the form of literature bleeds into the content of society; and how our criminal advocator leaves his jury forever hung in a tangle of ethical thorns.

Reading in Three Dimensions: Narrative Kinetics through Hamlet

While William Shakespeare’s plays and characters have been read through a myriad of interpretive lenses, literary criticism has yet to fully address the phenomenological experiences of narrative space and time circulating within Shakespeare’s written word. Using Hamlet as its point of departure, Reading in Three Dimensions addresses this critical blind-spot by examining the interactions between the play’s spatio-temporal configurations. I define such configurations as cross-sectional planes of space-time which inform each poetic moment along the play’s linear chronotope. The interactions between the configurations of removedpoetic moments in turn enrich the play’s otherwise one-dimensionality, i.e. its linear plot progression from the murder of King Hamlet to the death of Prince Hamlet. In parsing scenes from the royal wedding celebration and from Hamlet’s interaction with the Ghost in conjunction, it becomes clear that even far removed poetic moments embedded into a linear sequence speak to one another obliquely, illustrating the fluidity of poetic moments along the chronotope. Hamlet’s conscious moments of deliberation—such as when he decides to follow the ghost despite the advice of his friends—in turn elucidate the existence of a field of possibilities that poetically enriches an otherwise simple linear trajectory through the fashioning of poetic alternatives. However, it is a kinetic analysis of the “mousetrap sequence”, the play within the play, that serves as crux of this investigation. Not only does this poetic moment expand the field of possibilities to include poetic moments not necessarily inscribed into the chronotope, but it also does work to propound Hamlet’s subjective maturation and reconcile it with a kinetic analysis. From his soliloquy in the nunnery scene to his conclusive acceptance of his fate, Hamlet is shown to become self-conscious of the kinetic nature of his reality and self-deterministically reconciles himself to the dialectical tensions between the linear chronotope which binds him and the field of possibilities which informs it. Conclusively, my analysis extends past the scope of Hamlet and takes up issues of textual interaction, suggesting dialectical flexibility and active interpretive angularity on part of the reader and the read.

“Can it be sin to know?”: Satanic Questions in Paradise Lost

If the express objective of Paradise Lost is to “justify the ways of God to men,” then John Milton certainly did not make the task easy for himself – his re-imagination of the biblical Genesis is punctuated by troubling questions that leave the reader in doubt about the rationality of divine intentions. The temptation of Eve, as Milton represents it, is a pivotal moment in the epic poem that undermines the reader’s faith in doctrinal truths. Cognizant of the inscrutability of God’s will, Satan tempts Eve to consume the forbidden fruit by posing difficult, potentially unanswerable questions: “Why then was this [fruit] forbid? Why, but to awe;/ Why, but to keep ye low and ignorant,/ his worshippers?” (9.703-5) Unable to supply a ready answer to these questions, Eve defies heavenly decree and engenders the Fall. Left unanswered, these questions linger in the reader’s mind, threatening to unsettle theological concepts she once assumed were unquestionable.

While Milton does attempt to offer some answers to assuage the reader’s doubt, the question of the extent to which he succeeded is, perhaps, not as interesting as an inquiry into the operations and implications of such questions within the text and beyond the page. As the role of questions in Paradise Lost has been overlooked in Miltonic scholarship, this paper seeks to demonstrate how attending to it can enrich the reader’s understanding of the fundamental concerns of the poem.

In particular, this paper will focus on “satanic questions,” which arevdefined by their lack of definitive answers, and are asked by one who suspects this to be case. Having problematized satanic questions in the context of the poem, as well as that of Milton’s fervently religious society, this paper seeks to defend their epistemological and theological importance despite the dangers that accompany them. Through close readings of Paradise Lost, supplemented by analyses of a key selection of Milton’s prose works, this paper will ultimately posit that, Milton presents satanic questions as a valuable means of exercising reason, and thus free will.