Abstract
In Genesis, God put everlasting enmity between human beings and the serpent, which was then rewritten by John Milton in Paradise Lost; Milton’s God assigns human beings the task of revenging on the serpent, granting a sense of justice and sublime to the action of vengeance. The mutual-death picture of revenge, depicted in the Bible and sublimed by Milton, was rewritten de-constructively by Edgar Allen Poe in “The Cask of Amontillado” and also by Nathanial Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter. Both writers appropriated the mutual-death structure of avenger and victim to illustrate the miserable outcome and sinister nature of revenge. Poe and Hawthorne, echoing each other, transform the sublime mutual-death picture into an ironic double of sin and vengeance, in which occurs the ironic role-shifting between sinner and victim, the identification of the avenger as a greater sinner and the deconstruction of sublime and the possibility of redemption.
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