Volition's Face: Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature by Andrew Escobedo

Abstract

Reviewed by: Volition's Face: Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature by Andrew Escobedo Frank Swannack Escobedo, Andrew, Volition's Face: Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature ( ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern), Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2017; paperback; pp. 340; R.R.P. US $40.00; ISBN 9780268101664. In Volition's Face, Andrew Escobedo argues that premodern personifications channel energy 'as an expression of will' (p. 3). They create acts of volition as a discharge of what Escobedo terms 'prosopopoetic energy' (p. 6). Escobedo investigates why the medieval notion of the will and prosopopoeia continue to influence early modern literature. To address the complexities of his study, Escobedo reconsiders the much-studied link between personification and daemons. Through classical and Renaissance critical texts, he establishes that daemonism creates an energizing transaction between subject and external landscape. The similarities between allegory and personification are then analysed. In a fascinating argument, Escobedo states that personifications partially function [End Page 166] as character and allegorical signs. Through energizing personified traits, personifications spur literary subjects into action. Escobedo then tackles the widely explored history of the will. In an interesting twist, he discovers that ancient writers made no distinction between the will and self. Furthermore, medieval and Renaissance writers not only conceived of the will as independent, but it was also free from the cognitive processes of reason. Personifications became a part of the self over which the literary subject has no control. Little critical attention has been given to the Renaissance notion of the daemonic conscience. In the moral interludes of the Tudor period, Escobedo finds a difference between the Catholic and Protestant iterations. Catholic interludes often personify Conscience as activating the remorseful will to oppose despair through the anticipated joy of repentance. In Protestant texts, however, Conscience is separated from the will to become associated with despair. These differences in Reformed theology are further examined through the repentant will and the changing role of the conscience. Escobedo covers familiar theological ground to state that repentant Protestants have an insight into their own immoral character. His argument becomes satisfyingly more complex, when he examines a second-order act of volition countering the primary sin-driven daemonic conscience. It enables Escobedo to make a crucial distinction in Renaissance theological thought on the will. Following Conscience, the personification of Despair is examined in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. In order to understand the original usage of Despair by these Renaissance writers, Escobedo first summarizes his previous findings on personification. He usefully recapitulates that personifications flow between 'enactment and transmission' (p. 137). Personifications can represent daemonic energy and, also, be the daemons that possess the literary character. With Spenser's personification of Despair, Escobedo notes that although Despair commits suicide, he does not die. Spenser distinguishes between suicide as an act of will, and despair as an unavoidable religious malady with its own volition. In Doctor Faustus, Escobedo discovers a different type of prosopopoeia. He argues that the play's angels and daemons do not represent a part of or influence Faustus. Instead, he consumes them. Through an exciting analysis, Escobedo states that Faustus becomes his own autonomous will. The implication is that Faustus has no insight into his own despair. His sense of self has become part of an inescapable personification. Without a mediating act of volition to counter the daemonic conscience, he has become Despair. With the history of Love overrun with personifications, Escobedo analyses Spenser's Cupid in The Faerie Queene through Platonism. He challenges the critical consensus that there are two different Cupids in Spenser's epic poem. [End Page 167] Using Plato's notion of erotic rapture, Escobedo convincingly argues for a cruel daemonic Cupid necessary to inspire a desire for spiritual beauty. In John Milton's Paradise Lost, the personification of Sin is examined. Escobedo first investigates the connection between sin and serpents in premodern literature, which surprisingly eschews the beguiling biblical Genesis serpent in favour of Herodotus's Histories. Following a fascinating chicken and egg argument over whether pride or sin came first, Escobedo notes how, in Paradise Lost, the birth of Sin from Satan's head...