Such is monstrosity when compared to the subject of monarchy, a masculinity guaranteed by inheritance, biological and economic. What happens to the logic of monstrosity when the narrative of patrilinearity which underpins it is co-opted for the construction of an entrepreneurially self-fashioned figure: the male author as liberal subject? It has long been recognised that Milton's Areopagitica strives to envisage republicanism in government and in letters. As critics have argued, fictions and extended metaphors play an important role in Milton's prose, mediating between the abstract and the concrete, the general and the particular. What Le Doeuff terms ‘the philosophical unconscious’, the repressed metaphoricity on which abstract discourse depends, is a doubly feminine space in Milton's writing: feminine because it is the silenced other of rationality, and because its metaphors depend on certain crucial figurations of the female body. What Milton does in Areopagitica and elsewhere is to use the patrilineal discourse of monstrosity to coin metaphors for political change understood as at once traditional and new, and the chief means of achieving this awkward rhetorical manoeuvre is to associate swerves away from the proper order of the state with woman as mother, as opposed to the self-generating author-figure who produces texts of pure and complete masculinity. Milton's political prose involves itself with the questions of truth or truths, singularity or multiplicity, straightness or divergences, and the way these involvements are complicated by their grounding in a metaphoric unconscious of feminine figures and reproductive narratives.