Critical responses Flashcards
John Carey in his article ‘Milton’s Satan’
on evil
(encapsulates)
“Milton’s effort to encapsulate evil in Satan was not successful”
Quotes to support this:
N - “from inward grief / His bursting passion into plaints thus poured: / ‘O Earth, how like to Heaven’” - plosives invoke a vehemence and passion in him showing human feelings. He sees a beauty in earth which displays a sensitivity in his character
N - “Her graceful innocence, her every air / Of gesture or least action overawed / His malice […] That space the evil one abstracted stood / From his own evil, and for the time remained / Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed”
John Carey on Satan
“Satanists critics generally emphasise Satan’s courage, anti-Satanists his selfishness or folly”
Sandra M Gilbert
story - Sandra
“the story that milton most notably tells to women is of course the story of woman’s secondness, her otherness, and how that otherness leads inexorably to her demonic anger, her sin, and her exclusion from that garden of the gods”
Gertrude Stein called ‘patriarchal poetry’”
Diane K. McColley
scapegoating
“He broke the stereotypical scapegoating (laying blame all on one person) of Eve as essentially a temptress and uniquely gave her responsible motives for her independent movement on the morning of the fall”
Katherine Maus
strong-minded
“Celia is a strong-minded character who plays not only a pivotal role in the plot but an important thematic one as well”
Andrew Miller on the Fall
“Milton tells us over and over again that they have fallen because they have allowed their passions to subordinate their reasons”
Riggs on Jonson
said he had a “reckless side”
Blake
“he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” - blake concedes that the effect was not deliberate - power of the poetry.
C.S.Lewis
“beneath her dignity to bow to Adam or to god” but will “worship a vegetable”
is he missing the point a bit? Why does he use such extreme/humorous language?
he calls eve’s behaviour “murderous” when saying “i shall be no more, and adam wedded to another Eve… a death to think”
- he is being slightly melodramatic calling it murder…
Hazlitt on fallen sex
“hidden to emphasise the inescapable crime”
