PARADISE LOST: AO5

Question 1

Style & Genre

Barbara LEWALSKI

Answer 1

• “Milton employs specific literary modes in his epic to characterise the various orders of being”
  -> “the HEROIC mode for Satan and his damned society”
• Eve “goes on to cast herself as a Romance heroine” -> she should therefore be able to resist temptation - “What is Faith, Love, Virtue unassayed…?”
• MILTON DOESN’T CONDEMN THIS INTELLECTUAL WANDERING!!! Almost direct Areopagitica quote
• John ROGERS: Satan turns Eve’s disobedience into a CHIVALRIC act
  -> “PASTORAL…for prelapsarian life in Eden”
  -> “TRAGIC…for human life in the fallen world”
• Milton’s “epic [is] a heterocosm or compendium of subjects, forms, and styles…which profoundly transforms the genres themselves”

Question 2

Satan

1. CS LEWIS
2. William BLAKE
3. Stanley FISH/Percy SHELLEY

Answer 2

1. LEWIS: Satan is “a personified self-contradiction”
   -> Arguably the point? Especially in his changing of genres/style
   - His mix of rhetoric and emotion, builds pathos:
   …
2. Therefore BLAKE: Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”
   …
3. However FISH: “Milton’s method is to recreate in the mind of the reader…the drama of the Fall, to make him fall again…with Adam’s troubled clarity, that is to say ‘not deceived’”

Question 3

Eve’s Desire for Autonomy:

FREULER

Answer 3

• About Eve’s ‘awakening’ in Book IV, in which she sees her own beautiful reflection before being turned away by an invisible voice:
  -> She only knows what she’s told, as Satan argues by questioning the rhetoric “the gods are first”
• Wants to temp her with intellectual autonomy

BEAUTY
1. “This scenario imputes to the newborn Eve as her first desire a ‘vain’ narcissism”
-> Christopher HILL: “[Satan’s] approach to Eve is a parody of the rituals of Courtly Love”
+
PATRIARCHAL RESTRICTION
2. “As the voice interprets her for herself, Eve is not a self…she is rather a substanceless image”
=
DESIRE/TEMPTATION
3. “It is not primarily narcissism to which the beautiful talking serpent tempts Eve but knowledge: to cease respecting the authority fetish of an invisible power”
-> John Rogers, “arbitrary hierarchies”

• “‘Completeness’” is what Adam “fears in Eve and lacks in himself”
• She is his rib -> why he seeks unity?

Question 4

John ROGERS vs. CS LEWIS

1. Why does Eve fall?
2. “Ritualistic utterance”/”Stately periphrases”

Answer 4

1.
* JR:
- “Arbitrary hierarchies are the source of Eden’s imperfections”
-> See ‘hierarchy’
* CSL:
- “Eve fell through Pride”
- “This is not the writing of a man who embraces the Hierarchical principle with reluctance, but rather of a man enchanted by it”
-> The voice of the poem’s orthodoxy seems to reinforce Adam’s superiority: “So spake the patriarch of mankind”
-> LEWALSKI: Yet Eve “does not express any need for completion by another”, unlike Adam, which “undercuts gender hierarchy”

2.
* JR
Eve’s decision to forgo any ceremonial “ritualistic utterance” in Book IX creates the first “genuine conversation” on earth
* CSL:
- Adam and Eve’s “stately periphrases [are] much less ridiculous than similar formalities between fallen creatures in Milton’s own time…My Lord and My Lady”

Question 5

John ROGERS

Answer 5

-> Is Eden perfect?
- “Innocence, that as a veil…”
- paradox, paradoxical construction of Eden
- ‘Eden were no Eden thus exposed’

-> “Linguistic mobility” - semantic flexibility/possibilities of ‘wandering’ lost after fall