Paper No.1 Renaissance Literature

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Name: - Jayti Rudresh-Kumar Thakar.

Stream: - M.A.

Main Subject: - English

Part: - 1. Sem: - 1.

Roll. No: - 38

Paper. No: - 1. Renaissance Literature.

Assignment Topic: - Discuss the Three Major Characters from Paradise Lost by John Milton.

Mentor: - Dr. Dilip.P.Barad.

Department Of English

Batch= 2015 – 2017.

 Introduction:-

Paradise Lost is about Adam and Eve; how they came to be created and how they came to lose their place in the Garden of Eden also called paradise. It’s the same story you find in the first page of Genesis, expanded by John Milton into a very long, detailed, narrative poem (epic). It also includes the story of Satan. Originally, he was called Lucifer, an angel in heaven who led his followers in a war against God, and was ultimately sent with them to Hell. Thirst for revenge led him to cause man’s downfall by turning into a Serpent and tempting Eve to eat the forbidden fruit.

Over view of ‘Paradise Lost’:-

The story opens in Hell, where Satan and his followers are recovering from defeat in a war they waged against God. They build a place, called Pandemonium, where a safer course of revenge can be planned. Satan undertakes this mission alone.

    Satan gains entrance into the Garden of Eden, where he finds Adam and Eve and becomes jealous of them. He overhears them speak of God’s commandment that they should not eat the forbidden fruit. Here, Satan finds the opportunity to apply his tricks to make his revenge plan succeed.

    Satan returns to earth, and enters a serpent. Finding Eve alone he induces her to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree. Adam, resigned to join in her fate, eats also. Their innocence is lost and they become aware of their nakedness. In shame and despair, they become hostile to each other.

    Satan’s success, build a highway to earth, their new home. Upon his return to hell, instead of a celebration of victory, Satan and his crew are turned into serpents as punishment. Whereas, Adam and Eve are sent away from the Garden of Paradise.

Discuss Three Characters:-

1.     Adam.

The first human, created by God from the dust of Earth. He is part of God’s creation after the rebellious angels have been defeated. At first Adam (and Eve) can talk with angels and seem destined to become like angels if they follow God’s commands. Adam eats the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge because he cannot bear losing Eve. ‘His inordinate desire for Eve is his downfall.’ He and Eve feud after the fall but are reconciled. They eventually go forth together to face the world and death.

 Before the fall, Adam is as nearly perfect a human being as can be imagined. He is physically attractive, mentally adept, and spiritually profound. He stands out in Eden as the apex of the hierarchical pyramid. Only Eve can compare to him, and she only in physical beauty.

The conversations between Adam and Eve before Book X are models of civilized discourse. These conversations are difficult to imagine as real, but they reflect the nature of the two humans. Adam's and humanity's values are reflected in his attitude, which is revealed through his speech — to Eve, to Raphael, and to God.

 Adam is the first man and the father of mankind. He prefigures the human race, representing the perfect male form. Adam is all fathers, sons and brothers rolled into one. Formed in the image of God, he is God-like, but not a God. Neither is he flawless as he is a kind of replica, inferior to his maker. Adam is created with free will and so has to make a choice whether to be obedient to God and refuse the apple, or to follow Eve. His fond (which also means foolish) love for Eve is his downfall. Adam is superior to Eve - he was created in the image of God, she in the image of man, and Adam is even called her 'author' - but he does not initially assert his authority. Adam is too trusting of Eve, taking the fruit she offers to him, and too devoted, and choosing to share her fate against the command of God.

Adam is a strong, intelligent, and rational character possessed of a remarkable relationship with God. In fact, before the fall, he is as perfect as a human being can be. He has an enormous capacity for reason, and can understand the most sophisticated ideas instantly.

 Adam’s greatest weakness is his love for Eve. He falls in love with her immediately upon seeing her, and confides to Raphael that his attraction to her is almost overwhelming. Though Raphael warns him to keep his affections in check, Adam is powerless to prevent his love from overwhelming his reason. After Eve eats from the Tree of Knowledge, he quickly does the same, realizing that if she is doomed, he must follow her into doom as well if he wants to avoid losing her. Eve has become his companion for life and he is unwilling to part with her even if that means disobeying God. Adam’s curiosity and hunger for knowledge is another weakness. Adam is an incredibly important man, but not for what he actually does in the poem. He's important because of what he's destined to do. Now we know Adam isn't the most exciting character. He's kind of dull and he puts too much stock in Eve's beauty.

Adam’s soliloquy represents his love to Eve:-

"O fairest of Creation, last and best
Of all God's works, creature in whom excelled
Whatever can to sight or thought be formed,
Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet!
How art thou lost! how on a sudden lost,
Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote!
Rather, how hast thou yielded to transgress
The strict forbiddance, how to violate
The sacred Fruit forbidden? Some cursed fraud
Of enemy hath beguiled thee, yet unknown,
And me with thee hath ruined; for with thee
Certain my resolution is to die.
How can I live without thee? how forgo
Thy sweet converse, and love so dearly joined,
To live again in these wild woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart……………..

 Above soliloquy displays the love of Adam towards Eve. He afraid when he comes to know that Eve ate that forbidden fruit and they will depart when Eve gets punishment for disobeyed to God. He more over thinks that if she will be destroyed by God’s command and even though God creates another Eve for him he would never forget this Eve. There for, he decided to eat that fruit and agrees to give company to her fate. But, he could not effort to lose her.  

2.     Eve.

Eve is the first Woman created by God from Adam’s rib as a companion for him. She is more physically attractive than Adam, but not as strong physically or intellectually. She is seduced and tricked by Satan in the form of serpent and eats the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge. She then tempts Adam whose love and desire for her is so strong that eats the fruit rather than risk separation from Eve. Ultimately, Eve brings about reconciliation with Adam when she begs forgiveness from him. God promised that her seed will eventually bruise the head of the serpent symbolically referring to Jesus overcoming death and Satan.

Eve is a simpler character than Adam. She is created from Adam’s rib as his helpmeet. While she is beautiful, wise, and able, she is superior to Adam only in her beauty. From the time of her creation, when she looks in the water and falls in love with her own reflection, Eve is linked to the flaw of vanity, and Satan as the serpent will use this defect against her. Before the fall, Eve is generally presented as submissive to Adam and, to some extent, dependent on him. Her reasoning powers are not as fully realized as his. However, Milton in no way suggests a lack of intelligence on Eve’s part.

Milton is quick to note, however,

“Yet went she not, as not with such discourse

Delighted, or not capable of her ear

Of what was high: such pleasures she reserved,”

Eve listens to Raphael’s description of the war in Heaven and the defeat of the rebellious angels. When the conversation turns to more abstract questions of creation and planetary motion at the start of Book VIII, Eve walks away to tend her Garden. In other words, Eve is perfectly capable of comprehending the abstruse subject, but she prefers hearing the ideas from Adam alone.

Eve does have a tendency now and then to question Adam, but she does so in a rational, respectful manner. In Book IX, such questioning leads to temptation. Eve tell Adam at the start of Book IX that they can do more work if they work separately. Adam knows that Eve is more likely to be tricked by Satan if she is alone and argues against separation. His love for Eve, though, allows him to be persuaded, and against his better judgment, he lets her go.

Eve does have a tendency now and then to question Adam, but she does so in a rational, respectful manner. Eve tell Adam at the start of Book IX that they can do more work if they work separately. Adam knows that Eve is more likely to be tricked by Satan if she is alone and argues against separation. His love for Eve, though, allows him to be persuaded, and against his better judgment, he lets her go. Eve wins the argument by knowingly using her advantages over Adam. Eve sets herself up for the fall and is not equal to the task of dealing with Satan by herself.

Eve yields to temptation through a combination of flattery (vanity) and sophistic argument by the serpent. Satan is happy to find Eve alone and acknowledges that Adam would be a much more difficult opponent. Satan knows Eve’s weaknesses and plays on them. She is charmed by him and cannot detect the flaws in his arguments.

After she eats the fruit, Eve immediately changes. She begins to think of ways of becoming Adam’s equal or perhaps his superior. But, fearful of losing Adam to another female creation, she decides that he must eat the fruit also. Adam does so but not because of Eve’s arguments. He eats willfully because he is unwilling to be parted from Eve.

After the fall, Eve, like Adam, is acrimonious and depressed. However, her love for Adam initiates the regeneration of the pair. She apologizes, and her love causes a change in Adam; they can face the future together. Eve is also glorified by being told that her seed will eventually destroy Satan, though her position in relation to Adam is made clear when Michael puts her to sleep while he shows Adam the vision of the future.

Eve is certainly not a feminist heroine. Like so many characters in the epic, she has an assigned role in the hierarchy of the universe. Milton does not denigrate women through the character of Eve; he simply follows the thought of his time as to the role of women in society. Eve has as many important responsibilities as Adam, but in the hierarchy of the universe, she falls just below him.

                                                                                                                                             

Soliloquy of Eve: -                                                                           A thing not undesirable-sometime
Superior; for, inferior, who is free?
This may be well; but what if God have seen,
And death ensue? Then I shall be no more;
And Adam, wedded to another Eve,
Shall live with her enjoying, I extinct!
A death to think! Confirmed, then, I resolve
Adam shall share with me in bliss or woe.
So dear I love him that with him all deaths
I could endure, without him live no life."

Here, from Eve’s soliloquy we find that she doesn’t think too much upon Satan’s tempting words and eat the fruit from The Forbidden tree. But later she realized that now she might be destroyed as sinner. And she also afraid that after her if Adam loves another Eve she cannot bear that thought even and decides to convince him to eat that fruit too. Here we find her with her selfishness.  

3.     Satan: -

Before his rebellion, he was known as Lucifer and was second only to God. His envy of the Son creates Sin, and in an incestuous relationship with his daughter, he produces the offspring, Death. His rebellion id easily crushed by the Son, and he is cast into Hell. His goal is to corrupt God’s new creation, Man and Earth. He succeeds in bringing about the fall of Adam and Eve but is punished for the act. He can shift his shape and tempts Eve in the form of a serpent. He appears noble to Man but not in comparison to God.

Probably the most famous quote about Paradise Lost is William Blake’s statement that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” While Blake may have meant something other than what is generally understood from this quotation, the idea that Satan is the hero, or at least a type of hero, in Paradise Lost is widespread. However, the progression, or, more precisely, regression, of Satan’s character from Book I through Book XII gives a much different and much clearer picture of Milton’s attitude toward Satan.

Writers and critics of the Romantic era advanced the notion that Satan was a Promethean hero, pitting himself against an unjust God. Most of these writers based their ideas on the picture of Satan in the first two books of Paradise Lost. In those books, Satan rises off the lake of fire and delivers his heroic speech still challenging God. Satan tells the other rebels that they can make “a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” and adds, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n” Satan also calls for and leads the grand council. Finally, he goes forth on his own to cross Chaos and find Earth. Without question, this picture of Satan makes him heroic in his initial introduction to the reader.

Besides his actions, Satan also appears heroic because the first two books focus on Hell and the fallen angels. The reader’s introduction to the poem is through Satan’s point of view. Milton, by beginning in medias res gives Satan the first scene in the poem, a fact that makes Satan the first empathetic character. Also, Milton’s writing in these books, and his characterization of Satan, make the archfiend understandable and unforgettable.

These facts certainly make Satan the most interesting character in the poem—but they do not make him the hero. Because the reader hears Satan’s version first, the reader is unaware of the exaggerations and outright lies that are parts of Satan’s magnificent speeches. Moreover, the reader can easily overlook the fact that Milton states that, whatever powers and abilities the fallen angels have in Hell, those powers and abilities come from God, who could at any moment take them away.

The presentation of Satan makes him seem greater than he actually is and initially draws the reader to Satan’s viewpoint. Further, because all of the other characters in the poem—Adam, Eve, God, the Son, the angels—are essentially types rather than characters, Milton spends more artistic energy on the development of Satan so that throughout the poem, Satan’s character maintains the reader’s interest and, perhaps, sympathy—at least to an extent.

    No matter how brilliantly Milton created the character of Satan, the chief demon cannot be the hero of the poem. For Milton, Satan is the enemy who chooses to commit an act that goes against the basic laws of God that challenges the very nature of the universe. Satan tries to destroy the hierarchy of Heaven through his rebellion. Satan commits this act not because of the tyranny of God but because he wants what he wants rather than what God wants. Satan is an egoist. His interests always turn on his personal desires. Unlike Adam, who discusses a multiplicity of subjects with Raphael, rarely mentioning his own desires, Satan sees everything in terms of what will happen to him.                                          

       

Satan’s Soliloquy: -

 "O Earth, how like to Heaven, if not preferred
More justly, seat worthier of Gods, as built
With second thoughts, reforming what was old!
For what God, after better, worse would build?

Satan forgets for a while his revengeful ideas and lost in the beauty of Eve: (455-470)

If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin pass,
What pleasing seemed for her now pleases more,
She most, and in her look sums all delight:
Such pleasure took the Serpent to behold
This flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve
Thus early, thus alone. Her heavenly form
Angelic, but more soft and feminine,
Her graceful innocence, her every air

Satan encourages himself – REVENGE: (473-490)

"Thoughts, whither have ye led me? with what sweet
Compulsion thus transported to forget
What hither brought us? hate, not love, nor hope
Of Paradise for Hell, here to taste
Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy,
Save what is in destroying; other joy
To me is lost.

At a first glance Satan seduced by Eve’s beauty and forgets his goal for while and that too, why he comes to Garden of Eden? Now he pushes his mind not to divert and to concentrate on his revenge. Then he tempts Eve by attack on her weakness ‘vanity’. He praise for her beauty more and more. Here we find Satan’s ‘power of word’; which he uses for calm course of revenge against God, and seduces her to eat that fruit from Forbidden Tree with saying that she deserves the place of almighty God. Moreover he includes that God has fear if one would eat that fruit definitely being superior to him, he can’t effort that therefore, he forbid everyone to eat that ‘Fruit of Knowledge’. His words have that much affection that one cannot resist to accept. Eve also trapped by Satan’s words and ate that fruit.

  

    "Wonder not, Sovran mistress (if perhaps
Thou canst who art sole wonder), much less arm
Thy looks, the heaven of mildness, with disdain,
Displeased that I approach thee thus, and gaze
Insatiate, I thus single, nor have feared
Thy awful brow, more awful thus retired.
Fairest resemblance of thy Maker fair,
Thee all things living gaze on, all things thine
By gift, and thy celestial beauty adore,
With ravishment beheld-there best beheld
Where universally admired.

  Conclusion:-

Throughout, the epic Milton emphasize on character of Satan first. But he also describes Characters of Adam and Eve very ornamentally and beautifully. Even he maintains the Puritan test by representation of 
almighty God. At last when Adam, Eve and Satan punished for their deed of disobeyed to Him he was ready to destroy his own creation. Here, readers have question; can the devil be an epic hero? This seems to be the case in the Paradise Lost only. Milton’s Satan is brave, resourceful and powerful and an excellent leader as well. However, this idea does not last for long; when one reaches Book III, the favorable image of Satan as a heroic freedom fighter deteriorates and in the end he is transformed into a beast.

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