Paradise Lost Mindmap

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  • Paradise Lost
    • Eve
      • Quotes
        • 'fairest unsupported flower'
        • 'she plucked she ate, earth  felt the wound'
        • 'safest and seemliest by her husband stays'
        • 'goddess amongst gods'
        • 'greedily she engorged without restraint'
        • 'render me more equal'
        • 'her rash hand in evil hour'
        • ‘sufficient to stand but free to fall’
        • 'tresses all disordered'
      • Critics
        • C.S. Lewis - 'Eve falls through pride'
        • C.S. Lewis - 'Through giving Adam the fruit Eve commits murder'
        • Turner - 'Milton both uses contemporary assumptions about women and is in conflict with them
        • Smith - 'Eve only bids for power because Satan tells her she can venture higher than her lot'
        • Coar - 'the hunger of Eden’s infamous apple-eater'
        • Johnson - 'contempt of females, as subordinate and inferior beings'
      • Context
        • Myth of Narcissus - source of temptation to all characters Eve almost falls in love with herself,
        • Sin as a foil to Eve - Sin always giving birth like eves punishment is to have a painful birth
          • Sin dies by becoming multiple snakes, renaissance zoology believed snakes were born from crawling out of their parent
        • Renaissance belief that only humans can sin – eve as the weaker sex, is she aware she is sinning, Adam only recognised as culpable because he knows that he is sinning as he does it
          • Argument that Milton was a proto-feminist for presenting Eve as showing more repentance than Adam
            • Moore - 'Milton shifts his interpretation of Genesis away from conventional misogyny to give Eve more sympathy, and more equality'
    • Adam
      • Quotes
        • 'fondly overcome with femal charm'
        • 'carnal desire enflaming, in lust they burne'
        • 'with my permission then'
        • 'his eye pursu’d'
        • 'was shee thy God'
        • 'she gave me of the Tree, and I did eat'
        • 'Adam, freely taste'
      • Critics
        • C.S. Lewis -Adam falls through uxoriousness
        • Rust - 'The relationship between Adam and Eve in the first books is one of mutual dependence, not a relation of domination or hierarchy.'
        • Empson - ‘Milton though that men ought to control women’.
        • Weston - 'Eve really believes she has acted in the best interests of herself, and by extension of Adam.'
      • Context
        • Divorce Tracts - more leniency in the church’s position on divorce, focus on spirtitual compatibility
        • Before Paradise Lost became an Epic poem it was a play called Adam Unparadised with Adam as the Epic hero
    • Satan
      • Quotes
        • 'stood stupidly good'
        • 'fraudulent temptation'
        • 'some orator renowned'
        • '[God] our great forbidder'
        • 'meditated in fraud and malice'
        • 'onely in destroying I find ease to my relentless thoughts'
        • 'false glitter'
        • 'bent on mans destruction'
        • 'Satan exulted sat'
      • Critics
        • Baldwin - '[Satan] is a tragic hero'
        • Blake - 'Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it'
        • Fish - 'Milton means for us to be seduced by Satan just as our forefathers were'
        • Fowler - 'The implication is that Satan, besides talking persuasively, is acting a part'
        • Carey - 'Satan is superior in character to Milton’s God'
        • Blake - 'Milton wrote in fetter when he wrote of angels and God, and at liberty when of devils and hell.’'
      • Context
        • Charles I charged with tyranny and treason against the people – refused to accept the charges, reflected in Satan
        • Blake believed Satan is the unintentional epic hero, in literary terms Satan is the hero – questing individual who bravely confronts death, compares him to Odysseus

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