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Feminist Criticism In John Milton's Paradise Lost

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Milton's speaker starts Paradise Lost by expressing that his subject will be Adam and Eve's insubordination and fall from refinement. He conjures a glorious muse and solicits help in identifying his goal-oriented story and God's anticipated humanity. The activity starts with Satan and his individual dissident blessed messengers who are discovered affixed to a pool of blaze in Hell. They rapidly free themselves and travel to land, where they uncover minerals and develop Pandemonium, which will be their gathering place. Inside Pandemonium, the radical holy messengers, who are presently fiends, banter about if they may as well start an alternate war with God. Beezelbub prescribes that they endeavour to degenerate God's adored new creation, humanity. …show more content…

In his representation of Eve he dramatizes and reinforces the ingrained perception of woman perception of woman as, in various ways, allied to the more dangerous and degenerate human tendencies’ (p. 167). This feminist criticism primarily correlates to the surroundings in which Milton wrote. Women were treated as subordinates to men and this is not only apparent in Milton’s Paradise Lost but also in the poetry of poets like that of John Donne who treated women as merely subjected to sexual satisfaction and also the romances of the period depicted the women as sexually wanton. Eve’s obedience to patriarchy is somewhat frustrating and her personality is somewhat identifiable with Satan whose efforts aimed towards destroying the patriarchy in the heaven. Although there is a stark resemblance between Satan and Eve, Satan’s rationale for the rebellion was intentional and held a completely different motive. His ulterior motive was to build another patriarchal hierarchy where he reigns as the god. In contrast, Milton’s Eve is not a demonic character who holds the will to possess heaven or create an abode ruled by

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OVERARCHING THEMES Though The Odyssey and Paradise Lost are penned during completely separate time periods–with a span of roughly nine centuries between the writing of each–the two works still share many similar themes and subject matters. Some are more vital components for the genre in general, necessary for a piece of literature to be considered an epic; others remain less conspicuous, though with just as great an impact on the overall story. Heroism and the Hero’s Journey: One of the most defining elements of an epic work is the presence of the Hero’s Journey, also known as the monomyth. Introduced by Joseph Campbell, the Hero’s Journey describes the typical narrative pattern that accompanies many forms of storytelling, most commonly and most easily seen in classical literature.

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In Victorian society, women had the choice between two roles: the pure woman or the fallen woman. Bram Stoker plays with these anxieties revolving around female sexuality – he follows the gothic tradition of innocent damsel in distress against looming evil. The narrative structure Stoker imploys to the text through intertextuality reveals multiple point of view distinguishing a duality in Lucy - her true self and 'thing'. In order to cope with Lucy’s worsening condition, the male authoritative figures of the text assign a duality present in Lucy to make sense of her shifting from “pure woman” to “fallen woman”. Stoker exhibits in the structure of the multi-faceted narrative how certain characters are unable to cope with the duality present

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Throughout Old English Literature, women were seen as evil. Like in Beowulf where the woman with the most power was a monstrous sea creature who destroyed things. Or in Lanval and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight where women were dishonest and corrupted men, or like in The Wife of Bath where women manipulated men to get what they wanted; owned them in a way. In old English texts women are seen as an evil force; a force of destruction, corruption and cunning.

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This causes trouble to mankind in both of the stories. The Monster tries to comply with humans in a virtuous way for a second time, but once again receives hatred in response. Satan’s contact with humans begins with Eve, who he persuades to turn to sin. The Monster and Satan both seek revenge on their creators.

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This creation allegory is made clear from the beginning with the epigraph from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which begins the novel. In an attempt to further

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truly underline the entire novel and not only remain unanswered but become increasingly blurry for both the creature and his creator. Indeed, Baldick notes that as the two “refer themselves back to Paradise Lost – a guiding text with apparently fixed moral roles – they can no longer be sure whether they correspond to Adam, to God, or to Satan, or to

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Although John Milton’s Paradise Lost remains to be a celebrated piece recounting the spiritual, moral, and cosmological origin of man’s existence, the imagery that Milton places within the novel remains heavily overlooked. The imagery, although initially difficult to recognize, embodies the plight and odyssey of Satan and the general essence of the novel, as the imagery unravels the consequences of temptation that the human soul faces in the descent from heaven into the secular realms. Though various forms of imagery exist within the piece, the contrast between light and dark imagery portrays this viewpoint accurately, but its interplay and intermingling with other imagery, specifically the contrasting imagery of height and depth as well as cold and warmth, remain to be strong points

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