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Satan's False Hero

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On the surface, John Milton’s Paradise Lost is an epic tale about the battle between good and evil in the spiritual realm. Milton, a devout Puritan, used this setting for his work not only to describe the struggle between the supernatural forces of good and evil; his epic also served as an allegorical social commentary on the chaos caused by the English Civil War of the 1640s. Throughout the decade, King Charles I, exercising his “divine right” to rule England as he saw fit, had instigated war across the United Kingdom, taking the lives of many citizens, and later refusing to accept the Parliament’s terms at the end of the war. This act angered many Puritan members of the group who felt that Charles was abusing his power, and committing sacrilege …show more content…

Yet in Milton’s eyes, neither of these figures was a hero. As the epic progresses, the reader is constantly forced to alter his perception of Satan based upon the context in which his motives are described; “Satan’s false heroism draws from the reader a response that is immediately challenged by the epic voice, who at the same time challenges the concept of heroism in which the response is rooted. ... At some point during th[e] sequence of actions, the reader becomes immune to the Satanic appeal because he has learned what is, or, [more precisely], what is not” (Fish 529). At the outset of Book I, Satan appears a sympathetic figure, and all of the other angels are willing to loyally follow him into battle. By the opening of Book VI, this pretense is done away with as the angel Abdiel abandons Satan’s side in the fight for Heaven, and later relates the depth of Satan’s treachery to God’s archangels. Abdiel is praised for realizing the error of his ways and is permitted to reenter the kingdom of Heaven; Raphael’s welcoming speech, which notes that Abdiel has “fought the better fight” in choosing to bear reproach from Satan instead of suffering at the hands of God, as the other fallen angels will soon do, reflects Milton’s personal religious and political views on the issue of kingship and divine right (Milton 138: VI.29-43). Milton’s chief complaint against Charles I was that he abused his power as a king, and did not follow the Calvinist belief that the will of God reigned above all other powers, including that of a monarch (Rivers 309). This obliviousness to the supremacy of God’s law is evident in the behavior of Milton’s Satan as he tries to convince Abdiel to come back to his side before the battle for

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Dialectical Journal #2 John Milton’s pensive epic poem Paradise Lost amplifies the fate of those who disobey God’s orders will follow the same consequences of banishment in hell as Satan and, his followers received. With Satan and his followers being banished from the heavens after disowning God's rules and starting a war, sent a land “one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames, no light” this place is named hell. Now that they are in hell redemption is wanted from the failure of the first war, Satan’s pride is too strong to let God have victory so he influences the other troops to join him to being another war upon the heavens again results to failure. Dramatic irony is featured in various parts in this poem.

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By the development of the genre , the gothic villain appears as the main character in a gothic story . The gothic hero – villain characteristics often embody three main types as their model : Milton’s Satan, a rebellious compelling figure derived from Milton’s “Paradise Lost”; or Prometheus ,a mythological character who exceeded his limit by stealing fire from Zeus, the father of gods in Greek mythology, and offers it to mankind ; or Byronic hero, a complex moody, cynical, character derived from the famous English romantic poet Lord Byron, marked by his rejection of traditional values with noticeable intelligence, cunning, intense feeling of passion and strong sensual desires .

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