Milton's Satan: is he the hero of Paradise Lost?

Aims

This course aims to:

• enable you to read Milton’s Paradise Lost with greater understanding and appreciation
• equip you to come to your own conclusions about the much-debated question of whether Satan is the hero of Milton’s poem
• open up new angles on some time-honoured literary questions

Course content

In writing his epic poem Paradise Lost, Milton ambitiously set out to achieve in English what Homer had done in Greek and Virgil in Latin. But Milton and his contemporaries understood an epic to be the story of a virtuous hero who inspires imitation; hence a key choice for any aspiring epic poet was who the poem’s hero was to be. Yet after many years of pondering this question, Milton finally wrote a poem in which it is famously debatable who the hero is – and in which the most obvious candidate for that role is an astonishingly unconventional choice, especially for a writer who was a committed Christian: namely the Devil himself.

More puzzlingly still, Milton gives to Satan a claim to heroism not only in terms of the conventions of literary genre, but also in relation to the most pressing political issues of Milton’s time, by making Satan an eloquent exponent of principled resistance to tyranny, a cause which Milton himself had tirelessly defended throughout his life.

So is Satan really the hero of Paradise Lost, as many readers through the centuries have concluded? And if that was the poet’s intention, what could it mean for him to have made such an unorthodox choice? Or was Milton perhaps, as William Blake famously suggested, in some sense “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”?

We will look closely together at the main episodes in the poem featuring Satan, while weighing some influential critical arguments that have been made on both sides, and considering Satan’s claim to heroism from a variety of angles, among them:

• literary – how solid a claim does Satan have to be an ‘epic’ or a ‘tragic’ hero?
• political – how sound is Satan’s case to be a champion of freedom and justice?
• psychological – does Satan claim a certain centrality of interest in the poem by virtue of being its most psychologically complex and engaging character, and/or by the psychological importance he has for its other characters?
• intellectual – what to make of Satan’s potentially heroic affiliation with critical thought, and with Renaissance discourses of ever-expanding knowledge?
• theological – how does Milton use Satan’s example to explore unorthodox ideas about God, grace, and salvation?

We will aim to reach our own conclusions about all these matters and more, in a week spent closely studying Satan’s role in Paradise Lost.

What to expect on this course

The course will be taught as an interactive seminar, using a flexible mix of class discussion, lecture-style presentation, and tutor-led collaborative reading of key scenes and passages from Paradise Lost.

The course will involve extensive close reading of the set text, so you must bring a copy of Paradise Lost with you to every class, and you should also become as familiar as possible with the poem in advance. (Our focus in the class will be on Paradise Lost Books 1-6 and 9-10, but some familiarity with the rest of the poem would be beneficial, and naturally the poem is more enjoyable if read as a whole!)

Course sessions

The following is a rough outline of how we will progress through the poem day by day, which is intended to help you prepare for each class by re-reading appropriate parts of the poem:

1. Paradise Lost, Book 1 – Satan in Hell – an epic hero in the Homeric tradition? – an introduction to the poem’s remarkable ambiguity
2. Paradise Lost, Books 2-3 – Satan the cosmic explorer – ‘dark materials’ and ‘new worlds’ – the sublime vastness of Paradise Lost
3. Paradise Lost, Book 4-5 – Satan enters the Garden of Eden – a formidable critical reader, and an irrepressible psychological presence
4. Paradise Lost, Books 5-6 – Satan and the war in Heaven – principled freedom fighter or arch-hypocrite? is his enemy a benevolent deity or a cosmic tyrant?
5. Paradise Lost, Books 9-10 – Satan, Eve, and the Forbidden Fruit – motives and outcomes – is Milton’s Satan a hero in the final reckoning?

Learning outcomes

As a result of the course, you will gain a greater understanding of the subject and you should be able to:

• understand why the question whether Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost has been the most famously debated of all questions in Milton criticism, and be aware of some of the most influential arguments that have been made on both sides
• develop a broader and more nuanced understanding of Milton’s masterpiece by exploring the question of Satan’s purported heroism from a variety of angles
• understand how Milton’s wider religious and political views are both pertinent and puzzling in relation to his depiction in Paradise Lost of a seemingly heroic Satan

Required Reading

Milton, John, The Major Works (Edited by Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

This edition is strongly recommended because it contains all the works by Milton to be referred to during the course, including Paradise Lost. But in principle you could get by with any other modern edition of Paradise Lost. In any case, please bring your copy of Paradise Lost to every lecture. I also strongly recommend reading the whole poem before the course starts.