Msp final

Milton works to flesh out the meatless skeleton of Genesis, allowing the reader to consider and perhaps understand why Adam and Eve fall, Shelley, through her characterizations of both Frankenstein and the creature, causes us to reevaluate the absolutes of “good” and “evil” in the Fall and more thoroughly understand how Satan came to tempt Eve in the Garden of Eden, and Pullman, by creating characters that the reader can’t help but love and pitting them against the forces of the Church, makes the reader sympathize with what would traditionally be considered Satanic.

Paradise Lost• Anthropomorphic portrayals of G-d, Satan, Adam and Eve

• “Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord G-d had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath G-d said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” (Genesis 3)

• “O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams / That bring to my remembrance from what state / I fell, how glorious once above the sphere; / Till pride and worse ambition threw me down / Warring in Heav’n against Heav’n’s matchless King” (PL 4.37-41)

• “For never can true reconcilement grow / Where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep: / Which would but lead me to a worse relapse / And heavier fall...” (PL 4.98-101)

• “...the story of Adam and Eve, though tragic…[is] Not simply the greatest story ever told, it is every story ever told: ‘Milton’s Adam and Eve are all men and women inclusively…’” (PL pg xxxii)

• “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.” (Genesis 3)

• “I of brute human, ye of human g-ds. / So ye shall die perhaps, by putting off / Human, to put on g-ds, death to be wished…” (PL 9.712-14)

• Allows the reader to understand the rationale behind both Satan’s tempting of Eve and Eve’s being tempted

•Consider Satan’s side of the story

•Makes the same themes even more human

•More immediate and relatable

•Paradise Lost is so removed from us

•Is Satan as good as G-d? or G-d as guilty as Satan?

Frankenstein

•“As many commentators have pointed out, Milton had, by submitting G-d’s providence to rational debate, inadvertently exposed the foundations of his religion to subversion.” (F 180)

•“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?” (PL, X.743-45; qtd. F 180)

•“As most readers of the novel attest, its most challenging effect comes from the reversal of sympathies demanded by monster’s narrative. This jolt is reinforce by the ‘doubling’ in the relationship between the monster and Victor (and in Victor’s resemblance to Walton too), so that all identities in the novel are unstable and shifting, the roles of master and slave, pursuer and pursued alternating or merging.” (F 183)

Chris Baldick, Assembling Frankenstein

“Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link at any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy, and prosperous, guarded by, the especial care of his creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but i was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times i considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when i viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.”(Frankenstein, 90)

Percy Bysshe Shelley, On Frankenstein

•“Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked. Requite affection with scorn; -- let one being be selected for whatever cause, as the refuse of his kind -- divide him, a social being, from society, and you impose upon him the irresistible obligations -- malevolence and selfishness. ” (F 214)

Lawrence Lipking, Frankenstein, the True Story

•“Frankenstein teaches its reader to live with uncertainty, in a world where moral absolutes -- even the ones we cling to -- may cancel each other out.” (F 423)

His Dark Materials

•Makes us side with the opposition

•Care most about Will and Lyra

•Fall wasn’t necessarily a bad thing

•In my case, I found that my interest was most vividly caught by the meaning of the temptation-and-fall theme. Suppose that the prohibition on the knowledge of good and evil were an expression of jealous cruelty, and the gaining of such knowledge an act of virtue? Suppose the Fall should be celebrated and not deplored? As I played with it, my story resolved itself into an account of the necessity of growing up, and a refusal to lament the loss of innocence. The true end of human life, I found myself saying, was not redemption by a nonexistent Son of G-d, but the gaining and transmission of wisdom. Innocence is not wise, and wisdom cannot be innocent, and if we are going to do any good in the world, we have to leave childhood behind

Philip Pullman, Introduction to Paradise Lost

•“‘But then we wouldn’t have been able to build it. None could if they put themselves first. We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we’ve got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different world, and then we’ll build...The Republic of Heaven,’ said Lyra”

•(His Dark Materials, 929)

•“Pullman calls his readers not only to sharpened consciousness, awareness of the present moment, but also to a keener memory, without which our experience lacks feeling, meaning, cohesiveness, and applicability. When Dr. Mary Malone hears form Atal the story of how the mulefa came to consciousness when they gained knowledge of the sraf ...she realizes how the story, including the snake and the attainment of knowledge...was the dawn of “memory and wakefulness”...as well as being a parallel world version of the story of Adam and Eve in the Grade of Eden. Memory, wakefulness (and one might add history) began with the so-called but misnamed Fall.”

•‘“‘...the last novel depicts how ‘“G-d’’ and “Satan” [that is, Metatron and...Lord Asriel] perish together, leaving us with the human, Lyra and Will’”’

Millicent Lenz, Introduction to His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip

Pullman’s Trilogy

•“So the snake said, “Put your foot through the hole in the seedpod where I was playing, and you will become wise.” So she put a foot in where the snake had been. And the oil entered her blood and helped her see more clearly than before, and the first thing she saw was the sraf.” (Amber Spyglass, 224)

Milton worked to flesh out the meatless skeleton of Genesis, allowing the reader to consider and perhaps understand why Adam and Eve fell, Shelley, through her characterizations of both Frankenstein and the creature, caused us to reevaluate the absolutes of “good” and “evil” in the Fall and more thoroughly understand how Satan came to tempt Eve in the Garden of Eden, and Pullman, by creating characters that the reader couldn’t help but love and pitting them against the forces of the Church, made the reader sympathize with what would traditionally be considered Satanic.