Heros: PL

• Tragic Hero = a character who suffers from a fatal flaw and is doomed to destruction; must be admirable; return the world back to order; Developed by Aristotle
• Harmartia = fatal flaw
• Peripeteia = reversal of circumstances
• Anagnorisis = realisation
• “Adam fell through uxoriousness” – C.S Lewis
• “purposeful hierarchical order” - McColley
• “instant stroke of death” = God's punishment for Adam & Eve
• “Overmuch admiring” "crime" = Adam's Harmartia
• “harken to the voice of thy wife” = Adam obeying Eve; against God's order
• AO3: 10 Commandments

  • "You shall have no God before me"
• AO3: Great Chain of Being : Didacus Valades (1579)

  1. God
  2. Angels
  3. Demons
  4. Humans
  5. Animals
  6. Plants
  7. Non-living
  8. Hell

  
• “bent on mans destruction” = Satan's ambition
• “It is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven” = Satan's conflict with status
• “I in none of these find place or refuge; and the more I see pleasures about me, I feel torment within me” = Satan's conflict with destruction; not entirely evil
• “Relentless thoughts” “Sweet interchange” = Satan's torment over destroying paradise; not entirely evil
• “machiavellian hero” = Kececi (2009)
• “speaks for freedom but from an autocratic viewpoint” = Ianucci (21st cent)
• “The devil” was Milton’s “hero” instead of “Adam” – Dryden (17th cent)
• “Adam cannot give Milton much scope to express what he really feels about life, but Satan is there, Satan gives him scope” - Fish
• Genre: Epic Poetry

  • Uses heroic chracters
  • Emphasis on morals, philosophy & divine intervention
• “What harm? Idleness had been worse. My labour will sustain me” = Adam being a hard working individual
• “His more attentive mind” = more admirable compared to Eve
• “Clothes us unworthy, pitying while He judged” = understands God's judgement and pity
• “Seek not temptation then” “trial will come unsought” = Post-fall Adam ordering Eve; mirrors the Lord's prayer
• AO3: Lord’s Prayer

  • Trial used to “deliver us from evil”
  • Providence
• Milton = “Assert Eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to men”
• Bett = “(Milton) seeks to redefine classical heroism in Christian terms”
• Milton = Adam is “The better fortitude of patience and heroic martyrdom” (prologue of B9)
• Eve has “Pseudo-heroic ambitions” = Evans