Literary Analysis Paradise Lost By John Milton

When we think of women in seventeenth-century English literature we find copious reference to the Damsel in Distress, an ethereally beautiful creature of infinite gentleness and vulnerability, dependent on the male protagonist to save her from some beast or moral folly. Or we see Woman as the object of desire: beautiful beyond compare, gentle, soft-spoken (if she speaks at all), compliant, virtuous, and generally idealised. What readers seldom see is a woman with any sort of personality – often she is merely a bit of feminised fluff, a kind of pseudo-human placeholder stuck into a poem or plot to motivate the (male) protagonist to action. This over-simplified, often underdeveloped characterisation is turned completely on its (rather, her) head in John Milton’s Paradise Lost: Eve, the woman known to all of Christianity as the Fallen Woman who was tricked by Satan into sampling the forbidden fruit of God’s Tree of Knowledge and therefore leading to Man’s exp ulsion from the Garden of Eden into the world of pain, toil, and sorrow. Milton created a female character who not only looked good, but was intellectual, perceptive, rational, emotionally intelligent, and humanly fallible in ways that are relatable, realistic, and familiar. Eve, the Mother of Mankind, is not only the First Woman but one of the first female characters to be significantly developed beyond the usual strategically-placed plot device (with the possible exception of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath). 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(2010 AP Literature and Composition) Disobedience and Exile an Analysis of Satan from Milton’s Paradise Lost John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, has been the subject of criticism and interpretation through many years; these interpretations concur in that Adam and Eve are the sufferers of the poem, and it is their blight to lose Paradise because of their disobedience; however, their exile