“As whom the Fables name of monstrous size,
Titanian, or Earth-born, that warr’d on Jove,
Briareos or Typhon, whom the Den
By ancient Tarsus held, or that Sea-beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim th’ Ocean stream:”
Milton, 197-202
One of the things that stuck out the most about this reading to me is the natural imagery that Milton portrays throughout this piece, particularly in reference to Satan. This is something that was brought up in class last week and caught my attention as someone with a deep passion for the environment.
Milton’s perspective, one can assume seeing as he is a religious guy from the 1600s, is not one with much empathy toward Satan himself. However, particularly in the early stages of the text, Milton humanizes Satan and instigates an empathetic response from the readers in Satan’s direction. In addition, he utilizes nature-driven imagery to describe the character. To me, this may be connected to (not intentionally by the author) the complex relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. Essentially, Satan is not a big fan of humans and uses them in spite of God. One can argue that the same unfair treatment and cause for empathy that one sees in Milton’s text could extend to the environment. This is also quite interesting because, according to a lot of Christian scripture, God created the natural world. This makes Milton’s use of natural imagery interesting on another level, creating a sort of uncanniness that God may experience with Satan.
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I am always so so fascinated with nature imagery in texts, and how it can be used to humanize and create empathy for characters. It’s also interesting that animal imagery can be used to dehumanize characters, and make them animalistic, and often are used in a racist sense. I feel like we see both humanizing nature imagery, and then dehumanizing animal imagery used for Satan, which just raises even more questions on how we should view Satan in this text.
This was very interesting! Paradise Lost definitely has a lot of connections to nature, including how people should/can interact with nature for their benefit. It changes the way we view Satan throughout the text, almost subconsciously. I also think the idea of a Natural Paradise, such as where the story takes place, to be something worth exploring. Like, does it center the two humans or the natural beauty?
This reminds me of the conversations we had surrounding Grendel in Beowulf. Using nature to understand a villain is surprisingly common and evocative.
Satan the Environmentalist™? I might just be a Satanist Apologist due to the fact that I grew up with A LOT of stories about why Satan isn’t a bad dude necessarily, but I never understood why people get mad at the reasons Satan had for disliking humans – they’re kind of terrible and destroy stuff that doesn’t belong strictly to them. I kind of wonder if Milton’s portrayal of Satan being a metaphor for our relationship with nature to mean that it’s bad to think of nature in that way? Then again there was a period of time where nature was considered satanic and evil so it kind of fits.
This was a very interesting post! paradise lost makes so many connections to nature. how we should act with the world around us. sometimes we forgot and can be destructive. We have to be better as a whole one step at a time. we see satans perspective as to how he sees the world’s treated.