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Feminist Criticism In John Milton's Paradise Lost

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Milton's speaker starts Paradise Lost by expressing that his subject will be Adam and Eve's insubordination and fall from refinement. He conjures a glorious muse and solicits help in identifying his goal-oriented story and God's anticipated humanity. The activity starts with Satan and his individual dissident blessed messengers who are discovered affixed to a pool of blaze in Hell. They rapidly free themselves and travel to land, where they uncover minerals and develop Pandemonium, which will be their gathering place. Inside Pandemonium, the radical holy messengers, who are presently fiends, banter about if they may as well start an alternate war with God. Beezelbub prescribes that they endeavour to degenerate God's adored new creation, humanity. …show more content…

In his representation of Eve he dramatizes and reinforces the ingrained perception of woman perception of woman as, in various ways, allied to the more dangerous and degenerate human tendencies’ (p. 167). This feminist criticism primarily correlates to the surroundings in which Milton wrote. Women were treated as subordinates to men and this is not only apparent in Milton’s Paradise Lost but also in the poetry of poets like that of John Donne who treated women as merely subjected to sexual satisfaction and also the romances of the period depicted the women as sexually wanton. Eve’s obedience to patriarchy is somewhat frustrating and her personality is somewhat identifiable with Satan whose efforts aimed towards destroying the patriarchy in the heaven. Although there is a stark resemblance between Satan and Eve, Satan’s rationale for the rebellion was intentional and held a completely different motive. His ulterior motive was to build another patriarchal hierarchy where he reigns as the god. In contrast, Milton’s Eve is not a demonic character who holds the will to possess heaven or create an abode ruled by

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