PARADISE LOST: Fall & Genre

Question 1

Opening:
1. “No more of talk”
2. “I now must change those notes to tragic”
3. “to describe races and games…impreses quaint, capárisons and steeds”

Answer 1

1. Immediate negation, the Fall’s restrictions on language and speech (linguistic mobility of “wandering”) affects Milton himself!
2. Book IX takes place in an Aristotelian unified temporal (24hrs) and spacial (Eden) setting
3. Impenetrable (horse-related) vocab - Pointlessness of chivalric epic -> glittery, superficial
   - “Impreses quaint” from Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene”, an epic poem following several nights, each meant to examine one virtue

Question 2

Temptation, Genre + Fall
- (SATAN) “Will God…not praise rather your dauntless virtue?”
- WANDERING

+
- vs. Satan almost tempted back to good by Eve with the PASTORAL
-> Ultimately ends TRAGICALLY, the pastoral dies

Answer 2

CHIVALRIC EPIC is connected to FALL
* JR: Satan turns Eve’s disobedience into a chivalric act
-> “Dauntless virtue” - heroine of a Romance
-> Eve is tempted with a CHIVALRIC QUEST NARRATIVE
- “wandering” as a trace of the GENRE Milton rejected
- Genre (linguistic choice) inspires action, so changes the outcome -> alternative possibilities

WANDERING
* From SPACIAL…
-> Directionless movement
- Free from predetermination (Calvinism)
* to MORAL
-> Straying
- New ethical constraints (“No more of talk”)
* also to INTELLECTUAL
-> ie. an attempt to break out of arbitrary hierarchies
-> JR: “Linguistic mobility” - semantic flexibility/possibilities lost after fall
- Adam: “Strange desire of wandering this unhappy morn”

Question 3

The Fall + Sex
1. “Eve, whose eye darted contagious fire”
2. “their mutual guilt the seal”
3. “their eyes how opened, and their minds how darkened “
4. “innocence, that as a veil // Had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone”

Answer 3

1.
-> Looking as part of temptation (sexual here)
-> She initiates (“contagious”) -> things not as they ‘should be’ in the post-lapsarian world
* She is blamed:
- Adam’s later monosyllabic change (“O Eve, in evil hour”)
- Eve as the epitome of the female temptress:
“so rose the Danite strong // Hercúlean Sampson (ADAM) from the harlot lap // Of Phílistéan Dálilá (EVE)”
——–> Epic simile not representative - unfair (fallen) world
-> Heat, passion, lust, sin, temptation (Fall at midday, sex in the heat of the afternoon)

2. One flesh, now both take responsibility

3.
-> “how” repetition - unanswerable, inexpressible sin of the fall, failure of language after the fall
-> “darkened” vs. “enlightened” - deceived

4. -> “as a veil” - therefore seeing the truth
   - “ill” already present in the pre-lapsarian world -> when is the fall?
   -> “shadowed”, yet hid darkness
   - deconstruction/mixing of imagery
   - “to guilty shame he covered” -> ignorance is bliss -> they’ve exposed the darkness of the universe, now want that cover back (intellectually, now spread to physically)