The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature

224 Pages·2008·2.1 MB·English

by  Nancy Rosenfeld

THE HUMAN SATAN IN
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY
ENGLISH LITERATURE
To Zalmen, and to our children Liora, Sharon, and Avi.
The Human Satan in
Seventeenth-Century
English Literature
From Milton to Rochester
NANCY ROSENFELD
University of Haifa, Israel
Max Stern College of Jezreel Valley, Israel
© Nancy Rosenfeld 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Nancy Rosenfeld has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Rosenfeld, Nancy, 1944–
The human Satan in seventeenth-century English literature: from Milton to Rochester
1. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise lost 2. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise regained
3. Bunyan, John, 1628–1688. Grace abounding to the chief of sinners 4. Bunyan, John,
1628–1688. Holy war 5. Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 1647–1680 – Criticism and
interpretation 6. Etherege, George, Sir, 1635?–1691 – Criticism and interpretation
7. English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism 8. Devil in
literature 9. Body, Human, in literature 10. Evil in literature
I. Title
820.9’351
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rosenfeld, Nancy.
The human Satan in seventeenth-century English literature: from Milton to Rochester / by
Nancy Rosenfeld.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-7546-6468-0 (alk. paper)
1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Devil in
literature. 3. Body, Human, in literature. 4. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise lost. 5. Milton,
John, 1608–1674. Paradise regained. 6. Bunyan, John, 1628–1688. Grace abounding to the
chief of sinners. 7. Bunyan, John, 1628–1688. Holy war. 8. Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of,
1647–1680—Criticism and interpretation. 9. Etherege, George, Sir, 1635?–1691—Criticism
and interpretation. 10. Evil in literature. I. Title.
PR431.R67 2008
820.9’351—dc22
2007046692
ISBN: 978-0-7546-6468-0
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall.
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Satan’s Journey into Evil 5
2 The Tempter of Grace Abounding 31
3 Diabolus and His Unholy War 53
4 Paradise Regained: Satan and the Son 79
5 “Thine now is all this world”: A Human Satanic Archetype 101
6 Rochester and the Theriophilic Paradox 127
7 The Mode of Man: “The Man of Mode” 147
8 The Earl of Rochester Meets Milton’s Muse 169
Epilogue: Where Is the Satan of Samson Agonistes? 187
Works Cited 195
Index 209
Acknowledgements
A few years ago on a cool, sunny, spring afternoon, I was strolling around Ein
Hashofet, the kibbutz (collective village) of which my husband and I have been
members for most of our adult lives, in the company of a dear friend who himself
had once been a member of the community. Our discussion naturally focused on
the difficulties faced by the individual kibbutz member, as well as on the problems
facing the Israeli cooperative movement in general. Finally my friend stopped near
a beautifully manicured lawn, where a group of noisy children were kicking around
a football in the shade of a dignified old tree. He sighed and said, “It still looks like
paradise to me!” Sensing that for him this was a major road-not-taken moment, I
answered, “Well, when we were younger we dreamed of building a utopia, but as
older adults in an imperfect world we know that every paradise is paradise lost.” I’m
not sure that my friend was comforted by these words, but I myself was.
I first read and studied Paradise Lost in an undergraduate seminar at the City
College of New York. It is not surprising that I kept my notes, since I do remember
sensing unfinished business with the poem (back in the sixties it was conventional
to speak of books or poems, rather than texts). For the almost thirty subsequent
years—during which I immigrated to Israel, married and raised a family, and worked
as a high school teacher of English—Milton was on hold. He was, it seems, always
there in the background, however, waiting to come to the forefront. This happened in
1993, when for reasons that now sound ludicrous, I decided that the time had come
to go to grad school. On walking into Professor Noam Flinker’s Milton seminar at
the University of Haifa I discovered that Milton, along with his Father, his Son, and
his Satan, had been patiently waiting for me all those years.
I should like to begin my thanks with Professor Flinker, the ever-patient,
ever-helpful mentor of my belated studies. He reminded me why I had once been
fascinated by the writings and life of John Milton, and encouraged my newfound
interest in John Bunyan and John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester. I am also grateful
to other faculty members of the Department of English Language and Literature of
the University of Haifa for their support and friendship: in particular Dr. Wolf Ze’ev
Hirst and Dr. Sarah Gilead. I am especially grateful to my friend, neighbor, and
colleague, Dr. Itzik Peleg of Beit Berl College, and to my friend, role model, and
colleague, Dr. Esther Carmel-Hakim, for their constant encouragement.
I would like to thank the Research Authority of the University of Haifa for
granting me the status of Researcher in the Department of English, thus enabling
continued access to the university’s excellent library.
Portions of this work have appeared in articles in scholarly journals. I am most
grateful to the Keats-Shelley Association of America, Inc., for permission to republish
a revised version of an article that originally appeared in the Keats-Shelley Journal (49
[2000]). I should like to express my gratitude to the editor of New Comparison: A
Journal of Comparative and General Literary Studies (35–36 [Spring–Autumn 2003])
Acknowledgements vii
for permission to use text that appeared in that journal. Chapter 6 contains a revised
version of articles that appeared in Early Modern Literary Studies (9.3 [September
2003]). Chapter 7 contains a revised version of part of my article, “The Man of
Mode: The Mode of Man,” which appeared in The McNeese Review (42 [2004]). An
earlier version of chapter 8 appeared in Revista Atenea (ISSN0885-6079, 2.2 [2006]).
Portions of this work have appeared in the following article: Nancy Rosenfeld and
Yitzhak (Itzik) Peleg, “‘Let Me Die with the Philistines’: Samson Agonistes and
the Samson of Judges as Prophets,” Moed: Annual for Jewish Studies (14 [2004]).
I am most grateful to Peter Lang Publishers for permission to republish a revised
version of portions of my article, “‘So counterfeit holy would this Divel be’: Debate
and Disinformation as Satanic Strategies in Milton and Bunyan” in John Bunyan:
Reading Dissenting Writing, edited by N.H. Keeble (2002).
Most difficult of all is the expression of gratitude to my family, simply because
words are weak: my husband Zalmen; our children Liora, Sharon, Avi, and their
wonderful families; my mother, Beatrice Fields; my brother and sister-in-law,
Michael and Cinthia Sadeh. They’ve been with me all along, and I’m constantly
humbled by the strength of their conviction that if something is important to me, it
really must be important.
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Introduction
An examination of the Satan characters of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise
Regained and of the Tempter and Diabolus in the spiritual autobiography and
visionary prose of John Bunyan—Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and The
Holy War, respectively—led me to posit the existence of an archetypal human Satan
character, a creation of the two great nonconformist writers of the early Restoration
period. To claim the status of archetype the character must be shown to serve as
a pattern for other characters. I therefore decided to trace the Satan characters of
Milton and Bunyan forward in time to the speaker of the poems of John Wilmot,
second earl of Rochester, to the public persona of the earl himself, and to Dorimant,
the young protagonist of George Etherege’s Man of Mode, for which the earl of
Rochester served as model. Then, working backward chronologically, I addressed
the question of the apparent absence of the Satan in Milton’s last great work, Samson
Agonistes.
The Satan of Paradise Lost, Grace Abounding, The Holy War, and Paradise
Regained is first viewed as an archetype-in-the-making, whose development can be
followed work by work. As part of the discussion of each separate work I examine
the character as a representation of each writer’s engagement with loss—personal,
political, religious—resulting from the restoration of the monarchy and of the
established Church of England in the 1660s. Given the despair engendered by the
Restoration in the religious structures to which they belonged, it is perhaps not
surprising that during this period both Milton and Bunyan created Satan characters—
characters noted for their articulation of those two quintessentially human emotions:
confusion and anger. The creation of these characters, moreover, entailed pondering
questions that would always be central to the believing Christian: to what extent is
the search for redemption a group-based, as opposed to individual, endeavor? Is
there a correlation between evil and individuation wherein one perceives oneself as
a discrete entity rather than as a member of a group?
The initial decision to begin this report of my investigations with a discussion of
the Satan of Paradise Lost (first published in 1667, the year after Grace Abounding)
was an intuitive response to received critical wisdom, wherein the Satan of Milton’s
great epic is not only the most attractive of the satanic characters of seventeenth-
century English letters, but one of the canon’s most intriguingly complex. As noted
by Neil Forsyth, Satan’s domination of the epic is nothing less than overwhelming:
“Satan’s presence as the dominating character makes the text itself, at most of the key
moments, inveigling, unreliable, seductive, fascinating. The Satanic epic continues
even when he is not himself present [...] And even after he drops ignominiously
out of the poem in Book 10 with that splendid and extended hiss, the seductive text
keeps him active” (7).
Further study of Milton’s and Bunyan’s oeuvres suggested an additional reason
for opening with a discussion of the Satan of Pandaemonium and Eden: I noted that