More on Milton’s Satan

[Satan] remains an inescapable object of attention, and of

troubled admiration-whether we admire the character or

the force that calls him into being . . .

Of course, most of us presume that the battle has been

fought already, that the heroic Satan ( the Romantic

Satan) is primarily an error of neophytes, a figure whose

claims on the mind are admitted only to be cast out by

a sophisticated appeal to Milton's way of testing and

tempting the reader (and perhaps himself). But still I

would want to account for so persistent a fascination . . .

The claims of Satan might be articulated as follows:

it is not that I like Satan's voice, mind, or attitude better

than those of other characters in the poem, but rather

that Satan, at times, seems to be the only character

with a voice, mind, or attitude of his own, or the one

who places the stresses of voice, mind, and attitude most

clearly. I am fascinated with Satan's character because he seems to be the only character. The lure of Satan is the lure of the dramatized mind; he is the vessel for what Milton learned from reading Hamlet, King Lear, or Macbeth. . .

To put it more strongly: I like to think about Satan because Satan is the only character in the poem who thinks, or in whom I best recognize what it feels like to think (though this may only mean, of course, to think like Satan). Satan is Milton's picture of what thinking looks like, an image of the mind, of subjectivity, of self-consciousness, a representation of the awkward pressures we put on ourselves to interpret our own situation within the mind's shifting circle of freedom and compulsion. Satan is the poet's most palpable image of what human thought is like as it is moved, wounded, or disowned by its memories, desires, intentions, sensations, as it confronts body and environment, inertia and pain, as it engages the words and stories which shape and misshape it. Satan is an image.of the mind in its dividedness from both itself and others, in its illusions of inwardness and power. . . .

What is crucial to the focus on mind, however, is not any specific evidence in Satan of unconscious mental processes (e.g. Oedipal conflicts or sado-masochistic instincts), though we may discover these as well. For the moment, what counts more is the diverse attention to the mind working itself in any way, to the phenomenology or figurations of subjectivity in general. This Satan is not necessarily Romantic, though he may foreshadow the burdens of Romantic subjectivity and self-centering. . .

Satan, despite his unresting intellect, gets a lot wrong, perhaps gets everything wrong. But it is less than obvious what we are to make of this.

From Kenneth Gross, “Satan and the Romantic Satan: a notebook,” in from Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987).