Milton's Satan is perhaps one of the most hotly discussed literary characters, as generations of critics over the last three hundred years have kept the battle over the issue of the primacy of Satan in Paradise Lost not only alive but also enduringly animated. It appears as if every generation has found its own reading and interpretation of this highly complex character created by Milton. The critical pendulum swings from one extreme to another: While some hail Satan as the hero of the epic, some find him a lowly creature worse than a worm (Vijayasree, 68).
Milton presents Satan in conflicting qualities. He is "confounded though immoral"; he is anguished though proud and obdurate; his eye is cruel and remorseful. And though he is filled with hate and revenge, though he is calculating and sarcastic, he is simultaneously gentle and kind, as when he "gently raise[s] [the] fainted courage, and dispel[s] [the] fears" of his stricken angel legions (Vijayasree, 68).
Likewise, Satan's physical being has no integrity: he repeatedly changes shape and substance; and with the frames gone, this makes it difficult for the reader to answe "Who is Satan?" by placing him either in a "real and objective" or in a "fabulous" frame. For this metamorphoses come out both in reality and as similes: he "becomes" the "strippling Cherub," the beasts of prey, but he is also "like" the wolf, the cormorant, and the mist. However, at one point, he is just "wrapped" in mist, an association less that a simile. Sometimes his form exists in some indeterminate zone between likeness and being: Gabriel's guard finds him "Squat like a toad close at the ear of Eve" as he brings her the disturbing dream; but a few lines later Ithuriel touches him with his spear, which causes Satan to "start up in his own shape." (Fuller, 52)
Here Satan's physical self is difficult to distinguish from either his likeness in simile (toad) and position (squat) or, more significant, his psychological self, the self who speaks "falsehood" which "returns/ Of force to its own likeness." The confusion characterizes his most famous metamorphosis into the serpent, who is both a vessel, separate from Satan, that he "enters," in which he "constrains," "mixes," "incarnates," "encloses," and "imbrutes" himself (Fuller, 52).
Satan is disjunctive in inner and outer substance" the line of division does not run between a "real" and a "fabulous" character. There is a continuum of correspondence between Satan's physical metamorphoses and his psychic divisions. To answer the question posed above, Milton is not describing Satan in two incompatible modes-the tangible Satan fantastically and the character of Satan realistically. He is representing both in the same mode. One feels a disjunction in mode because a change in physical aspect is more noticeable and thus apparently fantastic than a shift in psychic aspect (Fuller, 52).
Such dualities of identity as cruelty-remose and angel-toad appear throughout Paradise Lost, forcing the issue of substantiality, the issue of frame, and the issue of cause. Thus Satan's spear changes, both within and between similes, from a spear to a tall pine, which is then made into the mast of a ship, which changes to a cane and later to a magic wand.
We can see almost all of Satan's virtues and defects in his approach to Eden. After Satan leaves hell, the reader gradually gains a heavenly perspective on Satan. In hell we had only the narrators comments to assure us that Satan was glozing over despair with rhetoric. In Eden, Uriel sees through the mask but noy before Satan has passed by pretending to be a cherub; when Satan alights on earth, Uriel notices Satan's "ire, envy and despair." Once in Eden, Satan reveals the noble characteristics that he still posseses. First, wonder at spotting Adam and Even (4.358-65).
If admiration leads Satan to the brink of love, his commitment to revenge leads him to sympathy (4.366-69). Inaudibly, he tells Adam and Eve that God is to blame for wronging Satan, not Satan for wronging them, which is only a consequence of God's actions. Satan ends by confessing his crime before he commits it.
Thus, Satan's whole character is revealed here in miniature: his partly admirable anture, his intelligence, his awareness, his cunning, his powers of speech, his determination, and his monomania. Satan's own nataure is further ruined as he plans to ruin Adam and Eve's: all his talents are in the service of his thwarted passion for power. If he cannot be vice regent in heaven there shall be nothing else if he can destroy it. We admire Satan as a hero only if we deny his social and political aspects, only if we cut him out of his context and view him as part of ourselves, as a dramatization of our id. But Paradise Lost is a public poem, illustrating the effects of egoism on history at large. To compare great things to small, Satan is a social disease (Blessington, 34).
References
Fuller, Elizabeth Ely. Milton's Kinesthetic Vision in Paradise Lost. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, Inc., 1983.
Blessington, Francis C. Paradise Lost: A Student's Companion to the Poem. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2004.
Vijayasree, C. "The Primacy of Satan." in John Milton, Paradise Lost Book 1. Delhi: Dorling Kindersley, 2006.
