The taming of the devil: A study in the various aspects of Miltonic Satan represented in the heroes of the novels written by women writers from late 18th century to 20th century

Abstract

Adopting the Bloomian and Gilert-and-Gubar-like approach toward a female tradition in English literary history, this thesis examines the influence of the hero figure represented in Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost and its later metamorphoses upon the construction of the heroes written by women writers from 18^th century onward. By this examination, this thesis aims to show the female obsessive adherence to demonic father-lover figures.

Despite his fall, Milton's Satan is a father figure with so much masculine power and beauty that male Romantic poets made him their idol. Women writers, however, have transformed him into their own heroes, by emphasising his potential as “father” and “lover”. The result of their rewriting of Miltonic Satan is his literary progeny, such as Radcliffean villains (humanised but villainous), Byronic heroes (human heroes but unattainable) and Rochester (tamable father-lover). These heroes have fiery, penetrating, hard eyes as their recognition factors, because, as in Rochester's symbolic castration or Freud-Lacan psychology, eyes signify sexual desire. Their 20^th century offspring, the heroes of mass-market romantic novels, play the dual roles of father-like protective lover, and villainous enemy. Their father-lover role helps fulfil the female desire of being loved by their fathers. The villainous role emphasises the growing female power in that the heroines eventually overcome the heroes. While the symbolic castration or even death is required to equalise male hero and female heroine in 19^th century novels, 20 ^th century novels only require the heroine's mastery of the hero's power. The modern heroines, however, give birth to sons, as Jane Eyre gives birth to her son, to bring about the denouement and to conform to the traditional values that place sons over daughters. The fact that the progeny of Miltonic Satan is given the role of the father-substitutes of the heroines reflects the social construction of Western civilisation, where fathers have absolute power over their wives and daughters. Daughters, who are defined as being “sinister”, pine for the father's love; their desire is reflected in the women's novels.