The document discusses how Milton, Shelley, and Pullman reimagined the story of the Fall from Genesis to make readers reconsider traditional interpretations. Milton provided context for why Adam and Eve fell. Shelley caused readers to question the absolutes of good and evil through Frankenstein and the creature. Pullman made readers sympathize with traditionally Satanic characters by loving the protagonists he pitted against the Church.

2. Milton works to flesh out the meatless skeleton of Genesis,
allowing the reader to consider and perhaps understand why
Adam and Eve fall, Shelley, through her characterizations of
both Frankenstein and the creature, causes us to reevaluate the
absolutes of “good” and “evil” in the Fall and more thoroughly
understand how Satan came to tempt Eve in the Garden of Eden,
and Pullman, by creating characters that the reader can’t help
but love and pitting them against the forces of the Church,
makes the reader sympathize with what would traditionally be
considered Satanic.

3. Paradise Lost
•
•
Anthropomorphic portrayals of G-d, Satan, Adam and Eve
•
“O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams / That bring to my
remembrance from what state / I fell, how glorious once above the
sphere; / Till pride and worse ambition threw me down / Warring in
Heav’n against Heav’n’s matchless King” (PL 4.37-41)
•
“Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the
Lord G-d had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath G-d
said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” (Genesis 3)
“For never can true reconcilement grow / Where wounds of deadly hate have
pierced so deep: / Which would but lead me to a worse relapse / And heavier
fall...” (PL 4.98-101)

4. •
•
•
•
“...the story of Adam and Eve, though tragic…[is] Not simply the greatest
story ever told, it is every story ever told: ‘Milton’s Adam and Eve are all
men and women inclusively…’” (PL pg xxxii)
“And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was
pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of
the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he
did eat.” (Genesis 3)
“I of brute human, ye of human g-ds. / So ye shall die perhaps, by putting off
/ Human, to put on g-ds, death to be wished…” (PL 9.712-14)
Allows the reader to understand the rationale behind both Satan’s tempting of
Eve and Eve’s being tempted

5. Frankenstein
• Consider Satan’s side of the story
• Makes the same themes even more human
• More immediate and relatable
• Paradise Lost is so removed from us
• Is Satan as good as G-d? or G-d as guilty as
Satan?

6. Chris Baldick, Assembling Frankenstein
•“As many commentators have pointed out, Milton had, by submitting G-d’s
providence to rational debate, inadvertently exposed the foundations of his
religion to subversion.” (F 180)
•“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man? Did I solicit thee /
From darkness to promote me?” (PL, X.743-45; qtd. F 180)
•“As most readers of the novel attest, its most challenging effect comes from the
reversal of sympathies demanded by monster’s narrative. This jolt is reinforce by
the ‘doubling’ in the relationship between the monster and Victor (and in Victor’s
resemblance to Walton too), so that all identities in the novel are unstable and
shifting, the roles of master and slave, pursuer and pursued alternating or
merging.” (F 183)

7. “Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link at any other being in
existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect.
He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy, and
prosperous, guarded by, the especial care of his creator; he was allowed to
converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature,
but i was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times i considered Satan as
the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when i viewed the
bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.”
(Frankenstein, 90)

8. Percy Bysshe Shelley, On Frankenstein
•“Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked.
Requite affection with scorn; -- let one being be
selected for whatever cause, as the refuse of his kind
-- divide him, a social being, from society, and you
impose upon him the irresistible obligations -malevolence and selfishness. ” (F 214)

9. Lawrence Lipking, Frankenstein, the True Story
•“Frankenstein teaches its reader to live with
uncertainty, in a world where moral absolutes
-- even the ones we cling to -- may cancel
each other out.” (F 423)

10. His Dark Materials
• Makes us side with the opposition
• Care most about Will and Lyra
• Fall wasn’t necessarily a bad thing

11. Philip Pullman, Introduction to Paradise Lost
•In my case, I found that my interest was most vividly caught by the
meaning of the temptation-and-fall theme. Suppose that the
prohibition on the knowledge of good and evil were an expression
of jealous cruelty, and the gaining of such knowledge an act of
virtue? Suppose the Fall should be celebrated and not deplored? As I
played with it, my story resolved itself into an account of the
necessity of growing up, and a refusal to lament the loss of
innocence. The true end of human life, I found myself saying, was
not redemption by a nonexistent Son of G-d, but the gaining and
transmission of wisdom. Innocence is not wise, and wisdom cannot
be innocent, and if we are going to do any good in the world, we
have to leave childhood behind

12. •“‘But then we wouldn’t have been able to build it. None could if
they put themselves first. We have to be all those difficult things like
cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we’ve got to study
and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different world, and
then we’ll build...The Republic of Heaven,’ said Lyra”
•(His Dark Materials, 929)

13. Millicent Lenz, Introduction to His Dark Materials
Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy
•“Pullman calls his readers not only to sharpened consciousness, awareness of the
present moment, but also to a keener memory, without which our experience
lacks feeling, meaning, cohesiveness, and applicability. When Dr. Mary Malone
hears form Atal the story of how the mulefa came to consciousness when they
gained knowledge of the sraf ...she realizes how the story, including the snake
and the attainment of knowledge...was the dawn of “memory and
wakefulness”...as well as being a parallel world version of the story of Adam and
Eve in the Grade of Eden. Memory, wakefulness (and one might add history)
began with the so-called but misnamed Fall.”
•‘“‘...the last novel depicts how ‘“G-d’’ and “Satan” [that is, Metatron and...Lord
Asriel] perish together, leaving us with the human, Lyra and Will’”’

14. •“So the snake said, “Put your foot through the hole in
the seedpod where I was playing, and you will
become wise.” So she put a foot in where the snake
had been. And the oil entered her blood and helped her
see more clearly than before, and the first thing she
saw was the sraf.” (Amber Spyglass, 224)

15. Milton worked to flesh out the meatless skeleton of Genesis,
allowing the reader to consider and perhaps understand why
Adam and Eve fell, Shelley, through her characterizations of
both Frankenstein and the creature, caused us to reevaluate the
absolutes of “good” and “evil” in the Fall and more thoroughly
understand how Satan came to tempt Eve in the Garden of Eden,
and Pullman, by creating characters that the reader couldn’t help
but love and pitting them against the forces of the Church, made
the reader sympathize with what would traditionally be
considered Satanic.