critics

Lewis - fails to convince us that

Adam and Eve are happy

Coleridge - Nothing can exceed the

energy and magnificence of the character of Satan

Blake - of the Devil’s

party without knowing it

Froula - Milton simply believed in

the sexual subordination of women

Lewis - seeing God as malevolent or Satan as attractive is simply

an indication of a Fallen state

Empson - Paradise Lost has no

easily identified hero

Samuel - Eve is the

lowliest rational creature in the hierarchy of the poem

Gilbert and Gubar - patriarchal ideas about Eve’s

secondariness, inequality, inferiority and subjection to Adam

Forsyth - by measuring Satan against the heroic standards, we become conscious of

the inadequacy and fragility of all the heroic virtues celebrated in literature, of the susceptibility of them all to demonic perversion