Jamie DaSilva
Professor Nicholas Helms
Rethinking Medieval Literature
8 December, 2023
After reading both Paradise Lost by John Milton and The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish I became interested in the way both describe paradise. Both texts describe a type of paradise in their way and I am curious as to how they are both similar and different from each other. I created this annotated bibliography to help highlight how the paradise described in both texts is similar. I added the links to each article after each citation to make the articles accessible for those who want to read them.
Annotated Bibliography
Paradise Lost: Book 1, milton.host.dartmouth.edu/reading_room/pl/book_1/text.shtml. Accessed 5 Dec. 2023.
Paradise Lost is an epic poem written by John Milton that describes a scenario where Satan attempts to overthrow God and claim Heaven as his own. In the beginning of the poem, we see Satan getting defeated by God when he attempts to overthrow Heaven. God then Banishes Satan to hell and Satan is cast out of Heaven for all of eternity. Satan ends up preferring Hell because he is its ruler. Then he and his people built a massive temple that they decided to name Pandemonium. After the temple was constructed Satan had a debate with the other devils to come up with a plan to take over Heaven and make it their own. During this debate, they decide that Satan tempted the humans that God had created into disobeying him. When Satan gets to Hell he meets his children Death and Sin who then introduces him to Chaos, Discord, Night, and Confusion. They then build a bridge from Hell to Earth to complete their plan of corruption. At this point in the story, God is also attempting to make plans to overthrow Satan as ruler of Hell to prevent the overtaking of Heaven. The son of God offers himself as a sacrifice to make God’s plan become a reality. This pleases God. Satan then enters Heaven disguised as a cherub and convinces Archangel Uriel to show him the way to the Garden of Eden. Once in the garden, Satan observes the behavior of Adam and Eve, the humans that God had recently created. While observing Satan notices that they avoid eating the fruit off of a single tree due to God’s orders and plans to use that as a way to convince Adam and Eve to disobey God. While this is taking place Eve is sleeping and has a dream about the fruit on the tree. She tells Adam of this dream and talks to him about eating the fruit on the tree. Archangel Rafael warns Adam against eating the fruit so he does not become doomed as Satan did. Rafael then talks to Adam about creation and love. Adam tells Rafael about the love he holds for Eve and how he is sexually attracted to her. Rafael then tells him that this is Satan tempting him and not to fall for his tricks. After Rafael leaves Satan turns himself into a snake and remains in the garden. Adam and Eve then go about their days as normal. Satan then convinced Eve to take a bite of the fruit from the tree, then she goes on to convince Adam to follow suit. After they eat the fruit they are disappointed in how sinful the world is and argue about who is to blame for their sins. Sin and Death then go to Earth. Satan returns to hell and God then calls upon Adam and Eve to tell them what their punishment will be. God decides to have his angels change the conditions of Earth to an unfavorable nature. This upsets Adam until Eve reminds him of a prophecy in which a human from a future generation kills the serpent. Archangel Micheal then leads Adam and Eve out of Paradise. Adam is hesitant to leave paradise, but while Michael guides them out he comforts him and they finally leave paradise for good.
“The Blazing World (1668) – Scholarly Edition.” Digital Cavendish Project, 16 Apr. 2019, digitalcavendish.org/complete-works/the-blazing-world-1668/.
The Blazing World is a novel written by Margaret Cavendish that challenges the gender roles of the period. At the beginning of the novel, we see a merchant kidnap a young woman to force her into marriage. As a punishment for the kidnapping the Gods then push his ship toward the North Pole where they enter an alternate world. As they continue to move towards the north the merchant, as well as his crew, freeze to death, but the lady miraculously survives. This new world is the Blazing World. When in this new world she notices that the men all look like animals, but walk, talk, and act the same as humans do. When bear-men see the merchant ship, they go to it and rescue the woman. When they notice that she is different from them they decide to take her to their emperor. Their emperor lives in a large gold palace that the lady sees as beautiful. When she is brought before the emperor he believes her to be a powerful goddess and then marries her. In return for marrying her, he gives her complete power over this world. After being made Empress she uses her new privilege to learn everything she can about her new home. She first learns that all the inhabitants of the world speak the same language. She also learns that each species of inhabitant has its purpose in the world. The goose-men are the astronomers, the bear-men are the philosophers who test the goose-men’s theories. The ape-men are the chemists. She then proves the lice-men wrong for the poor scientific work that they show her. They were unable to explain to her why their work was correct and she was able to point out their mistakes. She then banishes them from the palace due to their poor work. She begins to believe that the religion followed by the inhabitants of the Blazing World is the cause of failure so she starts to convert them to her religion to improve the world. To follow through with her plan she built two separate temples, one out of shining-star stone and the other out of burning-fire stone. Then the Empress goes to meet the spirits of the world who can travel anywhere they want due to having no physical body. These spirits are theoretical philosophers. She asks them about the creation theory for this world to be able to write her religious text about God for this world. They send her to the Duchess of Newcastle, who tells her to write the book as a work of fiction rather than a religious text. They become close friends and the Duchess asks for the Empress’s help with getting Fortune to start favoring her husband. The empress helps the Duchess and realizes that the religion she has created caused conflict throughout the world. A war breaks out between the real world and the Blazing World causing the Empress to defend her homeland. After defeating enemy forces, the Empress decides to go back to her home world.
Ulreich, John C. “A Paradise Within: The Fortunate Fall in Paradise Lost.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 32, no. 3, 1971, pp. 351–66. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2708351. Accessed 8 Dec. 2023. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2708351 )
This is an article written by John C. Ultreich about the fall of man being the true paradise in Paradise Lost. In this article, Ultreich goes on to say that the Garden of Eden was not the paradise in Paradise Lost, but it was found during the fall of Adam and Eve. He states that based on God’s intentions with allowing Adam and Eve to fall from grace, an event that he created, paradise is found within ourselves rather than in a physical place. This is due to the idea that Adam and Eve could make Earth their paradise like they had in the Garden of Eden. Paradise in this article is described as something that is not entirely reliant on a physical place, but rather the ability to create an individual idea of paradise. This is a good example of how Paradise is described in Paradise Lost because it helps show the depth of the poem through one of the main concepts of the story, Paradise, in a way that may not be widely thought of when reading the text itself.
Trubowitz, Rachel. “The Reenchantment of Utopia and the Female Monarchical Self: Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 11, no. 2, 1992, pp. 229–45. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/464299. Accessed 8 Dec. 2023.
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/464299?seq=2 )
This is an article written by Rachel Trubowitz about the utopia, or the paradise, that Marie Cavendish created in The Blazing World. In this article, Trubowitz explains the new world that the Empress enters in the utopia throughout the story even though the Empress felt the need to make political and religious changes and she describes how the newfound power she has could make it the utopia. This world was deemed a utopia due to the Empress being more appreciated in this new world and being given the power to make her own decisions. This article is a good example of how paradise is described because it explains how paradise could be both the physical world, but also the new power the Empress was given when she entered the new world.
LESLIE, MARINA. “Gender, Genre and the Utopian Body in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World.” Utopian Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 1996, pp. 6–24. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719470. Accessed 8 Dec. 2023.
(https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.plymouth.edu/stable/20719470 )
This is an article written by Marina Leslie about how the feminist ideals present in The Blazing World are what help make it a utopian story. In the article, the female body is discussed as a form of utopian writing. Leslie states that The Blazing World created a new form of utopian writing where the utopia itself is not entirely run by women making the story a more personal and individual style of utopia specifically written for Marie Cavendish herself. This is also a unique form of utopia because the utopia is formed while remaining feminine in a way that does not sexualize the female body. This article is a good example of the paradise in The Blazing World because it helps highlight more ways in which the paradise is formed throughout the story while also showing how unique this form of paradise is in a literary sense.
Sprockets and Springes 