If Satan were a Nazi, Eve a Green Alien, and God a Talking Lion: C. S. Lewis’s Novels in Creative Dialogue with Paradise Lost by David Mark Purdy Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (English) Acadia University Spring Convocation 2012 © by David Mark Purdy, 2012 (ii) This thesis by David Mark Purdy was defended successfully in an oral examination on March 19, 2012. The examining committee for the thesis was: __________________________ Dr. Zelda Abramson, Chair __________________________ Dr. Maxine Hancock, External Reader __________________________ Dr. Jessica Slights, Internal Reader __________________________ Dr. Richard Cunningham, Supervisor __________________________ Dr. Patricia Rigg, Head This thesis is accepted in its present form by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree Master of Arts (English). …………………………………………………………… (iii) I, David Mark Purdy, grant permission to the University Librarian at Acadia University to reproduce, loan or distribute copies of my thesis in microform, paper or electronic formats on a non-profit basis. I, however, retain the copyright in my thesis. _____________________________ Author _____________________________ Supervisor _____________________________ Date (iv) Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………1 Connecting Lewis’s fiction and Paradise Lost.........................................................3 Defining intertextual analysis…………………..............................................................8 Selecting the novels that most extensively evoke Lewis’s reading of Paradise Lost……………………………………………………………………………..………………………..15 Chapter One: The Screwtape Letters Discerning how The Screwtape Letters emulates Paradise Lost...........................21 Establishing the relationship between Milton’s Satan and Screwtape.................24 Rejecting Satan and Screwtape as heroes............................................................26 Identifying absurdity in Paradise Lost and The Screwtape Letters……..................33 Examining the preoccupations of Satan and Screwtape.......................................36 Categorizing the objects of Satan’s and Screwtape’s wrath.................................38 Searching for the sense of injured merit in Paradise Lost and The Screwtape Letters.......................................................................................................41 Characterizing God in Paradise Lost and The Screwtape Letters..........................43 Explaining the fall of the angels in Paradise Lost and The Screwtape Letters…....45 Chapter Two: Perelandra Perceiving how Perelandra addresses the assumptions of Paradise Lost............50 Outlining the astronomical models that frame Paradise Lost and Perelandra.....56 Comparing Milton’s and Lewis’s incorporation of non-Christian mythology.......63 Analyzing Lewis’s approach to the heresies he does not believe are Milton’s.....69 (v) Considering Lewis’s approach to the heresies he does believe are Milton’s........74 Chapter Three: The Magician’s Nephew Addressing The Magician’s Nephew’s affinities with Paradise Lost.....................79 Inspecting Milton’s and Lewis’s creation narratives……….....................................82 Juxtaposing the specifics of creation in Paradise Lost and The Magician’s Nephew………………………………………………………………………………………………...85 Studying Milton’s and Lewis’s climactic temptation scenes.................................88 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………..……………………………….93 (vi) Critics such as Kath Filmer-Davies and Lauren Shohet have denigrated C. S. Lewis’s novels as unimaginative and uncritical reproductions of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. This thesis is a case study in Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Perelandra, and The Magician’s Nephew that counters Filmer-Davies’ and Shohet’s claims, instead arguing that Lewis’s engagement with Paradise Lost by way of novel-writing is consistently innovative, well-researched, and critically as well as theologically rigorous. The first chapter argues that Lewis formulates the unique voice of Screwtape as a critique of Milton’s Satan. The second demonstrates that the cosmic scope of Perelandra provides Lewis with an outlet for his thoughts on Milton’s depiction of God. The final chapter suggests that the form and imagery of The Magician’s Nephew is such that young readers will be prepared to delight in Milton’s poem later in life. (1) The Screwtape Letters (1942), Perelandra (1943), and The Magician’s Nephew (1955) are all widely read and highly praised twentieth-century novels1 that, as with the rest of C. S. Lewis’s fiction, are replete with allusions to John Milton’s seventeenth- century epic poem Paradise Lost. Lewis wrote the first two of these novels at the same time that he was composing A Preface to Paradise Lost, a text that was so central to the early-twentieth-century Milton Controversy that one critic has declared the “ruling deities [of] the Milton Society of America [to be] C.S. Lewis et al” (Herman 3). Because Lewis was deeply engaged in thinking about Milton’s poem in 1941 and 1942, the influence of Paradise Lost on the novels Lewis wrote in that period is understandable. Lewis read, wrote about, and gave lectures on Paradise Lost regularly throughout his lifetime, however, so Lewis’s study of the poem is contemporary with his writing of The Magician’s Nephew as well. Unfortunately, not all of Lewis’s critics have perceived how intelligent and productive his engagement with Paradise Lost is in his novels. Kath Filmer-Davies denigrates Lewis’s “deconstructing and reconstructing” Paradise Lost, arguing that this practice “betrays in Lewis qualities of reticence and insecurity” (6); Filmer-Davies suggests that Lewis would have had to take more risks and be more creative in order to develop novels that do not have this kind of interplay with Paradise Lost. Similarly, Lauren Shohet argues that “Lewis’s adaptations . do not fully engage” the concepts in Paradise Lost “in the sense of questioning them, challenging them, pushing their arguments past where they take themselves” (62); for Shohet, Lewis’s 1 The Screwtape Letters “met with considerable critical and popular praise” after its initial publication and the novel “has gone on to become one of Lewis’s most memorable, innovative works” (Wagner n.pag.). “Lewis’s highly acclaimed Perelandra . looks at the conflicts between science and ethics” (Frolund 102). Each of “C. S. Lewis’s seven Chronicles of Narnia stories . enjoys much acclaim [and] is widely read” (George 186). (2) novels unimaginatively reproduce Milton’s poem without productively contributing to Milton’s arguments. In spite of these two critics’ deprecations, the dialogue between Lewis’s novels and Milton’s poem is highly intelligent and productive. Through his fiction, Lewis critically expands and alters Milton’s ideas in ways that courageously conflicted with the critical and philosophical climate of Lewis’s day. Screwtape, the demonic protagonist of The Screwtape Letters, is a thoroughly developed fictional reaction to Milton’s Satan; Lewis believed that Paradise Lost “might have been a comic poem” if only its epic form had not prevented Satan’s absurdities from being humourous (Preface, 95), so the comic genre of The Screwtape Letters allows Lewis to foreground the absurdity that he perceives in Milton’s poem. Because many of Lewis’s contemporaries viewed Satan as the valiant hero of Paradise Lost, Lewis’s emphasis on the ridiculousness of Satan’s analogue in The Screwtape Letters advances a contentious claim. Likewise, the theology and cosmology of Perelandra is in dialogue with the philosophical underpinnings of Paradise Lost; by writing Perelandra as a science fiction novel, Lewis is able to engage with the philosophical commitments of Milton’s poem in a more straightforward manner than would be available to other genres. The intricate way in which Lewis accepts and rejects the philosophical commitments of Paradise Lost in his construction of Perelandra’s universe evinces a well-researched, academic wrestling with Milton’s ideas. The Magician’s Nephew is far more straightforward in its relationship with Paradise Lost. As a children’s novel, this instalment in The Chronicles of Narnia liberally borrows images and plot elements from Milton in such a way that young readers are (3) prepared to recognize these literary features in the Western canon later in life. The Magician’s Nephew is a valuable resource for the enculturation of children because Lewis successfully incorporates many of the most vibrant images from Paradise Lost into this novel. The disparate, thoughtfully-chosen genres of Lewis’s novels allow him to express his readings of Paradise Lost in diverse ways that together comprise a creative dialogue with Milton’s poem that is of a calibre and rigour comparable to the scholarly analysis in A Preface to Paradise Lost. Connecting Lewis’s fiction and Paradise Lost Although there are many striking similarities between Milton’s poem and Lewis’s novels, Lewis’s inspiration for the novels is not attributable to Milton by virtue of these similarities alone. According to the law of parsimony, any similarities between Milton’s and Lewis’s fiction are best explained by the fact that both men draw heavily on the Bible and their common Christian heritage as sources for their writing. Even if it were somehow proven that Lewis’s fiction borrows nothing from Milton, the fact that