Befriending Hell’s Fiend: On the evocation of Milton’s Satan in Voyage Around My Room

The characterization of God’s chief fallen angel, Lucifer, can be divided into a time before and after John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). The depiction of a morally grey, physically corruptible Satan sparked the rise of the ambitious, motivated, and seductive devils in subsequent literature. Although Milton’s Satan serves to deter excessive pride and disobedience in man, he is most often described as a leader of a seemly positive democratic rebellion. He is seen “more and more as superhuman rather than supernatural” (McCallam 243). In Voyage Around my Room (1794), Xavier de Maistre characterises Milton’s Satan as a deeply fascinating and paradoxically human entity. Satan experiences the most extreme torment (“l’excès du Malheur”) allocated to a creature by God; however, it is his fortitude, grandeur, and courage keeps him active and capable of further havoc. The clear distinction between Dante’s inert, colossal, and frozen, Satan in Inferno (1314) and the “the flying Fiend” of Paradise Lost, makes De Maistre’s preference for the latter tyrant quite understandable (II. 643).

Despite Satan’s evil and unremorseful connotation in both secular and Christian society, De Maistre acknowledges his humanlike stubbornness in the face of chaos. By anthropomorphizing Satan and partaking in his council, Voyages adopts the approach of Paradise Lost and subsequently, Milton’s theoretical partiality for Lucifer, the fallen angel. The fallen and unfallen entities of Paradise Lost “are in no way the disembodied will-less instruments of God’s bidding” (McCallam 242). Rather Milton’s host enjoys food, sex, grace, and autonomous will, which legitimized Lucifer’s disobedience. Although Satan breaks “the gates of hell to disturb the peace,” De Maistre sympathises with Satan partly due to his steadfastness in “the confusion of chaos.” Together with Milton, De Maistre descends “into the vast caverns of Satan’s abode” to become member of “the Infernal Council.” In Book I of Paradise Lost Milton’s Satan states “the mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n,” apathetic to the confines of space and mind (I. 254-55). De Maistre’s room and Satan’s fall from Heaven limits not the capacity to imagine, cultivate, and experience something immaterial as true. They think beyond the literal and see what William Blake describes as "… a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower” in “Auguries of Innocence.” Although many describe the French Revolution as a hell-on-earth, the authors of Voyage and Paradise Lost think otherwise—the experience of joy exceeds the conditions of Hell.

***

Mccallam, David. "Xavier de Maistre and Angelology". (Re-)Writing the Radical: Enlightenment, Revolution and Cultural Transfer in 1790s Germany, Britain and France, edited by Maike Oergel, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2013, pp. 239-250. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.1515/9783110290110.239

 

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