Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost

“…consisted of Paradise Lost…” (pg. 116)

Paradise Lost was written by John Milton in the seventeenth-century when the Anglican Church was beginning to receive backlash from the people of England. Milton was deeply angered by the vanity of the church and chose to express his contempt through an epic poem. Milton’s epic work centers around Genesis and the fall of Adam and Eve. In the end, Milton described something known as the “felix culpa”, better known as the “fortunate fall”, a idea that explains how mankind is better having been expelled from the Garden of Eden because it lead to the arrival of the Messiah and gave mankind more opportunity to prove itself as good.

EDIT: Shelley uses Paradise Lost as a reference in Frankenstein so the reader can draw the similarities between Adam and Eve's fall from grace and Victor's own fall in going against nature. When Victor decides to rebel against the natural flow of things and create his own monster, the unfortunate events in the rest of his life is his fall from grace.

Credit/Links: http://www.paradiselost.org/5-overview.html