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TITANIC REBELLION: THE PROMETHEAN ICONOGRAPHY OF MILTON, BLAKE AND SHELLEY (AESCHYLUS)
Abstract
The mythical Prometheus is a figure for rebellion; his stolen fire, a symbol of illegitimate power. This dissertation asserts that in Paradise Lost, The Four Zoas, and Prometheus Unbound, the English poets Milton, Blake, and Shelley exploit the myth for their respective views on tyrant and rebel, power and impotence, revolution and the status quo. Evidence from political treatises the poets read (and those they wrote), along with examples from the visual arts, are used to focus on the Titan as heroic or demonic rebel. The opening chapter shows that Prometheus in Greek and Latin sources displayed a dual nature--on the one hand, savior, creator, and friend of man, and on the other, arsonist, enemy of gods, and defiler of man. I use Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound to establish the myth as political radicalism. The second chapter examines the Promethean/Titan temperament in medieval allegory and political philosophy, and in Dante's Divine Comedy. Dante opposes proud Titanism against church or state, but allows rebellion for the individual Promethean. Some see Milton's Satan as noble Promethean; Milton sees him as the arrogant Prometheus, robbing humankind of happiness and cursing us with "brutish desires." In his political treatises, Milton upholds the right of political revolution and regicide, but he refuses to condone Promethean/Satanic rebellion against divine kingship and insists that the loving Father is not the tyrant Zeus. To the Romanticists Blake and Shelley, tyrant and rebel are psychic states. Both revise Milton's Titanism to reject illegitimate patriarchal power, human or divine. In The Four Zoas, Blake challenges first the rebel Orc, then the tyrant Urizen to overthrow the excesses within the human psyche and thereby to break the recurring cycle of tyranny and rebellion. In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley advocates intellectual radicalism, but his repentant Prometheus teaches that hatred and revenge are always a mistake, and that revolution must be a gradual freeing of enslaved humankind from political and religious paternalism.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
Recommended Citation
LEWIS, LINDA MARLENE, "TITANIC REBELLION: THE PROMETHEAN ICONOGRAPHY OF MILTON, BLAKE AND SHELLEY (AESCHYLUS)" (1987). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8722411.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8722411