Is Satan Gay?

Dame Elenor Hull's musings about performance have inspired me to post on an idea I've been mulling over about reading Paradise Lost. The question of Satan's sexuality is a way to get at a bigger question about performative reading and interpretation of Paradise Lost.

The lines in question appear in Book 5, after the Father has exalted the Son. Satan is not happy:

Soon as midnight brought on the duskie houre
Friendliest to sleep and silence, he resolv'd
With all his Legions to dislodge, and leave
Unworshipt, unobey'd the Throne supream
Contemptuous, and his next subordinate
Awak'ning, thus to him in secret spake.
Sleepst thou, Companion dear, what sleep can close
Thy eye-lids? and remembrest what Decree
Of yesterday, so late hath past the lips
Of Heav'ns Almightie. Thou to me thy thoughts
Wast wont, I mine to thee was wont to impart;
Both waking we were one; how then can now
Thy sleep dissent?

[Courtesy of the Milton Reading Room]

I know I am not the first person to raise questions about Satan's sexuality. Ask whether Satan is teh ghey among Miltonists, and discussion will likely go into angelic ontology and other Greek words ending in “-gy” or "-cy" (In defense of the “gay” anachronism, see magistra on “gay” for medival sexuality here.) Shakespeareans would be much more comfortable allowing several possible answers, and might offer performative consistency rather than some form of authorial intention (so-called or not) as the key criterion for legitimate interpretation. Not “what does this mean?” but “what works in performance while remaining consistent with the rest of the text?”

Shakespeareans, for obvious reasons, are much more willing to bring performative questions to the fore in their readings than Miltonists. Harry Berger, for instance, often brings up performative questions in the process of brilliantly illuminating Shakespeare. But as an epic, Paradise Lost ought to be heard, and I wonder how useful questions of performance are, especially in a teaching context.

The question of Satan's sexuality, then, might not be whether Satan and Beelzebub are lovers, but rather the question of how the modern day rhapsode might deliver these lines. If you will allow me to indulge my inner A.C. Bradley for a moment, here are two possibilities for the rhapsode “visualizing” in order to find the character's “motivation”:

1. Beelzebub, an aristocratic angel, sleeps alone in his mansion. Satan barges in, throws open the doors to Beelzebub's chamber: [A bit angry, and a bit incredulously]: "Sleepest thou?! . . ."



2. Beelzebub and Satan, lovers, lie in bed together. Satan is restless, can't sleep. He gently strokes Beelzebub in the bed they share: [softly, trying to wake without startling]: “Sleepest thou, . . .”

I find the second more compelling than the first, because in the first version the “companion dear” would have to be delivered with a bit of a sneer, and as the line continues, it becomes harder and harder to rein this back in to express a real mutuality, which Satan seems to want to play on. (Of course, this is his first seduction, and the question of how much Beelzebub is manipulated/duped by Satan into rebelling is interesting.) In the immediate context, I find the first second more consistent with the lines and easier to deliver. It's consistent with much else in the epic (Raphael's embarrassed description of the angelic hibbity-dibbity in Book 8, for instance, though many Miltonists would insist that his language of substantial interpenetration isn't really sexual). But to fully check its consistency one would have to check the language Satan and Beelzebub use for each other throughout (“compeer” and such). Still, the question would not be what did Milton mean, but what works in a performative reading of the epic.

There are dangers in treating Milton this way, surely, not the least of which is that most students will only get one crack at Milton and could come away thinking that the epic is X or Y, rather than can be read X-ly or Y-ly.