Prometheus on Perelandra: The Inversion of the Satanic Hero in C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra

Abstract

Approaching the character of Satan in A Preface to Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis asserted that the Romantics’ admiration for Milton’s angelic rebel as a heroic figure was misplaced. It is a passing reference, but the comment revealed Lewis’s discomfort with the concept of the romantic hero. Two years later, he would continue his investigation of this archetype with his publication of Perelandra. While the way Lewis reworked facets of Miltonic’s Paradise Lost in his extra-terrestrial Garden of Eden have been well studied, the obvious sources for Lewis’s work loom so large in its scholarship that the similar reimagining of Romantic concepts and character types in which he engaged has received little attention. Yet the presence of Romantic echoes among all of the medieval allusions is quite telling. Lewis seems to make particular use of Shelly’s Prometheus Unbound, his favourite poem, in much the same way he does Paradise Lost, adapting that which he loved while ‘correcting’ that which he felt went wrong. This explores this recasting of Romantic concepts and observe Lewis’s efforts to bring the Byronic hero in line with the Christian cosmology of the Ransom trilogy, trying to paint a picture of authentically realized humanity.