What Do Men Want? Satan, the Rake, and Masculine Desire

Abstract

If John Milton is ever to succeed in his epic task of justifying the ways of God to men, prior questions need to be addressed: what do men want? When we think of “justification,” we might think of reason, but what will give men pleasure? What will satisfy them? The education that Paradise Lost attempts might well be premised on right reason, but most of its critical cruxes come about when our own “baser” longings intersect and cross over that rational deliberativeness. Desire and attraction play central parts in the poem; though Milton does indeed try his best to foreground the superior charms of thought and rationality, he is no more successful than the liberal and Whig satirists whose visions of liberty and of what men want he in part sets out to correct. The vision in question might run like this:

I Rise at Eleven, I Dine about Two,

I get drunk before Seven, and the next thing I do;

I send for my Whore, when for fear of a Clap,

I Spend in her hand, and I Spew in her Lap;

Then we quarrel and scold, till I fall asleep,

When the Bitch, growing bold, to my Pocket does creep.

Then slyly she leaves me, and to revenge th’affront,

At once she bereaves me of Money and Cunt.

If by chance then I wake, hot-headed and drunk,