On Paradise Lost and Katha Pollitt

Picking up again on the Paradise Lost theme ... I've been meditating on the appeal of Milton's Satan, the ultimate rebel. I submit the literary and (film) offspring of Satan is Hannibal Lector of Silence of the Lambs fame (a great movie and a good book). It's not that we admire Hannibal or want to be his friend. I think it's that, on some dark level we don't like to think about, we want to be Hannibal. Hannibal is god-like in the way he creates his own moral universe -- a place of beauty and terror -- and lives in it. And I doubt I'm the first one to make this point.
I was thinking about these themes after hearing a Katha Pollit interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air about Pollit's book "Learning to Drive." That essay, which appeared in The New Yorker, is one of my all-time favorites. Pollit is a heterosexual feminist, and "Learning to Drive" is about her discovering that her longtime lover has been cheating on her. She dumps him and -- at long last, as a lifelong New Yorker -- has to learn to drive. The essay is funny and smart and bittersweet.
So Pollitt talked to Gross about how her lover had told her he wasn't the monogamous type, and she thought he was speaking in the abstract or whatever, certainly not about her. Terry asked her about how she reacted:

Terry Gross: That's such a staple of American popular culture, you know -- the rambler, the man who can't be tied down, who's heels are a-wandering, and so on. So how did you respond to it?

Katha Pollit: I said, `Oh, well, you know, fidelity is very important to me, and I can understand if that's not the way you want to live, but that's the way I have to live. And the person I live with will have to live like that, blah, blah, blah.' You know? And the fact is that if somebody ever says, you know, `Sometimes I feel I'm not cut out for monogamy,' you should believe them. You should believe them.
But, you know, women have this thing--I don't like to speak in generalizations about men and women, although I do it as we all do--but I do think women have this penchant for ramblers and rovers. A lot of women do. And I've thought a lot about this and I write about this in one of the stories, that part of it is you think you can tame them, and that would be so great. That would show how wonderful you are and also how intense the love must be that could conquer that, right? But I came to the conclusion that there's another reason, and that's that you want to be them. You want to be that person. You want to be that rambler and rover, but, for various reasons, you don't let yourself do that, you repress that part of yourself. But if you can be with a person who's like that, that's, in a way, a way of acquiring that characteristic. So I think that women who are attracted to men like that often have that side of themselves that they've suppressed.

Gross: Are you describing yourself?

Pollitt: Maybe. I don't know. I'll have to find out as life goes on. I'm married again, so I'd better not have that quality.

Listen to the whole interview here. A pal says it's a stretch to equate Satan and serial killers to philandering men. My point here, though, is the way we weirdly and often secretly identify with things that are totally unlike ourselves, things that we find intellectually and/or morally abhorrent. And how that identification creates a dramatic tension. I believe it's better to be aware of that phenomenon and examine it than to go along blithely pretending it doesn't exist.