How John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost and the Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, shaped the character of Dutch Van der Linde in Red Dead Redemption 2.
All posts on this site feature detailed discussion of literary allusions in Red Dead Redemption 2, and as such contain unmarked major and minor spoilers for the game, and occasionally the eventual fates of some characters in Red Dead Redemption. Read at your own risk.
The writers of Red Dead Redemption 2 – Dan Houser, Michael Unsworth, and Rupert Humphries – drew more inspiration from Paradise Lost, the epic by John Milton, than any other work. Milton is the 17th-century poet who gives the game’s Agent Milton and John-I-Mean-Jim Milton their names. The poem tells a much-expanded version of the Biblical story of Genesis, beginning with the aftermath of Lucifer’s rebellion in heaven and ending with Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. The poem and the game both deal with themes of sin and repentance – but they arrive at disparate conclusions.
Although RDR2 is, in a sense, a remapping of the characters, themes, and plot of Paradise Lost, in no way is it a straight allegory. Take Mr. Abel and Cain, for example. Paradise Lost relates the Biblical story in which Cain kills his brother, Abel. In RDR2, Cain is the sweet camp dog, and Mr. Abel is the villainous boss of the Laramie Gang. This is a sign reminding us that the paradigm we know isn’t in place here.
The use of Paradise Lost grows more complex when it comes to major characters like Dutch Van der Linde. These figures show the influence not only of many different works, but of different characters within Paradise Lost itself. While one might expect to Micah to be Satan, his similarities to that character are superficial, mostly functioning at the plot level rather than shaping who he is as a person. Milton’s Satan is magnetic and seductive, “a paradigm for the Byronic hero at his most attractive” (Gilbert and Gubar 201). He’s the most compelling character in the work. He has the best speeches, the best arguments. As malicious as he is, it’s often rather hard to disagree with him. The most famous commentary on Paradise Lost — because it captures an essential quality of the work so well — is William Blake’s observation that Milton “was of the Devil’s party without knowing it” (quoted in Milton xxiii).
How Paradise Lost Inspired Dutch Van der Linde
The figure who bears the most similarity to Satan, the charismatic iconoclast, is Dutch Van der Linde. Dutch has the hubris to believe that he’s strong enough to take on the United States government, just as Satan thinks he can take on God. Like Satan, Dutch “wouldst seem/Patron of liberty” (IV.957-958), but also like Satan, what he really wants is to rule over people as a kind of king. Uncle calls him out on it in camp dialog (Horseshoe Overlook), and so does Molly in “That’s Murfree Country.” Satan, in hell, stresses the fact that he’s king (II.445-456). He also says that it’s “Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven” (I.263) — words we can easily imagine Dutch agreeing with.
The writers identify Dutch with Satan in several small ways. In his journal entry after “A Rage Unleashed,” Arthur says that Dutch seemed “like a dangerous snake.” The snake is the form Satan takes when he enters the garden of Eden to tempt Eve to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. In one of his prophecies, Blind Man Cassidy identifies Dutch as the devil: “Surrounded by fields of burning fire and flesh, the devil will make his sacrifice.” This prognostication describes the moment in “My Last Boy” when Arthur is about to be stabbed and Dutch turns and walks away. Dutch also appears as Satan in another prophecy: “Your whole life, sir, you have followed the wrong star.” Before his rebellion, Satan’s name was Lucifer, which means “morning star.” Dutch is the star that Arthur follows.
Dutch Van der Linde, Lord Byron
Dutch’s similarities to Satan extend beyond Milton’s text. Again, Milton’s Satan is a prototype for the Byronic hero. These figures “are arrogant, intelligent, educated outcasts, who somehow balance their cynicism and self-destructive tendencies with a mysterious magnetism and attraction” (Fall). The Byronic hero is often conflated with the person who developed the figure: George Gordon, Lord Byron. The Romantic poet was fascinated by Paradise Lost. In the preface to his drama Cain: A Mystery, he wrote, “Since I was twenty I have never read Milton; but I had read him so frequently before, that this may make little difference.” Byron’s fascination with Cain is the reason Dutch gives that name to the camp dog.
Byron was, to say the least, an infamous and complicated person. He was often astonishingly cruel to the people in his life, especially his lovers, but showed “a dedication to the freedom of nations and individuals” (Norton 611) and died a leader in the Greek War of Independence. Byron himself said he was “so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long — I am such a strange mélange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me” (quoted in Norton 611). The people who know Dutch — Arthur, John, Sadie1 — do have difficulty describing him, and in many ways, he remains a conundrum to players.
Byron, though an aristocrat, was something of a outlaw himself. He was forced to leave England due to his scandalous lifestyle, and because he wanted to continue to have sex with men, which at that time was illegal — and punishable by death (Gordon 190). (The game, unfortunately, has a slyly homophobic slant.) Byron also had many relationships with women. He was callous and cruel to Claire Clairmont, a young woman who was infatuated with him and who had his child (Gordon). Byron’s relationship with Clairmont may have influenced Dutch’s with Molly: the older, charismatic man approached by the younger, naive woman. Molly’s poem and some of her camp dialog2 intriguingly imply that she actually left Ireland to be with Dutch — a move Clairmont would once have approved of, as she followed Byron to Switzerland. Their relationship broke up in great enmity, like Dutch and Molly’s does.
Shortly before Clairmont approached Byron, Byron’s marriage ended in scandal. His wife’s name was Anna Isabella — she went by Annabella. Dutch’s lover whom Colm murdered was named Annabelle. Names that are allusive are often repeated in the game, as if to highlight them. Letters from an Annabelle and an Annabel (“Letter to Miriam Wegner” and “Letter to Alfred from Annabel”) can be found in an abandoned mail wagon and by looting a male pedestrian in Blackwater. In the Vetter’s Echo cabin, we can find poems written to an Annabella (again, Byron was a poet), and on the same desk where the poems are kept, Dutch’s companion request item, which is specifically called “Dutch’s Pipe” — even if the player never triggers the request, the connection between Dutch and the poems, which is to say Dutch and Byron, is cemented. (Dutch is portrayed, of course, by Benjamin Byron Davis.)
Besides Dutch’s affinities with Satan and Byron, he is, ironically, also similar to Milton’s God. He’s the creator of the gang’s world and demands his followers’ absolute faith and obedience. He forbids Arthur knowledge just as God forbids Adam knowledge (those injunctions, and the types of knowledge being forbidden, are very different, which will be addressed in depth soon). Doubting him makes Dutch, like God, very angry. He’s not the forgiving sort. Molly, who (unfortunately for her) has gained great insight into Dutch’s character, sarcastically says “now I’ve got God’s ear” when she finally manages to get Dutch’s undivided attention in “That’s Murfree Country.”
Killing by Will
Dutch Van der Linde bears marked similarities to another Paradise Lost character: Death. In the poem, Death is personified as the child of Satan and Sin, who is in turn personified as Satan’s “daughter” who sprang from his head like Athena did from Zeus’s. Milton describes Death as “not mounted yet/On his pale horse” (X.589-590), an allusion to Revelation 6:8: “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” The Count, Dutch’s horse, is a cremello, which means he has pink skin and white hair — he’s pale, in other words, as opposed to the white horse that Conquest rides. It’s tempting to want to think of the four riders who chase John and Arthur near the end of “Red Dead Redemption” as representing the four horsemen, but Micah, Joe, and Cleet lack a certain archetypal stature (and with the exception of Baylock, their horses are the wrong colors, as well).
At the end of “Visiting Hours,” Dutch, so frothy with rage he apparently can’t think about the implications of what he’s saying, tells John, “You are my son. You are my brother.” In Paradise Lost, Death rapes Sin, who gives birth to monsters (II.777-802), so Death has sons who are also his brothers. This incestuous comment also relates to Byron, who had an affair with his half-sister and may have been the father of her child (Gordon 157).
In a more literal sense, of course, Dutch is related to death/Death because he’s responsible for so many: Bronte’s, Gloria’s, Molly’s, Cornwall’s, Eagle Flies’s, Micah’s. And Dutch must bear some responsibility for the deaths in the gang — he’s the one leading them into ever-greater danger — but there’s a more subtly ominous element to this. Almost all of the gang members who die — Hosea, Lenny, Molly, Susan, Arthur, Micah — have offered some keenly-felt insult to Dutch’s ego. In camp interactions if not in story missions, it’s easy to identify moments when Dutch might momentarily wish them dead. (The exception, as discovered thus far, is Sean; Kieran isn’t included here because as we see in his companion activity, and in the way he’s treated in camp, he was never really accepted.) Hosea and Arthur are openly skeptical of Dutch’s plans. Molly claims she betrayed Dutch to get his attention; Micah really does betray Dutch to save himself. Lenny analyzes Evelyn Miller’s flaws and Dutch slams his book down, snarling “you are too harsh a critic” (Horseshoe Overlook). At Beaver Hollow, Susan asks what they’re doing and Dutch gets up to physically back her down her, demanding “Who are you? To question me, I mean.”
Most of the gang members who escape Dutch’s influence alive in 1899 — Strauss, Trelawny, Reverend Swanson, Mary-Beth, Karen, Pearson, Tilly, Sadie, Abigail, Bill — abandon Dutch, but they never stand up to him, never tell him he’s wrong. John, Uncle, and Javier are the only ones who question Dutch to his face and live. The interaction in which Uncle calls Dutch out for his hunger for power is particularly illuminating. “I can’t stay mad at you, old man, but right now, I’d like to kill you,” Dutch says, with palpable sincerity. Uncle defuses Dutch’s irritation by playing the Fool to Dutch’s King. Javier betrays his uncertainty at Clemens Point, but he’s walking Dutch’s line by the end of the interaction, which presumably soothes Dutch’s ego. John is the big exception, and perhaps saving John from Dutch is the truest sense in which Arthur saves John from Death.
This is not entirely a supernatural element, of course; we see Dutch kill. But somehow, Dutch seems to kill without even trying. And sometimes this is a gray area. In Arthur’s journal, he writes (emphases mine): “Hosea got himself killed, Lenny got shot in the head, Marston got himself arrested.” That apparent error in parallelism conveys a sense of unease. The size of Arthur’s handwriting varies between entries; here, it’s at its largest so that the words stack on the page:
subject | verb | intensive pronoun
subject | verb |
subject | verb | intensive pronoun
It’s odd phrasing: it implies that Hosea and John made specific mistakes that led to their captures. But they didn’t. The point is not that they are fault for what happened to them, but that Lenny’s death is particularly not his fault, because it’s someone else’s. Moments before Lenny dies, Arthur tells Dutch, “I reckon me and Lenny try to find a way across the roofs, so if you’ll cover us.” Dutch agrees to do so. “Cover us” means “we are going to be moving through an area that will make us particularly vulnerable to threats, so please watch us from a position of relative safety and provide suppression fire against enemies as necessary so that we don’t get shot.” What Dutch is actually doing when Lenny gets shot is huddling behind the wall with everyone else, not even looking in Arthur and Lenny’s direction3.
Almost certainly, Dutch doesn’t consciously mean for Lenny to die, or truly want Hosea to die. But Lenny offers grave danger to Dutch’s towering, fragile ego: he’s smarter than Dutch, he isn’t susceptible to Dutch’s attempts to condescend to him, and he offers incisive criticism of Evelyn Miller, Dutch’s guiding star4. Dutch is a narcissist. Insulting his ego is, to him, a death-worthy offense — as we see quite explicitly in “Revenge is a Dish Best Eaten.” The fact that the characters who challenge him become marked for Death show how bound up he is with that figure. His mere malice kills, seeping like a toxin from his pores.
Though these recombinations of characters may seem chaotic, even fracturing, most of them are inherent in Paradise Lost: Dutch Van der Linde is like Satan, but in his relationship to Micah, he’s also like Eve, easily tempted into indulging his worst desires. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar note, “the enmity God sets between the woman and the serpent is . . . the discord necessary to divide those who are not opposites or enemies but too much alike, too much attracted to each other” (196). Death, too, is part of this equation: “Death . . . has raped (and thus fused with) his mother, Sin . . . just as ‘he’ will meld with Eve when in eating the apple she ends up ‘eating Death’” (198). The element out of place in Dutch Van der Linde, as far as Paradise Lost is concerned, is God. As we will see, much of Red Dead Redemption 2‘s project is interrogating or inverting Milton’s concepts of heaven and hell, good and evil.
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- See, for instance, “Red Dead Redemption” and “An Honest Day’s Labors.” ↩︎
- On the dock at Shady Belle, muttering to herself about Dutch, Molly says, “All the way across the Atlantic. In her poem, she writes, “I was a girl — until your call/Commanded me to cross the sea.” ↩︎
- Perhaps Arthur did mean “stay here with four other heavily armed men occasionally shooting at people who can’t see Lenny and me, let alone shoot us from this angle,” but this seems unlikely. After all, he doesn’t have to tell Dutch not to let the Pinkertons follow them up and shoot them all, and given the urgency of the situation, taking that moment to state the obvious would be rather ridiculous. Dutch betrays some awareness of his fault in the moments following Lenny’s death. Suddenly, he’s the most solicitous he’ll be of Arthur in the entire game. He’s the last to jump to the other building because he’s turned back to wait for Arthur. He tells Arthur to follow first behind him when they look for a way across the roofs. When they find a place to hide, he moves aside a board over the window, calls Arthur over, and gestures for him to get in first. ↩︎
- Camp dialog, 2 events observed at both Horseshoe Overlook and Clemens Point. ↩︎
Bibliography
Expand for sources.
- Fall, Wendy. “Glossary of the Gothic: Byronic Hero.” E-Publications@Marquette, Marquette University, epublications.marquette.edu/gothic_byronichero/. Accessed 27 June 2024.
- Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 2020.
- Gordon, Charlotte. Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley. Random House, 2016.
- Houser, Dan, et al. Red Dead Redemption II. Rockstar Games, 2018.
- Milton, John. The Major Works. Edited by Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, Oxford University Press, 2008.
- Stillinger, Jack, and Deidre Shauna Lynch. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Volume D, The Romantic Period. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt and M. H. Abrams, 8th ed., Vol D, W.W. Norton & Co, 2006.
