Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, is the first science fiction novel. Famously, it was conceived as part of a contest between Shelley, her husband Percy, and their friends Lord Byron and John William Polidori. The group was staying in Geneva, where Byron rented a house called Villa Diodati. They were “delighted to learn that Milton had once stayed there, an astonishingly good omen for this group who by now saw themselves as fallen angels, like Milton’s Satan: rebellious and misunderstood” (Gordon 168).
Finishing our journey through the intertwined Eden and Hell of RDR2.
As I began to discuss last week, the writers of RDR2 create a taut juxtaposition in the game by presenting the uncolonized natural world as Eden — but also basing each of the gang’s camps on a different aspect of hell, as imagined by Dante Alighieri in The Inferno.
Eden, in Red Dead Redemption 2, is the natural, unindustrialized world. However, the writers create a stark juxtaposition by using Dante’s Inferno — meaning “Hell” — to define and describe the Van der Linde gang’s journey through this Edenic world. No matter how beautiful their surroundings, their circumstances make their environments punishing. As Milton’s Satan says, “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell” (IV.75). The gang brings their misery with them.
The relationship between RDR2 and the Bible is an odd one. The game seems thoroughly secular on the surface, but its ideas about sin and redemption are not unchristian — perhaps because it relies so much on Paradise Lost to shape it. But the use of that text doesn't entirely account for the use of Biblical material in the game, which indicates a broad familiarity with that body of work.
On the face of it, the writers' choice to use Wuthering Heights to shape the narrative of Red Dead Redemption 2 was a promising one. Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar explain, is “a radically corrective ‘misreading’ of Milton . . . with the fall from heaven to hell transformed into a fall from a realm that conventional theology would associate with ‘hell’ (the Heights) to a place that parodies ‘heaven’ (the Grange)” (189). RDR2 attempts a similar project, with Arthur’s fall into knowledge being not the path to sin, but to redemption.
The flawed beliefs about gender that Dan Houser, Michael Unsworth, and Rupert Humphries demonstrate through RDR2 harm their efforts to write characters of both the genders the game depicts. They dismiss the women and damn the men rather than allow them to act in ways the Western codes as feminine. If they were able to understand that women are not lesser beings, perhaps their minds would be broad enough to imagine other endings for their male characters. But they aren't: women are not written well in RDR2.
Homophobia often shares roots with misogyny: patriarchal constructs define male homosexuality as inherently feminine, which patriarchy believes is bad, because, naturally, women are less than, other, prone to evil, etc. Rockstar's portrayals of women in Red Dead Redemption 2 don't significantly diverge from this viewpoint.
Paradise Lost and Arthurian legend are both so steeped in misogyny that removing it would transform either work unrecognizably. Eve, as Milton infamously writes her, is a dim-witted, sexy doll, if a doll could also be evil. This conception of Eve connects directly to the chivalric treatment of women. Many people take offense at the idea that chivalry is misogynistic because they think of it as “being nice to women,” when its real function is to infantilize and patronize women based on the presupposition that they are lesser beings that must be guided and taken care of – Eves who must be protected from their own sinful nature.
The remaining allusions to King Arthur in RDR2 that didn’t fit into essays elsewhere: what's up with Kieran's beheading, why Arthur sees a deer in his honor visions, Pleasance, and much more.
