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Lopez 1 Emme Lopez Professor Swann English 312 12 Dec
Lopez 1 Emme Lopez Professor Swann English 312 12 Dec
Lopez 1 Emme Lopez Professor Swann English 312 12 Dec
Emme Lopez
Professor Swann
English 312
12 Dec 1999
Judeo-Christianity being the major religious tradition of the west, most readers are
familiar with the Genesis story which, for many, defines gender relations in Western society.
Genesis explicitly lays out male/female relations in that it establishes woman must follow man:
“…And thy [Eve’s] desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (King James
Bible Genesis 3.16). Indeed, God made Eve specifically as “an help meet” (Genesis 2.18) for
Adam.
Through retelling the Genesis story in his epic poem Paradise Lost, Milton cannot help
but expand upon the male/female relationship at the story’s center. Despite his premise of
“justif[ying] the wayes of God to men,” (bk. 1, line 26), Milton is unable to keep his writing as
tightly controlled as he perhaps intends; it gets away from him. Milton embellishes upon the
biblical story making it and its characters his own. Milton’s own writing involves a much more
complex question regarding male/female relationships than does the Genesis story as read in the
King James Bible. In attempting to make logic of this parable about the origin of human species,
Milton only makes it problematic, especially in regards to Adam and Eve’s interpersonal
relationship.
To refuse to interpret the relationship between Adam and Eve and fail to place Milton’s
depiction of their relationship in a broader perspective historically and socially seems folly given
the explicit gender focus, intentional or not, of the piece. However, Diane McColley, in her
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article, “Eve and the Arts of Eden,” does just that. She too easily glosses over the gender
question, particularly the engendering of the male. In refusing to address the question that truly
stands at the locus of Milton’s work, McColley almost cannot read Paradise Lost effectively.
McColley urges the reader to “reconsider the modern notion that the meaning of literature has
little to do with words” (100), insisting that the reader simply swallow Paradise Lost whole like a
pill: “Milton offers to repair the world we know and the selves we are as he says his and our aims
is” (101).
McColley’s reading too much transcends the bounds and aims of literature and historical
reality. Neither an apostle nor a saint, but an author, Milton wrote from a perspective—his own
—as influenced by his society and time. Milton’s rewriting of scripture undeniably interprets that
scripture which, in turn may be interpreted. Although McColley raises a valid point in reminding
the reader to focus on the beauty of the written word, she negates that which makes writing like
Milton’s great. Many aspects of literature are just as or more important than beautiful
construction. Meaning and perception are also crucial to literary merit. Otherwise, all writing
would be like “Jabberwocky,” all form and no function. The truly skilled artist couches a deeper
Milton constructs a complex formula for gender relations. Male/female relations are not
smooth, even in Paradise. The Edenic Adam and Eve have many difficulties with their perceived
and proscribed roles. Milton’s description of Adam and Eve’s individual creations mirrors the
process of socialization by which engendering occurs. First, each individual is sexed, as at birth,
male or female. Next, both Adam and Eve learn from their society how to behave as masculine
and feminine. Adam knew not “who [he] was, or where, or from what” (bk. 7, line 907) until
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God (the only society Adam knows) dictates Adam’s self to him. God calls Adam, “first Man, of
men innumerable ordain’d / First Father” (bk. 7, lines 934-35) and makes Adam lord of the earth.
Adam did not know innately of his power and position until his society (God) told him what it
meant to be a man and explained what it was to have the power to name.
Language plays an important part in engendering and creation in this context. Adam’s
desire for an equal, a “consort” who, in effect, speaks his same language, spurs god to create Eve
(bk. 7, lines 994-1108). God’s power to name Adam and so classify him, and Adam’s power to
name all lowlier beasts than he (including Eve), symbolizes dominion over the named.
Verbalizing Eve in God’s words makes her feminine. Like Adam, Eve first exists, and then
society’s language engenders her as feminine. In her un-socialized state, Eve prefers her own
image in the mirror of the lake (bk. 4, lines 477-80) to Adam in the flesh.
Eve must learn her gender and her place through the language of her society: “there I had
fixt / Mine eyes till now, and pin’d with vain desire, / Had not a voice thus warnd me, What thou
seest, / …fair Creature, is thyself (bk. 4, lines 465-68). Her society conditions Eve to love Adam
and place him above herself. Regardless of whether Milton intended to convey this message, his
representation of the process of engendering seems revolutionary and not quite in keeping with
Christine Froula tackles gender issues head on in her article, “When Eve Reads Milton:
Undoing the Canonical Economy.” Froula essentially takes Milton to task for his part in the
feminist Reading focuses on Adam, God, and Milton’s blatant repression of Eve:
condition that Eve can “read” the world in only one way, by
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Milton’s God, Milton himself, and Western culture that the voice
tells her she is. Indeed, the poem’s master plot is designed
However, Froula goes so far in the opposite direction of McColley that the two almost meet.
Where McColley treats the poem too delicately, Froula refuses to engage with the text. Like
McColley, Froula swallows the pill whole and accepts Milton and Paradise Lost at face value.
Rather than dissecting the text and finding it radical in nature (especially for the late 1600’s),
Froula seeks to critique her own socio-historical moment as somehow epitomized by Milton’s
stated intent in writing Paradise Lost. Froula removes Milton too far from his place and time to
create and effective reading. Closer study of the text shows the radical and challenging nature of
Milton’s writing. One need only read at a surface level to begin to see Milton’s departure from
strict essentialism. For example, Adam and Eve’s amorous romp in the bower, pre-fall, cleaves
from the standard theology of Milton’s time (Class Notes, 26 Nov. 1999).
Adam proves conspicuous by his absence from both McColley’s and Froula’s works.
McColley’s scope widens only enough to include Eve as an analogy of poesy, saying, “Milton
revises… [the] allegorizing of scripture that makes Adam reason, mind, or soul; Eve passion,
sense, or flesh” (104). After this, Adam, for the most part, drops out of McColley’s paper.
McColley very much fails here; she points out Milton’s departure from the standard prescription
of masculinity/femininity, and then refuses to address the issue of gender. Including Adam in her
argument would have forced McColley to act as critic to Milton’s piece. Such a critique would
have run counter to McColley’s thesis. The unproblematic reading of Eve as tender of the garden
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and artist figure seems too easy. Despite the fact that “it is unheard of before Milton to show
[Adam and Eve] gardening, and especially to make Eve a gardener even more committed and
original than Adam” (104), there is more at work in Paradise Lost than Adam and Eve making
flower arrangements. McColley sets herself up to address the larger issues, such as gender, but
never does.
Froula, too, denies Adam’s importance, as though only the female of the species
experiences the process of engendering. Froula too quickly equates God’s speech with Adam’s
purpose when, through Adam’s dream of Eve’s nativity, “Adam attributes to Eve her secondary
status” (330). This reading fails to recognize the continuing process by which Adam and Eve
must both be reprogrammed constantly to accept their ordained roles. For instance, Eve must
speak God’s words before yielding to a request Adam makes of her rather than obeying
naturally, without thought: “My Author and Disposer, what thou bidst / Unargu’d I obey; so God
Adam also doubts his role. He appears uneasy with his socialized position of superiority
over Eve.
Froula's discussion of womb envy in relation to this passage as a justification for Adam’s
qualms, though in line with her thesis, seems incomplete. Froula fails to recognize Adam’s
struggle within himself over his place and Eve’s. The passage reads like a question about God’s
lessons; Adam understands Eve’s inferiority because of God’s teachings. Adam speaks of Eve’s
innate inferiority in God’s words while the discussion of Eve’s beauty and intelligence comes
straight from Adam. Thus, one wonders what Eden would have been like without God’s
Froula too readily settles upon the solution of womb envy as an answer to Adam’s feeling
of incompleteness; however, the matter appears to be more complex than that. Upon returning to
the nativity scenes, it becomes evident that Adam has always viewed himself in pieces, even
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prior to the loss of his rib: “My self I then perus’d, and Limb by Limb / Survey’d” (bk. 7, line
904). In contrast, in Eve’s introduction to herself, she appears as a whole being: “As I bent down
to look, just opposite, / A Shape within the watry gleam appeered, / Bending to look on me” (bk.
4, lines 460-62). Regardless of the social roles Eve acquires, she harbors a complete and
attractive vision of her self. Unfortunately, these brief moments are all Milton writes about male
and female in their natural state before induction into society and its norms.
In the context of the work, it almost seems unnatural that the sexes would relate to one
another at all. Woman exists as a reflection of a reflection of God and, thus is furthest from God.
Her presence in the previously homo-gendered world seems an anomaly. Woman’s appearance
finally negates the need for asexual reproduction in which God and Satan engage. After the fall,
Adam asks himself this question: “O why did God, / Creator wise, that peopl'd highest Heav'n /
With Spirits Masculine, create at last / This noveltie on Earth, this fair defect / Of Nature, and
not fill the World at once / With Men as Angels without Feminine, / Or find some other way to
generate / Mankind?” (bk. 9, 888-94). Unfortunately, Adam addresses himself to the wrong
deity. The female and heterosexual reproduction first appear “Likest to [Satan] in shape and
count'nance bright, / … / Out of thy head I sprung: amazement seis'd / All th' Host of Heav'n;
back they recoild affraid / At first, and call'd me SIN” (bk. 2, lines 756-60). Sin’s eventual
coupling with Satan who “becam’st enamoured” with his image in Sin, produces Death: man’s
eventual fate. This succession closely parallels Adam and Eve’s own story thereby intimately
The theme of self-love projected onto another becomes too strong to ignore. Milton’s
writing seems to negate love without narcissistic love entirely. God’s original narcissism, in first
creating the angels then man in His own image, carries over into all the relationships in Paradise
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Lost. The narrative states “Hee for God only, shee for God in him” (bk. 4, line 299); however,
the rest of the story seems to contradict this recipe for easy faith. Perhaps a truer statement would
For his own glory God created first the angels and, later, man. God admires what he sees
of Himself in Adam and distinguishes Adam from the rest of creation based on that image: “My
Image, not imparted to the Brute, / Whose fellowship therefore unmeet for thee” (bk. 7, lines
1078-79). Here Adam’s lonely fate mirrors God’s; without an equal, no real companionship can
flourish. Perhaps it is to combat this loneliness that God keeps generating images of himself.
Like Sin sprung from Satan’s head, God molds Eve from a rib out of Adam’s side. Also,
like Satan with Sin, Adam loves this reflection of himself, Eve: “Manlike, but different sex, so
lovly faire, / That what seemd fair in all the World, seemd now / Mean” (bk. 7, lines 1108-09).
Adam finally sees himself whole in Eve as Eve sees herself whole in the reflecting pool.
Since God prohibits Eve from loving her own reflection, Eve must reproduce
heterosexually to create her own image of herself. Sin serves as the template for heterosexual
reproduction, generating inbred images of herself “with sorrow infinite” (bk 2, line 797),
consequently foreshadowing Eve’s condemnation to the pain of childbirth after her original sin.
Neither Sin nor Eve finds the kind of joy in their “reflections” that Adam, Satan, or God does.
Thus, regardless of its intent, Milton’s text questions the very nature of heterosexual,
male/female relations, especially in regards to it rewards for women. Milton illustrates Eve’s
Milton’s complex work leaves a great deal of room for interpretation, particularly as
Milton grounded his endeavors in such a loaded context. The subtlety and beauty with which
Milton constructs his epic cry out for ever closer reading and examination of the text. Milton’s
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injunction to read Paradise Lost in a certain way might work for a more cut and dried, sin-and-
salvation piece such as Spenser’s The Faerie Queene; however, Milton’s complexity of situation
and depth of character development deny his own intentions. Perhaps Milton overshot himself in
trying to rationalize the story of “our mother Eve” and our “first father” Adam and their inter-
Works Cited
"King James Bible". Portland. Web. (16 Dec. 2007): King James Bible Online. 11 Dec.
2009. <http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/>.
Froula, Christine. "When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy." Critical
Milton, John. "Paradise Lost". Charlottesville, VA, 1667. Web. The Modern English
<http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ >.
McColley, Diane. "Eve and the Arts of Eden." Milton and the Idea of Woman. Ed.