Feminism Regained: Exposing the Objectification of Eve in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, [under review with Milton Studies].

Abstract

 

This essay reopens the case of Eve in John Milton’s Paradise Lost with the view to better understanding her motivations for initiating the fall of humankind. In the process, Eve’s day-to-day life is assessed anew using contemporary feminist critical methods that expose the objectification of Eve at the hands of God, Adam, and Satan, in a Paradise showing signs of widespread and entrenched sexual inequality. These observations re-position Eve as an agitated unequal initiating the fall, and have a very real impact on the amount of culpability attributed to her actions. The approach taken in this essay marks a break from critical trends that have analysed Eve within Milton studies during the last two decades. With a more comprehensive method of close analysis that takes in Eve’s Paradisal context (landscape, language, infrastructure, and inhabitants) alongside close analysis of her creation and temptation, this essay encompasses most layers of Eve’s daily life. From this position we are in a much better position to challenge the judgements—divine or otherwise—that Eve’s actions in Paradise have attracted through time.

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The life of Eve in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (PL) is arguably the most well-known and well-developed portrait of original woman in the Western literary tradition to date. As “first of women”, Eve’s actions in biblical Paradise, and Milton’s retelling of those actions, have had far-reaching consequences not only for biblical Eve, but for all women living under the influence of the Eve myth (4.409). Patriarchal assumptions about men’s headship in the home, and traditional notions about women’s inherent inferiority, instrumentality, and violability, all receive one of their earliest and fullest iterations in Milton’s depiction of Eve’s life. Considering the patriarchal assumptions underlying this myth of Eve have long informed historical notions of womanhood, it is incumbent on today’s feminist literary critics to better understand this myth as long as it has a bearing on the treatment of women in our own moment. This duty, however, appears to have been taken up in a less vigorous fashion in Milton studies in recent years compared to the approaches taken in the 1970s through to the early 1990s. Indeed, this project will argue that critical work on Milton’s Eve in recent years has performed an unintentional disservice to a fuller understanding of Eve’s daily life due to a shift in orientation away from investigating the textual clues that illuminate further her unique perspective of Milton’s Paradise. Knowing more about Eve’s perspective through delving further into the layers of the text can help us clarify the conjoint factors contributing to her initiation of the fall. Looking not only at what is said between Eve and the various actors that cross her path, but also at what is not said, indeed what is implied by the physical, gestural treatments of Eve, is an approach we see very little of in recent analyses of her life. As one of three key figures of blame for the fall of humankind, we need a new way to investigate Eve’s blameworthiness alongside the overarching judgements—divine or otherwise—that her actions have attracted. What is required is a microscopic analysis of Eve’s intimate, day-to-day interactions that can be incorporated into a macroscopic reconciliation to the wider social context in which she exists. To bring about this much-needed audit of Eve’s life, this project will investigate the object-like treatment of Eve using methods yet to be utilised in Milton studies today. Such an investigation helps us produce a deeper and more structured appraisal of her treatment by God, Adam, and Satan, which in turn better informs us about her motivations behind the initiation of the fall. Commentators infrequently invoke the term object to describe Eve—a “direct object” of Satan’s hostility (J. M. Evans 230), “more than an object of [Adam’s] physical desire” (Kristin A. Pruitt 53), an “object for [Adam’s] love” (James Grantham Turner 238)—but this term is never fully explained or tested in a way that supports its use in their critiques. The effect of using the term in this way implies that the audience already knows the kind of behaviour implied when the object-like treatment of Eve is briefly flagged as problematic. But in reality, scholars within Milton studies have only brushed the surface of the extent of Eve’s objectification. We need a clearer understanding of this treatment. One approach that provides such clarity is outlined in Martha Nussbaum’s landmark essay Objectification (1995). Her work is useful in its clear formulation of the common conditions present when an animate person is treated as an inanimate object—or put simply, when someone is treated as a thing. Some of these conditions are put briefly in the following:

1)    Instrumentality is present when a person treats[1] another person as a tool for her or his purposes;

2)    Denial of Autonomy is present when a person treats another person as lacking autonomy or self-determination;

3)    Violability is present when a person treats another person as lacking boundary integrity, that is, it is permissible to break up, smash, or break into;

4)    Ownership is present when a person treats a person as something that is owned or can be bought or sold (257).

As Nussbaum demonstrates through analysing a handful of literary and real-world examples of objectification, not all of these conditions are required to be present for Eve to be considered an inanimate object in Paradise. In fact, the presence of any one of the features listed is sufficient for the judgement of objectification to be applied to any particular element in Eve’s treatment. According to Nussbaum, “objectification is a relatively loose cluster-term” where often “a plurality of features is present when the term [objectification] is applied” (258). But the list of conditions only constitutes half of Nussbaum’s theory. She also argues equally strongly for the inclusion of each case’s unique context that plays a crucial and deciding role in any assessment of objectification: “in the matter of objectification, context is everything” according to Nussbaum (271). To account for context then, we need to assess the relationship between Eve and the persons with whom she interacts, while also assessing details of the larger social context in which she acts (271). In short, we can sum up Nussbaum’s theory by identifying two broad planks in her approach: first, she identifies the need to step through in no set sequence several features of treating a person as an object (features listed earlier); second, she identifies the need to analyse the context of that treatment. These two theoretical planks will be used together as a loose method for assessing the life of Eve in this investigation. Close analysis of Eve’s Paradisal context—its landscape, language, infrastructure, and inhabitants—is an essential first step. Second, close analysis of two crucial moments in Eve’s life—her creation and temptation—provide the right foundation for better interpreting how she is treated by various actors in Paradise. These distinct elements dictate this project’s formal structure that will encompass four sections addressing Eve’s critical context, Paradisal context, creation, and temptation.

Our own judgements can then collectively inform a final assessment of the divine judgements applied to Eve—with particular attention paid to the final sentence of punishment passed on her in the concluding books of PL. Ultimately, our new assessment of Eve’s life represents a form of calling Milton‘s “great argument” to account in a forthright fashion that stems from an impulse opposite to one of homage or fealty to the author-figure of Milton—a critical position not uncommon in the field of Milton studies in recent times (1.24).[2] Indeed, this project’s approach represents a resistance to the legitimating, and stabilising force of Milton-the-author—a force that has largely constrained the interpretive direction taken by a number of feminist critics within Milton studies during the last two decades. Alternatively, the approach taken in this investigation is grounded in an openly anti-patriarchal position rarely seen in the commentary surrounding Milton’s Eve. Through adopting this particular position, this investigation aims to restore the kind of robust feminist criticism that came to prominence in Milton studies during the 1970s through to the early 1990s, from the likes of Christine Froula, Mary Nyquist, and Regina Schwartz.

 To settle any potential semantic ambiguity surrounding the adoption of anti-patriarchal, or any other terms stemming from the critical position in which this project is situated, it is necessary to define some key terms as follows: anti, as in opposed to or against; patriarchal, as in characteristic of male dominance that is actual or symbolic. Anti-patriarchal then is a term used here to designate a position that entails working against the perpetuation of male dominance in its myriad forms. It is important to remember that the term patriarchy is a term that has undergone significant semantic broadening since the 1980s. The term now experiences an application that far exceeds the narrower definition used during Milton’s time when it was associated with the patrilineal authority of divinely appointed kings and biological fathers. Such semantic broadening of the term patriarchy has come about through the acts of individual women exercising their right to rename their environment from a woman-centred perspective. So it follows, since the phenomenon of male dominance has been renamed as patriarchy for modern audiences, women are now in a better position to argue against the endurance of male dominance within their own moment.[3]

Acknowledging the importance of this exercise in renaming is crucial for this project, since it is guided by the desire to bring about a renaming of Eve’s life from an anti-patriarchal point of view. In this renaming, this project offers a challenge to the various privileged namings of her experience already on record—names that already enjoy high circulation and a secure footing within Milton studies today. In the following section, we will look more closely at how critics have named the life of Eve within the last two decades, and from there we can prosecute the case for our own renaming.                   

Eve’s Critical Context

Were we better at calling canonical authority to account in Milton studies from the 1970s through to the early 1990s? Going by a small sample[4] of commentary on Milton’s Eve taken from that time, it appears so. This period witnessed the conspicuous self-positioning of literary critics recognising the potential of their work to alter notions of womanhood in their own time. In contrast, recent studies of Eve rarely exhibit such noticeable self-positioning of critics who are aware of their ability to influence their own moment. Arguably, this mode of conservative interpretation within the feminist current of Milton studies today reveals a critical cautiousness bearing the signs of overall diminished critical power. In contrast, Froula’s When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy represents a touchstone of the more vigorous approach many women writers took during the 1980s in their assessments of Eve. Her study shows how the unique observational skills of a literary critic can effect an “undoing of the cultural economy inscribed” in a text, as much as she can effect a disturbance of the cultural economy inscribed outside that text (336). Froula does this through tracing the impact of God’s guiding voice on Eve, thereby revealing that voice’s implication in Eve’s education into subordination in Paradise. What is so compelling about Froula’s work is that her approach exposes historical, Judeo-Christian links to modern notions of men’s assumed headship in the home. On the whole, Froula’s work shows her power in using the text as an “instrument” for making visible what is still by nature today a diffuse, and ever-shifting operation of patriarchal power (336).

Nyquist spotted a different critical trend back in the 1980s. She noticed some critics[5] promoting the qualities of harmony and mutuality in the marriage of Eve and Adam, at the expense of giving due attention to sexual differences that are “ordered hierarchically and ideologically” throughout PL (172). Back then, Nyquist noticed that the celebration of “mutual dependence” and “harmonious pairing” purportedly found in the marriage of Eve and Adam, had the effect of “neutralising [the] critical discourse” surrounding Eve’s unequal status that is grounded in her sex (172, 171, 174). Since then the trend has continued in the works of Pruitt, Victoria Silver, and Claire Colebrook, to cite just a sample of scholars from the last two decades who continue to advocate Milton as a pioneer of the idea of companionate marriage at the expense of giving due censure to the sexual inequality underlying the marriage structure as it is represented in PL. The concept of equality appears disturbingly malleable in the hands of Pruitt. She says that Milton’s depiction of Eve represents “a remarkably positive characterisation of woman in what is a remarkably egalitarian marriage” (111). Considering an egalitarian relationship is one generally characterised by the shared belief in equality of all parties involved, we are left with some serious questions as to how Pruitt can identify a remarkable egalitarianism in the marriage of Eve and Adam—especially considering there is every indication that their coupling is based on a belief in asymmetry between the sexes. It is my contention that Milton conveys a fundamental asymmetry between the female and male sex in PL that manifests at various levels within the text as a power imbalance favouring the male. The ubiquitous effects of this underlying inequality can be detected at one level, through a superficial study of linguistic elements revealing the man-made nature of the language used in the text that exerts power over and through its actors. Detection then goes to deeper levels, seen in the movements and motivations of actors that bespeak the effects of male authority and control. The pervasiveness of this imbalance between the sexes is largely played down in Pruitt’s study of Eve. Instead, Pruitt emphasises the quality of “reciprocity” between Eve and Adam (46). Like her use of egalitarian, Pruitt’s emphasis on reciprocity can be seen as equally contentious. Reciprocity is a term that implies a relationship of equivalence seen in the matching of movement, force, or energy between parties. It speaks of an equal interplay that can be defined further by looking at the relation between the term’s Latin etymological strands: recus (back) and procus (forward). The problem with Pruitt’s reliance on this notion of interplay as a back-forward or forward-back movement—a notion implied in her use of reciprocity—is that even a casual study of the relationship between Eve and Adam shows on the whole either a forward-forward motion of energy for one sex or a backward-backward motion of energy for the other. Eve is largely portrayed as yielding to, submitting to, or compliant with Adam’s direction of energy; Adam is largely portrayed as initiating energy. It is a picture of imbalance. This is precisely why we need to adopt a method that can better investigate this movement of energy between the sexes in a more careful way. Objectification theory can do this, since it provides testable conditions for locating imbalances in the movement of energy between parties; testable conditions that can be applied to Eve and Adam to help inform us better of their individual statuses in Paradise.

Pruitt asserts that Eve in her relationship with Adam is “more than an object of physical desire” (53). Indeed, I agree in part with Pruitt. Eve does not just play the role of a sexual object fashioned to meet Adam’s particular desire for a particular mate. Eve is more than that. Designated as the “mother of mankind”, she is also an instrument created to propagate a human population that enhances the power of God through her initiation of a line of a “race of worshippers” (1.36, 7.630). Not to mention the role assigned to her by Satan. His use of Eve to serve his own attempts to diminish God’s power forms the crux of the narrative and provides a disturbing insight into the motives that drive his tool-like use of Eve. From the first day of Eve’s entry into the world she is never encouraged to see herself as someone whose end is in herself. So it follows, once this foundational condition of her existence is established, other denials predictably flow from that first denial of autonomy. If Eve’s raison d’etre is first as the property and instrument of God, and second as the property and instrument of Adam, then it is perfectly logical to see God’s chief detractor and humankind’s first enemy, Satan, treating Eve as serving similar ends for his own designs. To tell it plainly involves re-telling the story of the trajectory of a woman passing through the hands of three men that reveals a disturbing triptych of male possession—and this is even before we begin the task of taking into account the contributing factors found in the landscape and its inhabitants that support this object-like treatment of Eve.

Indeed, the objectification of Eve that is found in her instrumentality, violability, ownership, and denial of autonomy, has failed to attract significant attention from scholars during the last two decades. The closest any critic has come to fully exploring the object-like treatment of Eve comes from Schwartz’s study from the early 1990s. Schwartz sees the power of Satan’s gaze as a form of mastery over Eve who is treated as a prime object of destruction within the sight of that gaze. According to Schwartz, “the object position is a familiar one” for Eve, considering she “began her life as the object of her own gaze” during her first waking moments in Paradise (90). When Eve is later encouraged by Satan to become the object of more gazes during her dream, he effectively encourages a further expansion of her role as an exhibit. The theme of sight, and the role it plays in Eve’s objectification, provides the organising focus for Schwartz’s study that pays particular attention to Satan’s “predatory voyeurism” witnessed in his various approaches to Eve (93). Since Schwartz’s chief focus is on the single theme of sight, then we can understand why she does not explore in a more comprehensive fashion the general objectification of Eve throughout PL in its entirety (99).  In this respect, our investigation of Eve can be seen as picking up from the work already begun by Schwartz on Eve’s objectification.

Equally important for this investigation are the works produced by some critics in the last two decades who have used new approaches to better analyse what it feels like to be Eve for a day. One excellent example of this kind of scholarship is seen in Deborah A. Interdonato’s methodical combing through of each step in the discourse of Eve and Adam’s separation scene. It brings forth new insights about one of the most crucial moments in the narrative when Eve moves away from Adam to garden alone in an act of self-determination. Interdonato says the separation scene reveals some clues to Eve’s “gender-based inferiority complex”, since Eve “betray[s] a keen sense of injury” at Adam’s implied suggestion that she does not possess the strength to stand safely away from him in the face of Satan’s potential attack (98). The result of Interdonato’s cogently argued and astute analysis points to ways we might view asymmetry between the sexes as creating vulnerable conditions for the fall. Her study illuminates our understanding of Eve’s “multi-levelled motivations and intentions”, which reveal Eve as “sensitive to and resentful of her inferior position” in Paradise (99, 101). Interdonato’s proposition, that the unequal living conditions of Paradise contribute significantly to Eve’s initiation of the fall, will be taken up in this investigation’s final assessment of Eve’s blameworthiness for that fall.

Another scholar within Milton studies who has made a similarly valuable contribution to expanding our understanding of Eve’s daily life within the last two decades is Mandy Green. Her meticulous tracing of Milton’s Ovidian allusions[6] back to their original sources[7] have enabled readers “to speculate” with more confidence “about Eve’s feelings about her life in Eden with Adam” (921-922). Green’s reinterpretation of Eve is all the richer for its revelation of previously undetected Ovidian references found in Milton’s proleptic similes and metaphors; a reinterpretation that exposes more “emotional insights” into crucial scenes involving Eve (911). We see in Green’s work how some Miltonic similes that may initially appear to be homologous in one correspondence can expand under her analysis to reveal even more correspondences. Such analysis has an impact on longstanding conclusions already made about the treatment of Eve in Paradise. Some of Green’s new Ovidian observations will be adopted in this project to help assess Adam and Satan’s object-like treatment of Eve.

Another band of scholars[8] that have come to prominence in Milton studies during the last two decades have focussed on new insights that come from stepping outside the text of PL. These critics investigate theological commentary on biblical Eve that is produced by Milton’s contemporaries, which then informs modern critical assessments of Miltonic conceptions of Eve. This trend has resulted in a drift of critical focus away from the important work of exploring more fully the contributing factors found within the text of PL that caused Eve to initiate the fall in the first place. That said, the trend has produced valuable work on Milton’s Eve from carefully recovering, documenting, and analysing a previously unanalysed body of writing by Milton’s female and male contemporaries. Desma Polydorou is one example of this approach. She reads Milton’s Eve alongside the views of Rachel Speght, who is the first woman to contribute a theological critique of Eve to the infamous pamphlet war in Milton’s time known as the querelle des femmes (quarrel about women). Through critically positioning the views of Speght alongside Milton, we get a better picture of the “self-interested, supra-theological motives driving their individual arguments” (30). In short, Speght’s commentary reveals her motivation for improving the social conditions of women during her own time; Milton’s commentary reveals his motivations for improving the well-being of men during his time through restoration of marriage to a pre-lapsarian standard. Speght argues for equality between men and women based “primarily on the belief that they both possessed an immortal soul” at the time of creation (23-24); in contradistinction, Milton espouses women’s inferiority as the “weaker” sex in a “divinely sanctioned hierarchy” that presupposes sexual inequality (PL 6.909, Polydorou 24).

Overall, what is missing from much of the commentary on Milton’s Eve during the last two decades is a comprehensive assessment of her treatment and living conditions ; an assessment that at least marks an attempt to encompass a majority of the elements in her environment that contribute to her quality of life overall. It is my contention that objectification theory can achieve this in part, since it allows for the study of Eve’s material environment alongside her treatment within that environment. According to Catharine MacKinnon, the experience of objectification is arguably “definitive of and synonymous with women’s lives as gender female” (535). If this is the case for Eve too, then Milton studies within the last two decades has arguably left the most essential element of Eve’s life under-analysed for today’s readers. The first step to rectifying this lack of analysis is to look at Eve’s Paradisal context through a study of the language, landscape, infrastructure, and population in which she is immersed. This essential first step in the area of context will help us make a more informed assessment of Eve’s direct treatment by God, Adam, and Satan, which will be investigated in later sections.

Eve’s Paradisal Context

Sexual asymmetry in PL can be detected at a superficial level in the disproportion of semantic space distributed between the sexes in the text. One aspect of this disproportion is seen in the male nominal influence exerted on Eve through the actors in the narrative. Every one of the forty times[9] that humankind, which represents female and male, is signified as mankind in the text, the male sex receives more semantic space than the female sex. Such a privileged reach of the male position in the language alone indicates the primacy of men in Eve’s environment before we even begin to address their privileged position as the only sex enjoying a direct likeness to a God figured male. Just as language limits our experience of reality, so it follows language limits Eve’s experience of reality in Paradise. In this respect, we can suggest that the saturating influence of the universal application of mankind in Paradise contributes to a form of linguistic determinism for Eve. The predominance of mankind limits Eve’s cognitive ability to take in the phenomena of Paradise because her attention is continually drawn to the centrality of the male sex whenever she encounters speech. Indeed, we can draw on evidence from empirical studies that suggest Eve would be thinking of the image of man whenever she encounters the universal application of man and mankind in the text. Dale Spender’s pioneering investigation of the man-made nature of the English language reminds us of one study that found “young children thought that man meant male people in universal sentences such as ‘man needs food’” (152). Another empirical study brought to our attention by Spender shows that university students think “male when confronted with titles such as Political Man and Urban Man” (152). Such empirical evidence informs our view of Eve’s experience of Paradise, since at each instance of the invocation of mankind she would never have immediate confirmation that she is included in this purported universal category. These studies give us a better idea about the systematic linguistic sexism found within the language surrounding Eve in Paradise, thereby strengthening our position to assess the real-world impact of such language. At this initial stage of our investigation it appears that the speech moving around and through Eve does not treat her as having an equal footing with men.

Continuing at this surface level we can see that Milton’s Paradise depicts a high population of male entities exerting collective influence on Eve. From the first passages in the first book, three key figures that press their claims through Eve are all denoted male: Satan “th’infernal Serpent he it was” (1.34); God the “Creator and… His will” (1.31); Son of God “the one greater Man [to] restore us” [emphasis added] (1.4-5). What becomes clear is that the majority of the game-changers in PL are men. When Satan, God, the Son of God, and the angels are all denoted with masculine third-person pronouns, we can safely assume Eve indeed takes these pronouns at face value, as does the reader. In anticipation of any objection to our assumption of a stable male sex assigned to these influential actors in the narrative, a response is best put as a simple syllogism: male entities are generally signified with male names and male pronouns; Satan, the angels, God, and the Son of God are all signified in the text with male names and male pronouns; therefore, these are indeed male actors from the perspective of Eve. In the absence of knowing whether, for instance, any angel exhibits the sexual characteristics of a man at any one moment in the narrative, we are left with no choice but to rely on the only clear signifiers of male sex—their names and pronominal identifiers—despite any minor suggestion from a handful of speeches[10] that indicate sexual ambiguity of the angels themselves. If we are still left with some doubt about the stability of sexual classification found in PL, we only have to look to the epithets used to name God that employ signs of male titular authority: “Heaven’s perpetual King” (1.131); “Heaven’s all-powerful King” (2.851); “ethereal King” (2.978); “Eternal King” (3.374); “all-bounteous King” (5.640); “invisible King” (7.122); “Universal Lord” (5.205). Similar titles are used for the Son of God: “Heaven’s matchless King” (4.41); “Messiah King” (5.664); “King Anointed” (5.777); “rightful King” (5.818); “Heaven’s Lord supreme” (2.236). The same titles are used ironically to derogate Satan, and similarly call on appellations of male authority: “Supreme King” (1.735). All of these names show in their sum how the presence of male power can be detected in the nouns, pronouns, and titles of authority populating the text. These signifiers of male influence should not be trivialised or brushed aside in this project’s gradual attempt to unearth the minutiae of Eve’s daily experience in Paradise.

If we now shift our focus to the material landscape, at once we notice a high level of male security presence and mass male ownership of the land and infrastructure. Men saturate the surveillance operations inside and outside the region. Uriel tracks the movement of Satan and suspects this “first grand thief” has already intruded into Paradise (4.192). This observation prompts Uriel to give a warning to Gabriel, who holds continual “charge and strict watch” over the gate of Paradise (4.562). Once warned, Gabriel arranges “his bands of night-watch [men] to walk the round of Paradise”, while appointing two beefy male spirits, Ithuriel and Zephon, to guard the bower where Eve and Adam reside (Book Four The Argument). Taken together, the collection of these male entities represent a thick blanket of control contributing to Eve’s experience of being fenced in. Eve would feel the presence of plenipotentiary power invested in these angels acting at the behest of God. Such a visible presence of divine military authority that looks all-male suggests the region is sustained by and for the interests of men.

It is important to note at this point in the narrative a reference to Adam’s sole ownership of the living space occupied by both Eve and Adam. This space is “Adam’s bower” (Book Four The Argument). His exclusive control over Eve’s domestic space is not the only indicator of his dominion over all that lives in Paradise. We see a strong indication that he also commands authority over the expanse of the garden itself, when we are told that the “verdurous wall of Paradise” allows Adam “our general sire” a “prospect large into his nether empire neighbouring round [emphasis added]” (4.143-45). In this scene, we see extensive male authority over the land is expressed by the wide-ranging gaze of Adam over all he owns.

Adam’s conspicuous display of rule over the garden and all it contains is reinforced much later in the narrative when Adam recalls his naming of “each bird and beast” that passed under his vision (8.349). God explicitly connects Adam’s act of naming to the resultant obligation of those animals to “pay fealty” to Adam “with low subjection” (8.344-45). As Kristen Poole observes, Adam’s action of naming is portrayed in “highly visual” and “highly ceremonial terms”, featuring an ordered file of animals marching up to Adam to receive their “majestically bestowed titles” (555). God’s ushering forth of those animals to receive their new ruler (Adam), provides evidence of God’s explicit encouragement of Adam’s prerogative to name those animals. In contradistinction, Eve’s less visual exercise in giving only the “flowers…. names” is smaller in scale and treated as less of a formal event in the narrative (11.273, 77). Nyquist notices the “incidental” nature of Eve’s confession of her flower naming; a confession expressed to the audience only in the final books of the narrative when she becomes painfully aware of her impending expulsion from Paradise (172). Eve only briefly remembers her naming of the flowers as part of a “lyrical utterance” suggestive of the agony associated with her farewell to those flowers (172). In comparison to Adam, Eve’s exercise in naming, and her expressive recollection of that naming, does not carry the signs of God-ordained authority associated with Adam’s exercise in naming. Nyquist’s and Poole’s observations help us conclude that Eve’s power over only a minor section of the landscape does not equal the power Adam enjoys over the entire region and the animals contained therein.  This conclusion simply refutes Pruitt’s claim that “Milton allows for Eve’s equal participation in an activity that denotes wisdom and dominion” [emphasis] (126). Eve’s naming of the flowers does not equal Adam’s naming of all the animals and all the environment under his dominion.

Another indicator of asymmetry between the sexes in PL can be found on deeper level in the constitution of the sexes that bespeaks the promotion of divine male authority. The question of which sex is attributed the most power associated with the image of God is a crucial step to better understanding the general sweep of sexual asymmetry throughout the text. It is a question that can be addressed in part by analysing the scene that provides our first impression of Eve and Adam. At first glance the first human pair are represented in terms of balance in their joint enjoyment of “Godlike” qualities: “for in their looks divine / the image of their glorious Maker shone” (4.289-292). But any initial impression of equality between this particular woman and this particular man is shortly undercut with the clarification that “both [are] not equal as their sex not equal seemed…. He for God only, she for God in him” (4.295-96, 299). Silver analyses these lines alongside the correlative lines found in Genesis 1.27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him”. She notes that the English name God in these lines is a translation of the original Hebrew name Elohim. The name Elohim signifies a plural noun connoting the “idea of strength, power, and might” associated with the “unity and diversity within the nature of God” (282). So God in the sense of an image does not denote a person, but a collection of qualities signifying the supreme nature of God. Silver notes further that it can be argued that the image of God (Hebrew salem Elohim) is “somehow in evidence” through a sexual distinction revealed in the unequal appearances of Eve and Adam (283). “Adam in his nature corresponds directly to God”; Eve only experiences the image of God in a diluted form “derived from her relationship with Adam” (283-284). In short, it can be interpreted that divine authority figured in the image of God is figured male in PL; an interpretation supported in the text when we are told that Adam as “man [is] God’s latest image” in Paradise (4.567). Such an interpretation leads us to the logical conclusion that men have a monopoly on divine power within Paradise.

Taken together, what do all of these individual assessments of Eve’s context tell us about her life in Paradise? In regard to the concept of equality we see the following: an over-representation of the male position in the language Eve hears and speaks; an over-representation of the male sex in titular signifiers of authority; an over-representation of the male sex within the surveillance presence in Paradise; an over-representation of the male sex in positions of ownership of the land and infrastructure in Paradise; and absolute male dominance of divine authority. Overall, we can see sexual asymmetry at a number of levels within the text that accumulates to give the picture of an environment steeped in inequality. More evidence of sexual asymmetry comes to light during the scenes recalling Adam and Eve’s creation, and will be analysed closely in the following section.

Creation

Upon waking from “soundest sleep”, Adam’s first action is to direct his gaze in a straight line to the “ample sky” in the direction of Heaven (8.253, 258). By a “quick instinctive motion” he is immediately on his feet standing upright without any initial sign of faltering step (8.259). As far as births go, Adam’s entry into the world runs without a hitch. Through the orientation of Adam’s focus upward, he acknowledges the supernal source of his new earthly authority in Paradise. As “first man of men”, his first movements speak of his direct relationship with the male authority of God (8.297). This authority is promoted as substantial, fit, and adequate, as it is symbolised through the “ample” and comprehensive coverage of the sky (8.258). Such originary gestures play an important role in establishing Adam’s authority in his immediate environment. Full of questions, Adam at this stage admits he still has no full conception of “who” he is (8.270). His doubt brings about a natural inclination to “name whatever” he sees, thereby allowing him the means to better establish his identity in an unfamiliar region, and to further secure his sole authority in Paradise (8.272-73). By examining the movement of light as it “enlighten[s] Earth”, Adam finds he can name this quality as the “Sun” (8.273-74). At once, such naming reveals Adam’s ability to easily organise and contain the features of Paradise within the limits of his own cognitive reach. In effect, he is linguistically branding his presence in the environment through a process of identifying and labelling phenomena that exists outside the familiar “limb[s]” of his own body (8.267). Already Paradise bears the signs of male dominion just moments after the first man enters.

Adam now returns to the question of “how” he came into the world, and turns to the possibility of “some great Maker”—a maker who he assumes to be of the male sex—“how may I know Him”. (8.278, 288). Adam’s assumption that he is the product of conception by a sole male has the effect of essentially bypassing the possibility of the female sex having any significant attribution of divine originary authority in Paradise. Of course, attributing the male sex with the sole power of divine creation fits into a Miltonic paradigm. The pattern is first seen within the opening lines of PL where we are given the first account of creation of the “heavens and the earth” (1.9). Creation, we are told in these lines, is initiated by a sole “Spirit”[11] carrying a male ejaculative force that makes the formless “vast abyss… pregnant” (1.16, 21-22). There is an obvious omission of maternal waters in this account; waters that are very much present in the correlative Biblical account of creation in Genesis 1.6: “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters…. And God… divided the waters”. These waters carry traditional associations with maternal power and their omission from Milton’s first account of creation leaves us with a clear initial message that the male sex alone brings all life into being without any contribution of maternal power. At this stage we can now register two steps in a chain of paternal creation in PL: first, a male spirit creates heaven and earth; second, a male God creates the first human as a man in the form of Adam. The omission of the female sex in the process so far speaks volumes for the sexual inequality inherent in Eve’s world before she enters. Woman has no connotation with divine authority in the narrative at this point compared to man.

Before the act of creating Eve, a lonely Adam tells God of his “desire” for “conversation with his like” (8.417, 18). God sees this need as a fit request that he predicted would soon arise after creating Adam. God agrees with Adam that it is “not good for man to be alone” with the limited company of “beasts” over which Adam enjoys dominion (8.445, 438). So God accepts Adam’s request for a companion and promises to “please” Adam by fulfilling his “wish exactly to [his] heart’s desire” (8.449-51). At this moment, the details of God’s commission are clear. The specifications regarding the intended use of a new human design (Eve) have been explicitly stated by the intended recipient of that design. The specifications of Eve’s purpose—dictated by one man (Adam) and ratified by another (God)—express clearly that her end is not in herself. Her end is in Adam. This raises serious questions, since Eve’s primary function is as an instrument for Adam’s use first—a function that is already decided without her contribution or assent. Adam then falls asleep only to dream about God fashioning a “creature” from his own “rib” that eventually grows “manlike”, but in appearance is of a “different sex” (8.469-71). Upon waking, Adam immediately sees Eve as he “saw her in [his] dream” and watches her being led to him “by her Heavenly Maker” (8.482, 85). At this moment he feels not surprisingly “overjoyed” at God’s bestowal of his new gift (8.490). Such joy acknowledges Adam’s satisfaction that God has indeed “fulfilled” his promise, and such joy constitutes Adam’s acceptance of a new human product as fit for its intended use (8.491). The conditions of Eve’s ownership and instrumentality in Paradise are clear here from analysing Adam’s role in her creation.

It is worth pausing at this moment to acknowledge the importance Milton places on the power of creation as constituting the essential core of divine male authority in PL. Kent R. Lenhof elaborates on this power in relation to Milton’s materialist monism; a belief that claims every element in the universe comes from a single substance (God the Father) (15). According to Lenhof, this belief implies that “God is God by virtue of his singular role in the Genesis of the universe” (16).  Put another way, the definition of God is paternal creation, or paternal creation is God. Such power to create and bestow life creates in turn a debt on those who have received life. The result of receiving life leads to a life of “eternal arrearage”, experienced as a form of continual bondage to a single maker (16). We then see in Eve’s recollection of her own creation from Adam’s rib the effect such an ontological debt has had on her thoughts about marriage to him: “O thou for whom / and from whom I was formed flesh of thy flesh / and without whom am to no end” (4.440-42). Since Eve owes her life to Adam, she will orient all of her attention and actions toward Adam. Man is the centre of Eve’s existence. All of this suggests an inherent denial of Eve’s autonomy in her constitution—no self-sufficiency away from Adam; no self-direction away from Adam—that is commonly associated with the condition of ownership.

At this stage we only have a glimpse of the third step in the chain of paternal creation depicted in PL. Eve now is given the space to recollect the details of her entry into Paradise. Her first words—“That day I oft remember”—are telling in their frank admission that memories of her birth day are a recurring presence in her life (4.449). The nature of just how she came to her full development—was there difficulty involved?—has played on her mind frequently enough to attract the adverbial descriptor often. Just like Adam, Eve first comes to life after waking from a “sleep” and is full of questions “much wondering” about “what” she is and “how” she was “brought” there [emphasis added] (4.449-453). I have highlighted the neuter pronoun what as it indicates that Eve sees herself as a something; not as someone.  I have also highlighted the vehicular brought as it suggests a conveyance of some sort. Both terms taken together imply the transmission of an inanimate object, or even a piece of property. Compared to Adam’s enquiries about who he is when he first wakes, Eve suspects she is something other than a person with an I—more an object with a use. These subtle, pronominal hints tell us more about the object-like treatment of Eve than may first appear from a superficial reading of her creation account.

Eve then proceeds to tell us that her first moments of consciousness occur within close proximity to a “liquid plain” that is fed by “murmuring… waters” running “from a cave” (4.451-54). At first, the reflective qualities in that body of water act as a “crystal mirror” revealing what appears to be “another sky” to Eve (4.263, 459). Unlike Adam, Eve looks down in the opposite direction of the real sky above. It is a movement of focus away from that which symbolises the only true authority in Paradise—“the pure empyrean” where God “the almighty Father” sits “high-throned above all” (3.56-58). At once, Eve sees herself in the still water. Her fixation on her image is depicted as a misguided action focussing on an ill-chosen object. Indeed, Eve’s fondness for directing her sole attention on herself is described in hindsight as a “vain” pursuit, implying a valueless activity centring on an insubstantial source of authority (4.466). Unlike Adam, Eve here is seen faltering in making a miscalculated step toward an inadequate object of power—her own image. What is so effective about this scene is that the water not only embodies a false image of authority for Eve, it also reinforces a judgement about the inadequacy of maternal power that is symbolised by those deceptive, murmuring waters that have contributed to producing that false image. Much scholarship from feminist theologians[12] has already discussed the systematic suppression[13] of maternal power in the Biblical record, the result of which dates back to editorial decisions made by patristic editors responsible for collating and revising the sources that make up the Bible as we know it today. It is not within the scope of this project to go further into detail about evidence that suggests the historical suppression of divine maternal power. But the paradigm that is exposed within that history is flagged here to briefly inform us of Milton’s similar privileging of male symbols to signify divine authority. In short, the patristic practice of devaluing maternal symbols that could be linked to divine authority resembles closely the practice that we have seen in Milton’s depiction of the deceptive murmuring maternal waters.

The “Voice” of God intervenes at this point in the narrative to warn Eve away from focussing further on herself in the lake (4.467). He then proceeds to lead her to Adam who holds the position of a divinely ordained “preeminent” authority in Paradise (4.445). Eve’s intended use is then dictated to her in no uncertain terms when the voice declares that she is the prototype of a sex that “shalt bear” through the line of her daughters “multitudes” of children to the sons of Adam (4.473-74). Eve’s instrumentality to the cause of God could not be clearer since the ceremonial quality of the speech act bestowing her new title—“Mother of the Human Race”—indicates reproduction as one of her primary uses (4.475). Once led to waiting Adam, her intended authority, Eve momentarily turns “back” in a direction toward the lake that promises another glimpse of her own image; an image that she confesses she finds more appealing than Adam (4.480). In Eve’s virginal reluctance to accept Adam as her husband, Green sees previously unnoticed Ovidian traces of amorous Apollo’s pursuit of the virginal Daphne in Metamorphoses: “you know not who it is you fly, and for that reason you fly him” (1.514-15 Green 916). These lines are notably similar to the ones Milton uses to describe amorous Adam’s pursuit of Eve at the lake: “return fair Eve! Whom fli’st thou? Whom thou fli’st, of him thou art” (4.481-82). The correspondence in the element of flight in both descriptions gives an impression of Adam’s Apollo-like compulsion to physically assert his control over Eve, resulting in permanent curtailment of her freedom. It is only when we are told that Adam’s “gentle hand seized” Eve’s hand, that she finally understood how the inherent qualities of man excel those of woman [emphasis added] (4.488-90). I have highlighted seized in the foregoing quotation since it carries the action of the sentence and implies capture. The kind of forceful movement associated with capture—to take by force or stratagem—trumps the supporting adjectival suggestion of benign gentleness. Adam’s physicality leaves no other option for Eve but to yield, and it is this physicality that is clearly the deciding factor contributing to her acceptance of Adam as her immediate authority. Such a choice made in response to the limited options available for Eve brings up serious questions regarding her consent. The exchange certainly reveals signs of an objectionable passing of human chattel from one owner to the next.

The process of Eve’s creation and initiation into Paradise are then sealed through Adam’s naming of her in a process already seen in his naming of the animals living under his dominion: “woman is her name, of man extracted” (8.496-7). Pruitt says that “Adam’s naming of Eve in Book Eight emphasises their unity and equality, not his authority” (25). This is yet another indicator of Pruitt’s reliance on what can only be described as a mystifying conception of equality. Pruitt does not consider the ramifications of Adam’s naming as an act that ensures the privilege and permanence of his nominal marking on Eve in the historical record. As the property of Adam, Eve’s very existence extends the reach of his own name, thereby demonstrating yet another way the male sex occupies more space and more endurance in the language of Paradise alone. Adam’s naming is akin to today’s still common practice of women adopting men’s surnames upon marriage, which has undeniable implications for assumptions about the assumed ownership and instrumentality of women. As Spender suggests, “when females have no right to surnames, to family names of their own, the concept of woman as the property of man is subtly reinforced” (25). Indeed, Spender shows us how modern man’s investment in this naming practice is lived out, with some men finding it “jolly difficult to work out whether women were married these days because of the ridiculous practice of not taking their husband’s name” (25). Such sentiments reveal how important naming is for signifying whether a woman is either available or not available for other men to own or use. All of this leaves Pruitt’s observation of equality in Adam’s naming of Eve as perhaps the result of limited vision; whereas a Nussbaumian appraisal of Adam’s naming of Eve, as a practice bespeaking objectification, appears a more adequate method for assessing the impact of an act that denotes male ownership.

What we see in these creation accounts from both Eve and Adam is a disturbing mix of the assumed notion of male ownership and the resultant instrumental use of a woman, all of which disallows Eve’s autonomy. According to Nussbaum, “once one treats a human being as a thing one may buy or sell [property exchange], one is ipso facto treating that human being as a tool of one’s purposes” (264). This line of reasoning then leads Nussbaum to form the following rule: “ownership is by definition incompatible with autonomy” (264). In regard to Eve, we have seen how Adam’s ownership brings about a denial of her own autonomy at the time of her creation. Using this approach, we can view Eve as a reification of Nussbaum’s rule. Eve will never be self-sufficient away from Adam because her end is not, and never will be, in herself. These terms were dictated to her on her birth day.

As for the autonomy of men in Paradise, it is not hard to find moments throughout the narrative that subtly and not-so-subtly encourage the autonomy of the male sex. Adam’s recollection of Eve’s creation, for instance, fits a familiar pattern: Adam’s desires, whether expressed waking or asleep, are almost instantaneously fulfilled by God in the real world at the moment they are articulated. Just one hundred lines before his stated wish for, and receipt of, a gifted companion,  Adam dreams of surveying and mastering the land, and wakes to see that the land and its animal inhabitants are given to him: “I waked and found / before mine eyes all real as the dream / had lively shadowed” (8.309-11). In contradistinction to Adam’s experience, Eve dreams similarly of charting the land from an aerial view up in the “clouds”, yet she is not granted similar dominion over that land when she wakes (5.86). If her dream depicts her deepest wish, then that wish remains unfulfilled. Such a comparison between the dreams of Eve and Adam provides further support that Adam’s inclinations toward autonomy are largely encouraged and respected in Paradise, while Eve’s inclinations toward autonomy are largely discouraged and denied. 

Next we will turn to an analysis of the consequences of Eve’s first extended attempt to assert her own autonomy in Paradise. Her bold decision to work alone in the garden away from Adam delivers her directly into the hands of Satan. As Eve’s chief sexual objectifier in Paradise, Satan asserts his own dominance over Eve through his instrumental use and violation of her in the scenes surrounding his temptation. The following section will look closely at these motivations driving Satan’s approach to Eve, as he attempts to destroy all that she represents.   

Temptation

The more I see / pleasures about me so much more I feel / torment within me …. For only in destroying I find ease to my relentless thoughts.  (9.119-121, 129-130)

Satan’s impression of Paradise immediately preceding his temptation of Eve has been quoted in epigraph for its confession of two Satanic impulses: loneliness, stemming from lack of companionate pleasure in Hell; and destructive, malevolent envy, stemming from keenly felt injury at the promotion of humankind within God’s hierarchy. Both express Satan’s primary motives for penetrating Paradise and violating Eve. These two causes command significant attention for our project, and will provide the focus in this section for establishing a more structured delineation of the motivations driving Eve’s chief sexual objectifier. The conditions of violability, instrumentality, and ownership are the object-like qualities that come to the surface in Satan’s treatment of Eve. All of these qualities deserve to be investigated since they shed more light on Eve’s experience of and reaction to the conditions of Paradise leading to the fall.

To address Satan’s loneliness and consequent drive for pleasure, we should look to a sample of observations already made about the erotic nature of his advances toward Eve. There has already been considerable focus on this aspect of Satan’s temptation of Eve from a range of critical positions.[14] First, it should be noted that there is no clear indication in Biblical Genesis that Satan has sex with Eve during the temptation, however, there is evidence of Satan’s lust-filled interactions with Eve in the Rabbinical, midrashic readings of Genesis. Sources for this authority can be found in Genesis Rabbah and The Book of Enoch, both of which provide just a sample of the pre-Scriptural writings on the topic of Satan’s lechery. Respect here is given to the important work already done in this area by Evans in providing an extensive and detailed study of Milton’s adoption and revision of a number of Rabbinical influences in his depiction of a libidinous Satan. One influence that Evans draws our attention to is a set of lines from Genesis Rabbah 18.6 that explains just one of the reasons behind Satan’s sexual approach to Eve: “he saw them [Eve and Adam] engage in their natural functions ” so “he [the serpent] conceived a passion for her [Eve]” (Evans 46). This particular sequence of thoughts—Satan’s gazing on Eve and Adam, possibly catching them in a copulatory embrace, causing him to feel an increase in his own sexual desire—can be found in a comparable scene in Milton’s Paradise. Satan catches “sight” of Eve and Adam “imparadised in one another’s arms” and experiences the moment as a “tormenting” vision providing a sharp a reminder of his own “fierce desire” that remains “unfulfilled with pain of longing pines” (4.505-11). Here Milton establishes already a relationship of sexual desire between Satan in the role of objectifier and Eve in the role of objectified.

But this gives us a glimpse of just one layer of Satan’s drive to interfere with Eve. Envy, the malevolent and destructive sort, provides the other layer of Satan’s motivation to enter Eve’s world. Satan sees Eve as representing one half of a new species, humankind, created by God and granted sole enjoyment of a Paradisal world denied to him. Since Satan originates from a higher level in the chain of being, he naturally views himself as the rightful occupant of Paradise and more deserving than “earth-born” Eve and Adam (4.360). Here we see that envy of humankind provides the second element of Satan’s double impetus to interfere with and destroy Eve. Indeed, through Satan’s eyes, Eve embodies the potential for “pleasure” that is lacking in his life in Hell, and the “spoils” of Paradise “not for him ordained” (9.151, 470). Indicators of Eve’s chattel status abound in these scenes surrounding her temptation where Satan is depicted as a sexual interloper intending to conquer Paradise through the “ruin” of his enemies’ property (Eve) (9.493). To be more specific, Satan has every intention of “despoil[ing]” the innocence of Eve and he relishes the thought of sending Eve “back” to Adam “defaced” and “deflowered”—as damaged goods (9.411, 901). Such hints at Satan’s pre-meditated intention to violate Eve must be kept firmly in the front of our mind, especially considering from this point onward Satan adeptly convinces Eve of a more honourable set of intentions driving his approach.

In an act of self-determination, Eve boldly sets out to work alone in the face of Satan potentially crossing her path. Yet during this relatively brave act for Eve, she is described as a vulnerable, “unsupported”, ill-prepared “fair virgin”, figured in a bucolic scene reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s Crick’s “dairy”, where Satan as an Angel Clare-like figure pauses during his walking tour to admire Eve “alone” as another “delight” in the landscape (9.449-52). The overall impression here is one of openness to attack; a suggestion already forewarned in Milton’s earlier description of Eve’s likeness to “Pomona” (9.394). Both virgins, Eve and Pomona, represent initial denial of sexual access that is overcome by Satan and Vertumnus respectively through the violation of garden borders. As Green points out, both virgins are described as helpless to attack in “carrying not weapons but gardening tools” in their enclosed gardens—gardens that are both eventually penetrated by disguised men who execute “symbolic act[s] of violation” (918).  

During Satan’s very first observation of his new target, Eve, we detect hints of his motivation to sexually violate her. This can be seen in the description of the region near the barring walls of Eden featuring genitalic terms that connote initial denial of sexual access to a female. Satan approaches the perimeter of “delicious Paradise”; an “enclosure” featuring a “rural mound” (pubic bone) whose “hairy sides” (labia majora) with “thicket overgrown” (pubic hair) and “access denied” (Eve not intended for Satan’s use) (4.133-137). Compare this to Satan’s later “view” of Paradise once he has “overleaped” that barring wall (4.205, 181). Paradise now features a welcoming “lap” figured female “spread” open to a reveal a drenched “irriguous” crease in the landscape (4.254-55). Satan’s lascivious disposition quickly reads sexual invitation in the topography of Paradise now that he has the freedom to roam the circuits of the land.

Satan calls on similar sexual metaphors in his direct approach to Eve, using terms that allude to the topography of a female body. He describes to Eve the location of the Tree of Knowledge—“beyond a row of myrtles [breasts] on a flat [stomach] / fast by a fountain [genitals], one small thicket [pubic hair] past / of blowing myrrh and balm [vaporous effusions from the moist thicket]” (9.627-29). Wolfgang E. H. Rudat detects Shakespearean echoes of seductive language from ‘Venus and Adonis’ within Satan’s lines (8). Just as Venus explicitly describes her body in terms of landscape during her prolonged seduction of Adonis—“graze on my lips and if those hills be dry / stray lower where the pleasant fountains lie”—so Satan executes his approach to Eve using similar terms (233-34). At the conclusion of Satan’s suggestive description of “the way” to the Tree, he offers himself as a guide to “conduct” Eve to the place of the forbidden fruit of that tree (9.626, 630). Looking at conduct as it used in this passage, Satan proposes to engage in an escort’s tour of the contours of Eve’s body. The fact that he manages to get close enough to taste those “fair apples” (breasts) of Eve, represents his potential to effect a significant mishandling of Paradise’s “best of fruits” (9.585, 745). As the most prized piece of property in Paradise, the crux of the narrative then hinges on the fatal destruction Satan can inflict on humankind through his slow breaking down of Eve. 

If we can pause here to re-contextualise this episode within the sequence of strategic manoeuvres that have secured male power in PL, then we have no trouble locating Satan’s literal or figurative handling of Eve as the third, although admittedly brief, instance of Eve’s passage through male possession. After Eve’s initiation into the world as a possession of God, she then passes into the hands of Adam as a possession fulfilling the contractual demands placed upon her to meet the express requirements of Adam. These movements bring us to the current episode that tracks Eve’s passage out of the hands of Adam and directly into those of Satan. Eve’s exposure allows Satan to assert his own destructive strength against the creative strength of God that is expressed in the form of Eve. We see more clearly from this macroscopic view that Eve’s story encompasses a series of roles that bespeak an existence that is remarkably tool-like, since she is treated by all three men as an instrument to bring about their own individual claims to dominion. The case for arguing for an interpretation of Eve in this way, as an instrument of male power, is strengthened the longer she exists in the narrative, since the preceding context to each of her encounters with her male possessors tells the same story. We find here a predictable chain of inevitability that has a deciding influence on assessing Eve’s collective treatment by a succession of actors using her in a strikingly similar fashion. It would not be unreasonable to say at this point in the narrative that we see a clear paradigm of objectification coming into view. 

Returning now to Eve’s temptation, Satan inveigles Eve to taste the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge with promises she too can enjoy the “superior” status of a divine authority in Paradise—an authority purportedly contained in that fruit (9.825). Her very status as an agitated, unequal makes her inherently vulnerable to Satan’s designs in manipulating that vulnerability in order to undermine humankind’s monopoly on Earth. As we have seen, Eve is patently of the second order within her marriage and her larger environment, hence, it is highly excusable that she would want to grasp for anything whatsoever that would lift her out of that second order. Elisabeth Liebert says it is “explicable” that Eve reaches for the fruit “when we remember that she is conscious of her inferiority and has identified” in that fruit an avenue to “higher knowledge” that she believes can “dissolve hierarchy” (161). This motive suggests that the conditions in Milton’s Paradise reflect a weak and unsustainable structure to begin with. This project’s investigation has highlighted these problems inherent in the divinely ordered hierarchy that created Eve and the social conditions she had no real choice but to live under. The few glimpses we see of her reaching for a “sometime superior” position in Paradise—the lake scene, the dream, the fruit eating—now appear at the end of our investigation as perfectly reasonable responses to a life lived in a region entrenched with inequality between the sexes (9.824-25). Eve lived on the losing side during her days in Paradise. With this context in mind, it is utterly misguided to suggest that she used anything but a perfectly rational process of decision-making to take the actions that she took. The make-up of the material landscape in which she lived, the nature of her birth, and the nature of her marriage, have all contributed to her initiation of the fall. Yet, the judgement Eve receives in the closing books of PL condemns her actions as coming from the exercise of unreason and misdirected will. It is a judgement that constitutes a significant element in Milton’s grand argument that urges his audience to better apply their reason in obedience to God. With “strength entire and free will armed”, Milton argues, Eve should have obeyed the “high injunction not to taste the fruit” from the Tree of Knowledge (10.9, 10.13). When she does not follow the injunction, Eve’s action to eat the fruit is depicted as stemming from a perversion of her will, which ultimately causes her to “fall off from [her] Creator” and “transgress His will” (1.30-31). In the fallout from her actions, archangel Michael comes down hard Eve, attributing the inherent sinful state of humankind thereafter “mainly to the sin of Eve” (11.519). Adam too comes down hard on Eve in his verbal assault of her as a “fair defect of nature” acting out of “pride and wandering vanity” (10.874-75). The culmination of this collective denouncement comes in the final punishment decreed by the Son of God. His sentence on Eve is a promise to “greatly multiply” the sorrows of Eve through the children she shall conceive and through eternal submission to her husband’s will—“he over thee (Eve) shall rule” (10.193-96).

Milton’s audience is supposed to accept this collective judgement and consequent punishment of Eve. Indeed, they are supposed to accept her punishment for privileging Satan’s “glozing lies” over the single most important divine law in Paradise—to stay away from the fruit that promised her own escape from a life of subordination (3.93). Milton’s audience is also expected to accept the fact that Eve is attributed a significant amount of blame for causing that fall. But would Milton’s audience expect a fairer allocation of culpability between God, Adam, Satan, and Eve, if the features of Eve’s Paradise were assessed by modern researchers in the field of psychology who have done important work in assessing real-world situations of objectification. One such researcher, Erika R. Carr, is helpful for providing this project with an added measure to assess Eve’s experience in Paradise. She has defined the most common attributes of a typical sexually objectifying environment as follows:

1)    Existence of traditional gender roles

2)    A high probability of male contact exists, read as male-dominated environment

3)    Women typically hold less power than men in that environment

4)    A high degree of attention drawn to sexual/physical attributes of women’s bodies

5)    Approval and acknowledgement of the male gaze (21).

These conditions have been identified by Carr as elements in an environment that “encourage[s]” or “deepen[s]” cases of sexual objectification (14). As we have seen already, this project has detected every one of these five features in Eve’s immediate environment, which causes significant problems for the notion of blame attributed to her actions in attempting to transcend that environment.

Once we detect and detail these fundamental faults in Milton’s Paradise, we expose major faults in the structure of Milton’s overarching argument to ‘justify the ways of God to man” (1.26). Considering we can now more confidently contend that Paradise was never wholly attractive for one person representing one half of humankind, where does that leave Milton’s offer of a promise that believers can earn their eventual re-entry to a later iteration of that deeply unsatisfying Paradise? In light of what we now know about Eve’s life, Milton’s offer doesn’t sound so appealing for half of humankind. If we can allow ourselves to tackle this question in an exercise in counterfactual hypothesis, we could ask ourselves whether after all we have uncovered through this investigation, whether Milton’s argument would exhibit fewer faults if his Paradise were not figured as a place built on sexual inequality and widespread objectification of one sex by the other. Spender reminds us that “when we address ourselves to questions of this kind, it will be possible to shift towards locating inadequacies and deficiencies within the social structure and not within individual human beings” (Spender 60). This project has done just that. In exposing the conditions of entrenched sexual inequality in Paradise, and directing our magnifying glass on to the collective mistreatment of Eve in that environment, we now have a clearer view of the motivations driving her initiation of the fall. We now see better that Eve had no other real choice but to take the most convenient course of action offered by Satan in an attempt to transcend the disabling conditions of her life. Such knowledge informs this project’s exoneration of Eve in the face what we now better know about her treatment in Paradise.

All in all, we have shown why it is so important to perpetually test this myth of Eve—her creation, her marriage, and her temptation—with modern theoretical apparatuses that allow us to bring this myth into our own moment assessed anew. Considering the story of Eve has historically contributed to the mythologising of women witnessed today, so it follows, today’s standards should continue always to be brought to bear on that story going forward. The approach taken in this project provides just one step in the continual questioning, identifying, renaming, and challenging of the patriarchal status quo that has always constituted the essence of a feminist literary criticism that unashamedly acknowledges its politics. Ultimately the reach of this poem extends further than the limits of the audience of specialists who have produced in their commentaries during the last two decades a general whitewash of the otherwise disturbing treatment of Eve in PL. The words we use to discuss the treatment of Eve, either by condoning or condemning that treatment, have the ability to shape how we discuss similar treatment of women today. The importance of these words, and their ability to rename God’s tool-like use and punishment of Eve, or Adam’s ownership and control over Eve, or Satan’s violation of Eve, contributes to that larger process in resisting what can only be described as a long and “terrible tolerance” of “violence against women by men”—the single most condoned of human crimes (UN Women 2014).[15]

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Daly, Mary. The Church and the Second Sex. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

Evans, J. M. Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968.

Fallon, Stephen M. Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority. London: Cornell University Press, 2007.

Ferry, Anne. ‘Milton’s Creation of Eve’. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 28.1 (1988): 113-132.

Forsyth, Neil. The Satanic Epic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Froula, Christine. ‘When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy’. Critical Inquiry. 10.2 (1983): 321-347.

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[1] Nussbaum uses the term treatment for how we speak to, speak about, think about, or act towards a person.

[2] Maggie Kilgour pays “homage and fealty” to “the life and work of John Milton” in her introduction to Their Maker’s Image: New Essays on John Milton (2011).  Diane K. McColley confesses in religious tones to feelings of “communion” during the composition of Milton’s Eve (1983). Both imply a form of reverence for their lord John Milton that corroborates Stephen M. Fallon’s (2007) remark that “no wonder… Milton and Milton Studies have been scandals in the contemporary academy. If Roland Barthes famously announced three decades ago the ‘death of the author’, Milton is one author who has resolutely refused to die” (XI).

[3] Yet today we still witness prescriptivists, some of them arguably part of the dominant group, asserting their own anachronistic use of the term patriarchy as the correct and preferred use.

[4] Catherine Belsey (1988), Christine Froula (1983), Mary Nyquist (1987), Regina Schwartz (1991), and Jess G. Swann (1992).

[5] Diane K. McColley (1983), and Barbara K. Lewalski (1974).

[6] Daphne, Flora, Narcissus, Pomona, Proserpine, and Pygmalion.

[7] Metamorphoses, and Ars Amatoria.

[8] Anne Ferry (1988), Desma Polydorou (2001), Kristin A. Pruitt (2003), Alinda J. Sumers (2004), and Shannon Miller (2008).

[9] 1.36, 368; 2.383; 3.66, 161, 222, 275, 286; 4.10, 106, 313, 716; 5.228, 388, 506; 7.530; 8.358 (twice), 579, 650; 9.376, 415, 494, 950; 10.498, 676, 803, 876; 11.13, 38, 69, 159, 500, 696, 752, 903; 12.235, 276, 417, 601.

[10] 1.424, 8.624.

[11] The name Milton’s divine muse takes at this stage in the narrative.

[12] Mary Daly (1975), and Elaine H. Pagels (1976).

[13] The Gospel of Thomas 114, written 40 – 140AD and discovered late in 1945, provides evidence of systematic privileging of the male sex in the establishment of Christian authority: “Simon Peter said to them, ‘Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, 'See, I am going to attract her to make her male so that she too might become a living spirit that resembles you males. For every female that makes itself male will enter the kingdom of heaven” (Pagels 294).

[14] J. M. Evans (1968), J. M. Turner (1987), Neil Forsyth (2003), and Maggie Kilgour (2011).

[15] Speech excerpt from UN Women executive director Phumile Mlambo-Ngcuka 20 September 2014 “It has been suggested that the single greatest threat to a woman’s health is men… of all women killed in 2012, almost half were killed by intimate partners or family members” (UN Women).