Professor John Rogers:
We've been looking for the last few lectures at the ethics
and the theology that have throughout Paradise Lost
been produced -- at least, this has been my argument --
been produced and sanctioned by Milton's narrator.
We learned, for example, both from the narrator and also
from Raphael that Eve is inferior to Adam.
On the authority of the narrator and of Raphael,
the social hierarchy of Eden is established as what we can think
of as -- this is what also I have been arguing -- as the
dominant discourse of the poem. We can think of this as the
poem's official doctrine, if a poem can be said to have
an official doctrine. But there's obviously so much
more to Paradise Lost than the official discourses
of Raphael and the narrator. The poem seems continually --
and this is also what I've been arguing -- continually to be
opening up spaces for ideas other than the official,
sanctioned language of the narrator.
The angel Raphael, you'll remember,
was eager to assert the hierarchical worldview when the
narrator was speaking about Adam and Eve,
but as we saw last time, Raphael was willing to loosen
the constraints of the notion of hierarchy when he was pondering
the subject of astronomy. Raphael's astronomy was marked
really wonderfully by a lot of doubt and uncertainty,
and he refused to determine whether Ptolemy was right or
whether Copernicus was right. There's a way in which the
poem's doubt about one kind of hierarchy seemed to bleed over
into the other forms of hierarchy with which the poem
was also concerned. This is essentially a little
recap of the last lecture.Now so far in
Paradise Lost, the tension between the
poem's official line and what we can think of as its more
subversive strains -- this tension has surfaced in
Paradise Lost in a kind of contrapuntal fashion.
One position is simply juxtaposed without comment with
another, but the poem itself never seems explicitly in any
way to acknowledge the presence of the conflict or the presence
of the contradiction; that is, the poem doesn't seem
to acknowledge the presence of the conflict or contradiction
until now -- until Book Nine. Book Nine, which is the book of
the Fall, is structured by, I think, a far more explicit
opposition of that official, dominant discourse,
on the one hand, and the much more open-ended
critique of that discourse, on the other.
The stark opposition between these two competing positions is
manifest explicitly, for me, in the argument between
Adam and Eve on the morning of the Fall before their
separation.Before we actually look at the content of
that absolutely remarkable argument,
it's worth musing on the fact that Adam and Eve are having an
argument at all. It's amazing,
for that matter, that they're actually
conversing. In the conversation between
Adam and Eve before Eve's departure to work alone,
we have what, I think, has to be the first
conversation on earth: the first genuine dialogue,
a conversation -- well, there may be a very brief
exception in Book Five, but we'll set that aside --
that involves two individuals who do not already have in mind
the content of the other's speech;
a conversation (and of course, I'm thinking of all of the
conversations that we have, or that you have,
with one another) that possesses at least some element
of epistemological uncertainty, an element of surprise,
or the inability to know exactly what the other person is
going to say before he says it.Now Milton up to this
point hasn't been able to represent anything like the
genuine dialogue. There are some exceptions.
Maybe the dialogue between Satan and Abdiel during the war
in heaven, but on earth it's not so clear.
Before this moment, all language is more or less
ceremonial or ritualistic utterance.
Let's think of the Father and the Son in the dialogue in
heaven in Book Three. The Father's omniscience,
the fact that he knows everything, makes dialogue
absolutely impossible. He always knows in advance what
the Son is going to say. Even with Adam and Eve before
Book Nine -- Adam and Eve seem to know in advance,
in some way, the content of the other's
speech; and so Adam will begin a speech
(and this happens all the time) with some variation of this
little formula: "Well thou knowest Eve that
blah blah blah" -- in other words,
of course you know this, Eve, but I'm going to say it
anyway. Eve will tell Adam,
"That day I oft remember," and then she will proceed to tell
him something presumably that she's already told him a number
of times before. Conversation before this point
has been ritualistic, it's been ceremonial,
and it is essentially unnecessary in these early parts
of the poem.The dialogue between Adam and Eve at the
scene of their separation is really different from these
ceremonial utterances. For the first time,
they're speaking speeches from alien perspectives with purposes
and intentions that are foreign to one another.
They seem to us familiar -- we recognize these people,
and in this conversation, and it's actually an argument
as much as it is a conversation, Milton is giving us an emblem,
finally I think, of what this poem has been
doing all along: this poem has been arguing with
itself. The dominant official language
of hierarchy has been pitting itself against the questioning,
subversive language of equality, and here in this
conversation Milton gives a dramatic shape to what has been
heretofore the abstract, intellectual conflicts that had
so textured so many of the earlier books.
And so here in Book Nine at the moment of the separation between
Adam and Eve, we can see these two world
views, these two enormous ways in which Paradise Lost
thinks, separate almost to the point of
absolute incompatibility. Whether this divergence will be
nearly a separation or whether it will be an actual divorce,
I think, is an open question.Now you can think
of Milton assigning faces here in Book Nine to a lot of these
positions that have heretofore been abstract.
Adam represents in this dialogue the nervous voice of
the poem's orthodoxy, and Eve represents the
questioning voice, the voice that questions and
critiques that orthodoxy. To his credit -- and Milton's
not often given credit for this -- he goes out of his way to
lend a certain authority to Eve's critique,
and he does so by structuring her argument as something like a
retrospective of his own career as a radical polemicist:
so Eve takes up the role of the radical Milton in this,
it seems. She's put in the strange and
utterly fascinating position of quoting the younger Milton,
and you have something like a recap in the speeches of Eve
here, in this discussion with Adam,
of the great moments in this writer's work.Now,
the first subject of their discussion involves the topic
that has been absolutely central,
and we know this, to Milton throughout his
career, and this is the subject of work or labor -- essentially,
the value of human activity. The ostensible premise for the
separation of Adam and Eve on the morning of the Fall is Eve's
desire to work separately from Adam.
Eve is arguing that they will be more productive if they
divide their labors. Think of the ways in which this
resonates for us. Milton has been juxtaposing for
years the two accounts of the value of labor that he had found
in the New Testament, the parable of the workers in
the vineyard and the parable of the talents.
As early as Sonnet Seven, written when Milton was
twenty-three or twenty-four, he was depicting scenarios in
which those two parables could be seen to argue with one
another on just this question: on the value and the importance
of labor. While the parable of the
talents seemed to be chiding Milton for not working hard
enough and not working fast enough,
the parable of the workers in the vineyard seemed to
assure him in some way that he didn't need to work quite so
hard, that God didn't require his
incessant and laborious efforts. It's a measure of just how
difficult Milton wants it to be for us to adjudicate between
Adam and Eve in this book that he casts their argument in just
this language, the language of political
economy and work. It's an argument that involves
all of the implications, I think, of what are for Milton
those two highly charged parables.Now I think it's
almost impossible for us to come to this scene without some
assumption that Eve is wrong. We assume -- and it's
understandable -- that because Eve will, as we know,
go on to disobey the prohibition of the fruit,
she must therefore at this point on some level be wrong or
certainly, in some way, mistaken during this
conversation. But Milton takes some amazingly
interesting steps, I think, to counter what he
knows will be our immediate assumptions.
He attempts to counter our assumptions by allowing Eve to
voice that position in a dialogue that most closely
resembles the parable of the talents.
So look at page 383 in the Hughes. This is Book
Nine, line 201. First of all,
it's the narrator here who's opening the subject of work.
This is line 201. He's discussing the topic of
conversation between Adam and Eve at the beginning of their
day: "They cómmune how that day they best may ply /
Their growing work: for much thir work outgrew /
The hands' dispatch of two Gard'ning so wide."So we
learn from the official perspective of the narrator here
that Eve will have children. This is incredibly
consequential information that she was to have children even
before the Fall. We learn that even before they
have children, this garden demands an
extraordinary amount of work from Adam and Eve and that the
garden seems in some way to be actually spinning out of
control. This is a nightmare landscape
from the perspective of a house owner!
I think this passage is important because it's the
narrator here who validates Eve's initial position in this
first speech.So Eve suggests that when Adam and Eve work
together, their affectionate looks,
their absolutely adorable smiles, distract each other from
their labor. This is line 223 of Book Nine.
So all of those intervening looks and smiles,
she argues, "intermits / Our day's work brought to little,
though begun / Early, and th' hour of Supper comes
unearn'd." Eve has clearly embraced the
Protestant work ethic, and she displays an intuitive
grasp of the importance of the parable of the talents:
God only rewards those who exert themselves or who invest
their talent in an activity. It's impossible not to ascribe
to Eve at least some of the authority that's attached to the
parable of the talents here.Now Adam counters Eve
with some version of the parable of the workers in the vineyard,
claiming that there's more to work than simple productivity.
This is line 242. Adam's talking:
"For not to irksome toil, but to delight / He made us,
and delight to Reason join'd." For Adam, one is still serving
God when one takes pleasure in one's work.
The importance lies more in the willingness to serve and not in
the actual amount of work that's been accomplished or in the
amount of stuff that's been produced.
Milton himself was obviously always wanting to take Adam's
side in this debate, but he seems to have been
continually fearful -- at least this is my assumption -- that
Eve was right: that God requires our continual
labor.You can also hear Milton making a distinction
between Eve's zeal for labor and his own efforts in writing this
very poem. Milton's poem,
we remember, had been "long choosing but
beginning late." Like the workers in the
vineyard, Milton doesn't get around to writing the poem until
late in his literary career. Eve's labor is begun early,
and there's even a sense here that beginning early isn't good
enough for Eve; she seems to be pushing to get
up even earlier and to work even harder.
Eve is the modern voice of workplace efficiency.
She supplies the voice of conscience that chides not only
Adam but the voice of conscience that seems always to be chiding
the poet himself.Now surely Adam is right -- we have to hand
it to him -- in arguing that they are not in a position to
earn their supper as if they were merely wage laborers.
That's not how Milton's Eden works.
None of their labor actually goes into the harvesting or the
production of food. They're fed plenty,
but that's because the fruits simply land in their hands.
The work that they perform is all entirely ornamental -- it's
ornamental gardening: pruning, cutting back,
propping up. It's never productive in any
kind of economic sense or quasi-economic sense.
Their gardening is merely a virtuous activity that is
entirely divorced from the demands of productivity or the
demands of nourishment. So Adam is right;
but while Adam is right, in a certain sense he doesn't
address directly the problem that the narrator himself has
already acknowledged, and that's the problem that the
garden [laughs] seems to be growing at a faster
rate than Adam and Eve are able to manage.
This is amazing. Look at line 205.
This is where Eve notes how excessive [laughs]
the growth patterns seem to be in paradise.
So, Eve to Adam: Adam, well may we labour
still to dress This Garden,
still to tend Plant, Herb, and Flow'r,
Our pleasant task enjoin'd; but, till more hands
Aid us, the work under our labor grows,
Luxurious by restraint; what we by day
Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop,
or bind One night or two with wanton
growth derides Tending to wild.
I think Eve here makes an absolutely central argument.
It's not an argument that Adam counters, and I think it's not
an argument that Adam would even be capable of countering:
and that's the idea that the garden is on some level growing
out of control, that the vegetation is
literally here "tending to wild."
It's "tending to wild" because Adam and Eve are continually
cutting it back -- that's their "pleasant task enjoin'd":
"the work under our labor grows,
/ Luxurious by restraint…"
So Eve isn't simply describing natural growth patterns in the
garden: she's examining the effects on nature of the
imposition of culture.We're reminded here of the
etymological origin of our notion of culture,
which involves the cultivation of the land -- it's an
agricultural metaphor. In this respect,
Eve can be seen to articulate something like a theory of
culture, and her theory has everything
to do with our understanding of the Fall not as a theological
problem, but our understanding of the
Fall as a cultural problem. According to Eve,
the garden is wilding, it's growing disobedient;
but it's not growing disobedient out of any natural
necessity but because of Adam and Eve's cultural imposition of
restraining. It's that pruning and propping
and lopping and binding. If left to itself,
for all we know -- who knows? I think this is a perfectly
reasonable scenario -- the garden might actually grow at a
reasonable, moderate, and orderly pace.
This new disorderliness in the garden, this wildness,
seems to be the result of the unnatural,
cultural attempt to restrain that natural order.So think
of what this is. God's command to Adam and Eve
to restrain the garden is on some level the miniature version
of his much more consequential commandment to refrain from
eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.
I think that Eve in this speech presents us with a reading of
the significance of the more important commandment;
but of course, this is a reading that is
incredibly subversive, and that's why we rely so much
on Eve when we read this poem. She is so magnificently the
voice of the subversive. If I'm reading Eve correctly
here, the imposition of law doesn't control disorder:
it produces disorder. There's a sense in which the
arbitrary interdiction of the fruit sets in motion an
inexorable process whereby the interdiction has to be
broken.This is obviously a sense of the Fall that Milton
cannot permit within the official parameters of the
poem's dominant doctrine even though this theory,
Eve's subversive theory, does come actually rather close
to a number of Paul's statements in the Epistle to the Romans
-- but officially in the poem,
the Fall is an act of free will. It's a freely undertaken
choice, but according to Eve's embedded prophesy of the Fall,
which is what I take this to be, there's no such thing really
as free will. The Father's prohibition seems
to necessitate in some way their disobedience in the same way
that pruning a tree -- and we know this to be a fact --
pruning a tree forces or necessitates new growth.
It's almost as if Eve were suggesting that there was
something like an organic, natural necessity to the
Fall.Now I think that's one way in which Milton looks back
at his former interest in work -- at his former interest in the
interaction of those two parables,
and he's bending their implications and their meanings
in an entirely new way here; but there's another way in
which the separation dialogue looks back at and essentially
uses the essential material from Milton's earlier career.
This is Eve's staggeringly brilliant deployment of the
central argument from Areopagitica,
the 1644 anti-licensing tract.
Look at line 320 of Book Nine. This is page 386 in the
Hughes. Now Adam has claimed that they can best pass
the trial of Satan's temptation if they're together -- a
perfectly reasonable position. If Adam is there to guide Eve
and to protect her, the Fall is less likely to
happen; but to Eve -- and this is Eve's
argument -- this sounds as if Adam were attempting to censor
her environment, as if he were trying to protect
her from the potentially dangerous speech of the tempter.
Of course, that is what he's trying to do,
and so she responds to what she hears to be Adam's paternal
solicitude. This is Eve at line 322:
If this be our condition, thus to dwell
In narrow circuit strait'n'd by a Foe,
Subtle or violent, we not endu'd Single with like defense,
wherever met; How are we happy,
still in fear of harm? This is a devastating question.
Eve issues a powerful critique of what she takes to be Adam's
act of censorship. When she suggests that she is
living in an increasingly "narrow circuit straight'n'd by
a Foe," it's almost as if she's
alluding to Milton's declaration in Areopagitica;
you remember these lines: "I cannot praise a fugitive in
cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed,
that never sallies out and sees her adversary."
"What is virtue?" Milton had asked in
Areopagitica. What is it if it's never
tested? What is virtuous resistance if
there's nothing there actually to resist, if the information
one is being given is continually being licensed and
censored and controlled? Eve refuses to accept the idea
that Eden might be structured like an authoritarian state,
like the Stuart monarchy.At line 337 she lets loose.
This is a searing criticism of a paradise in which an
individual cannot be relied upon to choose freely her own
actions, line 337: "Let us not then
suspect our happy State / Left so imperfect by the Maker wise,
/ As not secure to single or combin'd."
Now the syntax is a little difficult there.
She's saying, "Let's not imagine that we're
unsafe here. Let's not doubt that the maker
created us secure," by which she means "safe," "whether we're on
our own or whether we're together."
Then she continues: "Frail is our happiness,
if this be so, / And Eden were no Eden thus
expos'd." Eve here is exposing an
ideological contradiction at the heart of Milton's Eden.
At the center of her argument is a powerful alternative to the
official line of Milton's poem. Eve is pronouncing -- this is
the structure of a theological argument, this is a theodicy:
she's justifying the ways of God to men as she sees them.
This is the logic, I take it, of what she's just
said: "If I am not free to resist temptation alone,
then this is not a justifiable world.
If I am not free to resist temptation alone,
God is not a justifiable God. Eden were no Eden, thus exposed.
Therefore," she concludes, "I must be free to resist
temptation alone." That's her logical
conclusion.Now Eve's claim for the true state of Eden is a
lot like Milton's claim some twenty years earlier in
Areopagitica for the true state of England.
There is at base a state of equality among human
individuals, and the individual himself,
singly and not combined, should be empowered to resist
temptation alone. The poem has gone to great
lengths to make the official case for God's -- how could it
not? this is a version of Genesis --
for God's imposition of an arbitrary set of hierarchical
distinctions and for God's ability to impose arbitrary law.
Milton is supporting that throughout the poem;
but Paradise Lost is also willing to identify just
those arbitrary hierarchies as something like the source for
Eden's imperfection, and he does that even as he
celebrates God's ability to impose these arbitrary
distinctions. It's this exposure of Eden's
structural flaws, I think, that best helps us
understand the internal dynamics of the temptation scene.
When Satan tempts Eve, he invariably tempts her with
some version of all of those desires and all of those
aspirations that Eden's hierarchical culture has
struggled, and struggled mightily,
to suppress.Look at the top of page 391.
This is line 538 of Book Nine. Our first encounter with Eve
involved, you'll remember, the suppression of her
admiration of that beautiful image that she saw in the pool
-- or the suppression of what came later to be interpreted as
something like her narcissism. Eve was created with what
seemed to be a natural, beautiful, and instinctive
admiration for the image that she found in the pool.
That admiration was, of course, entirely innocent
because Eve had no way of knowing that that was her own
image; but with the onset of that
mysterious warning voice, Eve was turned away from that
image of herself, and her behavior became branded
as narcissism thereafter. It wasn't, of course,
true narcissism, but the imposition of that new
restraint upon her seems to have produced in Eve,
or created in her, something like a true
narcissism. It's this culturally produced
-- this is a character flaw that we can identify as a culturally
produced one, and it's one that Satan is able
to exploit with utter ingenuity at the temptation scene.
So this is Satan at line 538 to Eve:
Fairest resemblance of thy Maker fair,Thee all
living things gaze on, all things thineBy gift,
and thy Celestial Beauty adoreWith ravishment beheld,
there best beheldWhere universally admir'd.
So Eve's affection for a responsive image,
for a sympathetic gaze -- that's all she was getting out
of the pool -- was denied her at the pool.
This restraint seems to have produced in her something like a
self-love, a self-love that has grown luxurious by restraint,
and Satan knows that. The tendency to narcissism was
only one component of her character that was exposed in
the scene at the poolside. The pleasure that Eve was
deriving from the answering smiles, those beautiful,
sympathetic looks in the pool -- that pleasure is akin in many
ways to the pleasure that a lot of infants derive from the first
moments of their existence. I'm thinking of the infant's
pleasure in its initial interaction with the mother.
This shouldn't be surprising: one of the things that Milton
tries to accomplish in the narrative of Eve's development
is something like a larger theory of human development in
general.But of course, unlike all the rest of us,
Eve doesn't have a mother. It's the role of the mother
both in culture and in nature that has been systemically
excluded, necessarily but nonetheless
systematically excluded, from Paradise Lost.
Whatever experience of a kind of maternal affection that
Eve may have felt in the answering looks and the
sympathetic smiles is summarily cut off with the warning voice.
Just as he did with her narcissism, Satan tempts Eve
with precisely that natural phenomenon, that natural
instinct that's been denied her. Look at Satan, line 578.
He describes his first glance at the "goodly Tree far distant
to behold," and we, of course, know what that
goodly tree is. The serpent says:
I nearer drew to gaze;When from the boughs a
savory odor blown,Grateful to appetite, more pleas'd my
sense Than smell of sweetest Fennel,
or the TeatsOf Ewe or Goat dropping with Milk at
Ev'n,Unsuckt of Lamb or Kid, that tend thir play.
Surely we all agree that this is a surprising [laughs]
and a strange simile here. In comparing the smell of the
forbidden fruit to mother's milk, Satan is offering Eve an
embedded image of the mother, and by placing the scene in the
evening or what he calls "Ev'n," Satan is able to insert Eve's
actual name into the expression of a natural desire to suckle at
the mother's breast.But what's at stake here isn't
simply Eve's longing for the mother that she never had.
The situation is a lot more radical than that because at the
scene at the pool, in so many ways,
Eve was actually mothering herself.
At least on an experiential level, Eve seemed to have been
-- this is the way she must have felt it subjectively:
she was the source of her own creation much as Satan claimed
that he had raised himself by his own quickening power.
Eve had represented the possibility for the poem of
something like an absolute self-possession and an absolute
self-containment. You'll remember that Adam had
informed Raphael in Book Eight (this was at line 547 of Book
Eight) that he had been struck by this incredible air of
self-contained-ness that Eve had.
He tells Raphael, "[W]hen I approach / Her
loveliness, so absolute she seems / And in herself
complete," and Raphael,
of course, hastened to warn Adam against the attraction to
female self-sufficiency. There's a sense in which
Eve is absolutely independent. She's mother and daughter
united in one self-determining being, and it is just this
maternal self-sufficiency that the law of the garden has denied
Eve -- and so like clockwork it returns here in Satan's
temptation. The third element of Satan's
temptation involves the taboo that was established by Raphael
-- this is the taboo of speculation.
Raphael had told Adam, "Don't concern yourself and
don't worry so much about speculating about the cosmos
because the structure of the cosmos simply doesn't concern
you." "Be lowly wise," Raphael told
Adam, and "know to know no more."
How on earth could Milton, the author of Areopagitica,
put those words in the mouth of the archangel?
It's too troubling even to speculate about.
But look down at line 602 of Book Nine.
(This is page 392.) The serpent argues that one of the effects
of the fruit was the awakening (and of course,
he's lying) in him of the power of reason, wakening in him his
capacity for speculation. Thenceforth to
Speculations high or deepI turn'd my thoughts,
and with capacious mindConsider'd all things
visible in Heav'n, Or Earth,
or Middle, all things fair and good...
No form of speculation has been licensed or censored for the
serpent, according to Satan. He gets to think whatever he
wants. This is exactly the vision of
the liberal, Miltonic universe represented so majestically and
so compellingly in Areopagitica.
Again the temptation to speculate is intimately linked
with this cultural law against speculation and the restraint of
speculation.Finally and most importantly,
Eve is tempted with just that aspect of her status that this
poem has most vigorously denied her and that's the possibility
-- and I take this very seriously -- that she's
actually, at least on a natural and
ontological level, Adam's equal.
The possibility of the fundamental or natural
egalitarianism of Eden, rather,
is one of the principal objects of cultural suppression in
Raphael's long discourse with Adam.
Raphael's denial of their equality really fills the pages
of Book Eight, and so naturally the desire for
equality surfaces one of the principal motives for Eve's
transgression. By eating the fruit,
Eve perhaps -- this is unspeakably heartbreaking -- can
produce in herself an equality with Adam.
That's the fantasy, and the speaking serpent
provides the best evidence imaginable of the alleged
ability of the fruit to function as a kind of chemical equalizer.
It's like a testosterone-laced cocktail that offers the false
hope of equality. Look at line 687, Satan to Eve:
[L]ook on mee,Mee who have touch'd and tasted,
yet both live,And life more perfet have attain'd than
FateMeant mee, by vent'ring higher then my
Lot. In other words,
"Eat this fruit and you will become greater than you have,
up to this point, been allowed to be.
Eat this fruit and you will become greater than your lot in
life permits." Now this has to be one of the
most powerful inducements. As a political philosopher,
Milton knows better than anyone the power of the desire for
equality.It's just this promise of equality that is most
important to Eve after she has eaten the fruit.
This is after the Fall. This is line 816 of Book Nine.
This is the middle of page 397. Eve is musing to herself:
But to Adam in what sortShall I appear?
shall I to him make knownAs yet my change,
and give him to partakeFull happiness with mee,
or rather not. But keep the odds of Knowledge
in my powerWithout Copartner?
so to add what wantsIn Female Sex, the more to draw his
Love [and I love this], And render me more equal,
and perhaps,A thing not undesireable,
sometimeSuperior: for inferior who is free?
There is an unspeakable pathos charging these lines because it
becomes clear that one of the primary reasons that Eve has
fallen in the first place involves a structural problem
inherent in the Miltonic paradise: and that's the
official insistence on a social hierarchy.
Of course, the poem is continually arguing that social
inferiority does not impinge upon human freedom.
Just because Eve is inferior to Adam doesn't mean that she isn't
free. That's the official line,
but Milton knows perfectly well that the radical type of freedom
for which he had argued in his early career as a polemicist had
been founded upon an assumption of equality.
In Areopagitica Milton had implied that we're all free
to read whatever we want because we are all equally endowed with
reason. That's at least implicitly his
argument, yet Paradise Lost had instituted at the heart
of its body politic a distinctly hierarchical society.
There may be a natural instinct for equality.
There's a natural instinct for equality that we feel both with
Adam and with Eve, but the official culture of
Eden has labored to suppress that instinct;
and at the moment of the temptation, the tremendous cost
of that suppression is measured.Now,
from the doctrinal point of view, Eve is clearly wrong here
to question her divinely sanctioned place in the order of
things. We have to see her as wrong,
but there is a voice that counters the poem's doctrine,
and it argues that the imposition of such an arbitrary
law of hierarchy can only produce a corresponding desire
to subvert that hierarchy. You'll note here the further
point that the denial of equality doesn't merely
precipitate a desire for equality.
I think it pushes us even further to a desire -- it's
really wild. The denial of equality actually
pushes us even further to a desire for superiority.
Eve entertains the lovely thought of being -- and isn't
this a wonderful phrase! -- "sometime / Superior," as if
Adam and Eve could assume different positions on the
hierarchical ladder at will -- as if Adam and Eve could "either
rung assume" or both, just as Milton's angels can
"either sex assume." The suppression of equality
even pushes Eve to that perfectly illogical but
completely understandable formulation: she'd like to be
"more equal," as if equality could be
quantified in some way; as if equality weren't a
relational phenomenon, a structural phenomenon,
but one that could be assumed entirely by oneself and one that
could be hoarded and kept within the self in quantity.Now,
according to the official doctrine of the poem,
the moment of Eve's eating of the fruit is the origin of the
original human condition of fallen-ness.
Man lived until this time in a state of paradisal perfection,
and it's out of an absolutely free will that man chooses to
disobey the divine command. But the narrative that Milton
employs to illustrate this official doctrine seems
continually to be questioning just that assumption.
Milton's poetry seems to counter this belief in Edenic
perfection and counter this belief, even,
in Edenic freedom before the Fall.
There's a sense in Paradise Lost that Adam and Eve --
and I know this is heretical -- were never completely free in
Eden. They were always burdened by a
set of cultural constraints of which the prohibition of the
fruit was simply the most outrageous,
but certainly not the only, one.Look at page 402.
This is another important moment after the Fall,
line 1051. This is the moment in which
Adam and Eve wake up after their first act of sexual intercourse
after the Fall. This is their first attempt at
fallen sleep which, of course, doesn't turn out to
be that pleasant. So: [U]p they roseAs
from unrest, and each the other viewing,Soon found thir Eyes
how op'nd, and thir mindsHow dark'n'd;
innocence, that as a veilHad shadow'd them from
knowing ill, was gone,Just confidence,
and native righteousness,And honor from
about them, naked leftTo guilty shame...
So this is Milton's version of the Genesis text.
This is what Genesis tells us: "he eyes of both were opened,
and they knew that they were naked..."
They've awakened to a new form of consciousness,
but Milton wants us to know that this new form of knowledge,
this new self-consciousness, isn't an enlightenment:
it's a darkening. "hir minds / How dark'n'd,"
Milton explains.But it's so much more complicated than that.
No sooner has Milton depicted the Fall as a darkening than he
does something incredibly strange.
He describes the Fall from innocence as if the Fall were in
itself something like an enlightenment:
"innocence, that as a veil / Had shadow'd
them from knowing ill, was gone…"
There's an incredibly complicated but wonderfully
contradictory interplay of lightening and darkening,
and the imagery here begins to deconstruct itself.
On the one hand, the Fall darkens their minds,
and on the other hand, they're enlightened as the
shadowy veil is lifted.It's at this moment that the poem
seems to expose the fictional status of its representation of
something like a perfect, unfallen innocence.
Surely we expected Milton to say something completely
different. Surely we expected Milton to
say that innocence was the natural, naked Adam and Eve,
and that this innocent nakedness is now being covered
with a veil, a veil of guilt or a veil of shame -- but Milton's
doing, of course, exactly the opposite.
What does he say? Innocence was itself the veil.
The very idea of their perfect, unfallen state was the veil;
the very notion that Adam and Eve ever lived in a free
paradise was a veil. It was a fiction,
it was a false covering -- a veil thrown over the Edenic
society that was always and already a product of fallen
cultural constraints.Now, I don't need to remind you of
this because I know this is what you're thinking.
We have, of course, run into the image of the veil
before in Paradise Lost. An image of the veil
appeared in the description in the length of Eve's hair,
and remember that was a fact of culture that was being mistaken
by the narrator as a fact of nature.
In Book Four, line 304, the narrator -- and
you don't need to move there because you remember these lines
-- the narrator tells us that Eve:
[A]s a veil down to the slender waistHer unadorned
golden tresses wore Disshevell'd,
but in wanton ringlets wav'd As the Vine curles her
tendrils, which impli'd Subjection...
Our first understanding of Eve's subjection to Adam was
derived from the length of Eve's hair, which she wore as a veil.
A veil, of course, is only worn to hide something.
It's a covering of a source of shame that in this case may have
seemed to be Eve's nakedness, but that equation of Eve's hair
with a veil took place -- think of it.
It took place before the Fall, before nakedness was shameful.
The poem seemed to raise the possibility that there was
actually never a moment at which Adam and Eve were entirely free
from the kinds of constraints and the kinds of prohibitions
that we associate with fallen culture,
with culture after the breaking of the prohibition.It's,
of course, no accident that the image of the veil occurs in Book
Nine in the context of our introduction to Edenic hierarchy
and to the fact of Eve's subordinate status,
because the Fall itself seems in so many ways,
I think, to be one of the cultural consequences of this
fact of sexual subordination. Milton's strange image of the
veil of innocence in Book Nine -- what is this?
This is a paradox, a rhetorical paradox,
and this paradox announces what is essentially the paradoxical
construction of Eden, of Milton's Eden.
On the official, on the doctrinal,
level of the poem, the falling of this veil of
innocence exposes Adam's and Eve's nakedness.
It's a sign of their new fallen consciousness of their shame.
That's how we're supposed to be reading, presumably,
this image; but this paradoxical image also
works on that other level, on the much more subversive
level of the poem. It exposes a structural flaw at
the heart of Milton's paradise. Milton lets the doctrinal veil
fall from the poem, and he exposes his own alliance
here -- and I really believe this -- with Eve's critique of
Eden's arbitrary hierarchy. It's as if Milton had torn the
veil of dogma from his poem and he's begun to realize what Eve
has known all along: "Eden were no Eden thus
expos'd."Okay. That's it.
