SOURCE: "Demystifying Disguises: Adam, Eve, and the Subject of Desire," in Renaissance Discourses of Desire, University of Missouri Press, 1993, pp. 237-58.

One of the chief innovations in Milton's conception of paradise is his frank acceptance of desire as an essential and inalienable attribute of the human condition. Free of "dishonest shame," Adam and Eve need neither the "mere shows of seeming pure" nor any of the other "troublesome disguises which wee wear." Yet not merely the "Hypocrites austere" the poet condemns for "defaming as impure what God declares / Pure," but many modern readers also question the innocence of this portrayal of uninhibited "connubial Love." What seems to be "free to all"—desire—may not be free and, in fact, has been interpreted as something less than pure and more than patriarchal, as the mystified voice of patriarchy itself.

In fact, though Adam demanded, and God seemed to grant, a consort fit "to participate / All rational delight," our first view of the human pair suggests that they are unequal, "as thir sex not equal seem'd." However, since this observation is conveyed not only through the potentially misleading verb of "seeming," but actually through the eyes of Satan himself, many of the poem's more sympathetic readers have been inclined to reject these "appearances" as deceptive. Yet unfortunately for this line of defense, all else that Satan observes about our "Grand Parents" turns out to be accurate not only from his own but from the narrator's point of view. If we are to dispute the inequality he attributes to Eve, then we must doubt both that she and Adam are "Lords of all," since they only seem so, and also suppose that Satan's gaze is no more correct in observing how they are formed than how they seem. Furthermore, although both male and female merely seem worthy of the image of their maker, it is their "seeming" to reflect this image that allows them to be "plac't" in "true filial freedom," while their purported inequality is reinforced by the description of Eve being "form'd" for "softness" and "sweet attractive grace," Adam "for contemplation … and valor." Finally, since Satan's observations prove especially reliable whenever his success is at stake, and since his observations here are not only useful to his plans but mixed with an unfeigned if ambivalent sense of admiration, it seems most plausible to assume that not merely his torment but his gaze is sharpened as he spies upon the pair, seeing

Two of far nobler shape erect and tall,
Godlike erect, with native Honor clad
In naked Majesty seem'd Lords of all,
And worthy seem'd, for in thir looks Divine
The image of thir glorious Maker shone,
Truth, Wisdom, Sanctitude severe and pure,
Severe, but in true filial freedom plac't;
Whence true autority in men; though both
Not equal, as thir sex not equal seem'd;
For contemplation hee and valor form'd,
For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace,
He for God only, shee for God in him.

Whatever the conflicting connotations of the verbs in this passage, their ultimate effect is to confirm the ironically appropriate inconsistency of Satan's gaze, a gaze not fundamentally different from our own. Sharing some of his dis-ease but also his awe, we are thus led into a paradisal paradox without any "seeming" resolution.

At the heart of this paradox lie the unresolved questions of whether Eve's weaker attributes can be reconciled with her full reflection of God's image, and whether her belatedness also implies a secondariness in dignity and power. The centrality of these issues is further stressed by the fact that the observation of her inherent "softness" is immediately followed and seemingly summarized by the most decisive statement of the difference between the two, their sequential and apparently subordinationist creation, "He for God only, Shee for God in Him." If this difference is taken literally, what, if anything, can remain of their "true filial freedom"; does it not thereby become an empty technicality, or even a covert form of domination that, as Christine Froula concludes, not only "transsexualizes" Eve's autonomous desire, but also serves as a means of "silencing and voiding … female creativity"? However, like the defense of Edenic desire that would dismiss Satan's "seeming" point of view entirely, an unproblematic acceptance of this point of view—which requires dismissing Eve entirely—raises as many problems as it resolves. Like a large number of the solutions proposed both by Milton's detractors and his defenders, Froula's account omits many of the epic's actual ambiguities by drawing upon inherited assumptions about the "orthodoxly" Puritan, patriarchal poet and, consequently, about the uniform, didactic purpose supposedly informing what is actually an unconventional, evolutionary epic. Yet just as surely as Milton's Eden contrasts with the conventionally static Paradise, his portrayal of the "yet sinless" Adam and Eve resists the conventional treatment by emphasizing the constant alteration, development, and reciprocity of capacities that belong at once to general human subjects and to specific male and female prototypes.

Thus any atemporal reading of this "allegory of desire" tends to ignore how the poem exploits traditional, even courtly models of male and female subjectivity only to subvert them, just as it exploits Edenic gates and boundaries primarily to subordinate them to individual choice. As Adam's "sudden apprehension" reveals in the aftermath of Eve's "tainted" dream, even Satan's most forceful incursions into Eden can easily be undone by the willing subject: "Evil into the mind of God or Man / May come and go, so unapprov'd, and leave / No spot or blame behind." Similarly, God's provisions for "advent'rous Eve" are not only ambiguous but also ultimately impermanent. Although she is initially depicted as the vine to Adam's elm, she later proves more of a quester, at least in the physical, heroic sense, than he is, while he takes on the guiding and corrective functions that Spenser would assign a feminine "conscience" or soul like Una's. In this way not only are both sexes "transsexualized," but the substitutions and transferences of this process are never stabilized into a new hierarchy. A dialectic of assertion and subversion is finally the most characteristic element of the landscape and life of this paradise; and in spite of the intimate connections between the former and the latter, no permanent alteration in matter or spirit ever occurs that is not subject to the reversal implicit in the free act of the desiring subject. Hence, lacking Eve's permission, Satan proves no Archimago; he can impose on her only the most transitory and ultimately unreal loss, a mere inquietude. Correspondingly, since all Edenic boundaries exist primarily to mark the threshold of choice, not of purity or contamination, its gender roles like its other "barriers" characteristically remain "virtue proof because—not in spite of—the potentially "errant" suggestions that surround them.

For these as well as a number of related reasons, the paradisal paradox can only be untangled by emphasizing that although the epic portrayal of gender (as of all physical appearances) grants each a power and a dignity of their own, the poem's characteristic mode of emblematic outline and qualification, statement and revision, ultimately depicts Eve's subjection to Adam's authority as more apparent than real. "Impli'd" but not coerced, even the most fundamental precept of her submission—that it be "requir'd with gentle sway"—remains open to her own as well as to Adam's interpretation. In fact, the multiple meanings of "requir'd" underscore the ambiguity of Milton's interpretation of biblical headship (1 Cor. 11:3-10; Eph. 5:23) in ways that make the verbal qualifications surrounding this "sway" far more meaningful than those surrounding "seeming." To require can mean either to request or to exact, but since the "yet sinless" Eve is not always "submiss," the former, not the latter sense predominates. Similarly, her emblematic role as Adam's vine fails to limit her to a largely passive or decorative function; while she may (and does) choose simply to complement his "masculine" sturdiness, she equally may and does choose to surpass and enthrall this "elm." Yet these like the poem's other vicissitudes are no more "tainted" than Eve's dream. While many critics have condemned this along with other aspects of her supposedly coy or flirtatious femininity, the variety of her moods, like the various walks and "seasons" of Eden, and like the "sweet reluctant amorous delay" with which she responds to Adam, supply an ambiguity necessary not only to the representation of her own freedom, but to that which she shares with all God's creation. The conditionality of her response and its complex potential for acceptance, withdrawal, or both, is the source and warrant of its independence as well as of its "attractive grace." Significantly, then, while J. Hillis Miller objects to Eve's admixture of "coy submission" and "modest pride," qualities that for him suggest a "wantonness" too experienced for innocence, he cannot help noting that it effectively places "her above Adam or outside his control and identifies her with Milton's independent power of poetry. Eve's curly tendrils imply independence as well as subjection."

Yet if these observations cast considerable doubt upon Froula's charge that "Eve is not a self, a subject at all; she is rather a substanceless image, a mere 'shadow' without object until the voice unites her to Adam," in some respects the human pair does appear to be separate and not equal in away that clearly implies Eve's inferiority. Although both receive "true autority" in reflecting their maker's "Truth, Wisdom, Sanctitude severe and pure," Adam seems the more exact copy, as the contemplation of "His fair large Front and Eye" declare. As noted above, Eve's gifts seem considerably less: softness, sweetness, attractiveness and Grace, even if the latter is taken to include spiritual as well as physical gifts. If this in turn implies a relay system of sexual authority and desire whereby Adam is made for God and Eve for God-in-him, the "part-ness" of his partner can in fact be taken as literally as Froula does. Must Eve interpret her creator only through Adam, or even worship him only through him—a seemingly idolatrous possibility? Furthermore, if she independently understands the will of the "presence Divine" directly, why does she so often need Adam's guidance, even in interpreting her own dream? In order accurately to define the nature of Eve's "subjection" to the God-in-him and the nature of a difference posed as a series of continuities-within-difference—as Eve's loose tendrils, for instance, at once repeat and modify the "manly clusters" of Adam's hair—we must then turn to the archetypal descriptions of awakening life to which Froula also turns: Eve's creation narrative in book 4, and Adam's parallel narrative in book 8. Only here and in what follows can we discover the cumulative effect of comparing Adam to Eve as contemplation to Grace, as clusters to tendrils, truth to quest, and finally, as vision to revision—comparisons that on at least three occasions relate them not only to each other, but to Raphael and finally to the whole heavenly order.

Although Eve relates the story of her awakening consciousness first, this fact need not, as several feminist critics remind us, grant it any kind of priority. First and last, like "Great / Or Bright infers not Excellence," as Raphael is at some pains to teach Adam. And while Adam finally understands what Eve earlier had "suddenly apprehended," that "to know / That which before us lies in daily life, / Is the prime Wisdom," Raphael's implicit approval of her reliance on experience over abstraction, like his mild disapproval of Adam's more abstract "roving," fails wholly to elevate her form of apprehension over his. As book 9 will make abundantly clear, not only do both modes have their dangers, but each is tied to clear-cut sexual differences that Raphael's ritual hailing of the pair reinforces. Playing upon his name, Raphael greets Adam as more than clay, as a creature fit to invite "Spirits of Heaven." Eve is on the other hand hailed as a type of Mary, "Mother of Mankind, whose fruitful Womb / Shall fill the World." The implication here is that Adam is intrinsically closer to the Spirits of Heaven, and Eve to her nursery, for whose "tendance" she leaves the discourse on astronomy. Hence once again the apparent mutuality of gender roles appears to dissolve into what Froula terms the "ontological hierarchy" of Paradise Lost.

However, this hierarchy is again modified or "corrected" by Raphael's narration of Satan's fall. The moral of this story is that "filial freedom" is opposed to the rigid "Orders and Degrees" that Satan upholds in the spurious name of "liberty" and depends instead upon an acceptance of difference. Since Adam's role in regard to Eve is far less priestly or exalted than that which Satan envied in the Son, both humans uttering prayers "unanimous," we must then question if their difference can also be a form of freedom, if not of equality as we have come to know it. This problem is magnified by the tremendous evolution in recent concepts of equality. As Joseph Wittreich points out in Feminist Milton, earlier female readers were likely to interpret gender differences as "evidence of distinction, not inequality"; early feminists, too, generally supported a concept of male and female mutuality in which "ideally their different qualities blend." For modern feminists after Freud, however, difference signifies domination. Thus for Froula, the whole point of the temporal priority of Eve's birth narration is to subsume it in Adam's; to inculcate the idea that "Eve can only 'read' the world in oneway, by making herself the mirror of the patriarchal authority of Adam." The mothering waters of the lake to which Eve is intuitively drawn, like her own reflected image, are thus canceled by the "invisible voice" that leads her to Adam, the voice at once of God/Adam/Milton and Patriarchy.

Yet as suggested above, this interpretation fails to account for the full scope of the mirroring process that connects Adam to Eve as vitally as Eve to her lake. In this process a recognition of difference precedes one of continuity, which in both narratives is represented as a gradual series of differentiations and corrections. The uniformity of this process is underscored by the fact that Eve's awakening response is not in fact to her own reflection, but like Adam's, to the questions surrounding her existence: "what I was, when thither brought, and how." Her next response is to a "murmuring sound / Of waters" that brings her to "a liquid Plain … Pure as th' expanse of Heav'n." Already aware of the existence of the Heavens, which symbolize the mental orientation of both human genders, her fascination with their replication both beneath and above her then causes her to seek an answering existence. While unlike Adam she finds this in the form of her own reflection, which Narcissus-like responds with "looks / Of sympathy and love," Eve is an unfallen anti- Narcissus who, as she later acknowledges, is merely "unexperienc't." Unlike the conceited creature who prefers self-absorption to another's love, but like the child of Lacan's mirror stage, initially incapable of separating self (the form recumbent on the green bank) from Other (reflection, watery womb, or Mother), and like Adam, she needs an external stimulus, God's voice, to help her make this distinction and hail her into the symbolic order. In this respect Eve provides an archetypal model of awakening consciousness fully as much as Adam does; her "hailing" into the symbolic order, like his, initiates her disand re-union with a creature like herself ("whose image thou art,") but without any confusion or shadow-barrier between them.

Entering the landscape of names/language/difference, Eve thus gains a new title and position, "Mother of human Race." This title, along with the acceptance and the renunciation it implies, exalts more than it limits her, since it allies her with the Son. Like him, she becomes an example of the interdependence of growth and sacrifice: both are able to reflect the Father's creative design only by renouncing self-love, yet both are appropriately rewarded by achieving the potential to produce "Multitudes like thyself," not merely like the Father or Adam. Hence, just as the Son's descent "to assume / Man's Nature" neither lessens nor degrades his own but grants him even greater equality with God, "equally enjoying / God-like fruition," so Eve can enjoy "God-like fruition" only by quitting her virgin, self-mirroring independence. In return she, too, gains restoration and exaltation within an expanded mirroring process, the potential for limitless reflexivity in the space of Edenic marriage, an exchange of desire mat is alone fecund.

Hence the poet's striking revision, in fact reversal, of the Narcissus myth also illuminates his use of pagan images to describe Eve in another controversial passage, when Adam on Eve

Smil'd with superior Love, as Jupiter
On Juno smiles, when he impregns the Clouds
That shed May Flowers; and press'd her Matron lip
With kisses pure …

This, too, suggests that love, like life itself, can be created only by the alternation of similarity with difference—as when God "conglob'd / Like things to like, the rest to several place / Disparted." Extending the metaphor, Adam and Eve may be understood as a primally innocent Jove and Juno "disparted" from all negative connotation, representatives of the masculine and feminine principles of sunbeam and cloud, male seed and female mist mingling in a flowerlike, gentle form of "sway." The sun shines down on the cloud for purposes of propagation inseparable from sexual delight, but inseparable also from the mysterious, asexual process of equality-within-difference imaged by Father and Son. Yet here we must once again address our recurrent problem; if Eve is represented as Son/Juno/cloud, the necessary principle of reception and nurture, then perhaps, as Mary Nyquist proposes, her desire is after all secondary: her-story actually a his-story of learning the "value of submitting desire to the paternal law." Continuing to weigh these stories, then, as to whether they blend into a kind of ur-story, we must next turn to Adam's reminiscences to Raphael in book 8 to see what actual limitations are imposed on Eve's desires by their different births.

Adam's first sensation, unlike Eve's, is tactile. While it is natural enough for him first to feel the sunlight on his skin, given that he awakes in sunlight, Eve in shade, this difference again suggests that Adam is to Eve as strong "male" light of the Sun to shaded "female" light of the Moon. However, the passage primarily serves to emphasize that Adam's natural affiliation, like Eve's, is with the heavens; the sun causes him to look upward much as the reflection of the heavenly expanse led her to gaze downward. In both cases a sensation of touch or sound motivates their sight, and causes them to assume the "Godlike erect" inclination they share with the angels. This is the essence not of Adam's but of their kind, which "upright with Front Serene" displays a "Sanctity of Reason" made "to correspond with Heav'n." Like the Son worshiping equally "with heart and voice and eyes," the love they render the Father like that they give each other is the exclusive prerogative of neither. Yet as the contrast between their awakening in shade or sunlight and then gazing either upward or downward also suggests, the organs of "voice and eyes" are experienced differently by male and female. Eve is led upon her awakening from sounds to sights, and thence back again to the invisible voice. Adam, on the other hand, is led from tactile sensations to gaze at the "ample Sky," and finally to see a "shape Divine" in his dream. So marked is his preference for the organ of sight that he even represents the "liquid Lapse of murmuring Streams" as what he saw.

Yet with an alternation characteristic of the poem, Adam's next impulse reasserts his analogy to Eve. Seeking a creature with an answering face, he searches among all

Creatures that liv'd, and mov'd, and walk'd, or flew,
Birds on the branches warbling: all things smil'd,
With fragrance and with joy my heart o'erflow'd.
Myself I then perus'd, and Limb
by Limb Survey'd…. ……
But who I was, or where, or from what cause,
Knew not;

First stopping to survey himself, Adam's attempt to find an answering reflection of life does not then focus, as does Eve's, on his own image, although his motive seems the same: to find a living being who will return his gaze and fill his void. Moreover, his attempts like Eve's are at once enabling and impairing; although he immediately perceives his difference from the creatures who smile back at him, and thus passes more spontaneously from the Imaginary to the Symbolic stage, his difficulty in locating the Law's source—the Father himself—is actually greater than hers. Attempting to answer the questions that also trouble Eve, "who I was, or where, or from what cause," he appeals to the Sun and Earth: "ye that live and move, fair Creatures, tell / Tell, if ye saw, how came I thus, how here?" Eve's affinity both with the sounds of creation and her own body is, taken as a whole, inadequate; but Adam's sense of difference and alienation is, if anything, more so. The natural response of neither is sufficient to identify themselves or their creator; without direct revelation from God to Eve through his voice, to Adam through his vision, both would be come idolaters either of Mother Goddess or Father Sun.

Thus, these narratives show Adam and Eve erring in related but inverse directions. Adam attempts to "read" nature sheerly through tactile and visual stimuli and through analytic comparisons that allow him more rapidly to develop his symbolic consciousness. He questions his existence through rational contemplation, which allows him to conclude that his being is "Not of myself; by some great Maker then, / In Goodness and power preeminent." Eve is also led to make comparisons but relies more on auditory sensations and on analogies rather than differences between inner and outer, higher and lower forms: her interest in the lake is prompted by the fact that it seems both a "liquid plain" and "another Sky." Yet if Adam is led by his sight, both physical and rational, into a more immediate entrance into the rational-symbolic order, Eve is equally adept in intuiting that her existence is alternately material and spiritual, just as the watery elements of earth and sky are alternately watery plain and fluid heavenly expanse. Neither Adam nor Eve is able to perceive the Deity unaided; God must intercept both Adam's confused search ("thus I call'd, and stray'd I knew not whither,") and Eve's pining with "vain desire." Adam is more dramatically depicted as seeking and conversing with his Maker, but only in a dream, and dream and voice are generally regarded as equivalent modes of prophetic knowledge. In any case, these modes reverse in books 9 and 10, where God speaks to Eve in a dream, to Adam through the prophetic voice of Michael.

Since analogy as well as difference is stressed in these scenes, it is not surprising that the first decree of the "shape Divine" is strictly parallel, if gender specific. The Father names Eve "Mother of human Race" and Adam the "First Man, of Men innumerable ordain'd / First Father." Following this, it is true, Adam is explicitly instructed in the uses and prohibitions of his garden, initiating a dialogue between Adam and his creator not later granted Eve. We must assume, however, that Adam instructs Eve in their joint authority over Eden, since Eve unequivocally considers the garden her responsibility, and since God declares both "authors to themselves in all." Most significantly, neither Adam nor Eve knows God by any name more explicit than "Whom thou sought'st I am," an obvious variant of the Mosaic "I am that I am." Adam's question concerning intimate address, "O by what Name, … how may I / Adore thee," is never answered; Adam and Eve are to know the "author" through whom they become authors of mankind only through verbs of being and through spontaneous dialogue, listening, response, and vision. The Puritan poet carefully resists any suggestion of Adam's priestly functions in regard either to divine worship or to the prohibitions this authority could sanction. Nor is God's fatherly instruction of Eve actually less than of Adam, even if it occurs offstage. As Adam describes his first sight of her to Raphael,

With "Heav'n in her Eye" Adam must acknowledge Eve his sister as well as spouse, "one Flesh, one Heart, one Soul." The name he gives her, "Woman," is not her name in the personal but only in the generic sense; Adam has wit enough to recognize his own species. Eve's name is no more "Woman" than Adam's is "Man"; titles are hardly names. It is only by a considerable distortion of the text, then, that Froula claims that God "soothes Adam's fears of female power … by bestowing upon Adam 'Dominion' over the fruits of this creation through authorizing him to name the animals and Eve." Far from subtracting from her female power, Eve's auditory response to the symbolic order forms a necessary complement to Adam's visual mode.

Yet even if we can assert that Adam lacks the complete authority over Eve that Froula claims he has, and if, by now, it is clear that their difference is one of degree and not of kind, a final charge of the feminist critique of the hierarchy of Edenic desire remains to be addressed. Eve's more guided transition from the Imaginary to the Symbolic stage, her greater reliance on the intuitive, responsive ear as opposed to Adam's rational, active eye, appear in fact to suggest that Milton, like Freud, traces a "progress in spirituality" that places the female sex on a lower evolutionary rung. And this objection could in fact be supported, had not the Christian poet set a much higher value than Freud upon the primacy of the Imaginary, which for him performs an intuitive, wholistic communion with the body of a universe he insists is divine, and had not Eve's greater access to this communion actually granted her a source of authority fully equivalent—and hence potentially even superior—to Adam's. In this respect Froula, too, must accord Eve abilities that are more than merely complementary; she remarks that while "Adam's need to possess Eve is usually understood as complemented by her need for his guidance, [yet] … Milton's text suggests a more subtle and more compelling source for this need: Adam's sense of inadequacy in face of what he sees as Eve's perfection."

However, Froula sees Adam's "alienation from his body" and even from God not as parallel to the sense of inadequacy Eve also feels, but as the direct cause of his subjugation of her. This view is challenged by the fact that Eve's ability to arrange thoughts and words, not merely domestic delights, clearly surpasses Adam's in a way that he finds both sustaining and inspiring. In highly cadenced and evocative blank verse, she turns her love for him into what James Turner calls an "aria," eighteen lines that have "the grace and recapitulative pattern of an Elizabethan sonnet." The author and not merely the singer of the piece, her voice is as authentic as her verse original; she creates a form that claims Adam as the demystified object of her own desire. Not Adam's "coy mistress" forever eluding him on the banks of an Edenic Umber, she is the sonneteer praising him because "With thee conversing I forget all time." Inverting Marvell's clever carpe diem to his lady, this lady seizes the day and the object of a desire to which she is also subject. Hierarchy is undermined by role reversal, which, as Turner notes, blurs "the usual division of faculties into 'male' and 'female' ; … [Milton's] Eve is more logocentric and intelligent than the conventional treatment, and his Adam, even in his prime, more emotionally susceptible."

Yet the implications of Eve's invention are broader still. She concludes her aria with a question suggested by the theme of her composition; tracing the course of an Edenic day, its "seasons and thir change," she wonders what the purpose of the most mysterious of these changes, the procession of "glittering Star-light," might mean: "But wherefore all night long shine these, for whom / This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes?" Adam is immediately aware both of the skill of her song and the importance of this question; addressing her as "Daughter of God and Man, accomplisht Eve," his reply supplies "manly" balance to her poetic skill as he offers a "hymn" to God's providence. Yet neither here nor elsewhere does his authority silence Eve; it only complements hers. Further, his conjecture that the stars "shine not in vain" is in turn supplanted by a higher authority, and what this authority reveals combines as it elevates the male and female responses to creation. Before informing them of the several possible arrangements of the universe and even hinting at the possibility of life on other planets, Raphael cautions that although experiential knowledge may at times exceed abstract, all forms of knowledge, in fact all life, are ultimately relative. Each should "Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid," but instead invest their energies in affairs closer to hand—not because of any divine prohibition or even because of the threat now posed by Satan, but because human understanding like the human body itself will be refined by obedience, so that in "tract of time" the human couple may become "Ethereal, as wee." At this point they would enjoy not only the intuitive understanding of the angels, but also their fully unencumbered sexual freedom, which can "either Sex assume, or both." Yet Raphael also acknowledges that their present state is not lacking sufficient perfection that they might then actually prefer to continue their earthly existence; no simple value can be attached to the process of "rising" in and for itself.

However, Raphael's final, private discourse with Adam also offers the most problematic representation of the poem's hierarchy of desire. Although seeming to agree with Adam in his opinion of Eve as "resembling less / His Image who made both, and less expressing / The character of that Dominion giv'n / Oe'r other Creatures," he adds that Adam's ambivalence as to whether Eve corresponds to this, or to his other view of her "As one intended first, not after made / Occasionally," lies in his own perceptions, not in Nature. Yet Raphael never precisely reveals what "Nature" dictates concerning Eve's role; he simply warns against "attributing overmuch to things less excellent" (emphasis supplied). Since these "things" refer neither to Eve nor to her accomplishments per se but only to her "fair outside," Raphael suggests that Adam can best appreciate and guide her by weighing her merits against his. Even this vaguely patriarchal advice must, however, in turn be weighed against its broader context, one in which the entire discussion between Adam and Raphael mirrors those previously initiated between Adam and Eve. As the prelude to Eve's sonnet included a didactic statement of obedience, a summation of the Pauline doctrine of headship—"what thou bidd'st / Unargu'd I obey; so God ordains, / God is thy law, thou mine"—so Adam now mimics Eve's procedure in conversing with Raphael. A statement of submission is followed by a tribute to Raphael's sensory powers—a tribute that similarly bestows the powers of the subject on their object. Just as Eve had deferred to Adam by attributing her rich sensory experience of Eden, her "nursery," to his presence, by her example Adam now demonstrates his humility (which is also his authority) by granting Eve his first-born prerogatives of Wisdom, Authority, and Reason. The result of this exchange is simultaneously to exalt masculine and feminine dignity; Eve is its synthesis for him as he had been it for her. She now becomes a vision of masculine virtue in feminine form: "Greatness of mind and nobleness thir seat / Build in her loveliest."

Still, like Raphael, the reader cannot immediately evaluate the full meaning of this transference, let alone how patriarchal, antipatriarchal, or even uxorious its assumptions may be, until it is tested against the background of Edenic gender relations as a whole. Here for the third time we have observed Adam and Eve performing a similar interchange, Eve responding, Adam recapitulating and interpreting her more spontaneous activity. She first questioned the purposes and motions of the stars, a query that Adam elaborates and poses to Raphael, while a little earlier she had narrated her experience of creation to Adam, a story that so delights him that he then adopts it as a means of entertaining the angel. On the third occasion Eve set another pattern by first acknowledging the principle of marital headship, then giving Adam a verse account of the experiential value, greater than all of Eden, she found in his company; she made her gifts, her perceptual and poetic skill, a supreme tribute to him. Later Adam gives Raphael a similar acknowledgment of his "official" superiority, then adds an experiential account of the supreme value of his conversation, a "process of speech" that figuratively synthesizes and transcends "masculine" and "feminine" gender traits. His compliment in fact paraphrases the very words that Eve had used to express her love for him. He tells Raphael,

For while I sit with thee, I seem in Heav'n
And sweeter thy discourse is to my ear
Than Fruits of Palm-tree pleasantest to thirst
And hunger both.

While Adam recognizes Raphael's differing "Grace Divine" as superior just as clearly as he sees that Eve's difference from himself can imply some relative superiority or inferiority between them, at the same time he can do no better than follow her example. While for Eve "Nor grateful Ev'ning mild, nor silent Night / With this her solemn Bird, nor walk by Moon, / Or glittering Star-light mild, without thee is sweet," now for Adam no fruits of Eden can supply the sweetness of Raphael's words. Significantly, their theoretical affinities here reverse, since Adam is more domestic and Eve more astronomical in her metaphors.

Whatever this reversal may mean in the abstract, the concrete result is the same. As in the Father's relation to the Son, submission merits exaltation and, more importantly, reciprocity. Orders exist to be broken and transformed: as in the "one first matter" Raphael describes, energy and light flow both upward and downward. Anything more rigid or circumscribed would disturb the harmonious intercourse of the universe, as Raphael in response acknowledges:

In this exchange, the discourse of "rational delight" is made the simultaneous prop and leveler of hierarchies; Adam can scarcely be as superior to Eve as Raphael is to himself, and yet his graceful deference merits acknowledgment of angel and man as "fellow servants" enjoying God's "Equal Love." In contrast, duplicitous self-promotion leads Satan, like Adam and Eve after their fall, to bestiality. Nor is their postlapsarian descent depicted as the effect of a divine curse upon those who exceed hierarchical boundaries, but merely as the natural and immediate outcome of Adam's failure correctly to apply Raphael's advice. Instead of skillfully weighing Eve's gifts with his, which would include balancing her more accurate interpretation of Raphael's instruction against his equally accurate intuition about Satan's most likely strat egy, Adam is distracted by a temporary loss of face that he fails to see has little or nothing to do either with his true authority or with Eve's true love for him. Atypically yet fatally, his regard for her sense of responsibility toward her garden, her determination, and her well-reasoned (if over-confident) acceptance of trial as a concomitant of Edenic life makes him lose his ability to direct and guide the admirable qualities that, unmodified, like both their garden and his own desire, "tend to wild." Yet if his error perhaps increases Eve's all-too-human liability to err, it cannot be said to produce her fall unless all we have seen of her, including God's pronouncement that both were created "sufficient to have stood," is rendered meaningless. Rather, Adam's failed conversation with Eve, his temporary but not-yet-tragic loss of appreciation for their radical relativity, becomes truly tragic only when Eve, like Adam overvaluing her momentary victory, chooses to forsake successful conversation not merely with Adam but with herself and her God. Indulging in a "process of speech" that is actually a process of rationalization, she begins to dream of synthesizing and supplanting Adam's gift for abstract understanding with her own for intuitive thinking and experimentation. Inevitably, this self-centered desire for rising leads her to overvalue the fallacious "evidence" of the wily serpent/Satan. Then and only then does she develop a sinful appetite for what is neither properly hers nor Adam's, the seemingly effortless but ultimately illusory ascent that throughout the poem is shown to be the essence of all descent.

Yet finally, the eternally authentic and not exclusively Edenic power of innocent desire is confirmed both because and in spite of loss of Eden. Self-knowledge and recognition of difference, the basis of both growth and exchange, are reestablished as the proper and in fact only channels of true union and communion between spiritual beings. And while both before and after the Fall this union is only temporary, this is because it must first be temporal, the result of free and rational choice in time, the mark of "Grace Divine." It is not God alone who raises his creatures "deifi'd" by his communion to "what highth thou wilt," but Adam can merit and Raphael bestow this same equality. By precisely the same means, the human genders may alternately exalt one another, so that ideally each is fit both to initiate and "to participate / all rational delight". Further, their capacity to do so directly follows from the fact that Eve is not the body to Adam's head nor the senses to his intelligence; as experience, beauty, hearing, Eve is analogous not merely to Christ, but to the poet himself. Milton can conceive her function in this way because he conceives poetry, like reason, as the necessary but not sufficient condition of Grace. Its sufficient condition depends neither exclusively upon Adam's more visual and analytic understanding nor upon Eve's auditory and intuitive imagination, but upon a process of "weighing" and blending both. This process of harmonizing her gifts with his is what Raphael recommends to Adam after showing him how dialectically to sift through his motives, andwhat allows Eve to initiate their recuperation after the Fall. Then, significantly, Eve again spontaneously intuits the necessity of weighing and accepting responsibility, while Adam's self-righteous sense of" the betrayal of his "higher" functions (as well as his emotional confusion) leads him into a momentary loss of all hope and even all remembrance of Raphael's subtle lessons.

Thus the question of "whence true autority in men," in Milton's universe one among many variants of the question of "whence true autonomy," can be accurately resolved only by at once refining and broadening our understanding of the universal basis of "Union or Communion," that semimysterious conversation in which difference, including the ultimate difference between God and his creation, is resolved in an act of complementarity inseparable from simultaneous Other and self-reflection. Autonomy hence becomes a metonymy of male and female gifts and desires that, in perfect balance, generates the synecdoche of divine intercourse and human marriage alike. Raphael counsels Adam (and his heirs) not to upset the balance of this exchange, which by resting upon an unstable and thus freely adaptable form of reflexivity, can achieve a liberating potential that is neither moderate nor conservative but extreme. Because in this system hierarchy is dependent upon temporal interpretation and initiative, not upon innate "natural dispositions," the inner harmony of its balance is at once subject to radical alternation and role reversal and to radical joy, the true analog of the heavenly union revealed/concealed behind Raphael's rosy blush, "Love's proper hue." Yet behind even this disguise are demystified glimpses—of an original sexual union precedent to original sin, of the unencumbered embraces of the angels, "Union of Pure with Pure/Desiring," and of the mutual glorification of the Father and Son, whose balanced energies produce the spontaneous desire to exalt and multiply the Other, the universal desire that "to fulfill is all … Bliss."