SOURCE: “The Politics of Poetry: Feminism and Paradise Lost,” in Milton Studies, Vol. XIV, 1980, pp. 3-24.

[In the following essay, Webber claims that Milton, however awkwardly and imperfectly, breaks new ground when he raises issues concerning women's rights and importance.]

In the highly delicate investigation of the relationship between politics and poetry, epic makes an obvious, though exhausting, field of inquiry. Traditionally, epic is described as a mingling of history with myth. Whatever this formula may actually mean, its effect is always that we are pulled in two ways, between a concern for the facts of the story (where was Troy? and when?) and a response to the universality of its symbols (Troy is any dying civilization). In epic we cannot have the one without the other: if Troy does not mean something, it does not matter where it was; if we do not know its actual history, we cannot be sure that our way of using the symbol is legitimate. Our uncertainty and ignorance in these matters are reflected in criticism's disarray.

One of the most blatant problems concerns the political orientation of the genre. We have a tendency to think of epic history (or politics), as well as myth, as conservative of a cultural past. Yet these materials may just as easily be instruments for social change. In fact, every major Western epic is revolutionary with respect to human consciousness.¹ Most significant poetry can make some analogous claim, but the epic purports to summarize its own culture, praise it, and at the same time subvert it, pointing the way to something higher.² Obviously an epic is not a tract, or a piece of socialist realism: even Milton, when he wrote Paradise Lost, had given up present hope for communal action, concluding that minds must change themselves before the world can change. The political poet's task is neither to man the barricades nor utterly to transcend his own time, but to speak through, challenge, and transform the political materials and symbols of his time so as ideally to facilitate communal fostering of human possibilities, or to enable the individual person to resist the moribund or tyrannical state.

In its deceptively Homeric simplicity,³ its apparent Christian moralism, its obvious personal involvement, and its relative nearness to our own time, Milton's epic poetry is conducive to easy stereotyping that allows us to approach it with distorting preconceptions. The difficulty of suspending disbelief when entering Milton's world should give us pause. We think of him as a poet of the past, yet in the great division that we make between the medieval and the modern age, Milton has to be considered a modern. To read him is to confront the central realities of our own culture, and we tend to react against some of those realities without recognizing that Milton himself is doing the same thing.⁴ Studying the story of Adam and Eve, one is led to Milton's divorce tracts or Areopagitica, and from there to more modern documents on divorce and free speech. Then we attack Milton with weapons which he himself gave us the power to create by being among the first to recognize these issues.⁵ With regard to cultural context, Milton's poetry puts us in a particularly difficult position. Because he himself was among those who first saw and helped to define the problems of our age, it is hard to put his ideas into historical perspective or to establish an aesthetic threshold to allow disinterested enjoyment of his art. He does not represent an antiquated part of our culture, as many unwary readers suppose. He anticipates our whole culture, with all its self-defeating conflicts, and asks us to choose change. Yet he speaks from a time that was itself a most unclear, ungainly, and mutilated mixture of ancient and modern ways, when nothing that we have now, including our problems, could have been taken for granted.

Despite the three hundred years between then and now, Milton almost makes possible an understanding of what it would be like to read a modern epic. Nothing else in our literature prepares us for the naive intensity of many readers' involvement in this poem. Almost everyone is either for or against Paradise Lost (or both at once); many see their own causes reflected or distorted in it. Its wholeness defeats argument, a fact which in itself breeds discontent. And so, because his issues are so contemporary, we find an easier course in detaching them from the poem and from the historical literary contexts which may not justify Milton, but do explain him.

In this essay, I wish to examine the role of women in his epics, from the particular perspective of Sandra K. Gilbert's recent analysis of the charge that Paradise Lost is misogynistic and patriarchal.⁶ I choose this topic because it is politically far-reaching. Milton did not select our myth of origins only because he was a Christian concerned with the problem of evil. He believed that successful marriages (which he called fit conversations) are crucial to individual happiness, to the well-being of the state, and, indeed, to the right understanding of the world. Furthermore, Western epic is a genre notable for its extensive, significant attention to women characters. Yet, as women consider the poem, disagreement increases as to its value for them, based on interpretations of Milton's attitude, or the attitude expressed in the poem, toward women's place in life, and the nature of the system of growth and meaning that defines “women's place.”⁷

Gilbert's essay, typifying the opposition, argues that “because the myth of origins that Milton articulates in Paradise Lost summarizes a long misogynistic tradition, literary women from Mary Wollstonecraft to Virginia Woolf have recorded anxieties about his paradigmatic patriarchal poetry.” She believes that the poem tells the story of woman's secondness and otherness, her consequent fall and exclusion from heaven and poetry, her alliance with Satan, Sin, and Death. Hence women readers have allayed anxieties by “rereading, misreading, and misinterpreting Paradise Lost.”⁸ In developing her argument, Gilbert lumps together women's reactions to Milton with their reactions to patriarchal poetry in general, and she implies that their responses are to ideas that really are in the poem.

Paradise Lost certainly is a story of otherness, and of alienation. In explaining the ways of God, or perhaps in coming to terms with them, Milton shows that in his mind alienation is a necessary risk, and perhaps even a necessary fact, of Creation. But to think of the story as featuring Eve's particular alliance with evil is surely to distort the myth, and to ignore the historical context (not of misogyny, but of revolution) from which the poem came. It may well be that in trying to adjust the perspective for a more accurate political reading, I will sometimes appear to be submitting the cause of women to that of humanity: that is a familiar and often justifiable charge against men who would rather consider any other rights than those of women. Yet the opposite risk is to let the literature of our common humanity be needlessly sacrificed. In this instance, it must be remembered that we are dealing with the seventeenth century, when almost no politically radical woman could or would have dissociated herself from men regarding the issues of religious and secular freedom which were then being fought out. Furthermore, Milton's sense of the direction in which humanity has to move is generally one which prepares the way for feminist thinking. When he did raise issues involving women's importance and women's rights, he was awkwardly and imperfectly breaking ground.

Gilbert does not acknowledge either the seventeenth-century or the epic context of Paradise Lost, or the context of Milton's own life and writings. As opposed to critics like Barbara Lewalski, whose findings she appears to think are “academic,”⁹ she sets out to consider not only “Milton's own intentions and assertions” but also the “implications of Milton's ideas for women.”¹⁰ At best such a separation of language from effect indicates a deep distrust of, or lack of concern for, Milton's use of words. And because Gilbert limits her territory to Paradise Lost, together with familiar platitudes about Milton's domestic life, she cannot adequately examine what his ideas and their implications are. More perhaps than most, revolutionary poets have to be read as a whole. The context of Milton's life and works has everything to do with every part of his writing. The prose tells us how to read the poetry.¹¹ Most important of all, Paradise Lost precedes and is incomplete without Paradise Regained.

Margaret Fuller wrote in 1846 that Milton was one of the fathers of her own age, a true understander of liberty, justice, marriage, and education, a father whose achievement still far outdistanced that of America, his child.¹² No doubt revolutionary fathers are as hard to accept as any other kind, but at least their inclination is to force rejection of patriarchy and conservative patriarchal systems, not to espouse them. When he wrote Paradise Lost, Milton was a fifty-two-year-old ex-convict who had narrowly escaped execution for opposing the restoration of Charles II at a time when most of his compatriots were changing their politics or taking shelter. The poem Milton had once intended to write was the old story of King Arthur. In choosing to write Paradise Lost instead, he could not and did not merely shift from one sort of patriarchy to another. We do not, of course, have his own explanation for the change. But it is apparent that he was abandoning a story that features one-man rule, an aristocratic society, and sex roles so stereotyped that their validity had already been challenged in poetry that Milton knew well.¹³ The form and content of biblical epic, in Milton's handling of them, are layered with complexities and implications that exploit and overturn their traditions, while using them to orient and enlighten the knowing reader.

As a rewriting of the Bible in the late seventeenth century, Paradise Lost had to satisfy orthodoxy or fall under censorship.¹⁴ In a superficially convincing way it appears as a bulwark of conservatism. Yet, even to read the Bible in English had not long before been an uncertain right. The orthodox King James Bible owed everything to Tyndale's formidably influential translation, with its pugnacious marginalia emphasizing political interpretation and application. Milton's primary tenets, stressed over and over throughout his revolutionary prose, are self-control, self-knowledge, and internal freedom, in total opposition to what he calls external things. Since for him it was absolutely impossible that God could ordain any law contrary to human good, the external authority of the Bible always supports the inner promptings of the human spirit, even when, by our lights, he has to wrench the text to make this happen.¹⁵ A double tension of this sort, between external control and inner conviction in Milton's own life, and between his inner convictions and some of the doctrines set forth in the Bible, informs all his involvement with the Bible, both in poetry and in prose.

The form of Paradise Lost is not only biblical; it is also epic. And, as previously indicated, Western epic traditionally undermines itself, providing criticism of the culture it is supposedly designed to admire. Just as Homer's poems implicitly criticize the Greek religious system, so do Milton's attack the Christianity of his peers. Moreover, in the Renaissance, the Bible itself was considered to be an epic: for translators like Tyndale it was the epic story of the chosen people, of whom the English nation was the contemporary realization. The fusion of Bible story with epic form very much increased the historical pertinence of Milton's poem, as at the same time the two elements radicalized each other. The Bible is famous for its denial of the decorum and aristocratic focus that epic had preserved,¹⁶ and the history of biblical interpretation had long served as a tool for reinterpretation of epic. Epic, on the other hand, in its own history demonstrates cultural relativism; and in its character it shows how to undercut the reigning culture while seeming to praise it. Paradise Lost takes every advantage of its complex tradition's capacity to appear to be doing one thing while actually achieving something else.

At least one further significant element in this history ought to be mentioned. Foxe's Book of Martyrs, second only to the Bible as a best-seller of the age, had long promoted that idea that the Bible is the epic story of the chosen people of whom the English are the contemporary representatives.¹⁷ Like the Bible, Foxe stressed the value of the lives of ordinary men and women, and, by recording the tortuous changes of religion that took place throughout the sixteenth century, increased the Puritan sense that individual conscience is more trustworthy than any reigning monarch. The failure of the revolution necessitated one more shift in emphasis: the chosen people themselves had broken their commitment. In Paradise Lost Milton says that true heroism requires patience, martyrdom, and loneliness.¹⁸ No reigning monarch, no one leader or party, can be trusted, only the just, self-knowing solitary being.¹⁹ Such a belief has obvious appeal to all men and women who find themselves victimized, and at once suggests one reason why women, who have always had to work by indirection and in isolation, still find value in the poem.

Renaissance artists were very fond of “turning pictures,” optical illusions which change foreground with background in a seemingly arbitrary way, to emphasize completely different scenes from different perspectives.²⁰ It is thus, I think, with the limited Old Testament God of Book III of Paradise Lost, a figure who may be ironically modeled after Homer's Zeus,²¹ and who has appeared to many readers, including Gilbert, as the autocratic designer of the conservative politics of heaven.²² Surrounding this figure, as background or foreground, is a much ampler idea or power, a force for life that is neither anthropomorphized nor sexed, and to which even the God of Book III defers by giving the scepter and the power to his Son, who is to bring all creation into this greater unity, when “God shall be all in all” (III, 317-41). This is the bright and fluent source imagined in terms of light and fountain at the beginning of Book III:

Hail holy Light, offspring of Heav'n first-born,
Or of th' eternal Coeternal beam
May I express thee unblam'd? since God is Light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from Eternitie, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.

(III, 1-6)

All precedence and place here become mysterious. Between Satan's extensive maligning of his anthropomorphized God, and Milton's own portrayal of such a limited and inimical figure, is this luminous Being completely surpassing or encompassing the realm of ordinary human meaning. The syntax makes it possible to conceive of this Being as a God beyond God, certainly beyond rational expression. To the extent that any version of deity is anthropomorphic, one might say that he is not yet deity in this sense.

The God who is a character in Book III and elsewhere in Paradise Lost, self-justifying, dictatorial, and judgmental as well as splendid, roughly corresponds to the Christian idea of God in the Old Testament.²³ No doubt seventeenth-century readers accepted such a figure more easily than we do today. But Milton does not accept him, nor is this God satisfied with himself. He is in process toward full realization of the higher state imagined in the images of light. The only way to achieve that condition is by abnegation of title and rank. In illustration of that necessity, God gives the power and the scepter to his Son, but it is anticipated that at the end the scepter will simply become unnecessary: all life will be one with God. While the language, that “God shall be all in all,” is biblical, and while the Bible is ordinarily understood to demonstrate that the more primitive Old Testament view of God yields to the New Testament sense of a God possessed of the more “feminine” qualities of love and mercy, this dramatic presentation of the change is Milton's own.

Although the words “Father” and “Son” refer to important concepts in the poem, the reality is very far from being simply a male patriarchal system, and not only because it is unusual for the patriarch to surrender his power voluntarily, foreseeing the end of all rule. The Son is begotten of the Father, out of time and out of any known sexual meaning. He then serves the Father as means of creation and separation, and also as a force for unity. Milton did not believe in the Holy Ghost as a distinct and equal part of a Trinity.²⁴ The Spirit, who seems interchangeable with God, the Son, and the Muse, is a symbolic, androgynous creative power. The extensive language of fertility and creativity everywhere in the poem prevents a conclusion that heaven is simply asexual. Nor is it the case, as Gilbert claims, that the female is excluded from heaven.²⁵ Wisdom and Understanding, for example, are female powers that existed in heaven before all Creation (VII, 1-12), although not necessarily named and bounded. Ordinarily, however, the descriptions of reproduction and creativity are so expressed as to prevent the sexes from falling into contraries. Both male and female muses are invoked. The angels “can either sex assume, or both; so soft / And uncompounded is thir Essence pure” (I, 424). When Adam questions Raphael about sex in heaven, Raphael blushes and declares, without reference to male or female characteristics, that sex is superior there because flesh presents no impediments (VIII, 618-29). Male and female are aspects of Creation, like light and dark, which grow more distinct the farther they are removed from heaven. And as heaven itself, in God's evolving process, moves closer to unity, its gradations may be expected to fall away with time.

In an interesting essay which Gilbert cites, Northrop Frye discusses the applicability to Milton's poetry “of the two great mythological structures” of our heritage—one, ruled by a male father-god, which dominates our culture from “the beginning of the Christian era down to the Romantic movement,” and the other, centered on a mother-goddess, which has more frequently been influential in modern times. Frye traces in Milton a basic adherence to the father myth, the conception of a male creator superior to created nature, and the assumption that in all natural things male reason is superior to female imagination, even though that creative imagination is what the poet requires. Nature can be led upward toward the divine, or downward with the demonic: Eve, as representative of nature, has affinities both ways. But Frye also indicates, quite apart from Eve's partial association with the demonic, that she is given an unusual amount of independent power in the poem. “The father-myth is an inherently conservative one; the other is more naturally revolutionary, and the revolutionary emphasis in Milton shows how near he is to the mythology of Romanticism.”²⁶

Frye's essay rightly indicates that, rather than merely contributing to a long tradition of Christian misogynism, as Gilbert believes, Milton drew upon a much deeper, more primitive set of oppositions which Western culture had for thousands of years colored in a way that now seems prejudicial to women. Milton is obviously not only reworking this tradition but preparing it for its demise in the anticipated final unification of all things in God. Yet it is important in his poetry; it represents to him the way in which life has chosen to work itself out, for good and for ill. It is also an essential part of the epic line within which he is working, and so something needs to be said of it and of the problems which it presents for women readers.

As a great deal of our literature and mythology shows, the human mind, conscious or unconscious, has a strong tendency to group all experience, all phenomena, into opposites: up-down, day-night, sun-moon, reason-imagination, strength-softness, creating-nurturing, heaven-earth, and male-female.²⁷ Although most people who discuss the subject are quick to point out that the terms male and female are intended symbolically rather than literally (Jung believed that each person contains both elements), still women through the ages have always been associated with these “female” characteristics. Further, since men have been the thinkers and the writers, the female characteristics have often acquired connotations both of otherness and of evil, as men have projected their fears and fantasies upon the other sex. These patterns are extremely clear in the treatment of women in epic poetry.²⁸ On the one hand, there are women who guide and inspire, although their roles are externally passive compared to those of men, who seek, wage war, conquer, and find. Such women are Penelope, Beatrice, and Gloriana. On the other hand, there are witch-women, who seek to beguile, seduce, distract, and corrupt, such as Circe, Armida, and Duessa. All other epic women, with a very few exceptions, belong somewhere on the spectrum between these extremes. In some very real sense, men are associated with process and women with goals: women can deceive because they know, and compel because they are. Some epic writers, particularly those who include warrior women in their stories, raise women to a position of greater equality of function, but men and women are almost always seen as fundamentally different from each other, as they are in Milton.²⁹

Part of Milton's task in justifying the ways of God to men is to explain why these differences exist. One question we would ask now is whether they do, whether indeed men and women are dissimilar, but for Milton such separations are a necessary aspect of Creation itself. Creation is by contraries; things are defined only by their opposites; self requires other. As soon as there are opposites, there is the potentiality for conflict even though Creation's end is a higher unity. Milton's God, who contains all opposites, shows conflict within himself:³⁰ when these differences are externally realized, the possibility of problems is realized as well, and the problems themselves make possible growth and change. Everything in the epic portrays a universe in process: that is a large part of the explanation of God's ways. Even God, in Milton's view, could not make instant perfection. In addition, Milton is changing the terms of epic and the traditional ways of looking at reality. The extraordinary power of the poetry is its ability to celebrate simultaneously so many different ways of thought and being, both the God of Old Testament righteousness and the New Testament God of change, contraries and their dissolution, inequality and equality between men and women.

Eve reflects every female potentiality that could enter the mind of a Renaissance epic writer and Christian humanist. Placed in the chain of being in a position officially subordinate to Adam's, she combines the opposite epic functions of witch and inspiration, being both Adam's downfall and his means of recovery. As Northrop Frye shows, she contains and reflects all the values associated with the mother-goddess, as well as the demonic associations that the Renaissance made with that cult. And she is a strong, human woman. Since even—or especially—today, women are struggling with just this problem of the multiple roles and definitions that have been thrust upon them, and which, with varying attitudes and in varying combinations, they perceive in themselves, Milton's Eve does generate intense feelings of identification. The first acts of her life portray a familiar dilemma: she wants to reflect upon herself, to look at herself in a pool and gain self-knowledge, but in order to know herself she is required to turn her attention to Adam, an alien other. The whole relationship between Adam and Eve, in fact, is affected by this stress between self-sufficiency and mutual need. As I will show a little later on, either posture, overindulged, becomes destructive, and balance is hard to maintain.

Traditional epic poetry, like the Bible, is patriarchal. Superficially, at least, it has to do with battles, journeys, conquests, the founding of nations. Ordinarily no problem and no success in epic occurs independently of women. Yet despite the near equality of warrior women, as exemplified most outstandingly by Britomart in Spenser's Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost is the first epic in which the active heroic role is shared equally between the sexes. Despite Britomart's obvious worldly equality, her goal is to find Artegall and marry him. Paradise Lost is the first epic whose scene is, in effect, the home, woman's traditional sphere, rather than the world of warfare and quest outside. Adam is called “domestic Adam” (IX, 318); when he shows signs of interest in places far removed from home, Raphael chastises him. Eve, in turn, has no supernatural or witchlike powers with which to tempt Adam or initiate the subsequent process of restoration. Although their weaknesses and their strengths differ, they are equally fallible; their epic battle is in large part their struggle to recognize and support each other's humanity. Many critics have pointed out in contrast the satirical, mock-heroic tone of Milton's treatment of Satan's “heroic” journey to Eden and of the epic warfare between the angels. It is one of the most remarkable things about the poem that seemingly insignificant domestic quarreling, set side by side with traditional epic endeavor, achieves such obvious, overwhelming importance. Human relationships are at the center of cosmic loss and gain.

Thus, while in most epics marriage or some analogous union is a symbol of the fulfillment for which the hero strives, in Paradise Lost marriage is a main subject and theme of the poem. Although the setting of Eden seems far removed from ordinary life, much that happens there is commonplace. The poem traces the lives of a man and woman from their first courtship through their first great disillusionment to their acceptance of life in the world that their descendants and Milton's readers know. Contrary to Gilbert's idea that Eve is a “divine afterthought,”³¹ she is from the beginning an essential part of the whole design of growth and change achieved through opposition, which involves risk. The first test laid upon both Adam and Eve, when they are created, is to recognize that they need each other as they exemplify that large pattern of opposites without which nothing in the world, or even the world itself, could exist. Definition is in relation to something or someone else: to recognize one's incompleteness is an essential sign of self-knowledge. So God was pleased with Adam when Adam expressed a longing for a companion, although not when Adam allowed himself to be dominated by desire and need.

Milton had an obvious dislike for the courtly tradition that reifies woman (and man too) by making her an object of adoration. Adam's disposition to do this falsifies both Adam's and Eve's positions, and prepares her for the false adulation of the serpent. Romanticized married love, relatively new in the Renaissance, was the preferred Puritan model:³² recognition of the woman as helpmeet released her both from the decorative, idealized courtly role and from her more common treatment as household drudge, and gave her an everyday value and importance that she would not have again for a long time.³³

Adam and Eve are often spoken of in language that implies absolute equality. Adam asks God for an equal, one who can share “all rational delight,” and is granted “thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self” (VIII, 450), whom Adam sees as “Bone of my Bone, Flesh of my Flesh, my Self / Before me” (VIII, 494). Eve, upon her creation, is less sure of Adam's importance to her, and shows preference for her own image reflected in a pool before she is persuaded that she is part of Adam's soul, and, as he tells her, “My other half” (IV, 488). Both Adam and Eve are majestic, made in the image of God, and free.

At the same time, in this many-faceted scheme of things, the sexes are different: men are suited to “contemplation and valor,” women to “softness” and “sweet attractive grace.” This is a summarizing of traditional epic virtues, as they are personified in Odysseus and Penelope, or Prince Arthur and Gloriana. “Sweet attractive grace” is the equivalent of the powers that enable Beatrice to bring Dante out of hell. Sweetness is a capacity for love which Adam said was lacking in him before Eve was created; grace is the capacity for salvation; and attractiveness is the quality that attracts or draws, making it possible for two to become one. We see frequent signs of Adam's or Eve's particular qualities turning up in the other: just as Adam acquires sweetness, Eve demonstrates the power of contemplation.

In addition to all these complex reformations of biblical and epic material, the reader is required to see Adam and Eve as symbolic reflections of the great contraries of the universe—sun and moon, earth and sky, reason and imagination. The act of Creation results in such contraries, which, however, are to be restored to wholeness in God by being raised to a fuller unity than they originally enjoyed. Creation is essentially divisive: heaven and earth were made by what Milton calls God's “divorcing command”³⁴ that sorted out the warring but indistinguishable elements of chaos. That is, Milton here thinks of the word “divorcing” as expressive of a positive act: only divorce could create coherence. Yet inherent in that word also is the recognition that Creation began with imperfection, that it consisted in separating rather than in uniting, and that the Creation therefore remains unfinished, caught up in a progress toward a higher unity.

Adam and Eve, two parts of a theoretically inseparable whole, were in this sense divorced at the moment of Eve's creation, and, god-like as they are, their harmony is possible only because of disjunction. Milton's justification of God is that Creation is good, that inherent in creation is this divorcing process, which is in itself some sort of fortunate fall. Milton is quite clear that divorce in our modern sense was not invented for Adam and Eve.³⁵ They are above, or prior to, that, but they feel the strain of their twoness. Even Eve's words, “unargued I obey,” by calling attention to the possibility of argument, both demonstrate and deny the strain.

Thus, although Milton says that his divorce tracts are not intended for this couple, we cannot help seeing in their marriage an illustration of what he means by both the best and the worst of wedded bliss. Marriage for him is a covenant, like that between man and God, and the covenant can be broken by spiritual or intellectual disagreement and incompatibility. When adultery is the only permissible reason for divorce, and the risks of adultery are so much greater for women than for men, it is easy for the man to control the marriage and his own freedom. Milton argues that the physical bond is much less important than the spiritual one, and that as soon as spiritual attunement is denied, the marriage is ended. Although he did not conceive of marriage without a dominant partner, he did suppose that this role might be taken by the wife, if she should exceed her husband in wisdom, and that either wife or husband could initiate divorce.³⁶

In the divorce tracts, Milton asks that marriage be removed from control of any ruling hierarchy, religious or civil, and placed in the power of the partners themselves. In theory, at least, this action would give the woman a legal means to remove herself from the power of paternal authorities and to negotiate equally in the matter of her own destiny. Milton's poem also makes it obvious that the reality of divorce affects day-to-day marital relations. Since marriage is based on mutual consent, unchangeable disagreement constitutes divorce. When Eve decides that the pair should work separately for a few hours, Adam cannot force her to change her mind. Since she is determined to go, a refusal of permission would constitute at the very least an opening of the way to divorce. Later, Adam could divorce Eve on any number of grounds, but he chooses to abandon himself to her.³⁷ In the recriminations which follow, they see that they have broken covenant with God, themselves, and each other, but as Eve took the first step away from the marriage, she now is first to try to repair the damage, and Adam, while pretending opposition, follows her all the way.

It is no mere lip service (Gilbert's term)³⁸ that Milton offers to matrimony. For him it is the basic, central figure of the way the world is, and of the way it could be—sometimes in a pattern of higher and lower status, sometimes in a balance of equals, sometimes stressing the separateness of the partners and sometimes their unity. For him the epic goal was the wholeness that marriage offers, figured also in every part of the universe that grows through its many opposites, and figured ultimately in the visionary time when “God shall be all in all.” The challenge that confronts us now is whether it is possible to retain that ideal, perhaps the only remaining idea that makes poetry out of life, while reaching beyond the particular poetry that seems to promote male dominance. While accepting this dominance, Milton himself searched beyond it as much as anyone in his age.

Eve and Adam were meant to move upward through the chain of being, free of death, until they reached the status of angels, and, eventually, without suffering death, to become one with God. Their destiny as free agents required them to be educated, and for this purpose God sent Raphael to teach them. Among the many remarkable attributes of Paradise Lost is its pervasive didacticism. The four central books of the poem are devoted to the education of the first man and woman. Both Eve and Adam listen to and absorb all that Raphael has to tell them, understanding with equal aptitude, as Milton tells us.³⁹ When Eve leaves before Raphael does, her departure serves several purposes, the most important of which is probably that it leaves Adam free to discuss her with the angel, in the section where he is told, but does not really admit, that he is an excessively doting husband.⁴⁰

Adam and Eve are both gardeners in this poem, a conception not without precedent, although Milton did choose to avoid the familiar division of labor according to which Adam delves and Eve spins. In her additional responsibilities for the household, Eve may be a prototype for the modern woman who fulfills her profession and is expected to do the dishes as well, or, more pleasingly, a forerunner of the Renaissance lady who presided over the great house and its surrounding villages. In any case, Adam is out of place here, nervously asking her to bring out her best stores for Raphael, and having no idea how food is preserved in Paradise. Since Eve's work is more comprehensive than his, it is understandable that she is the one who becomes preoccupied with the problem of their labor; Milton himself appears to agree that she has some reason for her concern.

Eve's cosmic association is with physical nature, which legitimately concerns the couple in their immediate day-to-day obligations, as well as in their thoughts about their descendants. Adam's association is with sky, which is supposed to make him more aware of God, but which also gives him a penchant for abstract speculation and generalization, and often makes him seem abstracted and ill at ease with ordinary life. Although both attend to lectures, Eve is more responsive to dreams: the work of reeducating her after the Fall thus is much less laborious than that of teaching Adam, who has to have everything explained to him. These are aspects of the traditional opposition between the minds of men and those of women. But both the way in which they are educated together by a tutor and the way in which they set forth together as travelers into an unknown world emphasize the opportunities which were at least sometimes available to both men and women in the Renaissance, and perhaps never again with quite the same balance of excitement and fear.

I have saved the problem of Satan for last, because it involves the most crucial issues for Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained in our time. Gilbert sees him romantically, commenting on his enormous attractiveness, especially to women, because he expresses their own need to rebel. But as most readers have noticed, Satan loses almost all his attractions after the opening two books of the poem, nor is there ever justification for describing him either as “a handsome devil” or as a “curly-haired Byronic hero.”⁴¹ Gilbert also sees him, more correctly, as a lover of incest and an artist of death. Here, more than anywhere else, it is important to recognize that for Milton God represents life. Because Satan has rebelled against life, he can love only himself and death (two objects which finally amount to the same thing). Gilbert does see women as being caught in a trap if they turn from God to Satan, but the attractiveness that she ascribes to Satan is more imaginary than she, and some of her authors, realize.

Satan is a perfect example of a patriarchal, domineering figure. His reason for rebellion is that he is totally threatened by God's decision to hand over the scepter to the Son. Abdiel's argument that the Son's new role will enable all Creation to be more closely united in God expresses exactly what Satan fears, that his own status must be lost or shared. He prefers hierarchy in hell to unity in heaven, and he tries to convince Eve of the rightness of his own distorted perspective. Satan is that odd kind of rebel who reacts against change: consequently, any reader who, like some of the romantics, wants to use him as a model has to misread and misinterpret Milton in order to do it.

Another point of importance: in all of Milton's poems there are patterns of resemblances, and in seeing affinities between Eve and Satan, Gilbert has merely selected one thread of this pattern in Paradise Lost. Satan also resembles the poet and God;⁴² Eve resembles Sin, Satan, Adam, the earth, Mary, and God. Milton, like everyone else in the Renaissance, is concerned with correspondences; they are a way of ordering experience. He is characteristic of his time also in believing that sin easily disguises itself as virtue, that evil and good so greatly resemble one another that it is difficult to choose the right path. In emphasizing likenesses between Eve, Adam, himself, and Satan, the poet wants to show that they do exist, that they are a constant danger, and that they can be overcome. Awareness of the danger may help us to avoid being surprised by sin.

Roland M. Frye's recent book, Milton's Imagery and the Visual Arts, provides valuable information not only about the traditional nature of these parallels, but also about the choices Milton made. In deciding how to portray Satan at the moment of the temptation of Eve, Milton rejected the possibility of “a serpent with the torso and head of a man,” by means of which he could easily have created a “curly-haired Byronic hero.” He also chose not to portray a woman-headed serpent, possibly with Eve's own face, a device extremely popular in the iconographic tradition. Such a figure would stress Eve's self-love, and give credence to Gilbert's argument for an incestuous undertone in the connection between woman and serpent. But, as Frye notes at this point, Milton “was not an antifeminist and could scarcely have put a ‘lady visage’ on his Tempter without seeming to some readers to invite an identification of the devil with woman.”⁴³

Imagination, allied with darkness and the muse, seems to Milton particularly vulnerable to invasion by Satanic elements. There is darkness in God also—Milton makes that very clear: from a cave near the throne of God both darkness and light proceed, and Satan himself, after all, is of God's creation. Just because the faculty of imagination is not always subject to reason, it is more suspect than reason, but it is not therefore inferior. Milton suspects his own poetic gift: possibly it is something of his own invention and not of God. He will not therefore deny or suppress it, but it may be that he stresses imagination excessively because he works in an irrational medium.

The most important and interesting element in this train of thought is the growth, in the Renaissance, of attention to subjectivity and to knowledge for its own sake. These are mirror images of each other: to be lost in oneself, Narcissus-like, may be to lose oneself; one may also become lost in the stars. Both activities are seen in the Renaissance as gifts which may be misused. Contemplation of self may lead to holiness or self-worship; contemplation of the stars may be a way of praising God's works or of trying to play God. As always, Adam's and Eve's vulnerabilities are opposite to one another. Eve's subjectivity makes her open to self-adulation; Adam's interest in the stars and his tendency toward idolatry make him forgetful of himself. Both lead to loss of accurate seeing of relationships. Satan exemplifies both extremes. The birth of Sin and his incest with her demonstrate his perverse self-love; his mastery of technology warns of the possible results of Adam's innocent speculations about outer space. Milton may have wished that these tendencies in human nature, both for good and for evil, could be shut off, but he knew better. They lead to alienation in our world, in any case.

Satan's alienation is absolute because he has carried to a perverse and absolute extreme the opposing tendencies manifested in Eve and Adam. Choosing self-love over love of life (an untenable paradox), his aim is to oppose God with himself, but God is the only standard to which he can apply. He argues that heaven and hell are both within, but has to choose God's standards (the norms of life) for definition. He wishes to make the world his empire, and does, by profaning it: everything is defined by its usefulness to him in his efforts to turn it against its true character in God's world. Thus he is unable to know either himself or the world, and becomes a totally alienated being.

The tendencies that destroy Satan are rejected by Eve and Adam as they choose each other and God (or life) over their own selfish and power-seeking propensities. Thus they have within them the possibility of paradise, even though it is apparent at the end of Paradise Lost that they must experience alienation henceforth as a way of life. Eve's unselfish recognition and acknowledgment of her need for Adam begins to save both of them from the negative tendencies in themselves. Previous scholars have observed the bold paralleling of Eve with the Son, at the end of Book X and the opening of Book XI, as both offer to accept all responsibility for human sin.⁴⁴ Frye too notes that Eve's compassionate and decisive role in the redemptive process has few precedents.⁴⁵ Yet sending Adam and Eve out alone, hand in hand (a detail apparently original in Milton) into the world,⁴⁶ Milton was not satisfied, and Paradise Regained is an attempt to deal with the central problem raised but not solved in Paradise Lost: what to do about subjectivity and alienation.

Subjectivity is seen in Paradise Lost as a female characteristic, and external knowing as a male one. Eve's first act is to contemplate herself, and Adam's to contemplate the heavens. Neither characteristic is in itself morally tarnished. In fact, both conventionally lead to knowledge of God. But they can also lead to individualism, another quality by which we now define the Renaissance and both praise and lament our own age. Modern readers often criticize the childlike natures of Adam and Eve. But Milton's first man and first woman are like that just because they have not yet fallen into self-consciousness and alienation, which are necessary to individualism as we know it. Renaissance thinkers clearly recognized that spiritual fragmentation and decay are allowed and even fostered by individualism. Milton had to consider this postlapsarian condition, which had become so evident in his time. The fear and fascination surrounding the problem are exemplified in Satan, who resembles numerous other Renaissance figures in the boundless energy with which he will address himself to any self-serving and ultimately self-destructive goal. He cannot be saved because he cannot submit himself to a larger whole.

If Sin is seen as female, so, obviously, is Mary in Paradise Regained, to whom Eve is often compared in Paradise Lost, and who traditionally is given the role of second Eve to Jesus' second Adam. She is the nurturing woman who helps Jesus to know himself, and helps to keep us from thinking of Jesus as either incomplete or aggressively masculine. In the poem he departs from and returns to his mother's house. His main activities in the poem (which, like Paradise Lost, rejects traditional epic action) are learning to know himself and rejecting the world that Satan has to offer. The poem says that he descended into himself (PR II, 111): it is the first epic in which subjectivity is made so explicit; and he names correctly the false worldly lures with which Satan would seduce him. Thus he repairs the damage done to self by Adam and Eve, and acknowledges the damage done to the world. Obviously, also, he combines the qualities of Adam and Eve which had been distinguished in their creation.

The sterility of both internal and external narcissism is well portrayed by Satan. Jesus' only recourse is to reject everything that Satan has to offer, as Satan had rejected everything of God. And one may read the poem as prophetic of the despair of the twentieth century, which has followed the Renaissance into a subjectivity now devoid both of God and of faith in anything. Satan and Jesus are two major aspects of modern consciousness, but one may conclude by feeling that there is nothing to choose between them. It is of course immensely important to recall that, as incarnation of the Son, Jesus is to represent and further the goal of reuniting all things in God. Satan has become devoted to holding in stasis the outward-moving, still hierarchical forms of Creation, turning them into grim parodies of themselves: thus an angel becomes a devil, and men and women become sex objects to one another. The Son's (and now Jesus') work is to carry all things beyond their separateness, into a fulfillment in perfect unity.

Jesus has rejected external things and power politics. Yet the “yes” that he says to life as symbolized by God, the “yes” that he says thereby to his own sense of wholeness, gives him the power to walk on water, stand on air, and be ministered to by angels. It also enables him to return to his mother's house instead of being dashed to pieces on the rocks. So a necessary connection between male and female may be restored here in a pattern of reciprocity that attempts to correct both the old patriarchal values and the medieval values of knight and lady. Standing on the pinnacle of his father's temple,⁴⁷ Jesus repeats the effort of Paradise Lost to reject patriarchal symbol and hierarchy. Learning from and in turn enlightening his mother, he restores the original pattern from which courtly love was derived.

Paradise Regained appears to be a poem of worldly rejection that prepares the way for romanticism by teaching descent into the self and admitting the total corruption of the world. Milton believed that humanity's only hope was in the subjective faith of the lonely man or woman. But it must also be remembered that Jesus, in appearing to reject everything the world offers, rejects only Satan's secular world. Under that tarnished surface, Milton believed, could still be found the perfect Eden of Eve and Adam, and human relationships based in natural love. In the atmosphere of doubt, fear, and greed in which the poem takes place, the role of Jesus must to a large extent appear negative. Mary's faith in the nature behind appearances, and her ability to make a link between the physical and the spiritual, are easy to miss in the context of the duel between Satan and her Son. But, as Michael has already insisted to Adam, the duel involves no exercise of power. Jesus rejects all of the so-called masculine values. His return to his mother's house is an affirmation of the new Adam, the new man.

Notes

1. For documentation of this point, see Joan Webber, Milton and His Epic Tradition (Seattle, 1978).

2. If Homer's poems celebrate the prowess of Greece and detail the military culture, they also question (perhaps deny) the sanity of the Trojan War. The Aeneid describes both the founding of Rome and the huge price that had to be paid for it. Tasso tells of a city (Jerusalem) that had to be destroyed in order to be saved. Camoens describes the utter decadence that overwhelms new lands after they have been discovered and claimed for Portugal. Spenser, Milton's immediate predecessor, in his romance epic presents the profound inadequacies of courtly love. The epics do not describe a better way. In fact, they do not utterly reject the world that they have, but in seeing its limitations they prepare the way for advance.

3. By these words I mean to suggest the large-scale sculpturing and the spare story line that so totally distinguish Milton from most of his predecessors. This apparent clarity is deceiving, but its artistic provenance is quite legitimately Homeric.

4. It is commonplace to speak of the English Civil Wars as the watershed between the medieval and the modern world, and to recognize thinkers like Descartes as the fathers of modern consciousness. It obviously follows that a poet like Milton, who lived through the Civil Wars on the rebel side, might also be seen as having helped to shape our world. See Jackie Di Salvo, “Blake Encountering Milton: Politics and the Family in Paradise Lost and The Four Zoas,” in Milton and the Line of Vision, ed. Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr. (Madison, Wis., 1975), pp. 143-84. On this point in general see also Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York, 1977).

5. Milton's genius for seeing the underlying issues in contemporary controversies, and for seeing issues of freedom where others had been unwilling to look, enabled him to pioneer the work of freedom on many different fronts. Rather than concern himself with the degree of liberty appropriate to Baptists, Levellers, or Quakers, as others were doing, he examined the validity (for him the necessity) of free expression. Rather than assume the divine sanctity of marriage, he examined it as a human institution entirely dependent for its success on the enduring compatibility of two fallible human beings. This almost unique ability to grasp the essentials of a problem makes us wonder why he could not trace out all the implications in the same way we ourselves would do it. Such an attitude not only shows a lack of appreciation for the magnitude of the achievement; it is also ahistorical.

6. “Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton's Bogey,” PMLA, XCIII (1978), 368-82. Gilbert's focus is on the reactions to Paradise Lost of a number of (mostly nineteenth-century) women writers, but she indicates that they are reacting to a conservative, patriarchal, misogynistic poem. In other words, she is not just representing what she regards as their point of view: she believes them to be right. While her essay does summarize some very persistent complaints about Milton, it also badly misrepresents both Milton and many of her authors, and probably ought to be answered point by point on their behalf. However, such a direct attack would dilute concentration on the most essential issue of how to read Milton. In the present essay I have tried, in fairness to Milton's own style of argument, to speak to that underlying issue. In the course of this endeavor, I do not mean to argue that Milton was not in some sense a “patriarchal” poet: he lived in the seventeenth century, and it seems pointless to complain that he was of his age. It is much more worthwhile to celebrate the extent to which, by transcending his time, he enabled us to ask for freedoms that he himself could not yet imagine.

   Some examples of Gilbert's misreadings of Milton are that in Paradise Lost a solitary Father-God is the only creator of all things, that Adam speaks for Milton (and for God), that the Fall is responsible for human generation, that Adam's fall is more fortunate than Eve's, that spirits are all masculine, that Satan is a handsome devil throughout much of Paradise Lost, that Satan “explores” his own secret depths, and that he is concerned with liberty and justice. Both in her reading of Milton, and in her analysis of women writers, Gilbert makes the mistake of assuming that a character's viewpoint can be identified with the author's. For example, although Charlotte Brontë's Shirley has a low opinion of Milton's characterization of Eve, Milton is first on the list of authors whom Charlotte recommended to her sister Emily, ahead of Shakespeare, about whose morality she has reservations, and far ahead of Pope, whom she says she does not admire; see Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London, 1908), p. 85. For more accurate readings of these writers, one should look at the works themselves, as well as at those of other critics, as, to take one example, Stuart Curran, “The Siege of Hateful Contraries: Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron, and Paradise Lost,” in Milton and the Line of Vision, ed. Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr. (Madison, Wis., 1975), pp. 209-30.

7. Previous writing on this subject includes Marcia Landy, “Kinship and the Role of Women in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies, IV, ed. James D. Simmonds (Pittsburgh, 1972), pp. 3-18; Barbara K. Lewalski, “Milton on Women—Yet Once More,” Milton Studies, VI, ed. James D. Simmonds (Pittsburgh, 1974), pp. 3-20; Di Salvo, “Blake Encountering Milton.”

8. Gilbert, Abstract, p. 357. Lewalski's fine essay, referred to in my previous note, anticipates much that I have to say here and obviates some of Gilbert's arguments, such as the idea that Eve's creativity is only in motherhood, while Adam is the poet and intellectual.

9. Gilbert, “Patriarchal Poetry,” p. 369.

10. Ibid., p. 381, n. 8.

11. On this point, see Northrop Frye, Five Essays on Milton's Epics (London, 1966), pp. 94ff.

12. In “The Prose Works of Milton,” Papers on Literature and Art (New York, 1846), pp. 38-39.

13. I am thinking especially of the mockery of the courtly codes in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and, with more thoughtfully directed point, in Spenser's Faerie Queene, where the sexism of the Arthurian world is made apparent.

14. On the problem of censorship, see Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, chap. 29, “Paradise Lost.”

15. For the most famous examples of Milton's practice, see his use of the biblical texts on divorce in the divorce tracts.

16. One might bear in mind this antithetical tradition in considering Sandra Gilbert's attack on Milton's “masculine” Latinity. The question of whether Milton was or was not a Latinate poet is still, oddly enough, very controversial; some of the scholarship is summarized in my book The Eloquent “I”: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison, Wis., 1966), pp. 287-88. Northrop Frye argues that “simplicity of language is a deep moral principle to Milton,” and that he was “the first great English writer to fight for semantic sanity” (Five Essays on Milton's Epics, pp. 122-24). In fact, heroic language is subverted in Paradise Lost, just as heroic ideas are, until what finally emerges is the stripped style of Paradise Regained.

17. William Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London, 1963).

18. IX, 31-32, in The Works of John Milton, II (New York, 1931), hereafter cited as CM. Future references will be to this edition and will be given in the text.

19. Abdiel is the obvious model of the fully formed heroic individual. The acceptance of the isolated person as heroic model occurs in Milton from necessity of his age, not from conviction. The concept of individualism is new in the Renaissance, not even fully articulated, yet the dangers of individualism inherited by our age are already apparent to Milton, as they were to a long line of subsequent antidemocratic English thinkers, and this problem will be a central issue in my discussion. For Milton, individualism is a means to a communal end.

20. On this see, for example, Rosalie Colie, “My Ecchoing Song”: Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism (Princeton, 1970), “Visual Traditions,” pp. 192-218.

21. I am extending a suggestion made by Northrop Frye, who suggests that God's self-justifying speech in Book III is modeled on the speech of Zeus at the opening of the Odyssey; see Five Essays on Milton's Epics, p. 105.

22. Gilbert, “Patriarchal Poetry,” pp. 368, 375.

23. For discussion and bibliography, see my “Milton's God,” ELH, XL (1973), 514-31.

24. Christian Doctrine, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, VI (New Haven, 1973), ed. Maurice Kelley, I, VI, “Of the Holy Spirit,” pp. 281-98. This edition is hereafter cited as YP.

25. “Patriarchal Poetry,” p. 373. As so often, here Gilbert accepts the word of a character, in this case disgruntled Adam, who after the Fall imagines that heaven contains male spirits only.

26. Northrop Frye, “The Revelation to Eve,” in Paradise Lost: A Tercentenary Tribute, ed. B. Rajan (Toronto, 1969), p. 46.

27. For discussion and bibliography, see Robert Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness (New York, 1972), p. 67.

28. Webber, Milton and His Epic Tradition.

29. For women now the question of how to make use of this extensive literature is extremely perplexing. Women are not in agreement as to the validity of these sexual distinctions. Nor can one be sure to what extent the literature creates or merely reflects them. If the stereotypes ought not to be perpetuated, then how does one deal with the literature?

30. See Don Parry Norford, “‘My other half’: The Coincidence of Opposites in Paradise Lost,” MLQ, XXXVI (1975), 21-53.

31. “Patriarchal Poetry,” p. 371.

32. See William Haller, “Hail Wedded Love,” ELH, XIII (1946), 79-97; William and Malleville Haller, “The Puritan Art of Love,” Huntington Library Quarterly, V (1942), 235-72; C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (London, 1953).

33. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, p. 119. Research on this subject has yielded controversial evidence. For a somewhat different interpretation, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York, 1977), p. 202.

34. John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, YP, II, 273.

35. Tetrachordon, YP, II, 665. Christopher Hill speculates interestingly on Milton's possible influence, and lack of influence, on Charlotte Brontë, who compares blind Rochester to Milton's Samson. Like Milton, Rochester lives long enough to gain a happy marriage. The divorce that Milton could envisage “still seemed impossible two centuries later”; see Milton and the English Revolution, p. 140.

36. Tetrachordon, p. 589: “then a superior and more natural law comes in, that the wiser should govern the less wise, whether male or female.” It is apparent throughout the tracts that Milton addresses himself to both men and women; the title of his initial tract begins, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Restored to the good of both Sexes.

37. Eve committed idolatry in worshiping the tree, and to Milton idolatry was a more serious offense than adultery. But Adam committed idolatry in worshiping Eve.

38. “Patriarchal Poetry,” p. 374.

39. In allowing Eve an education equal to Adam's, Milton certainly departs very far from the usual practice of his day: only a few aristocratic women were ordinarily privileged to learn so much. Since this episode of the poem is central, it seems strange that critics continue to believe that Eve has been denied the benefit of Raphael's instruction. This is a different kind of misreading from that which Gilbert claims women have had to exercise.

40. It also shows us, as Arnold Stein points out, that when Adam has other things on his mind, he is not so concerned about Eve's spending time alone in the Garden (The Art of Presence: The Poet and “Paradise Lost” [Berkeley, 1977]).

41. Gilbert, “Patriarchal Poetry,” p. 375. Gilbert ascribes this unlikely epithet to T. S. Eliot, on the authority of Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence (New York, 1973). I have not found the source in Eliot.

42. On these intentional parallels, see William Riggs, The Christian Poet in “Paradise Lost” (Berkeley, 1972).

43. Milton's Imagery and the Visual Arts (Princeton, 1978), p. 168.

44. Lewalski, “Milton on Women—Yet Once More,” p. 19. Joseph Summers, The Muse's Method (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 176-85.

45. Milton's Imagery, p. 294.

46. Ibid., pp. 314-15.

47. The act of standing on the pinnacle of the temple, which concludes the series of temptations in Book IV of Paradise Regained, is meant to recall the opening of Paradise Lost, in which Milton says that the Spirit prefers “Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure” (PL I, 17-18).