SOURCE: McColley, Diane Kelsey. “Shapes of Things Divine: Eve, Myth, and Dream.” In Milton's Eve, pp. 63-109. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

[In this excerpt, Colley examines the scene in which Eve observes herself in the pool after her creation. Colley disputes interpretations that view Eve's actions as a narcissistic impulse, instead maintaining that the scene asserts Eve's free will.]

“ANSWERING LOOKS”

The allusion to pagan fable that most haunts views of Milton's Eve is her Narcissus-like behavior when, fresh from her Creator's hand, she pauses at the verge of the mirror lake attracted by her own reflection and has to be called twice: first by God, who leads her to Adam, and then, as she starts back toward the softer beauty of the face in the lake, by Adam himself. Scholars have often noted echoes from Ovid's tale of Narcissus and attributed to Eve a native vanity that issues in the Fall, sometimes finding additional sinister implications in the scene's subterranean imagery and in parodic resemblances between the creation of Eve and the birth of Sin.¹ Others have argued that Eve's narcissism, since she quickly outgrows it, is an innocent stage of human development.² Recently, critics have exalted Eve's self-admiration either as a species of Platonic contemplation or as a preconscious unity with nature that her awakening consciousness of otherness shatters, so that her escape from immersion in the unconscious becomes a kind of fall and the official Fall a commendable rebellion against the oppressive forces of reason.³ According to Don Parry Norford, “There is a certain beauty, and even a sacred mystery, in Eve's narcissism” because it represents “the linking of above and below, man and nature, in uroboric unity”; yet, paradoxically, Eve's self-assertion in the Fall “generates human civilization,” a feat that Norford believes could not have been achieved in obedience to God because “in Paradise Lost, as in Christianity in general, selfhood is demonic”; and although this approach conflicts with Milton's conscious intentions, “if there were nothing in Paradise Lost but what Milton intended, it would be a relatively superficial work.”⁴ In other words, Norford reverts to the view that Milton was of Satan's party without knowing it, and makes the poem itself a pool of Narcissus for our own projections rather an invitation to drink of Siloa's brook.

The scene in which Eve is tempted to prefer her self to Adam is a textual remedy for a narcissistic reading of the poem. It takes the reader with Eve through a pattern of response that is a mimetic model, both for the art of marriage and for the art of reading. Like Eve, the reader pauses to see his own reflection, but that is not the end of the interpretive process, nor of Eve's experience. The allusions to Ovid's Narcissus do not show either that Eve was primordially vain or that selfhood develops through sin. They dissociate Eve, by careful attention to the differences in the two stories, from the flagrant narcissism habitually attributed to her in other representations of Genesis; and they stress the unlikeness between the compulsive and incestuous union of Satan and Sin to produce Death and the free and awakened alliance of Adam and Eve to produce a multitude of diverse lives. Like all good adventures, Eve's narrow escape from narcissism is exigent and perilous, requiring her to lose herself in order to find herself while leaving her full freedom to fail, and rewarding her with new opportunities and powers; and the poem is just such an adventure for the reader.

Renaissance apologists for poesie were well aware that any work of art can be a pool of Narcissus or a wellspring of grace, in either of which we can be sea-swallowed and cast again,⁵ depending on our responses. Although, as Sidney concedes, “mans wit may make Poesie … infect the fancie with unwoorthie objects, … whatsoever being abused, doth most harm, being rightly used … doeth most good”; the right use of poesie is “figuring foorth good things” in order to awaken “the inward light each mind hath in itself,” to “take naughtinesse away, and plant goodnesse even in the secretest cabinet of our soules”; while the right use of reading is to “take that goodnesse in hande” with the aim of “well-doing.”⁶ Spenser exercises the reader's ability to choose between narcissistic delectation and wholesome action while he follows Guyon, as Milton says, through “the bowr of earthly blisse that he might see and know, and yet abstain,” and thus performs “the scanning of error [so necessary] to the confirmation of truth” (4.311). Shakespeare tells us that art holds “the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image” (Hamlet III.ii); and Milton that poetry is a divine gift “of power … to inbreed and cherish … the seeds of vertue, and publick civility, to allay the perturbations of the mind, and set the affections in right tune” (3.238). For these Renaissance poets, poetry illuminates those chaotic depths we now call the unconscious and healthfully appropriates their energies not only for art's sake but also for life's sake; they urge the reader to turn from art to life as Eve turns from her “chrystal mirror” to Adam. The episode gives both Eve and the reader an opportunity to distinguish themselves from Echo, who can only repeat, and Narcissus, who sees only himself, and instead to make instructive and delightful use of all the poem's living waters, including but not stopping at those that reflect themselves.

Just as Eve's choice provides a model for a regenerate reading of the poem, Satan's survey of the Garden, which precedes and prepares for it, provides an image of a perverse reading, as, perched “like a Cormorant” on the tree of life he

                                                                                not true Life
Thereby regained, but sat devising Death
To them who liv'd; nor on the vertue thought
Of that life-giving Plant, but only us'd
For prospect, what well us'd had bin the pledge
Of immortality. So little knows
Any, but God alone, to value right
The good before him, but perverts best things
To worst abuse, or to thir meanest use.

[4.196-204]

For Milton all materials, processes, and powers, like poetry, are the stuff of virtue to those who love God and their neighbors and the stuff of sin to those who do not.⁷ Satan, in his desire to pervert God's works to “worst abuse,” puts “to meanest use” what might have been a means of rebirth even for him. By reducing himself from archangel to bird of prey and brooding “like a Cormorant” over ways to blight the new creation and make it sterile, he parodies the Spirit who in the beginning “Dove-like [sat] brooding on the vast Abyss / And [made] it pregnant”: the Spirit whom the poet asks to instruct him as he writes his poem (1.19-22). At the same time, Satan's misuse of the Tree prepares by proleptic parody for Eve's right use of the lake; for although she could have used her mirror as a pool of Narcissus, and trapped herself within herself, she uses it instead as a source of truth when, by a creative act of memory, she uses the experience to understand her calling and makes it into a poem (4.448-91) for her husband.

The lake into which Eve looks is one in which many waters unite their streams. Milton's “fit audience” was prepared to find figurative meanings in the waters of Eden by the similitude of the four rivers of Genesis as the four cardinal virtues.⁸ His own best gloss for his description of them is the comment in Areopagitica that “truth is compar'd in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetuall progression, they sick'n into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition” (4.333). It is this sense of process, and not dark hints of primordial deviousness, that accounts for the constant and varied motion of the divergent streams that spring from the great river which unchanging in its course, passes beneath the Mount of Paradise:

                                                                      for God had thrown
That Mountain as his Garden mould high rais'd
Upon the rapid current, which through veins
Of porous Earth with kindly thirst up drawn,
Rose a fresh Fountain, and with many a rill
Waterd the Garden; thence united fell
Down the steep glade, and met the neather Flood,
Which from his darksom passage now appears,
And now divided into four main Streams,
Runs divers, wandring many a famous Realme
And Country whereof here needs no account.

The ensuing lines, with their metatextual modesty and their glance at the Muse, are professedly among Milton's most artful, formally alluding to the topos of the locus amoenus in which art and nature are either at war in illusory groves or at peace in (mimetically) real ones; and it is full of ambiguous imagery that invites best or meanest use.

But rather to tell how, if Art could tell,
How from that Saphire Fount the crisped Brooks,
Rowling on Orient Pearl and sands of Gold,
With mazie error under pendant shades
Ran Nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
Flours worthy of Paradise which not nice Art
In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon
Powrd forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plaine,
Both where the morning Sun first warmly smote
The open field, and where the unpierc't shade
Imbround the noontide Bowrs: Thus was this place,
A happy rural seat of various view. …

Milton's art pointedly calls attention to itself, to the poetic process and its purpose of nurture, distinguishing between “Art” and the “nice” and “curious” art-for-art's sake that he has rejected in renouncing rhyme. Onomatopoetically the passage continues,

                                                  mean while murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills, disperst, or in a Lake,
That to the fringed Bank with Myrtle crownd,
Her chrystal mirror holds, unite thir streams.

[4.236-42, 260-63]

This is the mirror in which Eve beholds herself.

Several features of Milton's imagery make these united waters a metaphor for poetry. The waters of poetic inspiration in Milton's invocations include “the Pierian Sping” of “Lycidas” (15-16), the springs the “Muses haunt” (3.27), but also, and pre-eminently, “Siloa's Brook” (1.11, 3.30). Milton reinforces the kinship of these tropological streams by crowning the “chrystal mirror” with myrtle, which, following Ovid,⁹ he apostrophizes along with laurel and ivy at the beginning of “Lycidas” as emblems of his craft. Around the lake, “the Birds thir quire apply,” and, punningly, “aires, vernal aires … attune / The trembling leaves,” while Pan, the Graces, and the Hours knit earthly and divine influence in their dance. Opposed to the waters of sacred song and poetic truth are the rivers of Hell and the “Stygian pool” (3.14). The word “pool”—water that does not flow and is not fed—is associated with Satan (9.77) and the lust-god Chemos (1.411), never with Eve.

The myrtle-crowned bank, the union of streams, and the nuptial context also make Eve's mirror a marriage emblem that, by virtue of the allusion to Narcissus and other ambiguous imagery, provides a choice of interpretations. Words like “wandring,” “mazie error,” “darksome passage,” and “mirror” contain warning notes. During her temptation and fall they will be explicitly associated with Eve, and here they are implicitly associated with her by their erotic resonances. But these are prelapsarian caves and streams. The diverse waters of the art of God are bountifully nourishing and ever fresh, “visiting each plant,” and this image too will be associated with Eve, who visits “Each Flour” in “Her Nursurie” and brings them “water from th'ambrosial Fount” (8.44-47, 9.427-31, 11.275-79). Since to the pure all things are pure, the sinister implications afforded by a Satanic “prospect” do not taint the actual goodness of the fertile pleasures and opportunities, including passionate and procreative sexuality, offered for right use to Adam and Eve. The lake of potential narcissism and the wandering streams that form it rightly suggest to the postlapsarian mind a warning against self-love and the joint egoism that sometimes afflicts erotic love; but in Paradise, since erotic love is not yet blind and the very quality of selfhood is yet to be investigated, the mirror is innocently held up to the sky as a potential instrument of growth. And that is how Eve uses it: not at the moment of turning from the lake to Adam, but in the act of converting the experience into a poem.

In contrast, poets and painters before and during Milton's time regularly associate unambiguous images of vanity and self-love with Eve, which she never renounces. Commonly, other Eves see flowers as images and adornments of their own beauty, never as creatures to be nourished. Even more commonly, Eve's mirror is the woman-headed serpent, which often resembles Eve in detail, suggesting that she is tempted not by an external snake but by her own concupiscence, or by a narcissistic attraction to what is most like herself.¹⁰ By relegating the bi-form serpent to the gates of Hell and giving Eve a mirror whose invitation to narcissism she can reform into an awakening of conscience and then a poem, Milton provides Eve with what he calls in De Doctrina Christiana a “good temptation,” whereby “God tempts even the righteous for the purpose of proving them … that both they may become wiser by experience, and others may profit by their example” (15:87). Eve uses her mirror to scan error and discern truth, and both she and Adam become wiser by it. Having chosen rightly between the image of herself in the lake and the image of God in Adam, she goes forth, as Milton would have us go forth from his poem, to acts of love and right uses of art: she waters flowers “from th'ambroisal Fount,” and she tells her story “by a fresh Fountain side.”

Eve narrates the episode (4.440-91) with far greater depth and perspicacity than she was capable of when it occurred. The poem she makes is a recollection in a tranquillity that is possible only because she has used the substance of the recollection to make herself what Milton says a poet must be, the pattern of a true poem. Its spirited honesty and stylistic variety remind us that conversing in a language able to annunciate truth felicitously is one of the lost pleasures of Paradise that inspired poets can regain. “That day I oft remember,” she begins, indicating that she and Adam have been living sinlessly for some time; and she recalls her courtship with relief, gratitude, sobriety, amusement, gaiety, and wit. Her first awareness is onomatopoetic:

                                                                      a murmuring sound
Of waters issu'd from a Cave and spread
Into a liquid Plain, then stood unmov'd
Pure as th' expanse of Heav'n.

Her first steps are almost stumblingly alliterative: “I thither went / With unexperienc't thought, and laid me downe”; and her proneness is elongated in double vowels: “to look into the cleer / Smooth Lake, that to me seemd another Skie.” Whereas Adam first turns his eyes “strait toward Heav'n” (8.256), Eve, who is God's image through him, turns hers to a mirror of Heaven. To her surprise, as she relates in syntax that comically reflects the action,

A Shape within the watry gleam appeerd
Bending to look on me, I started back,
It started back, but pleas'd I soon returnd,
Pleas'd it returnd as soon with answering looks
Of sympathie and love. …

The language of heavenly shapes is neoplatonic, suggesting the potential for narcissism in that form of love wherein, according to Pico, the lover worships in the beloved “the Image his [the lover's] soul has formed.”¹¹ In his later conversation, Adam too will reveal a liability to detach contemplation from reality that needs to be (and is) corrected, and his potential for dualism as well as for contemplation is foreshadowed here when Eve first sees him “under a Platan,” which is the tree, as Plato tells us at the beginning of the Phaedrus, under which Socrates taught. Both Adam and Eve have the inherent and enlivening need of incarnate beings to distinguish between their own images and the images God has made, and to integrate the workings of perception, imagination, and reason that produce understanding. And that is what Eve does in this scene. Although the Eve of the story does not yet know that the playful inhabitant of “that other Skie” is herself, Eve as narrator recognizes the risks of narcissism as she recounts her calling:

                                                  there I had fixt
Mine eyes till now, and pin'd with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warnd me, What thou seest,
What there thou seest fair Creature is thy self,
With thee it came and goes: but follow me,
And I will bring thee where no shadow staies
Thy coming, and thy soft imbraces, hee
Whose image thou art, him thou shall enjoy
Inseparablie thine, to him shalt beare
Multitudes like thy self, and thence be call'd
Mother of human Race: what could I doe,
But follow strait, invisibly thus led?

What happens next is crucial. Seeing Adam, she tells him with a note of loving banter, she finds him “less faire, / Less winning soft, less amiablie milde, / Then that smooth watry image; back I turnd.” All the well-known human liability to become immersed in self-absorption echoes in her self-mocking confession. But she never actually reaches the lake, as Ovid's Narcissus does, to admire her own reflection knowing what it is. Instead, she makes the choice on which all further choices depend: she returns to Adam in response to his own cry.

Why, if not merely to reveal vanity, does Eve need to be called twice? Several observations may be made.

First, the method of Eve's creation is a part of what Milton believes to be God's way of creating all things, and requires for its completion the free and deliberate choice that Eve's decision, after she knows whose face is in the lake, supplies. According to Milton's theory of creation de deo, rather than ex nihilo (15:21-25), God gave of his own substance to be the matter of creation, but withdrew his will from it, so that his reasoning creatures might be free and nature might be instrumental to their purposes. The risk of this freedom is isolation in self: and that is what Satan chooses. Its purpose is the possibility of love; the beloved must be perceived as other before he or she can be loved any way but narcissistically. As in God's creation of cosmos out of chaos in Book 7, separation precedes relation; and it is through relation, not immersion in self, that selfhood develops. Adam, having given of his own substance to make Eve, learns in this episode to respect her freedom; and Eve learns to take pleasure in her origin. Creating one being out of another, but assuring the freedom that is necessary to love, is God's normal method of bringing forth, in which Adam has shared; and Eve will share in it by bearing “multitudes like [her] self” whose freedom she too will need to respect.

Second, Eve's remark, “what could I doe, / But follow strait” raises the question of the woman's consent in the marriage that is to be the pattern of all marriages. Her moment of hesitation marks her discovery that her will is free. Her turning and returning recapitulate the rubrics of solemnization of marriage in the Book of Common Prayer, preserved from the Sarum Rite,¹² in which a deliberate loosening and refastening of hands before the bride makes her vows bear witness to the intent of the church that her consent should be voluntary. It is important to Milton's concept of domestic liberty that Eve should respond spontaneously yet preparedly to Adam, and not only to his appearance but to his speech and the clasp of his hand, in full knowledge of who she is.

Milton states in De Doctrina Christiana that “the love of a man towards himself consists in loving himself next to God,” his care for his own salvation being a primary duty. This self-regard is opposed both to self-hatred, which produces sin, and “the extravagant self-love, whereby a man loves himself more than God, or despises his neighbor in comparison with himself.” From “righteousness toward ourselves … as from a fountain, the special virtues in general derive their origin,” since it includes pursuit of good, resistance to evil, and regulation of our affections, so that “our highest affections may be placed on the objects most worthy of them” (17:201-3). Eve's account of her first experience shows her growing understanding of this pattern. She does not marry what Raphael will call “an outside”—nor, since she clearly has a mind of her own, does Adam—and to do so would have been the psychological equivalent of marrying the wat'ry image. Instead, the marriage is a covenant of trust typologically prefiguring the New Covenant between Christ and the church.

Third, Adam's urgent speech is not without its own potentiality for narcissism: “Part of my soul I seek thee, and thee claim / My other half.” Later, conversing with Raphael, Adam in attributing his own proper excellence to Eve and misevaluating hers reveals a capacity to confuse images, and in the Fall he will become disastrously possessive. Eve's turning back toward the lake, though she properly sees it as a childish gesture since outgrown, provides a valuable precept for Adam, and in his own account of Eve's creation, in his rectified version to Raphael of wedded love, and in the separation colloquy, Adam prizes the love of one who is free and “conscious of her worth.”

Fourth, in order to be a “good temptation” for Eve, self-love has really to be a temptation, which it cannot be until she knows that the water-sprite is her own reflection and can compare her image with the reality of Adam. In addition to “exercising and manifesting” the “faith and patience” of the righteous, a “good temptation” can have the purpose of “lessening their self-confidence and reproving their weakness,” to the benefit both of themselves and of others, and “is therefore rather to be desired” (15:87-89). A weakness, in the unfallen or the regenerate “righteous,” is an opportunity for growth and in her narrative Eve not only acknowledges the weakness but manifests the responsive growth that the temptation elicits; and the response is stronger, more joyful, and more fully Eve's that it could have been without the difficulty to be overcome. Her designation of Adam as “thou for whom / And from whom I was formed flesh of thy flesh, / And without whom am to no end, my Guide / And Head” is (except for its central echo) her own idea. The voice that leads her to Adam calls him “hee / Whose image thou art,” and Adam tells her that he lent his bone to give her being, but neither subjects her. The voice promises, “him thou shalt enjoy / Inseparablie thine,” and Adam wants “to have thee by my side.” Her response is not abject but magnanimous. It shows a quality Raphael recommends to Adam, “self-esteem, grounded in just and right / Well managed” (8.571-72); she emerges from her brush with narcissism “self-knowing, and from thence / Magnanimous to correspond with Heav'n, / But grateful to acknowledge whence [her] good / Descends” (7.510-13):

For wee to [God] indeed all praises owe,
And daily thanks, I chiefly who enjoy
So farr the happier Lot, enjoying thee
Praeeminent by so much odds, while thou
Like consort to thy self canst no where find.

[4.444-48]

Fifth, Eve's second calling invokes attention to the differences between the “sweet and gladsome society” of Adam and Eve and the humorless and truly narcissistic union of Satan and Sin. Unlike Adam and Eve, Satan resents and denies having received the gift of life from another, claiming that he is “self-begot, self-rais'd” (5.860). At the other extreme, his incestuous union with Sin is so indistinguishable from the rest of his self-absorption that he promptly forgets all about her, and her narration to her consort of her beginning (2.787-814), the proleptic parody of Eve's, is necessary to remind him who she is. She too has sprung from her consort's “left side op'ning wide”; she is his “perfect image”; and, much as Eve will say to Adam, “My Author and Disposer, what thou bidst / Unargued I obey,” Sin says to Satan, “Thou art my Father, thou my Author, thou / My being gav'st me; whom should I obey / But thou, whom follow?” But the events within this parodic frame are monstrous opposites to those of the human marriage. Satan is surprised by Sin, who springs from his head with “miserable pain”; he is at first “averse” and in their infernal encounter he fails to recognize her. Adam pleads for Eve in “celestial Colloquie” with God, painlessly watches God create her ‘’with his hands” from his own rib, receives her “overjoyd” and recognizes her at once as “Flesh of my Flesh” and “dearer half” (8.455-99). At the birth of Sin “amazement seis'd / All th' Host of Heav'n; back they recoiled affraid,” while at the marriage of Adam and Eve “all Heav'n, / And happie Constellatins on that houre / Shed thir selectest influence; the Earth / Gave sign of Gratulation” (8.511-14). The birth of Sin is surrounded by war, Eve's by the peaceable kingdom. Satan with Sin becomes “enamour'd,” and, she reminds him, “such joy thou took'st / With me in secret, that my womb conceiv'd / A growing burden”; and she gives birth to Death, the devouring shadow, who promptly rapes his mother “in embraces forcible and foul” and begets the hounds of Hell. Eve is brought “where no shadow staies / [Her] coming” to enjoy the “Perpetual Fountain of Domestic sweets” that is the “source of human offspring” and “all the Charities” (4.750-60).

Finally, the relation that is imitated by Eve's to Adam and parodied by Sin's to Satan is the source of all selfhood and all connection, the relation the Son expresses to the Father as “image of thee in all things … Whom to obey is happiness entire” (6.736, 741).¹³ In both De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Regained, as well as Paradise Lost, Milton stresses the distinct personality of the Son: Father and Son are one in substance, sharing Godhead, but different in essence, distinguishing wills, so that the Son's responsive acts of creation and redemption are acts of love. Similarly, Adam and Eve, who are God's images not only in their persons but in their relation, are one flesh, sharing and propagating humanity, but different persons, distinguishing wills, so that their union too may be one of voluntary love. If their love is to be a fountain of charity, and not a pool of Narcissus, they need to learn to recognize and promote each other's personal essence, and the sifting of true and false images at the lake is a part of this process.

At the Fall, both Adam and Eve will succumb to narcissism. But that is not what this scene prefigures. On the contrary, a timely rememberance of the experience by the lake might have saved them from embracing shadows at their falls. What the scene does prefigure is Eve's initiating step toward reconciliation after the Fall, which completes the poem's reversal of the tale of Narcissus. For Echo cries to Narcissus, “Forsake me not so cruelly that loueth thee so deere”; but Narcissus prefers to die of self-love and betakes himself “to the Well of Styx, and there both day and night / Standes tooting on his shadow still as fondely as before.”¹⁴ Eve, echoing Echo, pleads, “Forsake me not thus, Adam, witness Heav'n / What love sincere, and reverence in my heart / I beare thee” (10.914-16); and Adam, unlike Narcissus, “relent[s] / Towards her” and “with peaceful words uprais[es] her soon” (10.940, 946). And these first steps of regenerate life imitate steps for which the whole poem prepares the reader who turns from the poem's perpetual streams, and the mirror they form, to the life they nourish.¹⁵

“PROPORTION DUE”

From the moment of recognition at the lake, Adam and Eve receive delight and instruction from each other's developing abilities, enjoying a “union of mind” enriched by diverse perspectives. Eve's reminiscences differ in notable ways from two parallel passages, Adam's accounts to Raphael of the same episode and of his own first moments; and each gains distinction from the other.

From Adam's point of view, God has created Eve in response to Adam's own plea (8.357-499). He knows that she was preveniently intended, but at the time of his seeking he has had to recognize his need and pluck up courage to ask, “presumptuous,” for something more than the paradisal plenitude he has surveyed and named. The Creator, testing him, smilingly chides, “is not the Earth / With various living creatures, and the Aire / Replenisht?” and Adam persists:

Among unequals what societie
Can sort, what harmonie or true delight?
Which must be mutual, in proportion due
Giv'n and receiv'd. …
                                                            Of fellowship I speak
Such as I seek, fit to participate
All rational delight. …

Further trial elicits from Adam an eloquent speech on the purposes of marriage, and the Son replies that Adam's self-knowledge expresses

          well the spirit within thee free,
My Image, not imparted to the Brute,
Whose fellowship therefore unmeet for thee
Good reason was thou freely shouldst dislike.

It is exactly her creation in God's image that makes Eve meet for Adam, “Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self, / Thy wish, exactly to thy heart's desire.” In a trance, Adam watches as God creates from his own rib and fresh life-blood the sum of loveliness, “Manlike, but different Sex,” whose looks Adam says

                                                                      infus'd
Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,
And into all things from her Aire inspir'd
The spirit of love and amorous delight.

Adam has in fact received more than he had asked for: not only “rational delight” but also “amorous delight,” a bounty which Adam could not have imagined for himself, which the more ascetic of the Fathers would have found unsuitable, and by which Adam is well-nigh overwhelmed. By stirring the passion that is Adam's “good temptation” and the “ingredient of vertu” he most needs to temper, Eve provides the challenge to Adam's “manly grace / And wisdom” by which he chiefly grows.

What happens next is loss and seeking. The dream-Eve disappears and Adam wakes to behold the real one

Led by her Heav'nly Maker, though unseen,
And guided by his voice, nor uninformd
Of nuptial Sanctitie and marriage Rites:
Grace was in all her steps, Heav'n in her Eye,
In every gesture dignitie and love.

At this point, the two accounts differ. In Adam's (8.491-520) it is after his ecstatic expansion of Genesis, “they shall be one Flesh, one Heart, one Soule,” that Eve turns away. Adam, having heard Eve's self-mocking explanation, interprets her act more courteously.

          She heard me thus, and though divinely brought,
Yet Innocence and Virgin Modestie,
Her vertue and the conscience of her worth,
That would be woo'd, and not unsought be won,
Not obvious, not obtrusive, but retir'd,
The more desirable, or to say all,
Nature her self, though pure of sinful thought,
Wrought in her so, that seeing me, she turn'd;
I follow'd her, she what was Honour knew,
And with obsequious Majestie approv'd
My pleaded reason.

This winningly youthful, halting speech is a lover's idealization of the moment of weakness Eve has honestly confessed. Its broken phrases, its air of casting about, and its apt synoeceosis “obsequious [obedient] Majesty [sovereignty]” show that Adam is still struggling with the problem of having asked for an equal and been given instead someone who is engagingly different. He is still off balance in the recital (8.521-59) of “vehement desire” and “commotion strange” that follows his epithalamion. He polarizes woman as Milton's age too often did when he calls Eve “th'inferiour, in the mind / And inward Faculties” resembling less God's image particularly in the faculty of dominion, yet “so absolute” that “All higher knowledge in her presence falls / Degraded,” while “Authority and Reason on her waite, / As one intended first, not after made / Occasionally.” Eve is neither “absolute” nor made “occasionally,” but part of an intended pair. The fact is, Adam has fallen into a dualistic opposition of the passion and the reason, and of the “outward” and “inward Faculties,” that need to be integrated in each partner, in due proportion, and in the marriage. That need, recognized and coped with in the next lines, is part of the good temptation for Adam that corresponds to Eve's reflection in the lake. Raphael's rebuke, though pertinent, is incomplete, and elicits from Adam a better response. Adam is still free to “approve the best,” and Eve's real nature is manifest in “those graceful acts, / Those thousand decencies that daily flow / From all her words and actions mixt with Love” (8.611, 600-602).

Both accounts of their meeting express in different ways a problem common to free and conscious beings. Self-knowledge and consciousness of worth, wooing and choosing, are only first steps to love. Further steps are called for, and although Eve has to be called by God and then, twice, by Adam, her second calling and her recalling of it provide opportunities for them both: for Adam to recognize that though he has given her substantial life she has also essential life of her own, free and responsive to “pleaded reason”; for Eve, to respond freely; for both, to grow in understanding of personhood and love.

The second passage to which Eve's account of her awakening should be compared is Adam's account of his own (8.250-355). Eve's perceptions are subordinate to Adam's, but necessary to them, illuminating them as fancy brightens reason and as poetry kindles virtuous deeds. Both find themselves reposed on flowers, Adam in sunlight and Eve in shade. Adam looks “strait toward Heav'n,” Eve towards heaven's mirror. Adam, too, hears “liquid Lapse of murmuring streams” but notices more than Eve does. Both peruse themselves, but Adam consciously, “Limb by Limb,” while Eve does not know that the charming face she peers at is her own. Adam at once tries speech, while Eve is content with looks. Adam deduces from his own existence that there must be “some great Maker,” an instance of Milton's belief that every man is endowed with sufficient reason to infer the existence of God. Adam asks the other creatures how he may know and adore his Maker, but “Answer none return'd”: he falls asleep and dreams of “One … of shape Divine” who bids him rise and tells him “call'd by thee I come thy Guide”; waking to find “all real” he sees approaching “Presence Divine” who raises him from his knees and says “Whom thou soughtst I am.” Eve has to be called, and although she follows “strait,” she wavers. The pattern “seek and ye shall find” is established in Adam's first hours, soon to be reaffirmed in his redoubled seeking and finding of Eve. The pattern for Eve is of conversion from a blank innocence to a pure one and of growing response to her calling.

Adam comes off better, yet both patterns are needed. Eve does not have Adam's sureness and alacrity of recognition or his capacity for reasoning straight to first causes, but his instruction of her will exercise his intellect as well as hers. Her first perceptions test the boundaries of fact and illusion, while his explore those of natural and divine revelation. Adam's responses are more direct. He is “for God only,” she “for God in him.” And this, I think, is the point of her story. Both are images of God, but she is also an image of Adam. This is the situation God has given them; it is in itself good, but like all good things it has liabilities. God has given his images freedom, therefore separateness, and seeds of growth. Hence he has not joined Eve to Adam of necessity. Rather, having “edified” her from his very bone, he sets her apart. She wakes, like Adam, alone. She and Adam, on their own, have to discover themselves and each other, distinguish themselves from each other, become two selves in order to become “one Soule.” For a start, Eve sees herself mirrored in a lake and Adam sees himself mirrored in her. This phase is necessary but rapidly to be outgrown. As they grow, they break through the mirrors of self, consciousness encountering consciousness for the enlargment of both, and regard each other and the creation in their charge with “looks Divine” in which “the image of thir glorious Maker shon.” Thus, mimetically, Milton calls us to break through our own reflections in the poem to its essential life and then to “words and actions mixt with Love.”

Notes

1. See for example Jon S. Lawry, The Shadow of Heaven (Ithaca, N.Y., 1963), p. 175; A. B. Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton, N. J., 1966), pp. 9 ff.; Jonathan H. Collett, “Milton's Use of Classical Mythology in Paradise Lost,” PMLA 85 (1970): 88-96; Douglas A. Day, “Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost IV,” TSLL 3 (1961).

2. These include Dennis Burden, The Logical Epic (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 83-85; Arnold Stein, Answerable Style (Minneapolis, 1953) p. 93; H. V. S. Ogden, “The Crisis of Paradise Lost Reconsidered,” PQ 36 (1957): 1-19; J. M. Evans, “Paradise Lost” and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford, 1968), 253-54.

3. Lee A. Jacobus, “Self-Knowledge in Paradise Lost: Conscience and Contemplation, MiltonS 3 (1971): 103-18; Don Parry Norford, “The Separation of the World Parents in Paradise Lost,” MiltonS 12 (1978): 3-24.

4. Norford, “The Separation of the World Parents,” pp. 14, 10, 21.

5. The Tempest II.i. Shakespeare puts these words into the mouth of a character whom the sea has “cast” in the vulgarest sense of the word, since he responds unregenerately and destructively; but most of the characters are recast in the senses of being re-formed and given new parts.

6. Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London, 1594; repr. Cambridge, 1904), pp. 57, 34, 22, 16, 19.

7. Milton discusses this concept in De Doctrina Christiana, 15:199.

8. Ralegh calls this a “strange opinion” History of the World (1614), p. 34.

9. Elegies, I.xv, trans. Christopher Marlowe, in The Works and Life of Christopher Marlowe: Poems, ed. L. C. Martin (New York, 1931, repr. 1966), p. 178.

10. Nature as a mirror for Eve's vanity in other versions of Genesis is discussed in ch. IV and V below. Examples of woman-headed serpents are given in ch. I.

    The image of the watery mirror, on the other hand, can signify the temperate “love of self” that goes hand in hand with love of neighbor as a duty second only to love of God. Edward Reynolds, in A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (London, 1658), quotes, perhaps as a proverb, “as Face answereth to Face in Water, so the heart of Man to Man” (p. 85). George Sandys comments that Teiresias's prophecy that Narcissus would not thrive unless “he know not himself” is “as strange as obscure; and seeming contradictory to that oracle of Apollo: To know a mans selfe is the chiefest knowledge”: Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz'd, And Represented in Figures … (Oxford, 1632), p. 103. See also Milton's primarily benign use of the Narcissus myth in A Mask.

11. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, A Platonick Discourse upon Love, trans. Thomas Stanley [1615], ed. Edmund G. Gardner (Boston, 1914), pp. 74-76.

12. Sources and revisions of the rite are compared in F. E. Brightman, The English Rite: Being a Synopsis of the Sources and Revisions of the Book of Common Prayer (London, 1920).

13. Charles Williams compares the relation of Adam and Eve to that of Father and Son as “derivation-in-love” and contrasts them to Satan's refusal of derivation in his introduction to The English Poems of John Milton (Oxford, 1940). Mother Mary Christopher Pecheux discusses the analogies of the holy and the infernal trinities and the human family in “The Second Adam and the Church in Paradise Lost,” ELH 34 (1967): 173. Stella P. Revard discusses the relation of Father and Son as a voluntary bond of love in “The Dramatic Function of the Son in Paradise Lost: A Commentary on Milton's ‘Trinitarianism,’” JEGP 66 (1967): 45-58. Joseph H. Summers points out sound patterns in the speeches of Eve and the Son that distinguish redemptive love from its parodies in The Muse's Method (London, 1962), ch. VII.

14. The XV Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1567), pp. 38-38.

15. I am glad to find related views in two recent articles: Janet Adelman's comparison of the creation of Eve to Milton's creation of his poem, “Creation and the Place of the Poet in Paradise Lost,” in The Author in His Work: Essays on a Problem in Criticism, eds. Louis L. Martz and Aubrey Williams (New Haven, 1978); and Patricia Parker's comparison of Eve's situation to the reader's in “Eve, Evening, and the Labor of Reading in Paradise Lost,” ELR 9 (1979): 319-42. On the poem as a “good temptation” of the reader see Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost,” (Berkeley, 1967), pp. 38-56.

All quotations from Milton's poetry and prose, unless otherwise specified, are from The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Frank Allen Patterson (New York, 1931).