SOURCE: Gregerson, Linda. “Fault Lines: Milton's Mirror of Desire.” In The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic, pp. 148-97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

[In this excerpt, Gregerson discusses the development of subjectivity in Paradise Lost, focusing on the issue of sexual difference and subordination.]

SATAN AND RECOGNITION

I have discussed Eve's tale of origins as though we had somehow been given unmediated access to it. But though the story is our first encounter with Eve's speaking voice in Paradise Lost, it is addressed in the first place not to us but to Adam and if “oft remembered” is presumably often rehearsed as well, reiterated as a kind of vow or devotional offering to him “from whom I was form'd … / And without whom am to no end” (IV 441-42). Much like the morning orisons of Book V, the narration serves a ceremonial function: it is the responsive half of a diptych in which Adam and Eve praise the Maker and His disposition of human affairs. Milton will call the morning prayers “unmeditated” (V 149), much as he calls his own verse “unpremeditated” (IX 24), but once we register the claim to divine inspiration, which circumvents the petrifactions of ecclesiastical hierarchy and secular poetics, we must take these professions with a grain of salt; they are narrowly rather than broadly descriptive. Adam and Eve and Milton use no priests but they use perforce what Raphael calls “process of speech.” Even as Adam and Eve address one another in Book IV—Adam rehearsing the interlocking terms of obedience and dominion, Eve narrating the process of subjectivity—their speeches are shaped by another, divine audience. As their subjectivity is mediated, so is their conversation.

God and Milton's readership are not the only eavesdroppers here. The testament of Adam and Eve is also overheard by one for whom the spectacle of conjugal and filial devotion is gall and wormwood. Though neither the poet nor his readers share Satan's loathing in this scene, Satan governs to a very large extent the point of view here. The salient themes of the overheard discourse—the structural revelations of interdependence and similitude—will become in his hands the indispensable tools of subversion; what might have been a merely expedient scene of narrative exposition becomes through his eavesdropping presence a key scene of narrative action. More importantly, we readers first behold our first parents if not exactly through the devil's eyes then over his shoulder. “For in thir looks Divine / The image of thir glorious Maker shone” (IV 291-92): it is the poet who writes these lines but the eye of Satan that testifies to their truth. It is Satan, from his perch on the Tree of Life, who beholds the human looks divine, and Satan alone, from the perspective of exile, who is in a position to recognize the children of God. Banished from his Maker's face, Satan brings to this recognition scene the considerable weight of loss and nostalgia:

                                                                      whom my thoughts pursue
With wonder, and could love, so lively shines
In them Divine resemblance, and such grace
The hand that form'd them on thir shape hath pour'd.

(IV 362-65)

This is the reasoning that Satan has denied before his followers in heaven and will deny again when he tempts Eve. Inciting the angels to rebellion or defying Abdiel, he adduces amnesia or oblivion of sources as proof of autonomy, but the logic he adopts for public and strategic purposes is not the logic to which his private observations conform. When Satan beholds Adam and Eve in the Garden, he immediately sees in them the Creator's hand (“the hand that form'd them”) as well as the Creator's countenance (“Divine resemblance.”) This double signature of the Maker is the single foundation of the human subject, the fact from which all else derives, and at this moment in Paradise Satan alone is in a position to read it.

Recognition is Satan's weapon as well as his special aptitude. To prepare the way for his temptation of Eve, he reformulates her own meditations and circumstances into the material of a dream. Eve has, for example, asked Adam why the stars shine all night: “For whom / this glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes?” (IV 657-58).¹ The moon, says Satan in her dream, will shine “in vain, / If none regard” (V 43-44). Adam has called her the sum of all his joy, and she learned as she was weaned from the likeness in the lake that her personal distinction rests upon a twofold “look”: upon the personal beauty and the perceptual capacity that are the likenesses of her Maker. So Satan is not playing upon undifferentiated vanity but upon Eve's educated sense of place when he unfolds the double aspect of sight, inviting her to see and be seen:

                                                            Now reigns
Full Orb'd the Moon, and with more pleasing light
Shadowy sets off the face of things; in vain,
If none regard; Heav'n wakes with all his eyes,
Whom to behold but thee, Nature's desire,
In whose sight all things joy, with ravishment
Attracted by thy beauty still to gaze.

(V 41-47)

Eve knows when we meet her that she is part of a hierarchy of likeness leading through Adam and the angels to God; Satan knows this from direct observation and in the dream addresses her as “Angelic Eve,” (V 74) promising that the apple will make her a goddess “among the Gods” (V 77). We must wait until Raphael's narration and Adam's response in Book VIII to know more about how Milton construes Eve's place in the created world, but Satan in a dream already manipulates the terms that will govern those later explications of degree. When Adam hears the dream narrated, he needn't search very far to find “resemblances … of our last Ev'ning's talk” (V 114-15). As readers, we find proleptic likenesses also: manipulations of the structured creation that Milton unfolds over the course of several books.

When Satan tempts Eve in the form of a serpent, therefore, the terms of persuasion will be more familiar yet, echoing the dream that echoes an earlier variety of waking apprehensions. Tellingly, the recyclings and overdeterminations also resemble those in another textual site: the stanzas that describe the nighttime temptation of Spenser's Redcrosse Knight. Archimago, who is Satan's close kinsman in his mastery of deceiving images and protean disguise, tempts Redcrosse in Book I of The Faerie Queene with a series of dreams and waking fantasies so at odds in their redundancy that they ought to alert the knight to foul play, but serve instead to convince him both of Una's depravity and of his own complicity in that depravity (FQ I i 36-ii 5). The sequence goes like this: Redcrosse dreams that his lady attempts to seduce him; he flees this dream directly into its waking counterpart, where a false spright impersonates Una; he extricates himself from renewed seduction only to return to lewd dreams; he abandons sleep for a second time only to be shown the spectacle of his lady wantonly consorting with another. The dreams are “false,” as is the waking lady; Archimago fashions both before the reader's eyes and conspicuously stage-manages the entire hallucinatory sequence. But the power of these dreams and waking visions lies precisely in their capacity to confound the boundaries of imaginative origin and moral responsibility.

When Satan causes Eve to dream of disobedience, Adam reassures her that “Evil into the mind of God or Man / May come and go, so unapprov'd, and leave / No spot or blame behind” (V 117-19), but the remembered logic of Spenser's allegory is quite at odds with this reassurance. In The Faerie Queene, Archimago's false likenesses insinuate themselves into the hero's inmost imaginative faculties and divide him from himself. They produce not merely narrative turbulence but causal confusion and moral contamination, as is suggested in the attributive ambiguities of a classical Spenserian adjective: having fled from vision to vision, Redcrosse lies at last in torment at “his guiltie sight” (FQ I ii 6, italics mine). That is, at the end of an overdetermined sequence, guilt appears to inhere not only in the figures who animate the vision but in the mind the vision inhabits. Sight is “guiltie” in both its aspects; the seer is infected by the seen.

In his own epic study of sin and redemption, Milton explicitly rejects the logic of passive moral contagion. In Book V of Paradise Lost, he summons this logic in order to reject it: “Evil into the mind of God or Man / May come and go … and leave / No spot or blame” (V 117-19). And Milton insists that Eve is guilty only after the Fall; she cannot be a little fallen. But the poet also gives due weight to the recursive structure of credulity—the suasive power of recognition—when he traces Eve's path through a sequence quite similar to Redcrosse's nighttime temptation. Mindful of her dream, of Adam's instructions in love, and of Raphael's cautionary explanations, Eve is at once forewarned and also more readily tempted when the lineaments of these prior encounters recur in Satan's arguments during the temptation. Satan's likeness to Archimago is nowhere more manifest: he contrives to convert cautionary speeches and preempting episodes into prefigurements. The layers of resemblance that he deploys serve only to augment his persuasive powers, seem only to draw the motive for transgression out of Eve's own heart. However much they are inverted and deformed, the likenesses Satan manipulates perversely endorse his argument, so powerful an experience it is to encounter again what one has encountered before. To persuade is to induce recognition. The temptation scene and Fall will be Eve's second mirror stage.

SEPARATION AND PLURALITY

When Eve proposes to go her separate way for a morning's labor in the Garden, Adam begins his counterargument by addressing her thus: “Sole Eve,” he says, “Associate sole” (IX 227). The words may sound like flattery—they are prelude to an admittedly condescending effort at connubial persuasion—but they also encapsulate a fundamental proposition about the nature of subjectivity in Paradise Lost. Subject status, argues Milton, exists in the form of a paradox. Human subjectivity is bound; it achieves its singleness through association; Eve is “sole” because she is kindred. “Sole Eve, Associate sole, to me beyond / Compare. …” But this part of the paradox is not endorsed by the poem: Eve's distinction, even to Adam, derives precisely from the fact that she is not beyond compare at all. What she is, and what she is for him, is a subject made of likeness-with-difference, and Adam's next word admits as much. The word is a comparative: “Sole Eve, Associate sole, to me beyond / Compare above all living Creatures dear …” (IX 227-28, italics mine). The very syntax belies the apparent claim of incomparability: “beyond compare” is an intensifier, an adverbial phrase, as one might say, “You are exceedingly above. …” The key word, “creatures,” underscores the relativity that Eve shares with all of Nature and with Adam too: all created things depend on another, on the Maker, for their substance and their origin.

The point, of course, has been made before. Milton makes it here again so that we may properly understand the action about to take place, which is the separation in the Garden.

          From her Husband's hand her hand
Soft she withdrew, and like a Wood-Nymph light,
Oread or Dryad, or of Delia's Train,
Betook her to the Groves, but Delia's self
In gait surpass'd and Goddess-like deport,
Though not as shee with Bow and Quiver arm'd,
But with such Gard'ning Tools as Art yet rude,
Guiltless of fire had form'd, or Angels brought.
To Pales, or Pomona, thus adorn'd,
Likest she seem'd, Pomona when she fled
Vertumnus, or to Ceres in her Prime,
Yet Virgin of Proserpina from Jove.

(IX 385-96)

The passage seems at first to be an ornament, pretty tribute to a pretty gardener, and Eve has been compared to classical deities before (even, though less directly, to Pomona [V 378]). But Milton, however else we may assess him, is one of the most deliberate poets in the language; he is not likely to be multiplying pleasant rural analogues here simply because he cannot decide whom Eve at her departure most resembles. The unprecedented spate of similes is significant, I believe, because in structure it anticipates an ominous dissolution of stable likeness. Contrary to the increase promised Eve in league with Adam (“multitudes like thyself”), these multiplying likenesses are barren; they proleptically warn of a splintered rather than a generative self.²

The similes signify thematically as well. The nymphs and rural deities to whom Eve is likened are conspicuous virgins—Diana who hated even the gaze of a man, Pomona who scorned myriad suitors, Ceres before she mated with her brother Jove—but virginity is a virtue not much prized in Paradise Lost. (Adam calls Eve's sin a “deflowering” not because he imagines some forced breaching of a hitherto sequestered body, but because that sin procures an ugly termination to unspotted affection and nonpunitive fertility.)³ Milton has gone to great lengths to establish Eve as a matron and not a maid (that her freedom from, and her vulnerability to, Satanic seduction so vividly depend upon a status secured by Adam reminds us, of course, that matronhood and maidenhood alike are the proprietary spheres of a masculine regime obsessed with policing its lineage). The multiplying personae that aggregate around Eve's separation from Adam amount to a critique of the imaginative configuration that elevates and eroticizes virginity, as do the pagan myths from which Eve's analogues are drawn, as does, by implication, the Roman Catholic church, which Milton equates with corrupted apprehension and corrupting appetite. The cult of virginity, as portrayed in the Protestant epic, builds its temple on the foundations of unrequited longing. Milton's paean to wedded love (IV 744-45) foreswears the lust engendered by false ideals of sexual purity. Any cultural nexus, any fashion or morality that manipulates desire on the basis of false impediment or cultivated impasse is one that Milton would have his readers scorn. And despite its effort at a “sage and serious doctrine” to the contrary, even Comus helplessly anticipates the maturer argument of Paradise Lost. For, as the masque exemplifies, and as the Ovidian context evoked by Eve's proliferating likenesses reminds us, eroticized virginity inevitably participates in the logic of rape and seduction.

Likest she seem'd, Pomona when she fled
Vertumnus, or to Ceres in her Prime,
Yet Virgin of Proserpina from Jove.(4)

Pomona and Ceres, the about-to-be-seduced. Proserpina, the about-to-be-raped. There are important realms—and this is one—in which Milton's moral and hermeneutic incisiveness make him a genuine friend to women. The formula he invokes and interrogates here is that pernicious and pervasive apprehension of virginity as an incitement, not a state that is stable in its own right but one that implies, and invites, its own undoing. Pomona does not flee from Vertumnus in Ovid's Metamorphoses, but Milton makes her flee so that he may link her to Proserpina as well as to Ceres. According to the erotic paradigm that dominates love poetry (and Ovidian allusion) in English for more than a century prior to Paradise Lost, a virgin's flight will be a catalyst to despoilation, just as Proserpina's virginity is the mythic “cause” of her abduction. The paradigm is one that Milton is consistently concerned to indict, and the abduction that exemplifies it is one he expected his readers to know by heart. Ovid relates that Venus, construing Proserpina's virginity and Pluto's freedom from desire as insults to her own dominion, contrives that Pluto shall be wounded by Cupid when Proserpina is in his view. Pluto's love wound leads to rape as surely as day leads to night or summer to winter (and Ceres' grief).⁵ Proserpina is the child in Milton's simile, not formally one of the figures likened to Eve. But once the mother of humankind becomes another such figure as Ceres and Pomona, once Eve too becomes a woman ripe for the taking, Eve's daughters will forever be vulnerable to the fate of Proserpina. And as if the erotic nexus were not overdetermined already, the catalytic construction of Proserpina's virginity serves to link Eve with yet another heroine who takes her identity from the world of flora: Spenser's fleeing Florimell.

It is worth insisting that this link, like the Petrarchan entrapment of women, can only make a proleptic appearance in Milton's poem before the Fall. The logic according to which male appetite is enhanced by female fear or resistance does not obtain in Milton's prelapsarian world, though it may be all too present in the minds of Milton's postlapsarian readers. Unbound by union with Marinell, Florimell in The Faerie Queene is an agent of disruption and radical instability. Florimell seduces by means of absence, the vacuum she creates as she flees, and this much Milton is willing to grant to the inherited erotic paradigm: Eve's very incompleteness, her lack, tempts Adam to idolize her. Eve is not, as Florimell is, a figure for proliferating fear but, by loosening the bonds of authorized likeness, she initiates a vertiginous proliferation of possibility, a kind of characterological indeterminacy that Milton emphatically contrasts to the true conditions of liberty.⁶ And at a crucial junction, Eve's history will hinge upon the specter of a second self, a kind of “False Florimell” who will determine her to recruit Adam for Sin and Death.

“Sole Wonder,” says Eve's tempter, “Fairest resemblance of thy Maker fair” (IX 533, 538). And he sounds the more eloquent because he borrows his formulas from Adam's habitual mode of address (“Sole Eve, Associate sole”). He echoes orthodoxy also, appearing to praise Eve on the grounds of her uniqueness and in the next breath making her perfection a matter of perfect likeness. But the coherent sequence of likeness that binds Eve to her Maker has been clouded by her separation from Adam, whom Eve herself has judged to be the Maker's truer, fairer resemblance (compounded of “manly grace / And wisdom, which alone is truly fair,” IV 490-91), who can in turn call Eve “best Image of myself” (V 95). The disruption of their carefully plotted two-part invention has opened likeness to the possibility of dissipation, as witness the riot of similes when Eve sets out on her own, and now makes likeness a ladder for private ambition. “Who sees thee?” says the serpent, “who shouldst be seen / A Goddess among Gods” (IX 546-47). Satan's language mimics the language in Eve's dream, which mimicked her waking question, but what was initially a fallibility of point of view, and in the dream was insinuation, becomes at last in the serpent's mouth a flagrant goading. Even Satan's most original line of argument, the argument in his own altered person, the argument that turns an improbable, hybrid disguise into an instance of compressed evolution, ingeniously imitates what has gone before: it is built on the system of degree explained by Raphael.⁷ How is it that you can speak? asks Eve of the serpent. I ate the fruit of a goodly tree, he replies, and moved upward as you see on the scale of creation. In her scene at the side of the lake, Eve was an infans, a creature who could not distinguish a sign from a thing. But in her encounter with Satan, she uncovers a chasm between signs and things, a fraudulence that bends appearance to its will. Unlike that first illiteracy, the splintering and proliferation that follow upon Eve's disobedience are acquired afflictions: they will signal the incoherence of Babel.

Eve's mistake in the temptation scene—her first and her fatal mistake—is to imagine a false abridgment to the reforming labor of human endeavor, “our pleasant labor,” as Adam describes it, “to reform / Yon flow'ry Arbors, yonder Alleys green” (IV 625-26). In the cosmos Raphael describes, the labor of human love is itself a reformative project, a progressive perfection of the divine lineaments lodged in human flesh, “the scale / By which to heav'nly Love thou may'st ascend” (VIII 591-92). The progress is digressive and incremental, a refinement in obedience, which is to say, in likeness: its perceptual footholds are the self in the other (“my Self / Before me,” VIII 495-96) and the Other in the self (“Divine resemblance,” IV 364). Conjugal love is a cognitive path, part of “the scale of Nature set / From centre to circumference, whereon / In contemplation of created things / By steps we may ascend to God” (V 509-12). Those steps seem to Eve too tedious once she credits the apparent shortcut embodied in the serpent. In contemplative discourse, Eve has known and preferred the pathways of digression: she takes from Adam's lips both words and kisses. But hearing human language from a serpent's tongue, she will long for “proportional ascent” (IX 936), a leap upward on the scale of nature commensurate to a serpent's sudden acquisition of human reason. The abridgement Eve longs for doesn't of course exist, except as she unwittingly and disastrously helps Sin and Death to build it: “broad, / Smooth, easy, inoffensive down to Hell” (X 304-05). Eating of the fruit, she abandons the poet's carefully imagined path of reformation for the serpent's illusory path of metamorphosis. And according to the ghastly logic of sin, that illusory path, once chosen, proves real. Eve's sudden change will turn to ashes in her mouth.

Knowing as we do what its outcome will be, we are tempted to read the separation scene as an ominous rehearsal for the Fall. Eve proposes to make her gardening labors more efficient or direct by abrogating the pleasures of “sweet intercourse,” of “talk between,” of “looks and smiles” (IX 237-39): isn't this proposed abridgment just a milder version of her later, irrevocable mistake? In an avowed effort to curb the fragmentation of her labors, she separates from Adam and lets loose a spate of similes: don't these accurately forecast the fragmentation of her person? Withdrawing, if only for a morning's work, from proximity to Adam and the hierarchical likeness that binds her to God, doesn't she open herself directly to the serpent, who makes hierarchical likeness his deceiving argument (eating the apple made me human; it will make a human divine)? As surely as we know where the plot must lead, we know that these questions must be answered in the negative. Orthodoxy must deny an incremental Fall. Eve must be sinless until she sins. Separation in the Garden cannot in itself entail perdition: “Eden were no Eden thus expos'd” (IX 341). It has been argued that the foreshadowings of the separation scene exist primarily to reflect the epistemological limits of Milton's readers, who simply cannot imagine a prelapsarian innocence. But I have come to believe that these foreshadowings also reveal the epistemological—or rather, the ideological—limits of Milton's poem as well. Eve on her own in the Garden seems to us to be conspicuously at risk because her status before the Fall has not been, cannot be, consistently conceived. Or so I shall argue in the concluding portion of the present chapter.

LIKENESS IN EXILE

Eve's first action after the Fall is to worship the tree from which she has eaten. The gesture could scarcely be a more flagrant or hackneyed exhibition of idolatry: transferring her morning orisons from praise of the Maker to praise of the thing she ought to understand as the Maker's handiwork, Eve offers “low Reverence … as to the power / That dwelt within” (IX 835-36). Diane McColley has suggested that we think of the tree and its prohibition as “God's signature” on the Garden, “his Deus fecit.”⁸ Like any idolater, Eve misreads the Maker's signature, thus confusing ends and means:

O Sovran, virtuous, precious of all Trees
In Paradise, of operation blest
To Sapience, hitherto obscur'd, infam'd,
And thy fair Fruit let hang, as to no end
Created …

(IX 795-99, italics mine)

In its mildest construction, the teleological reasoning here exhibits considerable backsliding: when, in a more neutral context, Eve wondered aloud why the stars should shine with no one to behold them (“when sleep hath shut all eyes,” IV 658), her parochialism was roundly corrected by Adam. In its full force, however, the apostrophe to the tree puts Eve's own doom in her mouth. The pun that is here anatomized (“fruit” contains an “end” within itself; the word means “end” or “consequence” in one of its constructions) is the pun with which Milton's epic begins: “Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste. …” The “end” or purpose to which the fruit was created, and which Eve in sin perforce must overlook, is perfection in obedience. When Eve with darkened judgment puts the fruit to “use” as she construes it and thus perverts its purpose, the fruit of her act is mortality: the end of innocence, the scripted end of every subjectivity, death and dissolution for her and all her kind. The true usefulness of the fruit is a demanding paradox, one that exacts not passive obedience but resourceful submission. It is the paradox that Patience delineates in Milton's nineteenth sonnet: the strenuous service of “stand and wait.”

Eve has punned once before on the fruit that so heavily signifies. “Serpent,” she says, just minutes before the Fall, “we might have spar'd our coming hither, / Fruitless to mee, though Fruit be here to excess” (IX 647-48, italics mine). Like all the puns in Paradise Lost, this one is weighted with the historical and predictive force of etymology.⁹ In the voice of Milton's epic narrator, a play on Latinate etymology may be an encapsulated form of cosmological argument, an explication of priority, subordination, and ontological hierarchy. In the voice of Satan, a pun may signal the cataclysmic introduction of bad faith into the rhetorical and social contract (as will be my subject in the following chapter). In any of the poem's voices, narrative or characterological, the play on words is conspicuously a play of mind, a window onto epistemology, and as such it is for Milton overwhelmingly a masculine prerogative. Yet Eve puns twice, once in innocence and once in guilt, on the fruit. What does the poet mean by allowing her a play on words in the midst of the temptation scene? Limiting Eve's intentional quibble to the trivial significance of fruit (the apples) and fruitlessness (of no benefit or consequence), he signals over her head to remind his readers of a previously established valence: dire fruit and mortal consequence are here to excess, as Eve will pay the highest price to learn. Although the ostensible thrust of Eve's speech to the serpent is a moral as well as a semantic scruple (Eve remains obedient), the very playfulness of her words suggests that she may be too much off her guard (she remains obedient for the moment).

Has Milton turned a Shakespearean jest to earnest? Must a woman who makes words wanton be treated like a wanton herself? The pleasure Eve takes in the unaccustomed liberty with words echoes her pleasure (and her danger) in the unaccustomed liberty from Adam's side: both decks are stacked against her. The narrator, whose anatomies of language and cosmos habitually rely on the tool of etymological wordplay, rather ruthlessly sends Eve over her head at the slightest lexical slippage. Satan, whose cruder punning betrays the opportunism at the heart of rhetoric and the heart of bad faith in his own breast, finds all the opening he needs in Eve's mild license. Adam might have played a better game here, since language has been for him such a ready instrument of cognitive power (he names the animals; he negotiates for a consort), but Eve's two Makers—God and the poet, the Word and the wordsmith—restrict her more jealously, even, one might judge, more meanly. Adam names the animals in an explicit ceremony of sovereignty (VIII 338-54); Eve names the flowers (XI 275-79) as an aspect of nurturance. She is safest when she speaks as though language were transparent, and since this is manifestly not the case, not even in Paradise, her safety is of course the weak link in the system.

Eve was trained to literacy when the spoken Word led her away from an image in the lake to a fellow creature “whose Image thou art.” But Milton also determined that her hold on the language of likeness should prove to be tenuous. As a condition of the Fall—as its consequence and also as its necessary enabler—Eve again mistakes the sign for the thing and this time mistakes it willfully. Her offer to worship the tree is staged as the mere enthusiastic overflow of personal ambition; the fruit is never an end in itself but a means to her own aggrandizement. On this point the poem is emphatic: the source and the sign of Eve's idolatry lie in the nature of her self-regard. Lest his readers find the argument obscure, Milton concludes Eve's tribute to the tree with a parallel tribute to “Experience,” which idol she erects as an instrument for and testament to self-creation (she wishes to acknowledge no “secondary hands” at work in her new begetting). And “experience” is by this point in Milton's poem another name for the devil.

According to the structure of subject formation in Paradise Lost, Eve's new self-regard is a learned narcissism, distinct from her infatuation with the image in the lake. This narcissism is not merely a consequence of the Fall but is the cognitive material of which the Fall is made. Here, once again, is Milton's contemporary George Sandys on the fable of Narcissus:

… A fearfull example we haue of the danger of self-loue in the fall of the Angells; who intermitting the beatificall vision, by reflecting vpon themselues, and admiration for their owne excellency, forgot their dependance vpon their creator.¹⁰

Milton concurs, and the terms of Sandys' analysis are manifest in the figure of Milton's Eve. Turning her face from the referentiality that makes her an image of God, Eve empties the self of significance. Wishing to promote the self from a sign to an autonomous thing, she abandons the self's only grounding. Choosing to enjoy and reify what ought instead to be used as a means to an end, she is “shackled to an inferior love,”¹¹ like the idolaters described by Augustine. During Eve's earlier progress in likeness to Adam and to God, subjectivity evolved as the precipitate of reformed desire. In her dyslexic self-absorption, subjectivity falls to pieces—quite palpably dis-integrates—along with judgment. In her effort to leap up the scale of creation, Eve is made by her creator to descend, confounding “the thing which distinguishes us from beasts, which is the understanding.”¹²

When Eve parted from Adam in the Garden, the poet signaled her precarious hold on creaturely coherence in a splintered simile but, after tasting the apple, Eve appropriates the splintered image as a matter of (false) choice: “But to Adam in what sort / Shall I appear?” (IX 816-17). Having torn the veil of innocence, Eve now conceives her person as a garment, a matter of disguise. Her singleness was always a two-part invention, a subjectivity formed around the Other who made her and made her love His image in Adam, but now that two-part subject will become duplicitous. Eve's doubleness was always (and, in Milton's terms, felicitously) triangular—she derives from two sources, a divine and a human; the second has always mediated her likeness to and her longing for the first. But now Eve's desire will become triangular in the simplified and degraded sense of the moderns: the mediating figure will be a site of jealousy and aspiring usurpation. One likeness will exist at the expense of the other:

          Then I shall be no more,
And Adam wedded to another Eve,
Shall live with her enjoying, I extinct;
A death to think.

(IX 827-30)

A death to think: the thought itself betrays Eve's new mortality in all its starkness.

The Other was always the foundation of the self, but now it exists at the self's expense, a competitor and potential replacement. Eve was only minutes hence addressed as “Sole Eve, Associate Sole”; now she is forever exiled from that summary association. She was once told that she contained the future within her, a paragon of frictionless simultaneity, “the fairest of her Daughters Eve” (IV 324); now she must give birth to those who will supplant her. It is not merely in relation to Adam that Eve must now contemplate her own terminus¹³—both the limits of personal influence and the dissolution of consciousness—it is in her own progeny: “Increase and multiply, / Now death to hear” (X 730-31). The promised generations can come to light now only as a succession of betrayals; Eve will bring her children forth in woe to a world of woe. A death to think, a death to hear, Adam finding solace in another Eve, one's children murdered before they are born, one's children ripening as the self declines: at every turning, the new subjectivity assumes its contours from annihilation.

Eve's first exile is from herself, just as feminism teaches us. But in Milton's poem that exile does not begin at the margin of a lake; it begins with disobedience. Having eaten of its fruit, Eve addresses herself to the tree by means of a soliloquy, which in Paradise Lost is a fallen rhetorical mode. Prior to the Fall, Eve's discourse was bound, part of a system in which legibility and kindness were cognate terms, in which her audience was ever at her side and words did not convert the self to an alien use. The soliloquy corrupts community, or so Milton's argument goes, because it is founded upon equal measures of hiddenness (“And I perhaps am secret,” IX 811) and histrionics. Soliloquy is the first performative enactment to signal Eve's new theatricalization. It is followed by others (“in her face excuse / Came Prologue, and Apology to prompt” [IX 853-54, italics mine]), equally marked by deception. Satan soliloquizes throughout his sojourn in Paradise, where his function is stage villainy; Adam will soliloquize when he must hide his thoughts from Eve; and Eve soliloquizes when an excess love of self has made her lose track of who she is. Demonizing the theatrical as he does in this poem, routinely equating histrionics with deception, Milton sounds for all the world like a Puritan in a play. But his moralizing rhetorical strictures are grounded, ironically, in a performative insight. Cut off by trespass and envy from the listeners (God and Adam) who have discursively shaped her, Eve can no longer master the coherence of the speaking voice. The point, after all, had been most pithily made in the heart of the playhouse: Hamlet's quibble (What is the matter my lord? Between who?) illustrates what the rhetoricians had always argued, that meaning is relational.

In the divinely inscribed and bound system of discourse by means of which Eve and Adam first came to consciousness, Milton never pretended to elide the digressive nature of words and subjectivity. Even when Adam converses “directly” with God or God's angel, the access to divinity is in fact indirect; language refers to one thing by means of another, relies upon figure and analogy, functions, since it must, as a mediating agent. Language, in short, is never consubstantial with God or with God's likeness in humankind; this predicating difference is what Raphael means by “process of speech.” Milton's portrayal of Edenic discourse, which refuses to suppress the indirection and forced richness of language, is as remarkable as his portrayal of Edenic love, which refuses to suppress mature sexuality: the two forms of prelapsarian “conversation” have a common, complicating ground, and now that they fall they fall together. The coherence of discourse and of sexual love is based, like Raphael's mediating voice, on “kindness”—on likeness of purpose or good will. Among all the bountiful digressions in the eloquent Garden, the one foreign and corrupting indirection is crossed purpose, language made double, as Satan's language is made double, not by richness of reference but by hypocrisy.

When hypocrisy enters human conversation, it enters as the double fault of language and sexual love. When kindness cracks, it begins with a hairline: “Sovran of Creatures,” says the snake to Eve, “universal Dame” (IX 612). And at this crucial moment before the Fall but after her separation from Adam, Eve replies: “Serpent, thy overpraising leaves in doubt / The virtue of that Fruit, in thee first prov'd” (IX 615-16). With this small leaven of unaccustomed wit, she appears to hold the flattering serpent at a distance. But the mild facetiousness we commonly associate with “self-possession” is used by Milton precisely to anticipate Eve's loosening hold on self, her defection from the discursive and libidinal continua that stabilize the self, her first experiment, in short, with the language of the serpent. So mild in its reproach as to mingle with encouragement, Eve's riposte is of two minds, moved by scruple but also by vanity. In trimming flattery's worst excess, she bolsters flattery's power; answering compliment with wit, she prolongs flirtation. There is at this point a touch of (Shakespeare's) Beatrice in Eve. But why must a woman's exercise of wit mean conference with the devil?

The answer, as in the problematic separation scene, lies not with the rightness or wrongness of Eve's behavior (it cannot yet be wrong) but with the nature of Milton's formulations—doctrinal, libidinal, generic. When, with the lightest of touches, Milton interpolates the genre of romantic comedy into his epic of wedded love, he invokes a libidinal economy that runs on the charm of verbal abrasion, a sophisticated Shakespearean adaptation of Petrarchan love, wherein the lady is at last allowed to speak, but only to withhold herself by wit as she once withheld herself by disdain. Romantic comedy is in its understanding of desire the direct heir of courtly love (and Shakespeare the heir of Spenser); in their deployment of impediment and aggravated longing, romantic comedy and courtly love together are the express counter-instances to Milton's ideal of domestic love, as built on the bonds of faith, of decorum, and of uncontested property rights: “sole propriety … of all things common else” (IV 751-52). In his portrait of love in Paradise, Milton has opposed self-possession to self-withholding and the wise innocence of easy married converse to the false “knowingness” of cross-grained courtship: “Hail wedded Love,” he writes, “… and O yet happiest if ye seek / No happier state, and know to know no more” (IV 750, 774-75). When the forbidden fruit becomes the heightened relish of sexual pleasure, Adam and Eve will find that pleasure has for the first time become the enemy of happiness, and the act of sexual “possession” become foreign inhabitation, the invasive possession of consciousness by lust.

In Eve's soliloquy after the Fall, the language of cross-purposes is set to work full-blown, the double agent of hypocrisy and sexual intrigue. With the taste of the fruit in her mouth, Eve sets her reason against itself in specious argument; she is literally of two minds:

                    But to Adam in what sort
Shall I appear? shall I to him make known
As yet my change, and give him to partake
Full happiness with mee, or rather not,
But keep the odds of Knowledge in my power
Without Copartner? so to add what wants
In Female Sex, the more to draw his Love,
And render me more equal, and perhaps,
A thing not undesirable, sometime
Superior: for inferior who is free?

(IX 816-25)

Thus Milton the tactician attempts to inoculate his philosophy of gender against the peremptory challenge of more radical levelers: to perceive the subordination of woman as a problem, this scene asserts, is itself a symptom of fallen consciousness. But the preemptive ideological victory thus achieved is a dubious one. The repentance and reconciliation staged in the later books of Milton's poem will patch up but not obliterate the spectacle here. What this scene offers to its readers for recognition is the bitter consequence of women's subordination in the only world we know, the world after the Fall. Desire is now a matter of duplicity and the interdependence of the sexes a matter of “odds” or of rivalry and cunning: Eve proposes to withhold from Adam in order “to draw his Love.” Death has entered the equation too, and desire will hereafter take its gauge and momentum from death as surely as will historical time: this is what distinguishes history from eternity. Inflected by death and its cognitive partner, denial, Eve's very thinking becomes sophistical: she fears that the fruit may be mortal; she resolves to share it with Adam rather than to die alone; she casts her betrayal as a kind of selflessness:

                              But what if God have seen,
And Death ensue? then I shall be no more,
And Adam wedded to another Eve,
Shall live with her enjoying, I extinct;
A death to think. Confirm'd then I resolve,
Adam shall share with me in bliss or woe:
So dear I love him, that with him all deaths
I could endure, without him live no life.

(IX 826-33)

Before the Fall, Eve needed the serpent to lead her astray, but now, her poet argues, she performs that function for herself. Having eaten of the apple, she finds deception incorporate; her very thinking is serpentine. By the time she carries the fruit to Adam, her self-deception will become outright manipulation and falsehood.

It is the anxious burden of the gender system in Paradise Lost that Adam, though more perfect in understanding and one degree closer to divinity, should be exposed to death and depravation in Eve's person. Eve is Adam's weaker self, his false position. While she in loving him loves upward toward divinity, he in loving her loves a likeness less perfect. Severed from him whose image she is, Eve goes on to make her likeness promiscuous, and left to her own unaided understanding she falls. Eve does not and cannot fall alone, and yet why not? Because the story doesn't go like that? Because she has never possessed, not once in the history of Judaic or Christian imagination, a fully representative status? Is it Adam alone who can stand (and fall) for mankind? Struggling to accommodate Eve's trespass, Adam deforms his own reason:

                                                                                Perhaps the Fact
Is not so heinous now, foretasted Fruit,
Profan'd first by the Serpent, by him first
Made common and unhallow'd ere our taste …

(IX 928-31, italics mine)

While he knowingly redesignates the agent of trespass (“our taste”), he wishfully mislocates the nature of trespass: since the fruit was never capable of violation as he pretends to believe, it cannot now be safe for consumption; it is the bond of obedience, not the fruit, that was hallowed and is now betrayed. Though the fruit has as yet passed only through Eve's lips, it is Adam's mouth in which the word recoils: in what manner the consequence or “fruit” of disobedience has been “foretasted” by the serpent it was Adam's privilege to learn from Raphael and is now his business to forget. The fruit of disobedience is the fruit of amnesia. The Fall of man has been preceded and conditioned not merely by the fall of the angels, but by the story of that fall and its willful suppression. When Adam forgets the story, he begins its reenactment. And as his willful forgetting testifies, Adam has also “foretasted” the fruit in the person of his other self, “my Self / Before me” (VIII 495-96); the taste is already “our” taste. His dependence upon the Creator was the cognitive burden, indeed the premise, of the first speech that issued from Adam's mouth, but in this crisis, Adam's decisive dependence is on his “other self” and fellow creature Eve: “to lose thee were to lose myself” (IX 959).

Here is how the foundational structures of patriarchy begin to reveal themselves as fault lines: the woman is diverted from undifferentiated and inarticulate longing beside a lake, she is trained to singleness in her union with a superior and promised that, under him, her likeness will lushly multiply. Separated from that partner, she is tempted by the perverted image of increase, a likeness made manifold in unmoored possibility. Having eaten of the fruit, she discovers the other side of the looking glass: not the doubleness around which subjectivity coheres, not the doubleness of discourse or dialectic, not the doubleness of human consciousness trained on the divine, but the doubleness of love at odds and language at cross-purposes, the enabling narrative of the mirror stage become the drama of competitive possession. When Eve in Milton's poem is restored to godliness, which is to say remorse, the likeness she sees will not be the smooth continuity of God-in-Adam, but Adam marred through her. Like Adam, she will now behold the spectacle of posterity only while beholding the spectacle of her own sin. In her dream version of Michael's narrative, and in the history it condenses and foretells, she will see not only the hand of God but the face of death. The mirror of Michael's prophecy, like A Mirror for Magistrates, is a recurrent de casibus plot, Eve's own fall enacted again and again in the person of her children, “multitudes like thyself.” Grief must be part of understanding now, and so must misogyny, though Milton may not have meant his poem to work in quite this way: consulting the mirror of history after the Fall, the woman encounters a recurrent, phobic, gendered portrait of Sin. The allegorical figure encapsulates the paradoxical logic of alienation, proprietorship, and corporeality, the paradoxical logic of a moralized, hierarchic gender divide. In Milton's plot and counterplot alike, as in the history the poem is mirror to, sin is his (Adam's, Satan's, man's) and therefore assumes a woman's body.

The idealized paradigms produced by patriarchy are bound to the same alienated and alienating logic as are its figures of degradation. If Eve's proliferating likenesses come to their horrifying fruition in fecund Sin, they come to another kind of terminus in the Virgin. When Raphael first approaches Eve at her bower in Book V, that approach is set to the accompaniment of similes very like the spate of classical analogies that will attend Eve's separation from Adam in Book IX. The bower in this earlier scene is said to be like Pomona's and Eve said to be lovelier than a wood nymph or than “the fairest Goddess feign'd / Of three that in Mount Ida naked strove” (V 381-82). The association bears a cautionary inscription: Venus' prize for being judged fairest on Mount Ida was the apple of discord, her legacy to the city of Troy as Eve's apple will be her legacy to humankind. But in the scene with Raphael the discordant capacities of beauty and the vertiginous proliferation of likeness are cut off by the angel's greeting and its narrative gloss. Milton reminds his readers that Eve's about-to-be-destabilized and destabilizing person, bound for now by league with Adam, will be bound in a league of likeness even after the Fall: “On whom the Angel Hail / Bestow'd, the holy salutation us'd / Long after to blest Mary, second Eve” (V 385-87).

After Eve and Adam have eaten the fruit of the forbidden tree, the resonance of Raphael's greeting is reintroduced as explicit prophecy, spoken twice: first by the Fruit of the annunciation himself, who is “Jesus son of Mary second Eve” (X 183), and later by Michael in his narrative of time future. After the Fall, then, there are two second Eves: the false double whom Eve imagines in jealous fear, and Mary, who is the remedy. In Mary, the seered chain of faith and likeness will be repaired and Eve will be restored to referentiality, though at the cost of death.

Mary has been part of the Christian story of redemption in all its versions, of course, even the Protestant. But Milton's effort to “solve” Eve's splintering likeness by invoking the Virgin, and this in a poem that anathematizes the mediating escape clauses and vested icons of the Catholic church, should strike us as a good deal more remarkable and more desperate than it has customarily done. For the tactical invocation of idealized femininity (Milton has rejected as invidious the idealizations of Petrarchism after all), no less than the revulsive rendering of Sin, testifies to an intractable problem in Milton's poem and philosophy—the problem of a postlapsarian humanity internally divided along the fault line of sex, each sex encumbered by the other's ambitions, each gendered subject condemned by a foundational asymmetry of power to form itself at the other's expense. So intractable does the patriarchal configuration prove to be that the epic's formidable attempt to imagine a world as yet untouched by the ways of grief is made, under this burden, to falter outright. In an effort to contain the proliferant disturbances that hierarchical gender has had to endure in the course of his poem, disturbances that are endemic to its own logic before and after the Fall, Milton in the expulsion scene invokes the Virgin Mother of God, whose oxymoronic status (untouched and procreative; above and below) both flagrantly displays the double construction of women under patriarchy and attempts to “solve” or stabilize the double status by means of a religious archetype. But the internal logic of Milton's patriarchal Reformation had taken him, I would argue, far beyond a virgin's ideological rescue.

A number of sympathetic readers have argued that, Milton's anti-egalitarianism notwithstanding, the ideology and characterological renderings of Paradise Lost represent a marked step forward in the conceptualization of relations between the sexes, especially when measured by the historical position of seventeenth-century English women.¹⁴ And many readers, emphasizing Eve's sympathetic launching of reconciliation after the Fall, have wished to construe her role in this portion of the poem as an extenuating argument on behalf of women and (more to the point) the poet's view of women. Joseph Wittreich, adducing the responses to Milton's poem by its early female readership, has argued that Paradise Lost functioned in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not merely as an ameliorating account of womankind but as an outright feminist sourcebook and, further, that Milton's female readers correctly discerned in the poem a consistent intention to expose and undermine the foundations of patriarchy, a claim I find implausible.¹⁵

Wittreich is right, it seems to me, when he insists that neither universalizing vilification of Milton nor ameliorist justification can adequately account for the genuine radicalism of Milton's epic poem. But unlike Wittreich I wish to argue that the most subversive of Milton's many subversions is the one he enacted in spite of himself: the one that made a woman the normative postlapsarian human subject. And I would argue, as a corollary, that Eve's normative status in the fallen world of Paradise Lost—the world to which its author and all of its readers belong—proceeds directly from the same (patriarchal) logic that emphasizes her extra degree of subordination and denies her a full representative status before and during the Fall. Much as we would like to recruit her author for what we perceive to be ideological consistency, Eve's normative status in Paradise Lost derives not from an independent and protofeminist calculation on the part of the poet, but from the foundationalist logic of Milton's patriarchal Christian domesticity—the domesticity he posited as a demolishing argument against Petrarchism and monarchy but not against the hierarchical relation of the sexes. Positing reciprocity within hierarchy, positing a subject status that is at once contingent and consensual, Milton had no choice but to make a woman his central figure for the human, “the bearer of God's image for posterity.”¹⁶ Cognitively, socially, materially, Eve occupies the normative place. In the postlapsarian world the poem inhabits and whose origin-in-sin it describes, a world created by God, made alien by the Fall, and ordered by degrees of creaturely likeness, there is no figure left, save Christ, to approximate unfallen Adam. Fallen, the patriarch's position can only be a false one. Fallen Eve is not, in this sense, false. The paths available to Eve—for redemption, for reformation, for continuing sin—must therefore serve as the paths available to humankind, both men and women alike. What Milton accomplishes within the structure of subjectivity advanced in Paradise Lost is so ordinary and so radical as in effect to make the fallback third-person pronoun a feminine one: the subject is now a she.

Notes

1. We have no clear indication that Satan directly overhears this portion of interchange between Adam and Eve. His broader reconnaissance efforts have taken him from their side some hundred lines earlier (IV 536). Satan may have returned by the end of Book IV, but he need not have done so; the point is perhaps too literal to contemplate productively. His own understanding and observation enable Satan to anticipate much of the material that Raphael will later reveal to his earthly hosts and to make that material, in particular the promised ascent “by degrees” to heaven, the center of his actual temptation. He may or may not have overheard Eve's revealing question about the astral presences, but he has heard more than enough in her first narration to infer the incipient flaw in Eve's sense of dominion. The moon is a light to see and be seen by; Satan has learned enough to know that these two versions of sight form a crux in Eve's acquired self-image.

2. The series of classical allusions in this passage has been much written about. For readings that counter my own and discern an emphasis on the generative (and regenerative) capacities of Eve, see John R. Knott, Jr., Milton's Pastoral Vision: An Approach to “Paradise Lost” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 109-26, and Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton's Eve, pp. 63-74.

3. “O fairest of Creation,” Adam exclaims, “How art thou lost … / Defac't, deflow'r'd, and now to Death devote?” (PL IX 896-901).

4. J. Martin Evans observes that the transition in these similes is from “virgin goddesses of wild nature … to raped goddesses of cultivated nature” (Paradise Lost: Books IX-X, ed. J. Martin Evans [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973], p. 73n).

5. The story is related in Metamorphoses V 346ff. (Ovid, Metamorphoses [Loeb Classical Library], trans. Frank Justus Miller, 3rd ed., 2 Vols. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977]).

6. Vertiginous proliferation is the theme of another encapsulated seduction story that links Eve to Florimell when its echoes are heard in the sequences of similes under discussion. What Milton refers to as Pomona's “flight” was in Milton's Ovidian source the story of her successful seduction by Vertumnus, a story that prefigures the seduction of Eve by Satan. According to Ovid, Pomona was a wood nymph who cared too exclusively for her labors in the orchard; Vertumnus, a god who wooed her in many disguises, including the guise of eloquence (Metamorphoses XIV 623-771). “He was feigned to be that god, which turned the yeare about,” writes George Sandys; “Vertumnus is also taken for the inconstant mutability of our humane affections” (Ovids Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz'd, and Represented in Figures, trans. George Sandys [Oxford, 1632; facsimile repr. New York: Garland Publishing, 1976], pp. 485-86). In his protean capacity and his vocation as a seducer, Vertumnus is an avatar of Milton's Satan. His subliminal presence in the proliferating similitudes engendered by Eve's departure in the Garden thus deepens the rhyme between that uncontained similitude and Satan's virtuosic practice of mimesis.

7. William Empson has argued that the likeness between Satan's argument and Raphael's sheds a decidedly unflattering light on the Christian God; Milton's God, pp. 147-81.

8. Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton's Eve, p. 10.

9. Maureen Quilligan has argued that the puns in Paradise Lost are also chronically weighted with the historical and literary example of The Faerie Queene, constituting a kind of “signature” of the earlier poem upon the later. See Milton's Spenser, pp. 72-76, 92-95.

10. Ovids Metamorphosis, trans. Sandys, p. 106.

11. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), I iii 3.

12. Ibid., III v 9.

13. The concept of terminus and its paradoxically transitive capacity, as realized in the nominative terminal, is central to Jonathan Goldberg's study of language and propriety—property rights, which is to say, priority—in Milton. See “Milton's Warning Voice: Considering Preventive Measures,” in Goldberg's Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 124-58. This chapter also contains an excellent postmodernist explication of the Ovidian Echo, Narcissus, and Medusa.

14. See, for instance, Barbara K. Lewalski, “Milton on Women,” Joan Malory Webber, “The Politics of Poetry,” Marilyn R. Farwell, “Eve, the Separation Scene,” and Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton's Eve. James Turner has examined the exegetical tradition of which the Miltonic divorce tracts are a part and assesses their antifeminism unflinchingly (“Milton's distinctive contribution to the cross-pollination of Genesis and Plato is to bring hatred into the orbit of Eros” [211]), but he finds in Paradise Lost an imagination genuinely torn between male supremacist and “ecstatic-egalitarian” (281) visions of marriage (James Grantham Turner, One Flesh).

15. Joseph Wittreich, Feminist Milton. During the period Wittreich surveys, roughly the late seventeenth century to 1830, “Milton was,” he argues, “not just an ally of feminists but their early sponsor” (ix). It is Wittreich's purpose to establish not only that Milton's early female readers correctly discerned the poet's feminist intentions (rather than imposing contestatory or revisionary readings of their own) but also that the Romantics' reading of Milton, taking many of its authorizing clues from this early female readership, is thus to be preferred to the readings generated by “trend-setting men of our own century” (147). Wittreich's primary thesis appealingly promises a bold solution to vexing impasses, but his use of period sources is unfortunately fast and loose, as documented in reviews by Diane Kelsey McColley (Renaissance Quarterly 42, No. 3 [1989]: 589-93) and James Grantham Turner (Criticism 31, No. 2 [1989]: 193-200).

16. Ilona Bell, “Milton's Dialogue with Petrarch,” p. 101.

Works Cited

Augustine of Hippo (Saint Augustine). On Christian Doctrine. Trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958.

Bell, Ilona. “Milton's Dialogue with Petrarch.” Milton Studies 28 (1992): 91-120.

Empson, William. Milton's God. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978.

Evans, J. Martin, ed. Paradise Lost: Books IX-X. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

Farwell, Marilyn R. “Eve, the Separation Scene, and the Renaissance Idea of Androgyny.” Milton Studies 16 (1982): 3-20.

Goldberg, Jonathan. Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts. New York: Methuen, 1986.

Knott, John R., Jr. Milton's Pastoral Vision: An Approach to “Paradise Lost”. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.

Lewalski, Barbara K. “Milton on Women—Yet Once More.” Milton Studies 6 (1974): 3-20.

McColley, Diane Kelsey. Milton's Eve. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

———. Review of Joseph Wittreich, Feminist Milton. Renaissance Quarterly 42, No. 3 (1989): 589-93.

Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: The Odyssey Press, 1957.

———. Complete Prose Works. Ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. 8 Vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82.

Ovid. Metamorphoses (Loeb Classical Library). Trans. Frank Justus Miller. 3rd ed. 2 Vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977.

———. Ovids Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz'd, and Represented in Figures. Trans. George Sandys. Oxford, 1632; facsimile repr. New York: Garland Publishing, 1976.

Quilligan, Maureen. Milton's Spenser: The Politics of Reading. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Turner, James Grantham. One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.

———. Review of Joseph Wittreich, Feminist Milton. Criticism 31, No. 2 (1989): 193-200.

Webber, Joan Malory. “The Politics of Poetry: Feminism and Paradise Lost.” Milton Studies 14 (1980): 3-24.

Wittreich, Joseph. Feminist Milton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.