SOURCE: Quilligan, Maureen. “The Gender of the Reader and the Problem of Sexuality.” In Milton's Spenser: The Politics of Reading, pp. 175-244. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983.

[In this excerpt, Quilligan looks at the role of reading and listening in Paradise Lost, noting that much of the action in the poem turns on whether Eve assumes a mediate position and with whom, concluding that Eve comes close to demonstrating the poem's “fit reader.”]

THE GENDER OF MILTON'S MUSE AND, THE PROBLEM OF THE FIT READER

If we turn now to that superior song and look at one of Milton's invocations in Paradise Lost, we shall see how he confronts the problems of the gender of inspiration and the concomitant problem of his reader's gender. In Book VII Milton invokes his muse for the first time by a specific name—Urania—and for the first time explicitly indicates that the Muse can be figured forth as female in gender.¹ Embedded within this invocation is Milton's most famous remark about his readership; it is important to look closely at the interconnections between the source of his inspiration and his fears about his audience. After naming Urania, he makes a request:

Return me to my native element:
Lest from this flying steed unreined, (as once
Bellerophon, though from a lower clime)
Dismounted, on the Aleian field I fall
Erroneous there to wander and forlorn.
Half yet remains unsung, but narrower bound
Within the visible diurnal sphere;
Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole,
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues;
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude; yet not alone, while thou
Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when morn
Purples the east: still govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few.

[VII.16-31]

There is a special relevance to the gender of the Muse in Book VII, for the book sings the story of creation, of the birth of the earth, the poet's “native” element, in terms of a cosmic femaleness: the earth is female, the light itself is female, the waters themselves a womb, and out of earth's womb come all the other creatures—so that on the sixth day “earth in her rich attire / Consummate lovely smiled” (501-2).² Out of a female entity comes a male creature and then a female: thus the female light is born before the male sun, whose light is refracted by the female moon, and the female earth gives birth to the two gendered animals. Only with the creation of Adam is this pattern reversed:

Male he created thee, but thy consort
Female for race;

[VII.529-30]

In the first two invocations, the poet asks for aid in singing his song and for protection against the dangerous ineffabilities he courts in its very singing; in Book VII Milton turns to consider the dangers posed him by his audience. The danger is posed by a force that is, like the inspirational source, peculiarly female:

But drive far off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race
Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard
In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears
To rapture, till the savage clamour drowned
Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend
Her son. So fail not thou, who thee implores:
For thou art heavenly, she an empty dream.

[VII.32-39]

Of course those who tore Orpheus limb from limb were women, maenads who in the midst of their frenzied worship of Dionysus were themselves inspired by a god. As Ovid tells the story, the women attack Orpheus because they think that he despises them:

So with his singing Orpheus drew the trees,
The beasts, the stones, to follow, when, behold!
The mad Ciconian women, fleeces flung
Across their maddened breasts, caught sight of him
From a near hill-top, as he joined his song
To the lyre's music. One of them, her tresses
Streaming in the light air, cried out: “Look there!
There is our despiser!” and she flung a spear
Straight at the singing mouth, but the leafy wand
Made only a mark and did no harm. Another
Let fly a stone, which, even as it flew
Was conquered by the sweet harmonious music,
Fell at his feet, as if to ask for pardon.

[Humphries, trans., XI.1-13]

Orpheus's music might have made him safe, but the maenads' own cacophanous music drowns Orpheus's in “savage clamour,” and the woods and rocks, at first his worshipers, become the weapons of his death.

This compelling story obviously bothered Milton profoundly; he refers to it in “L'Allegro”—where Eurydice is only half-won and another music may please Pluto more; he refers to it again in “Lycidas,” where Milton first asks the question he answers in Paradise Lost by calling Calliope an “empty dream”:

What could the muse herself that Orpheus bore,
The muse for her enchanting son
Whom universal nature did lament,
When by the rout that made the hideous roar,
His gory visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore.

[58-63]

The fear of dismemberment so startling in these passages (like the dismemberment written out of The Faerie Queene by Spenser's revisions of Ovid), stresses the very vulnerability of the poet in his inspiration. The maenads not only destroyed a great and inspired poet, they destroyed an exemplary husband, who had descended to hell to retrieve his dead wife; as such they are incalculably central to Milton's own problems in writing Paradise Lost. The barbarous dissonance of Bacchus and his revelers stand for any readers who read without the proper inspiration that is implied by Urania's rendering them “fit” (though few). Yet we should not dismember the poem's relationship to its Ovidian text here and ignore the undeniable sexual conflict played out in its verses.

To image inspiration itself as female is no threat to Milton: his own muse is a protectress. But the inspiration of females—themselves inspired votaries of a god—is; we would do well to ask why. Milton would have known that Dionysus/Bacchus was not merely a wine-besotted drunkard, but a Comus-like god of the earth's fertility and therefore an especially appropriate pagan god to call up and cast out of his account of Hebrew creation. Insofar as the maenads share, however parodically and demonically, in the intimacy of relations between divine power and human song, Milton casts out a type of inspiration at the same time that he casts out a type of reader. His casting-out is, finally, crucially political, and we should consider for a moment how unfashionable and politically suspect the kind of inspiration Milton claimed for himself was in mid-seventeenth-century England.³.

The anonymous author of An Answer to the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce had taxed Milton with antinomianism:

We answer: this is a wilde, mad, and frantick divinitie, just like to the opinions of the Maids of Algate; Oh say they, we live in Christ, and Christ doth all for us; we are Christed with Christ and Godded with God, and at the same time we sin here, we joyned to Christ do justice in him, for our life is hid with God in Christ.⁴

Milton's answer to this point in Colasterion was a witheringly gallant, “the Maids of Algate, whom he flouts, are likely to have more witt then the Servingman at Addlegate” ([Complete Prose Works, ed. Douglas Bush et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), II, 750n. Hereafter cited as] CPW.II.750). The principles on which Milton wrote the divorce tracts are not so free as the principles upon which he wrote The Christian Doctrine (where individual inspiration is to be trusted before the letter of Scripture); but that the anonymous author could tax him with a frenzied female antinomianism suggests the real intellectual danger posed by his own understanding of divine inspiration.

Another famous seventeenth-century antinomian, Anne Hutchinson, had not understood the mediate position in which she had been placed simply by being born a woman. If the soul before God had no sex, then why should not women—like maenads—have direct inspired relations with the divinity and be listened to in their interpretations of Scripture, equally with their husbands?⁵ In 1666 Quaker Margaret Fell had written and published an argument in favor of the ministry of women, titled Women Speaking Justified, Proved, and Allowed of by the Scriptures.⁶ Christopher Hill quotes two contradictory remarks by her fellow Quaker George Fox about the subjection of women. In the earlier remark, Fox flatly states that he would “suffer not a woman to teach nor usurp authority over the man, but to be silent. … If they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home.” The later remark in 1680 shows qualified support of women: “Neither did God set the man over the woman whilst they kept the image of God and obeyed his voice.” As Hill remarks, “between the two statements I have quoted, Fox had himself married.”⁷ (It was Margaret Fell whom he married.)

As the example of Anne Hutchinson suggests, the history of Protestantism is in part the history of controlling the expectations it raised in women.⁸ A telling point made by the anonymous Answer to Milton's first divorce tract was that Milton's position allowed women the same freedom as men had to divorce for incompatibility. In the later Tetrachordon Milton even went so far as to allow the woman to rule the man, if she were in fact his natural superior: for then “a superior and more natural law comes in, that the wiser should govern the less wise, whether male or female” (CPW.II.589).

Against these startling and sweeping freedoms, Milton places the originary law:

He for God only, she for God in him.

What is perhaps less immediately striking, but more profoundly interesting (in the context of Milton's sense of his inspiration) is that in this arrangement of the wife's subjection to her husband there is established not only a sexual hierarchy, but a mediated position for the woman with respect to the divine source. It negates a direct relationship between God and woman. She is “covered” by her husband, the male, and it is only through him that she may experience the divine. The purpose of her existence is to know divinity, but only mediately, through the darkened glass of her husband's divinity within.

The reasons for this choice (Fox at least had taken a different stand on Eve's status in paradise) are understandable in terms of the social history of seventeenth-century England. If each believer had become his own priest, and was no longer a member of an institutionally visible church, this priest found his congregation shrunk to the literal foundation upon which Paul had based his metaphoric description of Christ's relationship to his church: the love of a husband for his wife. The monarchial state had also dissolved, to be reconstituted anew but without the divine sanctions so successfully promulgated by Elizabeth and so unsuccessfully by the Stuarts. Radical Protestants were thrown back on the one social unit that might still stand—the nuclear family. The intense pressures on this unit required new political emphases, and the stress of Puritan theology, while it looks like a fostering of woman's status, actually puts her—as Milton does—in a more mediated position. As Lawrence Stone points out, “one of the first results of the doctrine of holy matrimony was a strengthening of the authority of the husband over the wife, and an increased readiness of the latter to submit herself to the dictates of the former. … This is similar to the paradox by which the first result of an increased concern for children was a greater determination to crush their sinful wills by whipping them.”⁹

Such is the chicken-and-egg problem of social change that it is also a distinct possibility that the need to reorient the family along stricter hierarchical lines was a cause of the doctrine of holy matrimony, not merely its result. Increasing the authority of the husband over the wife is a conservative social move designed to act as a safety valve on the revolutionary energies unleashed by the Reformation: if there were to be no more bishops and no more kings, there were still to be, finally and irrevocably, patriarchs. Smaller their kingdoms than before, but patriarchies nonetheless.

For a woman to have inspiration directly from God would be to threaten the last hierarchical relationship left; she would thereby have the authority to challenge her husband. By purging his audience of bacchantic revelers Milton purges the disordered unreason of anyone who would not be a fit reader. But taken in its Ovidian context, Milton is purging the maenad female reader who insists on a more direct relationship of her own to divine inspiration.¹⁰ This may seem needlessly to narrow the definition of the unfit—doubtless many more readers than frenzied Protestant prophetesses actually belong in that number. But it usefully indicates the place where Milton draws the line between his traditional, masculine poetic inspiration—at the end of a long line of both pagan and Hebrew prophets—and the newer enthusiasms in which women could legitimately participate (and for which Milton has some Protestant political sympathies). It distinguishes the works of inspiration—some are true vocations, others are not.

The casting out of the maenad reader also usefully suggests where Milton's female reader, reading as a female, must place herself. To be a fit reader, the woman must accept a mediated, covered position, must freely choose to conform to the hierarchy. The hierarchical arrangement is flatly stated; it is not something Milton argues. The arrangement holds by divine fiat (rather like “die he or justice must”); and to “justify” God's ways to woman is not to explain the situation, but to make her choose to accept it. The entire pressure of the argument of Paradise Lost as directed at this “covered” female reader is for her freely to choose the mediated position and to accept its rewards with gratitude. And the poem most persuasively holds that there are rewards, rewards as great, in fact, as the rewards held out for man's acceptance of Christ to which they have from the time of Paul been an analogue. Adam chooses to die for love of Eve. Christ chooses to die for love of man. The first choice is wrong and the second is right: but they are both based in love. And one may heretically suspect that Adam's offered sacrifice derives from the divinity within him for which Eve was made.

EVE AS READER

Eve's mediate creation puts her in a distinctly more difficult interpretive situation than Adam; in a sense, Eve's position shares the mediateness of the fallen reader's perspective from the very inception of her prelapsarian creation. Just as Adam will need to be taught how to find the metaphorical “paradise within” after he has lost the literal paradise without, Eve has from her origin been enjoined to find a divinity within—moreover not within herself, but within another (or to put it even more narrowly, within a relationship with another). The indirectness of her position with respect to divine power informs the smallest but most telling details of her description of her own creation; if we contrast that description with the scene in which Adam remembers his own creation we shall see just how natural and proper her mediate position is—and again, what dangers it potentially poses.

When Adam tells Raphael in Book VIII how he awoke to find himself created he explains that:

Straight toward heaven my wondering eyes I turned,
And gazed a while the ample sky, till raised
By quick instinctive motion up I sprung,
.....                                                  Thou sun, said I, fair light,
And thou enlightened earth, so fresh and gay,
.....Tell, if ye saw, how came I thus, how here?
Not of myself; by some great maker then,
In goodness and in power pre-eminent.

[VIII.257-79]

Adam knows instinctively and immediately what Satan so crucially forgets. Compare Eve's memory of her creation in Book IV as she describes it to Adam:

I first awaked and found myself reposed
Under a shade of flowers, much wondering where
And what I was, whence thither brought, and how.
Not distant far from thence a murmuring sound
Of waters issued from a cave and spread
Into a liquid plain, then stood unmoved
Pure as the expanse of heaven; I thither went
With unexperienced thought, and laid me down
On the green bank, to look into the clear
Smooth lake, that to me seemed another sky.

[IV.450-59]

Where Adam looks up at the true sky and then springs up, immediately to intuit his maker, Eve bends down to look into “another sky”—a secondary, mediated, reflective sky: a mirror, in more ways than one, of her own being. In exchanging a vision of her own image in the “other sky” of the pool's mirror, for Adam, “whose image thou art,” she ceases to look into a mirror, to know herself to be, in a sense, one herself. To say that Eve inhabits a mirror world of successively mediated figurations of divinity is to suggest the sheer difficulty of her interpretive situation. Because her first look at Adam does not tell her instantly that he is her superior, she needs to learn to see in a way necessarily more sophisticated than does Adam, who immediately knows in his vision that “one came, methought, of shape divine.” Where Adam can see a true and present God, Eve must “see” moral abstractions:

                                                            I yielded, and from that time see
How beauty is excelled by manly grace
And wisdom, which alone is truly fair.

[IV.489-91]

Such interpretive experiences ought to have made her proof against the tempter's ploy: “Look on me, / Me who have touched and tasted” (IX.686-90); but in having learned to interpret her first responses as wrong (and her first responses in the temptation scene are right), Eve's prelapsarian experiences do not serve her well. She errs in assuming that the injunction against eating the apple is open to interpretation. She has already learned that her ignorance can be turned to wisdom by mediating advice, from Adam. And so rightly in her dream she mistakes the demonic voice she hears for Adam's. In this dream, too, she experiences an inspiration like the poet's: “Forthwith up to the clouds / With him I flew, and underneath beheld / The earth outstretched immense, a prospect wide” (V.86-88). Such inspiration is, of course, a demonic parody of the true, and her own waking response and Adam's interpretation of it prove it to be so.

Eve is, as she was made to be, a good listener. In having learned to love wisdom by listening to Adam, Eve may the more easily listen to the tempter; all she finally does in choosing to eat the apple is to substitute one mediating instrument of wisdom for another:¹¹

Here grows the cure of all, this fruit divine,
Fair to the eye, inviting to the taste,
Of virtue to make wise:

[IX.776-78]

Satan chose his victim well.

He also, of course, chooses his time well, seducing Eve when she is separate from Adam, her proper mediator. The means by which she becomes separated from her husband—her own desire to labor separately and hence more efficiently—are crucial to the redefinition of the family which Milton reflects and effects in his poem, and to the differentiation of the labor of men from the labor of women within society. In Adam and Eve's conversation on gardening in Book IX, we see the economic issues of the reorganization of labor which was being effected in the second half of the seventeenth century debated directly on the surface of the text. Briefly put, Eve argues for a more efficient division of labor: “Let us divide our labours.” Adam argues against her point. Efficiency in the service of God is not necessary. Labor is sacred.

Yet not so strictly hath our Lord imposed
Labour, as to debar us when we need
Refreshment, whether food, or talk between,
Food of the mind,

[IX.235-38]

In Adam's view, this taskmaster God is one to whom he and Eve owe feudal fealty (262), one who makes no division between labor and living, or labor and leisure. Eve envisions an entirely different arrangement, in which one “earns” the right to supper. Two different economic organizations find expression here—baldly put, a feudal arrangement, in which God is lord, and a protocapitalistic one, in which the laborer hires out his physical exertion and is paid in terms of how much he has achieved. The ideology of labor opened up here is not, of course, merely a consideration of seventeenth-century modes of production; the Gospel parables offer such terms of labor as a way of talking about true service of God. Yet when Adam prefaces his praise of Eve's eagerness for efficiency, he interestingly confuses their two positions:

                                                            nothing lovelier can be found
In woman, than to study household good,
And good works in her husband to promote.

[IX.232-34]

Adam's terms subtly distinguish between Eve's work (household good) and his own (“good works”) even as he maintains that they must continue doing their identical work together. This distinction seems to be moot—and would, in any event, not finally exist in a truly feudal arrangement such as Adam has envisioned, where production and consumption take place together in the same household unit. Was not the curse of the fall just such a division of labor, where man must earn his living by the sweat of his brow, woman “laboring” now in pain to produce more laborers?

In Adam's praise of Eve's efficiency, we can see the modern patriarchal division of labor that, paradoxically, Eve's suggestion about laboring separately would bypass. The narrative logic of the poem insists that Eve's desire for independent labor is what helps to make the fall happen; had she remained close to Adam, the fall (presumably) would not have happened. The curse for the fall is that men and women labor separately; the contemporaneous economic reality adumbrated by the poem was the great impact on women of the reorganization of labor under the early capitalist system of seventeenth-century England. As evicted peasants turned wage-laborers, women could no longer combine their general labor with their care of their children. Thus by the seventeenth century women were overrepresented in the growing crowds of destitute laborers. Upper-class women, cut off from the imperialist world of capital production, became increasingly useless. Creatures of the salon, bearers of culture in a world where the arts and humanistic discipline had no real relation to politics. The new household, as Roberta Hamilton points out, was no longer

a place to produce, rather a place to consume; no longer a place to “work” but only a place to “live”: a place for private emotions and intimacy, a place for children, a world for women. This was a far different home from the one in which the Protestants had so recently enclosed the woman as good wife. And by a stroke of historical irony, when the world was divided in two, not only women but religion itself was relegated to the home.¹²

The conversation between the first husband and wife about efficient labor is preternaturally in touch with the shape of this ensuing history. The poem warns the reader that in Eve's desire for more efficient, literal labor lies the threat to a sacred vocation; what is true at the level of the poem's plot (and this part of the plot is Milton's creation) is true of history. Adam by his interpretation of what true labor is (it is sacred) would restrain Eve's slide into secularity. But it was a slide, as Max Weber points out, that became inevitable in history. That Eve's daughters lost a viable position in the new economy of secularized (separate) labor is also figured in the poem's concern for her “household good.” Eve is pivotal in the poem's refiguration of labor as vocation and labor as work.

Eve's proper, freely chosen work includes listening. Thus rightly Eve leaves the scene of Raphael's instruction of Adam, preferring to hear such discourse not from an angel, but from her husband.

Yet went she not, as not with such discourse
Delighted, or not capable her ear
Of what was high; such pleasure she reserved,
Adam relating, she sole auditress;
Her husband the relater she preferred
Before the angel, and of him to ask
Chose rather;

[VIII.48-54]

The choice is not hard (and, considering Raphael's answer answerless about the astronomical organization of the universe, not entirely wrong in any event), and the rewards are compelling:

                                        he, she knew would intermix
Grateful digressions, and solve high dispute
With conjugal caresses, from his lip
Not words alone pleased her. O when meet now
Such pairs, in love and mutual honour joined?

[VIII.54-58]

What Eve gains in going away is a topic for the meet and mutual conversation that Milton had deemed, in the divorce tracts, to be the sole basis of a fit marriage. As the narrator's outburst about present loss makes clear, Eve's choice is the crucial foundation for the perfect bliss of Edenic marriage:

he that can prove it lawfull and just to claime the performance of a fit and matchable conversation, no lesse essentiall to the prime scope of marriage then the gift of bodily conjunction, or els to have an equall plea of divorce as well as for that corporall deficiency … shall restore … matrimony … as much as may be, to the serene and blissfull condition it was in at the beginning;

[CPW.II.239-40]

The signal word used here and throughout the divorce tracts to describe a proper marriage bears directly on Milton's sense of his reader's cooperation in Paradise Lost. Because most of his direct addresses to the reader in the poem have to do with the problem of prelapsarian sexuality, it will be useful to look at Milton's arguments in the tracts about the means society may use to resurrect that relationship.

Milton persistently uses the word “fit” to describe the proper relations between husband and wife. So he asks in Tetrachordon, “Unless there be a love, and that love born of fitness, how can it last?” What “fitness” appears to mean is a union of minds, a likeness of disposition, and—specifically for the wife—an easy and happy conformity to her husband's desires. Milton's scriptural terms for the wife's position is as a “meet help.” “Unfitness” is a “contrariety of mind,” arising from a cause in “nature unchangeable”: and Milton would not allow that any exercise of the will could repair “utter unfitnesse,” it being by definition an “utter disconformity not concileable, because not to be amended without miracle” (CPW.II.669). Milton's consistent stance throughout the divorce tracts is that sexuality and procreation are lesser ends of marriage than mutual solace and help—the amiable and fit conversation of matrimony—a meet meeting of minds and characters, rather than sheer bodily conjunction. In this, of course, he went far beyond his century, and in defining the wife's work in marriage as being preeminently psychological (“concileable” support), the tracts failed, like Areopagitica, to move their immediate audience to action.¹³

What is perhaps most striking about Adam and Eve's marriage in the poem is that, in the context of the tracts' having made so little of sexuality in their arguments, Milton should then go on to celebrate prelapsarian sexuality in such detail.¹⁴ We do, of course, hear a “fit” conversation first, just before we witness the first embrace between our first parents: so Eve recounts her birth and its drama of her free acceptance of submission moments before we see the two naked embrace:

                                                  our general mother, and with eyes
Of conjugal attraction unreproved,
And meek surrender, half embracing leaned
On our first father, half her swelling breast
Naked met his under the flowing gold
Of her loose tresses hid:

[IV.492-97]

This cannot help but be arousing to readers of both genders: a primal scene is a primal scene whatever the sex of the child. And that we read from a child's point of view is absolutely structured by Milton's constant reference to the pair as “our father,” “our mother,” and the stress on Eve's “swelling breast” (all infants have experienced nursing).

Though perhaps with less reason than the reader, Satan's response sums up the tumult of emotions such a scene necessarily arouses:

                                        aside the devil turned
For envy, yet with jealous leer malign
Eyed them askance, and to himself thus plained.
          Sight hateful, sight tormenting! Thus these two
Imparadised in one another's arms
The happier Eden, shall enjoy their fill
Of bliss on bliss, while I to hell am thrust,
Where neither joy nor love, but fierce desire,
Among our other torments not the least,
Still unfulfilled with pain of longing pines;

[IV.502-10]

So rhetorically adept a poet as Milton is never unaware of his reader's presence or response—and here he provides terms for what must be a large part of the reader's experience of Adam and Eve's embrace. Milton does not directly label this response as the reader's—it is Satan's. So it is with all the greater emphasis that Milton does explicitly indicate the reader's presence at another moment of Adam and Eve's sexual communion. Perhaps the most signal address to the reader (similar to the less stressed lecture on “shame,” just after Milton describes the couple's nakedness at IV.313-18) is the paean to Wedded Love, where Milton defends Adam and Eve's sexual intercourse after they retreat to their “bower” at IV.739-75:

                                                                      into their inmost bower
Handed they went; and eased the putting off
These troublesome disguises which we wear,
Straight side by side were laid, nor turned I ween
Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial love refused:
Whatever hypocrites austerely talk
Of purity and place and innocence,
Defaming as impure what God declares
Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all.
Our maker bids increase, who bids abstain
But our destroyer, foe to God and man?
Hail wedded love, mysterious law, true source
Of human offspring, sole propriety
In Paradise of all things common else.

[IV.738-52]

The vocabulary and grammatical construction of this passage are strange. Its sense is, “whatever hypocrites say, this—I believe—happened.” The negative constructions are not unmiltonic (“nor turned,” “nor refused”), but they do defend against a trespass on privacy which more active constructions might have had; and they limn in little—turning away, refusing love—what happens all too often between fallen couples. The phrase “I ween” is signal: it is, in fact, unique to Paradise Lost. It is hapax logomenon to Milton's entire canon (at least on the testimony of the concordance). That it is Spenser's typical locution suggests, I think, the great indebtedness Milton has to Spenser in celebrating physical sexuality. Milton's own narrator's knowledge of Adam and Eve's sexual love comes spoken in Spenser's language.

Milton may owe to Spenser as well his defense of his poetic subject, which is here a fully and profoundly sexual, wedded love. Spenser had told us that he did not sing to such who could not feel kindly flame. Milton for his part makes an equally exclusive, radical choice:

Far be it, that I should write thee sin or blame,
Or think thee unbefitting holiest place,
Perpetual fountain of domestic sweets,
Whose bed is undefiled and chaste pronounced.

[IV.758-62]

In arguing against the hypocrites who talk austerely, and who held that Adam and Eve did not enjoy sexual intercourse before the fall, Milton casts out a barbarous dissonance like that made by Bacchus's revelers.¹⁵ The social organization founded in this fully sexual love is, of course, specifically patriarchal: “all charities / Of father, son, and brother first were known” (IV.756-57). The “mysterious” law of wedded love is the “sole propriety” in paradise, that is, the sole instance of property rights (“all things common else”). In a sense, sexual intimacy is the sole continuity between pre- and postlapsarian human experience. While this continuity validates a sexual hierarchy (and the privacy of property vested in sexuality) by establishing it from the very beginning (as Fox's later view denied), Milton also elevates sexuality itself, justifying it by making it so profoundly basic to innocent human experience. Sexuality is political because it is literally the basis of the polis; its political importance defends its rights.

What these daring celebrations of sexuality do in the poem is to enforce the physical reality of relations between Adam and Eve and make sense of, if they do not excuse, the drama of Adam's uxoriousness. What they do for the “covered” female reader is to persuade her of the importance of woman's participation in sexuality, the foundation of human society. Sexual pleasure itself is innocent when wedded to its relations in prelapsarian intimacy. A good marriage is a resurrection of the fall, restoring relations “as may be” to the condition they were in “at the beginning.”

The price of so close an approximation of prelapsarian experience is the wife's submission. But Milton insists on its rewards, and although we may no longer need or care socially and theologically to assent to the arguments, it is not just to ignore Milton's attempts at persuasion. Eve's double subjection—for her punishment is not merely to bear children in pain, but to (re)submit to her husband's will—allows her to play a crucial part in the restoration of the couple to God's favor. Her powerlessness becomes the avenue to power in the new dispensation. In her plea, “Forsake me not thus Adam,” Eve anticipates the successful supplication of them both before God. If Adam's choice to suffer death for her is not a true imitation of Christ's “heroic martyrdom unsung,” but rather a hideous parody of it (though it is so close that Milton needs to correct any possible interpretation of it in this light as soon as it is suggested: IX.993), then Adam's relenting and his forgiveness is the true office of the bridegroom toward his bride:

          She ended weeping, and her lowly plight,
Immovable till peace obtained from fault
Acknowledged and deplored, in Adam wrought
Commiseration; soon his heart relented
Towards her, his life so late and sole delight,
Now at his feet submissive in distress,
Creature so fair his reconcilement seeking,
His counsel whom she had displeased, his aid;
As one disarmed, his anger all he lost,
And thus with peaceful words upraised her soon.

[X.937-46]

The repetition of the twice-described prostrate postures Adam and Eve take at the end of Book X (X.1085-1105) insists upon the centrality of her submission to the whole series of relations that are clearer after the fall than before. The inferior position Eve complained of just before she fell becomes no mere slot in a hierarchy, but an absolute foundation for repentance and love. Milton argues this series of connections in reverse in Tetrachordon:

if man be the image of God, which consists in holines, and woman ought in the same respect to be the image and companion of man, in such wise to be lov'd, as the Church is belov'd of Christ, and if, as God is the head of Christ, and Christ the head of man, so man is the head of woman.

[CPW.II.591]

It is, to be sure, a very complicated set of relations to bring to bear on a hierarchical social relation few people doubted at the time. Yet what we see in this argument is not so much Milton's personal misogyny, as a crucial social conservatism. We see how closely connected matrimonial and sexual relations are to the state of the literal, physical church—an institution that was very much in doubt in Milton's day. If the only replica of the hierarchy of Christ's church left standing—left to Milton, the radical Protestant and regicide—was the relations between husband and wife, those relations are quintessentially important, being the basic social unit. He argues that it is “unprofitable and dangerous to the Commonwealth, when the household estate, out of which must flourish forth the vigor and spirit of all publick enterprises is so ill contented and procur'd at home” (CPW.II.247).¹⁶ Usually the matter of comedy, household discontents for Milton are potentially tragic, the matter not at all of mirth, but of imperial failure. Domestic relations become properly heroic and the fit subject for an epic.

Paradise Lost, by setting the politics of the family, the single basic unit of the human commonwealth, within the larger cosmic family of God the Father's government, is in part an extension of the argument of the divorce tracts' extreme care for the right ordering of human society. What is different from the tracts is the poem's address to the “covered” female reader, its efforts to persuade her freely to choose—as Eve learns the fatal consequences of not doing—the mediated position in which she finally exercises so much sway. The rewards she gains for making this choice are not only to have her gesture of submission and supplication become a paradigm for mankind's supplication of God—she also gains the love granted her by her husband, an intimacy of “conversation” both spiritual and physical which Milton celebrates in the epithalamic middle books of Paradise Lost.

The equality of labor which Barbara Lewalski sees as so central to Milton's view of women in Paradise Lost—“fully shared work in and responsibility for the human world”¹⁷—is the physical equivalent of their mutual conversation in the garden. Of course, postlapsarian, seventeenth-century English society saw no such equality of labor: economically women were losing ground to new modes of manufacture.¹⁸ But Adam and Eve's shared labor is a powerful part of Milton's persuasive argument to his female reader that she can be placed in a position of helpmeet, which looks at the last like the equal sharing of life's important labors. Because of the sexual intimacy of Milton's focus, Adam and Eve are of equal importance, if not equal to each other.

In the last two books of the epic, Eve drops out almost entirely; it is not by her own choice that she is not given the vision of future history which Michael presents first to Adam's view and then to his hearing. Only recently has the narrative of the last two books of Paradise Lost not been felt to be, as C. S. Lewis so quotably put it, an “untransmuted lump of futurity.”¹⁹ What is missed in Books XI and XII is not merely the loss of a densely textured verbal surface, but an intimacy of focus. Stanley Fish has suggested that Milton's technique in the parade of paradigmatic scenes in Michael's history is “reminiscent of The Faerie Queene where phrases like ‘many a day’ or ‘meanwhile’ or ‘it fortuned then’ are there only to separate one part of the allegory's total statement from another”—so each successive scene is merely another image of the same reality.²⁰ It is Milton's lesson in “reading history figuratively.”

Insofar as the culminating lesson is Adam's understanding that what he has been given is “A paradise within thee, happier far,” we can sense some rationale for Eve's exclusion from such instruction; such figurative reading has been her mode from the beginning, designed as she was for a God within. In any case, of course, she has her own series of “gentle dreams / Portending good” (XII.595-96): another parallel female vision of history, perhaps? We may lament Milton's suppression of this history (he was not loath to recount Eve's earlier dream). And it is not entirely irresponsible to guess that it might have moved along the lines of, say, Merlin's prophecy to Britomart—like Michael's, a Spenserian history: out of her womb would come a race culminating in the birth of another virgin, not Elizabeth, of course, but Mary, Mother of God. In suppressing this history (a suppression we know of only because he explains that there was, in fact, another set of dreams), Milton may finally become the “first of the masculinists”—as Virginia Woolf complained of him. Yet, when Eve recounts what those dreams were like (XII.610-23) she claims—against Michael's language—that her dreams came from God. It appears that while Michael recounts the visions of history to Adam, Eve gets hers direct from the divine source, unmediated. Eve's claim is unanswered. In asserting it, she has, literally, the last word in the poem, spoken by a character within it. The suggestion of direct inspiration and the placement of the speech gives Eve's claim great weight and a pivotal character. After the extremely careful theology and ethical discourse extensively given in Michael's prophetic history, we have Eve's assertion that the drama has all been hers:

                                                            though all by me is lost,
Such favour I unworthy am vouchsafed,
By me the promised seed shall all restore.

[XII.621-23]

(We may perhaps guess by this that Eve's dream might have been Paradise Regained, where her seed finally crushes her serpent adversary, after which “he unobserved / Home to his mother's house private returned.”) What Eve chooses to do on the basis of her dreams, however, is more instructive and more pivotally political than their unknown content. She says to Adam:

                                                                      but now lead on;
In me is no delay; with thee to go,
Is to stay here; without thee here to stay,
Is to go hence unwilling; thou to me
Art all things under heaven, all places thou,
Who for my willful crime art banished hence.

[XII.614-19]

She virtually commands Adam to lead, actively choosing to follow and to remain inseparable from her husband. If Adam's paradise has become one “within,” Eve's has become being with Adam. He has become her place. She chooses him over the garden she had wanted to manage independently of him.

To say that Milton argued for women's suppression/submission in Paradise Lost is to say nothing new; it has recently become a major complaint against Milton's achievement.²¹ But to see the poem in terms of its politics of reading, asking if, in fact, we may distinguish arguments made to readers of different genders, is to isolate the rewards offered for such submission. That the rewards are unacceptable does not mean they are not forcefully and alluringly offered. Lewalski rightly says that “few writers of any era—including our own—have taken women so seriously as Milton does.”²² Spenser of course did so before him; and like Spenser's, the seriousness of Milton's consideration of women has necessarily included women readers—with certain crucial political preconditions—within the fit readership of his poem. If it is too much to claim that the fit female reader—she who chooses obedience and submission—is a paradigm for the fit reader of the poem, it is still true that Eve's initial interpretive situation is closer to the fallen reader's corrected reading than any other perspective within the poem (Satan's is uncorrectable—though some readers may still choose it). So, too, Eve becomes the first character to choose the supplicant posture that Satan refuses to adopt with such resoundingly “heroic” rhetoric in Book I. That classical, masculine heroism Milton specifically rejects as an epic subject. One may legitimately wonder then, to whom belongs the “heroic martyrdom unsung” that Milton sings.

When Adam and Eve descend from their high garden they come out onto that level plain of human existence across which Una and the Redcrosse Knight, the first pair of Spenser's wanderers, begin, in high silhouette, to make their journey. Dryden, of course, noticing this connection, saw that Paradise Lost ends where The Faerie Queene begins. And so Spenser's couple, like Milton's, are also journeying toward the resurrected internal and apocalyptic garden of Eden. Dryden weighs together their claims to be true heroic poems:

Spenser has a better plea for his Faery Queen, had his action been finished, or had been one. And Milton, if the Devil had not been his hero, instead of Adam; if the giant had not foiled the knight, and driven him out of his stronghold, to wander through the world with his lady errant.²³

Dryden is wrong in his judgments of the poems as epics; his censure of Paradise Lost reveals how completely his neoclassical reading misses Milton's redefinition of heroism, a misreading all the more remarkable because in recognizing Milton's relations to Spenser, he had before him all the ingredients for a right reading of Milton's poem. Spenser had prepared the way for seeing the politically complicated relations between the sexes as itself a heroic subject. Caught by history in a polis ruled by a woman, Spenser had fulfilled his epic assignment of imperial celebration by scrutinizing the full force of sexual power within his society. If he failed to win that society's approbation (and to finish his epic), the fault was not entirely his own. Following after Spenser, and finding himself in an entirely different political dilemma, Milton like his grand original also scrutinizes the crucial political issue of relations between the sexes and like his teacher argues that faithful love is as heroic a subject, and one as fundamental to empire, as the “tedious havoc” of “battles feigned.”

Yet however wrong Dryden is in condemning the poems as epics, he is profoundly right to sense that, at the very end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve, bringing us with them, come to live in a Spenserian world for good.

The world was all before them where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

[XII.646-69]

That the infinity of possibility seems somehow comforted of its fearsome blankness by the promise of providential guidance; that Adam and Eve's solitary, yet hand-in-hand wandering balances loss against saving touch; that this pair, driven out into the desolation away from paradise, is still, finally, coming home—that all this can possibly be true witnesses the subtle balance of emotional power there is in Paradise Lost, and testifies to the success with which Milton makes readers take a Sidneyan goodness in hand which without delight they would fly as from a stranger. His achievement is more than an argument for a felix culpa; it is also more than the quiet beyond tragedy. It is a miracle of tone, and part of the immense pressure behind the power of the moment, both for Milton and for his reader—together readers of Spenser—flows from its origin in The Faerie Queene.

Notes

1. In Book I, Milton invokes a double-gendered Spirit, who “with mighty wings outspread / Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast abyss / And madest it pregnant” (I.20-22). The Invocation to III, insofar as it associates the Holy Light with the Son/sun (potentially distinct from the Muse), would appear to address a more specifically masculine source of inspiration. However, guessing the genders to the first two invocations is not as important as sensing the peculiar impact of Milton's directly assigning one in Book VII.

2. J. H. Summers, Muse's Method: An Introduction to Paradise Lost (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 88, notes that “Milton ‘realized’ his divine and all-embracing subject more often by sexual than merely sensuous metaphor and allusion.”

3. O. B. Hardison argues for the aesthetic/theological risk Milton takes in making the poem's verse unrhymed iambic pentameter. Citing Hobbes's censure of the notion of inspiration by which the poet, “enabled to speak wisely from principles of Nature and his own meditation, chooses rather to be thought to speak by inspiration like a Bagpipe,” Hardison outlines the rationalist attack “on everything that Milton felt sacred in epic style.” Of particular import is the need for rhyme as Dryden, for one, describe it: “Imagination in a poet is a faculty so wild and lawless, that like a high-ranging spaniel, it must have clogs tied to it lest it outrun the judgment” (Preface to The Indian Queen, 1664). (The political implications of this Restoration poetic are obvious.) O. B. Hardison, “A Note on the Note on the Verse of Paradise Lost,” a paper delivered at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, Houston, Texas, December 1980.

4. Cited in Complete Prose Works, ed. Douglas Bush et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), II, 750n. [Hereinafter referred to as CPW.]

5. Daniel D. Hall, The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-38: A Documentary History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), p. 311, explains that “Hutchinson's dramatic statement that she received divine revelations became the pretext for her banishment.” As one of the judges remarks in the riveting transcript of her trial, “It is the most desperate enthusiasm in the world” (p. 381), but because of the danger her “fluent Tongue & forwardness of Expression” posed “simple weomen of her own sex” (p. 365). Another judge summarizes: “You have stept out of your place, you haue rather bine a Husband than a Wife and a preacher than a Hearer; and a Magistrate than a Subject” (p. 383). News of the New England controversy made its way back to England immediately, forming the basis of the Presbyterian attack on Congregationalism in Robert Baillie's A Discourse against the Errours of the Time (1648).

6. Cited by Doris Mary Stenton, The English Woman in History (1957; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1977), p. 179.

7. Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 118.

8. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971), p. 138, remarks: “The prominence of women among the religious prophecy of this period is partly explained by the fact that the best hope of gaining an ear for female utterances was to represent them as the result of divine revelation.” See also Natalie Zemon Davis, “City Women and Religious Change,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 65-95.

9. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977; abridged ed., New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 142.

10. In the context of this negation of direct female inspiration from God, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar print a very interesting female “revision” of Milton's Eve in Book V; in Shirley, Charlotte Brontë's heroine imagines a “woman-Titan … she reclines her bosom on the ridge of Stilbro' Moor; her mighty hands are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face she speaks with God. That Eve is Jehovah's daughter, as Adam was his son” (The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], p. 194; emphasis added). That Brontë keeps the kneeling posture may perhaps suggest her sympathetic response to Milton's underargument for female heroism.

11. For a subtle analysis of Eve's character as it may be understood in relation to the arguments of the divorce tracts, see Mary Ann Nevins Radzinowicz, “Eve and Dalila: Renovation and the Hardening of the Heart,” in Reason and Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas, 1600-1800 ed. J. A. Mazzeo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 155-81.

12. [Hamilton, The Liberation of Women: A Study of Patriarchy and Capitalism (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1978),] p. 96. Hamilton sees the greatest social change impinging on women when “Protestantism crossed historical paths and became entwined with capitalism. Its particular form of patriarchal ideology was then itself altered, providing a remarkably successful, at least in terms of its persistence, ideological basis for the bourgeois family” (p. 95). For an illuminating discussion of the impact of economic change on the laboring poor through the early modern period, see Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (New York: Academic Press, 1979), esp. chap. 7, “The ‘Better Sort’ and the Laboring Poor.”

13. Milton went so far as to argue that the wife's adultery should not be considered grounds for divorce—in this outstripping all centuries: “Next adultery does not exclude her other fitnes, her other pleasingnes; she may be otherwise both loving and prevalent, as many adulteresses be; but in this general unfitness or alienation she can be nothing to him that can please. In adultery nothing is given from the husband, which he misses, or enjoyes the less, as it may be suttly giv'n; but this unfitnes defrauds him of the whole contentment which is sought in wedloc” (CPW.II.674).

14. John Halkett, Milton and the Idea of Matrimony (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 115, suggests that Milton is obliged to underplay his heterodox opinions in the poem, it being a different public forum from the pamphlets.

15. Kerrigan, [The Prophetic Milton (Charlottesville University Press of Virginia, 1974,] p. 136, interestingly argues that Milton's celebration of Love's “revels” purges the word of its association with Bacchus's rout: “As he drives off the fallen connotations of ‘revels’ Milton quite literally drives far off the savage clamor of ‘Bacchus and his revellers.’”

16. CPW.II.154-55; in Bucer, Milton makes the same argument: “First it will soon be manifest to them who know what wise men should know, that the constitution and reformation of a commonwealth … is, like a building, to begin orderly from the foundation thereof, which is marriage and the family” (CPW.II.431).

17. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, “Milton on Women—Yet Once More,” Milton Studies, 6 (1974), 7.

18. There was even less equality of labor as the century wore on. “As the workshop was severed from the household, most women became domestic household drudges for their absentee husbands,” Christopher Hill, Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), p. 39.

19. Cited by Stanley E. Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 316.

20. Ibid., p. 317; such figuration is a way back to the “literalism we enjoyed before the Fall.”

21. Marcia Landy, “Kinship and the Role of Women in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies, 4 (1972), 3-18.

22. Lewalski, “Milton on Women,” p. 5.

23. John Dryden, Essays, ed. W. P. Kerr, 2 vols. (1900; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), II, 165.