Professor John Rogers:
 We've been looking for the
last few lectures at the ethics
and the theology that have
throughout Paradise Lost
been produced -- at least,
this has been my argument --
been produced and sanctioned by
Milton's narrator.
We learned, for example,
both from the narrator and also
from Raphael that Eve is
inferior to Adam.
On the authority of the
narrator and of Raphael,
the social hierarchy of Eden is
established as what we can think
of as -- this is what also I
have been arguing -- as the
dominant discourse of the poem.
We can think of this as the
poem's official doctrine,
if a poem can be said to have
an official doctrine.
But there's obviously so much
more to Paradise Lost
than the official discourses
of Raphael and the narrator.
The poem seems continually --
and this is also what I've been
arguing -- continually to be
opening up spaces for ideas
other than the official,
sanctioned language of the
narrator.
The angel Raphael,
you'll remember,
was eager to assert the
hierarchical worldview when the
narrator was speaking about Adam
and Eve,
but as we saw last time,
Raphael was willing to loosen
the constraints of the notion of
hierarchy when he was pondering
the subject of astronomy.
Raphael's astronomy was marked
really wonderfully by a lot of
doubt and uncertainty,
and he refused to determine
whether Ptolemy was right or
whether Copernicus was right.
There's a way in which the
poem's doubt about one kind of
hierarchy seemed to bleed over
into the other forms of
hierarchy with which the poem
was also concerned.
This is essentially a little
recap of the last
lecture.Now so far in
Paradise Lost,
 the tension between the
poem's official line and what we
can think of as its more
subversive strains -- this
tension has surfaced in
Paradise Lost in a kind
of contrapuntal fashion.
One position is simply
juxtaposed without comment with
another, but the poem itself
never seems explicitly in any
way to acknowledge the presence
of the conflict or the presence
of the contradiction;
that is, the poem doesn't seem
to acknowledge the presence of
the conflict or contradiction
until now -- until Book Nine.
Book Nine, which is the book of
the Fall, is structured by,
I think, a far more explicit
opposition of that official,
dominant discourse,
on the one hand,
and the much more open-ended
critique of that discourse,
on the other.
The stark opposition between
these two competing positions is
manifest explicitly,
for me, in the argument between
Adam and Eve on the morning of
the Fall before their
separation.Before we
actually look at the content of
that absolutely remarkable
argument,
it's worth musing on the fact
that Adam and Eve are having an
argument at all.
It's amazing,
for that matter,
that they're actually
conversing.
In the conversation between
Adam and Eve before Eve's
departure to work alone,
we have what,
I think, has to be the first
conversation on earth:
the first genuine dialogue,
a conversation -- well,
there may be a very brief
exception in Book Five,
but we'll set that aside --
that involves two individuals
who do not already have in mind
the content of the other's
speech;
a conversation (and of course,
I'm thinking of all of the
conversations that we have,
or that you have,
with one another) that
possesses at least some element
of epistemological uncertainty,
an element of surprise,
or the inability to know
exactly what the other person is
going to say before he says
it.Now Milton up to this
point hasn't been able to
represent anything like the
genuine dialogue.
There are some exceptions.
Maybe the dialogue between
Satan and Abdiel during the war
in heaven, but on earth it's not
so clear.
Before this moment,
all language is more or less
ceremonial or ritualistic
utterance.
Let's think of the Father and
the Son in the dialogue in
heaven in Book Three.
The Father's omniscience,
the fact that he knows
everything, makes dialogue
absolutely impossible.
He always knows in advance what
the Son is going to say.
Even with Adam and Eve before
Book Nine -- Adam and Eve seem
to know in advance,
in some way,
the content of the other's
speech;
and so Adam will begin a speech
(and this happens all the time)
with some variation of this
little formula:
"Well thou knowest Eve that
blah blah blah" -- in other
words,
of course you know this,
Eve, but I'm going to say it
anyway.
Eve will tell Adam,
"That day I oft remember," and
then she will proceed to tell
him something presumably that
she's already told him a number
of times before.
Conversation before this point
has been ritualistic,
it's been ceremonial,
and it is essentially
unnecessary in these early parts
of the poem.The dialogue
between Adam and Eve at the
scene of their separation is
really different from these
ceremonial utterances.
For the first time,
they're speaking speeches from
alien perspectives with purposes
and intentions that are foreign
to one another.
They seem to us familiar -- we
recognize these people,
and in this conversation,
and it's actually an argument
as much as it is a conversation,
Milton is giving us an emblem,
finally I think,
of what this poem has been
doing all along:
this poem has been arguing with
itself.
The dominant official language
of hierarchy has been pitting
itself against the questioning,
subversive language of
equality, and here in this
conversation Milton gives a
dramatic shape to what has been
heretofore the abstract,
intellectual conflicts that had
so textured so many of the
earlier books.
And so here in Book Nine at the
moment of the separation between
Adam and Eve,
we can see these two world
views, these two enormous ways
in which Paradise Lost
thinks,
separate almost to the point of
absolute incompatibility.
Whether this divergence will be
nearly a separation or whether
it will be an actual divorce,
I think, is an open
question.Now you can think
of Milton assigning faces here
in Book Nine to a lot of these
positions that have heretofore
been abstract.
Adam represents in this
dialogue the nervous voice of
the poem's orthodoxy,
and Eve represents the
questioning voice,
the voice that questions and
critiques that orthodoxy.
To his credit -- and Milton's
not often given credit for this
-- he goes out of his way to
lend a certain authority to
Eve's critique,
and he does so by structuring
her argument as something like a
retrospective of his own career
as a radical polemicist:
so Eve takes up the role of the
radical Milton in this,
it seems.
She's put in the strange and
utterly fascinating position of
quoting the younger Milton,
and you have something like a
recap in the speeches of Eve
here, in this discussion with
Adam,
of the great moments in this
writer's work.Now,
the first subject of their
discussion involves the topic
that has been absolutely
central,
and we know this,
to Milton throughout his
career, and this is the subject
of work or labor -- essentially,
the value of human activity.
The ostensible premise for the
separation of Adam and Eve on
the morning of the Fall is Eve's
desire to work separately from
Adam.
Eve is arguing that they will
be more productive if they
divide their labors.
Think of the ways in which this
resonates for us.
Milton has been juxtaposing for
years the two accounts of the
value of labor that he had found
in the New Testament,
the parable of the workers in
the vineyard and the parable of
the talents.
As early as Sonnet Seven,
written when Milton was
twenty-three or twenty-four,
he was depicting scenarios in
which those two parables could
be seen to argue with one
another on just this question:
on the value and the importance
of labor.
While the parable of the
talents seemed to be chiding
Milton for not working hard
enough and not working fast
enough,
the parable of the workers in
the vineyard seemed to
assure him in some way that he
didn't need to work quite so
hard,
that God didn't require his
incessant and laborious efforts.
It's a measure of just how
difficult Milton wants it to be
for us to adjudicate between
Adam and Eve in this book that
he casts their argument in just
this language,
the language of political
economy and work.
It's an argument that involves
all of the implications,
I think, of what are for Milton
those two highly charged
parables.Now I think it's
almost impossible for us to come
to this scene without some
assumption that Eve is wrong.
We assume -- and it's
understandable -- that because
Eve will, as we know,
go on to disobey the
prohibition of the fruit,
she must therefore at this
point on some level be wrong or
certainly, in some way,
mistaken during this
conversation.
But Milton takes some amazingly
interesting steps,
I think, to counter what he
knows will be our immediate
assumptions.
He attempts to counter our
assumptions by allowing Eve to
voice that position in a
dialogue that most closely
resembles the parable of the
talents.
So look at page 383 in the
Hughes. This is Book
Nine, line 201.
First of all,
it's the narrator here who's
opening the subject of work.
This is line 201.
He's discussing the topic of
conversation between Adam and
Eve at the beginning of their
day: "They cómmune how
that day they best may ply /
Their growing work:
for much thir work outgrew /
The hands' dispatch of two
Gard'ning so wide."So we
learn from the official
perspective of the narrator here
that Eve will have children.
This is incredibly
consequential information that
she was to have children even
before the Fall.
We learn that even before they
have children,
this garden demands an
extraordinary amount of work
from Adam and Eve and that the
garden seems in some way to be
actually spinning out of
control.
This is a nightmare landscape
from the perspective of a house
owner!
I think this passage is
important because it's the
narrator here who validates
Eve's initial position in this
first speech.So Eve suggests
that when Adam and Eve work
together,
their affectionate looks,
their absolutely adorable
smiles, distract each other from
their labor.
This is line 223 of Book Nine.
So all of those intervening
looks and smiles,
she argues, "intermits / Our
day's work brought to little,
though begun / Early,
and th' hour of Supper comes
unearn'd."
Eve has clearly embraced the
Protestant work ethic,
and she displays an intuitive
grasp of the importance of the
parable of the talents:
God only rewards those who
exert themselves or who invest
their talent in an activity.
It's impossible not to ascribe
to Eve at least some of the
authority that's attached to the
parable of the talents
here.Now Adam counters Eve
with some version of the parable
of the workers in the vineyard,
claiming that there's more to
work than simple productivity.
This is line 242.
Adam's talking:
"For not to irksome toil,
but to delight / He made us,
and delight to Reason join'd."
For Adam, one is still serving
God when one takes pleasure in
one's work.
The importance lies more in the
willingness to serve and not in
the actual amount of work that's
been accomplished or in the
amount of stuff that's been
produced.
Milton himself was obviously
always wanting to take Adam's
side in this debate,
but he seems to have been
continually fearful -- at least
this is my assumption -- that
Eve was right:
that God requires our continual
labor.You can also hear
Milton making a distinction
between Eve's zeal for labor and
his own efforts in writing this
very poem.
Milton's poem,
we remember,
had been "long choosing but
beginning late."
Like the workers in the
vineyard, Milton doesn't get
around to writing the poem until
late in his literary career.
Eve's labor is begun early,
and there's even a sense here
that beginning early isn't good
enough for Eve;
she seems to be pushing to get
up even earlier and to work even
harder.
Eve is the modern voice of
workplace efficiency.
She supplies the voice of
conscience that chides not only
Adam but the voice of conscience
that seems always to be chiding
the poet himself.Now surely
Adam is right -- we have to hand
it to him -- in arguing that
they are not in a position to
earn their supper as if they
were merely wage laborers.
That's not how Milton's Eden
works.
None of their labor actually
goes into the harvesting or the
production of food.
They're fed plenty,
but that's because the fruits
simply land in their hands.
The work that they perform is
all entirely ornamental -- it's
ornamental gardening:
pruning, cutting back,
propping up.
It's never productive in any
kind of economic sense or
quasi-economic sense.
Their gardening is merely a
virtuous activity that is
entirely divorced from the
demands of productivity or the
demands of nourishment.
So Adam is right;
but while Adam is right,
in a certain sense he doesn't
address directly the problem
that the narrator himself has
already acknowledged,
and that's the problem that the
garden [laughs]
seems to be growing at a faster
rate than Adam and Eve are able
to manage.
This is amazing.
Look at line 205.
This is where Eve notes how
excessive [laughs]
the growth patterns seem to be
in paradise.
So, Eve to Adam: 
Adam, well may we labour
still to dress
This Garden,
still to tend Plant,
Herb, and Flow'r,
Our pleasant task enjoin'd;
but, till more hands
Aid us, the work under our
labor grows,
Luxurious by restraint;
what we by day
Lop overgrown,
or prune, or prop,
or bind
One night or two with wanton
growth derides
Tending to wild.
I think Eve here makes an
absolutely central argument.
It's not an argument that Adam
counters, and I think it's not
an argument that Adam would even
be capable of countering:
and that's the idea that the
garden is on some level growing
out of control,
that the vegetation is
literally here "tending to
wild."
It's "tending to wild" because
Adam and Eve are continually
cutting it back -- that's their
"pleasant task enjoin'd":
"the work under our labor
grows,
/ Luxurious by
restraintâ€¦"
So Eve isn't simply describing
natural growth patterns in the
garden: she's examining the
effects on nature of the
imposition of culture.We're
reminded here of the
etymological origin of our
notion of culture,
which involves the cultivation
of the land -- it's an
agricultural metaphor.
In this respect,
Eve can be seen to articulate
something like a theory of
culture,
and her theory has everything
to do with our understanding of
the Fall not as a theological
problem,
but our understanding of the
Fall as a cultural problem.
According to Eve,
the garden is wilding,
it's growing disobedient;
but it's not growing
disobedient out of any natural
necessity but because of Adam
and Eve's cultural imposition of
restraining.
It's that pruning and propping
and lopping and binding.
If left to itself,
for all we know -- who knows?
I think this is a perfectly
reasonable scenario -- the
garden might actually grow at a
reasonable, moderate,
and orderly pace.
This new disorderliness in the
garden, this wildness,
seems to be the result of the
unnatural,
cultural attempt to restrain
that natural order.So think
of what this is.
God's command to Adam and Eve
to restrain the garden is on
some level the miniature version
of his much more consequential
commandment to refrain from
eating the fruit from the Tree
of Knowledge.
I think that Eve in this speech
presents us with a reading of
the significance of the more
important commandment;
but of course,
this is a reading that is
incredibly subversive,
and that's why we rely so much
on Eve when we read this poem.
She is so magnificently the
voice of the subversive.
If I'm reading Eve correctly
here, the imposition of law
doesn't control disorder:
it produces disorder.
There's a sense in which the
arbitrary interdiction of the
fruit sets in motion an
inexorable process whereby the
interdiction has to be
broken.This is obviously a
sense of the Fall that Milton
cannot permit within the
official parameters of the
poem's dominant doctrine even
though this theory,
Eve's subversive theory,
does come actually rather close
to a number of Paul's statements
in the Epistle to the Romans
-- but officially in the
poem,
the Fall is an act of free will.
It's a freely undertaken
choice, but according to Eve's
embedded prophesy of the Fall,
which is what I take this to
be, there's no such thing really
as free will.
The Father's prohibition seems
to necessitate in some way their
disobedience in the same way
that pruning a tree -- and we
know this to be a fact --
pruning a tree forces or
necessitates new growth.
It's almost as if Eve were
suggesting that there was
something like an organic,
natural necessity to the
Fall.Now I think that's one
way in which Milton looks back
at his former interest in work
-- at his former interest in the
interaction of those two
parables,
and he's bending their
implications and their meanings
in an entirely new way here;
but there's another way in
which the separation dialogue
looks back at and essentially
uses the essential material from
Milton's earlier career.
This is Eve's staggeringly
brilliant deployment of the
central argument from
Areopagitica,
the 1644 anti-licensing
tract.
Look at line 320 of Book Nine.
This is page 386 in the
Hughes. Now Adam has
claimed that they can best pass
the trial of Satan's temptation
if they're together -- a
perfectly reasonable position.
If Adam is there to guide Eve
and to protect her,
the Fall is less likely to
happen;
but to Eve -- and this is Eve's
argument -- this sounds as if
Adam were attempting to censor
her environment,
as if he were trying to protect
her from the potentially
dangerous speech of the tempter.
Of course, that is what he's
trying to do,
and so she responds to what she
hears to be Adam's paternal
solicitude.
This is Eve at line 322: 
If this be our condition,
thus to dwell
In narrow circuit strait'n'd by
a Foe,
Subtle or violent, we not endu'd
Single with like defense,
wherever met;
How are we happy,
still in fear of harm?
This is a devastating question.
Eve issues a powerful critique
of what she takes to be Adam's
act of censorship.
When she suggests that she is
living in an increasingly
"narrow circuit straight'n'd by
a Foe,"
it's almost as if she's
alluding to Milton's declaration
in Areopagitica;
you remember these lines:
"I cannot praise a fugitive in
cloistered virtue,
unexercised and unbreathed,
that never sallies out and sees
her adversary."
"What is virtue?"
Milton had asked in
Areopagitica.
What is it if it's never
tested?
What is virtuous resistance if
there's nothing there actually
to resist, if the information
one is being given is
continually being licensed and
censored and controlled?
Eve refuses to accept the idea
that Eden might be structured
like an authoritarian state,
like the Stuart monarchy.At
line 337 she lets loose.
This is a searing criticism of
a paradise in which an
individual cannot be relied upon
to choose freely her own
actions,
line 337: "Let us not then
suspect our happy State / Left
so imperfect by the Maker wise,
/ As not secure to single or
combin'd."
Now the syntax is a little
difficult there.
She's saying,
"Let's not imagine that we're
unsafe here.
Let's not doubt that the maker
created us secure," by which she
means "safe," "whether we're on
our own or whether we're
together."
Then she continues:
"Frail is our happiness,
if this be so,
/ And Eden were no Eden thus
expos'd."
Eve here is exposing an
ideological contradiction at the
heart of Milton's Eden.
At the center of her argument
is a powerful alternative to the
official line of Milton's poem.
Eve is pronouncing -- this is
the structure of a theological
argument, this is a theodicy:
she's justifying the ways of
God to men as she sees them.
This is the logic,
I take it, of what she's just
said: "If I am not free to
resist temptation alone,
then this is not a justifiable
world.
If I am not free to resist
temptation alone,
God is not a justifiable God.
Eden were no Eden, thus exposed.
Therefore," she concludes,
"I must be free to resist
temptation alone."
That's her logical
conclusion.Now Eve's claim
for the true state of Eden is a
lot like Milton's claim some
twenty years earlier in
Areopagitica for the true
state of England.
There is at base a state of
equality among human
individuals, and the individual
himself,
singly and not combined,
should be empowered to resist
temptation alone.
The poem has gone to great
lengths to make the official
case for God's -- how could it
not?
this is a version of Genesis --
for God's imposition of an
arbitrary set of hierarchical
distinctions and for God's
ability to impose arbitrary law.
Milton is supporting that
throughout the poem;
but Paradise Lost is
also willing to identify just
those arbitrary hierarchies as
something like the source for
Eden's imperfection,
and he does that even as he
celebrates God's ability to
impose these arbitrary
distinctions.
It's this exposure of Eden's
structural flaws,
I think, that best helps us
understand the internal dynamics
of the temptation scene.
When Satan tempts Eve,
he invariably tempts her with
some version of all of those
desires and all of those
aspirations that Eden's
hierarchical culture has
struggled,
and struggled mightily,
to suppress.Look at the top
of page 391.
This is line 538 of Book Nine.
Our first encounter with Eve
involved, you'll remember,
the suppression of her
admiration of that beautiful
image that she saw in the pool
-- or the suppression of what
came later to be interpreted as
something like her narcissism.
Eve was created with what
seemed to be a natural,
beautiful, and instinctive
admiration for the image that
she found in the pool.
That admiration was,
of course, entirely innocent
because Eve had no way of
knowing that that was her own
image;
but with the onset of that
mysterious warning voice,
Eve was turned away from that
image of herself,
and her behavior became branded
as narcissism thereafter.
It wasn't, of course,
true narcissism,
but the imposition of that new
restraint upon her seems to have
produced in Eve,
or created in her,
something like a true
narcissism.
It's this culturally produced
-- this is a character flaw that
we can identify as a culturally
produced one,
and it's one that Satan is able
to exploit with utter ingenuity
at the temptation scene.
So this is Satan at line 538 to
Eve:
Fairest resemblance of
thy Maker fair,Thee all
living things gaze on,
all things thineBy gift,
and thy Celestial Beauty
adoreWith ravishment beheld,
there best beheldWhere
universally admir'd.
So Eve's affection for a
responsive image,
for a sympathetic gaze --
that's all she was getting out
of the pool -- was denied her at
the pool.
This restraint seems to have
produced in her something like a
self-love, a self-love that has
grown luxurious by restraint,
and Satan knows that.
The tendency to narcissism was
only one component of her
character that was exposed in
the scene at the poolside.
The pleasure that Eve was
deriving from the answering
smiles, those beautiful,
sympathetic looks in the pool
-- that pleasure is akin in many
ways to the pleasure that a lot
of infants derive from the first
moments of their existence.
I'm thinking of the infant's
pleasure in its initial
interaction with the mother.
This shouldn't be surprising:
one of the things that Milton
tries to accomplish in the
narrative of Eve's development
is something like a larger
theory of human development in
general.But of course,
unlike all the rest of us,
Eve doesn't have a mother.
It's the role of the mother
both in culture and in nature
that has been systemically
excluded,
necessarily but nonetheless
systematically excluded,
from Paradise Lost.
Whatever experience of a
kind of maternal affection that
Eve may have felt in the
answering looks and the
sympathetic smiles is summarily
cut off with the warning voice.
Just as he did with her
narcissism, Satan tempts Eve
with precisely that natural
phenomenon, that natural
instinct that's been denied her.
Look at Satan, line 578.
He describes his first glance
at the "goodly Tree far distant
to behold," and we,
of course, know what that
goodly tree is.
The serpent says: 
I nearer drew to
gaze;When from the boughs a
savory odor blown,Grateful
to appetite, more pleas'd my
sense
Than smell of sweetest Fennel,
or the TeatsOf Ewe or Goat
dropping with Milk at
Ev'n,Unsuckt of Lamb or Kid,
that tend thir play.
Surely we all agree that this
is a surprising [laughs]
and a strange simile here.
In comparing the smell of the
forbidden fruit to mother's
milk, Satan is offering Eve an
embedded image of the mother,
and by placing the scene in the
evening or what he calls "Ev'n,"
Satan is able to insert Eve's
actual name into the expression
of a natural desire to suckle at
the mother's breast.But
what's at stake here isn't
simply Eve's longing for the
mother that she never had.
The situation is a lot more
radical than that because at the
scene at the pool,
in so many ways,
Eve was actually mothering
herself.
At least on an experiential
level, Eve seemed to have been
-- this is the way she must have
felt it subjectively:
she was the source of her own
creation much as Satan claimed
that he had raised himself by
his own quickening power.
Eve had represented the
possibility for the poem of
something like an absolute
self-possession and an absolute
self-containment.
You'll remember that Adam had
informed Raphael in Book Eight
(this was at line 547 of Book
Eight) that he had been struck
by this incredible air of
self-contained-ness that Eve
had.
He tells Raphael,
"[W]hen I approach / Her
loveliness, so absolute she
seems / And in herself
complete,"
and Raphael,
of course, hastened to warn
Adam against the attraction to
female self-sufficiency.
There's a sense in which
Eve is absolutely independent.
She's mother and daughter
united in one self-determining
being, and it is just this
maternal self-sufficiency that
the law of the garden has denied
Eve -- and so like clockwork it
returns here in Satan's
temptation.
The third element of Satan's
temptation involves the taboo
that was established by Raphael
-- this is the taboo of
speculation.
Raphael had told Adam,
"Don't concern yourself and
don't worry so much about
speculating about the cosmos
because the structure of the
cosmos simply doesn't concern
you."
"Be lowly wise," Raphael told
Adam, and "know to know no
more."
How on earth could Milton,
the author of Areopagitica,
put those words in the
mouth of the archangel?
It's too troubling even to
speculate about.
But look down at line 602 of
Book Nine.
(This is page 392.) The serpent
argues that one of the effects
of the fruit was the awakening
(and of course,
he's lying) in him of the power
of reason, wakening in him his
capacity for speculation.
Thenceforth to
Speculations high or deepI
turn'd my thoughts,
and with capacious
mindConsider'd all things
visible in Heav'n,
Or Earth,
or Middle, all things fair and
good...
No form of speculation has been
licensed or censored for the
serpent, according to Satan.
He gets to think whatever he
wants.
This is exactly the vision of
the liberal, Miltonic universe
represented so majestically and
so compellingly in
Areopagitica.
Again the temptation to
speculate is intimately linked
with this cultural law against
speculation and the restraint of
speculation.Finally and most
importantly,
Eve is tempted with just that
aspect of her status that this
poem has most vigorously denied
her and that's the possibility
-- and I take this very
seriously -- that she's
actually,
at least on a natural and
ontological level,
Adam's equal.
The possibility of the
fundamental or natural
egalitarianism of Eden,
rather,
is one of the principal objects
of cultural suppression in
Raphael's long discourse with
Adam.
Raphael's denial of their
equality really fills the pages
of Book Eight,
and so naturally the desire for
equality surfaces one of the
principal motives for Eve's
transgression.
By eating the fruit,
Eve perhaps -- this is
unspeakably heartbreaking -- can
produce in herself an equality
with Adam.
That's the fantasy,
and the speaking serpent
provides the best evidence
imaginable of the alleged
ability of the fruit to function
as a kind of chemical equalizer.
It's like a testosterone-laced
cocktail that offers the false
hope of equality.
Look at line 687, Satan to Eve: 
[L]ook on mee,Mee who
have touch'd and tasted,
yet both live,And life more
perfet have attain'd than
FateMeant mee,
by vent'ring higher then my
Lot.
In other words,
"Eat this fruit and you will
become greater than you have,
up to this point,
been allowed to be.
Eat this fruit and you will
become greater than your lot in
life permits."
Now this has to be one of the
most powerful inducements.
As a political philosopher,
Milton knows better than anyone
the power of the desire for
equality.It's just this
promise of equality that is most
important to Eve after she has
eaten the fruit.
This is after the Fall.
This is line 816 of Book Nine.
This is the middle of page 397.
Eve is musing to herself: 
But to Adam in what
sortShall I appear?
shall I to him make knownAs
yet my change,
and give him to partakeFull
happiness with mee,
or rather not.
But keep the odds of Knowledge
in my powerWithout
Copartner?
so to add what wantsIn
Female Sex, the more to draw his
Love [and I love this],
And render me more equal,
and perhaps,A thing not
undesireable,
sometimeSuperior:
for inferior who is free?
There is an unspeakable pathos
charging these lines because it
becomes clear that one of the
primary reasons that Eve has
fallen in the first place
involves a structural problem
inherent in the Miltonic
paradise: and that's the
official insistence on a social
hierarchy.
Of course, the poem is
continually arguing that social
inferiority does not impinge
upon human freedom.
Just because Eve is inferior to
Adam doesn't mean that she isn't
free.
That's the official line,
but Milton knows perfectly well
that the radical type of freedom
for which he had argued in his
early career as a polemicist had
been founded upon an assumption
of equality.
In Areopagitica Milton
had implied that we're all free
to read whatever we want because
we are all equally endowed with
reason.
That's at least implicitly his
argument, yet Paradise Lost
had instituted at the heart
of its body politic a distinctly
hierarchical society.
There may be a natural instinct
for equality.
There's a natural instinct for
equality that we feel both with
Adam and with Eve,
but the official culture of
Eden has labored to suppress
that instinct;
and at the moment of the
temptation, the tremendous cost
of that suppression is
measured.Now,
from the doctrinal point of
view, Eve is clearly wrong here
to question her divinely
sanctioned place in the order of
things.
We have to see her as wrong,
but there is a voice that
counters the poem's doctrine,
and it argues that the
imposition of such an arbitrary
law of hierarchy can only
produce a corresponding desire
to subvert that hierarchy.
You'll note here the further
point that the denial of
equality doesn't merely
precipitate a desire for
equality.
I think it pushes us even
further to a desire -- it's
really wild.
The denial of equality actually
pushes us even further to a
desire for superiority.
Eve entertains the lovely
thought of being -- and isn't
this a wonderful phrase!
-- "sometime / Superior," as if
Adam and Eve could assume
different positions on the
hierarchical ladder at will --
as if Adam and Eve could "either
rung assume" or both,
just as Milton's angels can
"either sex assume."
The suppression of equality
even pushes Eve to that
perfectly illogical but
completely understandable
formulation: she'd like to be
"more equal,"
as if equality could be
quantified in some way;
as if equality weren't a
relational phenomenon,
a structural phenomenon,
but one that could be assumed
entirely by oneself and one that
could be hoarded and kept within
the self in quantity.Now,
according to the official
doctrine of the poem,
the moment of Eve's eating of
the fruit is the origin of the
original human condition of
fallen-ness.
Man lived until this time in a
state of paradisal perfection,
and it's out of an absolutely
free will that man chooses to
disobey the divine command.
But the narrative that Milton
employs to illustrate this
official doctrine seems
continually to be questioning
just that assumption.
Milton's poetry seems to
counter this belief in Edenic
perfection and counter this
belief, even,
in Edenic freedom before the
Fall.
There's a sense in Paradise
Lost that Adam and Eve --
and I know this is heretical --
were never completely free in
Eden.
They were always burdened by a
set of cultural constraints of
which the prohibition of the
fruit was simply the most
outrageous,
but certainly not the only,
one.Look at page 402.
This is another important
moment after the Fall,
line 1051.
This is the moment in which
Adam and Eve wake up after their
first act of sexual intercourse
after the Fall.
This is their first attempt at
fallen sleep which,
of course, doesn't turn out to
be that pleasant.
So: [U]p they roseAs
from unrest, and each the other
viewing,Soon found thir Eyes
how op'nd, and thir mindsHow
dark'n'd;
innocence, that as a
veilHad shadow'd them from
knowing ill, was gone,Just
confidence,
and native
righteousness,And honor from
about them, naked leftTo
guilty shame...
So this is Milton's version of
the Genesis text.
This is what Genesis tells us:
"he eyes of both were opened,
and they knew that they were
naked..."
They've awakened to a new form
of consciousness,
but Milton wants us to know
that this new form of knowledge,
this new self-consciousness,
isn't an enlightenment:
it's a darkening.
"hir minds / How dark'n'd,"
Milton explains.But it's so
much more complicated than that.
No sooner has Milton depicted
the Fall as a darkening than he
does something incredibly
strange.
He describes the Fall from
innocence as if the Fall were in
itself something like an
enlightenment:
"innocence,
that as a veil / Had shadow'd
them from knowing ill,
was goneâ€¦"
There's an incredibly
complicated but wonderfully
contradictory interplay of
lightening and darkening,
and the imagery here begins to
deconstruct itself.
On the one hand,
the Fall darkens their minds,
and on the other hand,
they're enlightened as the
shadowy veil is lifted.It's
at this moment that the poem
seems to expose the fictional
status of its representation of
something like a perfect,
unfallen innocence.
Surely we expected Milton to
say something completely
different.
Surely we expected Milton to
say that innocence was the
natural, naked Adam and Eve,
and that this innocent
nakedness is now being covered
with a veil, a veil of guilt or
a veil of shame -- but Milton's
doing,
of course, exactly the opposite.
What does he say?
Innocence was itself the veil.
The very idea of their perfect,
unfallen state was the veil;
the very notion that Adam and
Eve ever lived in a free
paradise was a veil.
It was a fiction,
it was a false covering -- a
veil thrown over the Edenic
society that was always and
already a product of fallen
cultural constraints.Now,
I don't need to remind you of
this because I know this is what
you're thinking.
We have, of course,
run into the image of the veil
before in Paradise Lost.
An image of the veil
appeared in the description in
the length of Eve's hair,
and remember that was a fact of
culture that was being mistaken
by the narrator as a fact of
nature.
In Book Four,
line 304, the narrator -- and
you don't need to move there
because you remember these lines
-- the narrator tells us that
Eve:
[A]s a veil down to the
slender waistHer unadorned
golden tresses wore
Disshevell'd,
but in wanton ringlets wav'd
As the Vine curles her
tendrils, which impli'd
Subjection...
Our first understanding of
Eve's subjection to Adam was
derived from the length of Eve's
hair, which she wore as a veil.
A veil, of course,
is only worn to hide something.
It's a covering of a source of
shame that in this case may have
seemed to be Eve's nakedness,
but that equation of Eve's hair
with a veil took place -- think
of it.
It took place before the Fall,
before nakedness was shameful.
The poem seemed to raise the
possibility that there was
actually never a moment at which
Adam and Eve were entirely free
from the kinds of constraints
and the kinds of prohibitions
that we associate with fallen
culture,
with culture after the breaking
of the prohibition.It's,
of course, no accident that the
image of the veil occurs in Book
Nine in the context of our
introduction to Edenic hierarchy
and to the fact of Eve's
subordinate status,
because the Fall itself seems
in so many ways,
I think, to be one of the
cultural consequences of this
fact of sexual subordination.
Milton's strange image of the
veil of innocence in Book Nine
-- what is this?
This is a paradox,
a rhetorical paradox,
and this paradox announces what
is essentially the paradoxical
construction of Eden,
of Milton's Eden.
On the official,
on the doctrinal,
level of the poem,
the falling of this veil of
innocence exposes Adam's and
Eve's nakedness.
It's a sign of their new fallen
consciousness of their shame.
That's how we're supposed to be
reading, presumably,
this image;
but this paradoxical image also
works on that other level,
on the much more subversive
level of the poem.
It exposes a structural flaw at
the heart of Milton's paradise.
Milton lets the doctrinal veil
fall from the poem,
and he exposes his own alliance
here -- and I really believe
this -- with Eve's critique of
Eden's arbitrary hierarchy.
It's as if Milton had torn the
veil of dogma from his poem and
he's begun to realize what Eve
has known all along:
"Eden were no Eden thus
expos'd."Okay.
That's it.
 
